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CONTENTS

Cover

The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra

Era of Ruin

Introduction

ANGELS OF ANOTHER AGE

Quote One

FULGURITE

FRAGMENTS (ALL WE HAVE LEFT)

EX LIBRIS

Quote Two

SYSTEM PURGE

AFTER THE DAWN, THE DARKNESS

HOMEBOUND

THE CARRION LORD OF THE IMPERIUM

About the Authors

An Extract from ‘Dark Imperium’

Backlist

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

It is a time of legend.

The galaxy is in flames. The Emperor’s glorious vision for humanity is in ruins. His favoured son, Horus, has turned from his father’s light and embraced Chaos.

His armies, the mighty and redoubtable Space Marines, are locked in a brutal civil war. Once, these ultimate warriors fought side by side as brothers, protecting the galaxy and bringing mankind back into the Emperor’s light. Now they are divided.

Some remain loyal to the Emperor, whilst others have sided with the Warmaster. Pre-eminent amongst them, the leaders of their thousands-strong Legions, are the primarchs. Magnificent, superhuman beings, they are the crowning achievement of the Emperor’s genetic science. Thrust into battle against one another, victory is uncertain for either side.

Worlds are burning. At Isstvan V, Horus dealt a vicious blow and three loyal Legions were all but destroyed. War was begun, a conflict that will engulf all mankind in fire. Treachery and betrayal have usurped honour and nobility. Assassins lurk in every shadow. Armies are gathering. All must choose a side or die.

Horus musters his armada, Terra itself the object of his wrath.

Seated upon the Golden Throne, the Emperor waits for his wayward son to return. But his true enemy is Chaos, a primordial force that seeks to enslave mankind to its capricious whims.

The screams of the innocent, the pleas of the righteous resound to the cruel laughter of Dark Gods. Suffering and damnation await all should the Emperor fail and the war be lost.

The end is here. The skies darken, colossal armies gather.

For the fate of the Throneworld, for the fate of mankind itself…

The Siege of Terra has begun.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome, dear reader, to the Era of Ruin anthology.

Presented here is the final instalment of the Horus Heresy series. Those words feel strange to write. In scale and longevity, the Horus Heresy is one of the most ambitious science fantasy narratives ever published. Its concept dates back to 1988, when it was first mentioned in Chapter Approved: Book of the Astronomican. Since then, Black Library has developed the story, and over the last two decades a score of different writers have contributed countless words, threading together an epic tapestry of a bloody and chaotic civil war.

It took fifty-four books to finally arrive at the epochal battle of that war, the Siege of Terra. Given the weight of its history, it was both curious and expected that we all so eagerly anticipated an ending that had already been long established. And though the duel between the Emperor and Horus was a long time coming, it was undoubtedly well worth the wait.

The story of the Heresy has always centred around a clash of gods, powerful beings with enormous influence and agency, battling for the fate

of the universe. Indeed, when asked to epitomise the Horus Heresy, often the first thing that comes to mind is Adrian Smith’s iconic artwork depicting the confrontation between father and son. Ultimately, it is that infamous moment that the Heresy boils down to. Though we have picked up a few meaningful extras along the way…

To me, this is a crucial part of what has made the Horus Heresy so enjoyable. Every single character is on a unique journey of self-discovery and self-assertion, fighting their own battles, getting lost, forging new and different paths. Not one character ends the series how they began it, and many are fundamentally changed. Of course, the gods and demigods needed to be balanced with more relatable, lower-agency characters, especially to demonstrate the impact these larger-than-life figures wrought on the world around them. But so many of these ‘secondary’ characters quickly became fascinating in their own right, and naturally this led to the issue of what to do with them as the series came to a close.

The Siege of Terra is the Heresy in a microcosm. That grand tapestry of blood and strife is condensed into one, relatively speaking, small warzone.

Of course the Imperial Palace is utterly enormous! But it’s still dwarfed when compared to, say, the five hundred worlds of Ultramar… When such a space is filled with the mightiest armies the galaxy has ever seen, alongside their demigod warlords – all of whom demand their minute in the limelight

– it becomes impossible to tie off every last strand. So, due to the inexorable march of the narrative, and despite the completion of the Siege of Terra, there remained beloved characters who hadn’t had their final moment. This didn’t feel right. And so, the Era of Ruin anthology was born.

At its heart, this is a collection of endings. It’s an earnest goodbye to a series we have all come to cherish for differing reasons. It is not exhaustive, but it does showcase a strata of memorable characters and how they cope with the end of an era. For many, like Ilya Ravallion or Diocletian Coros, the siege is over, and they must find their place amidst the shattered world they now inhabit. Others, like Gaellon and Baeron, must come to terms with the end of a more spiritual journey. Yet, Era of Ruin is so-called because it typifies what is to come. Decay and stagnation define the impending 40K

setting, and each story in this series plays its part in foreshadowing those horrors. After all, the Horus Heresy was originally viewed as a mere prequel to Warhammer 40,000. Well, what a legacy that prequel became.

It is with bittersweet pleasure, and more than a touch of gratitude, that I offer you this final farewell to the series that has guided us all through the fiercest conflicts, the toughest betrayals, the most poignant of reunions, and some truly remarkable triumphs.

It has certainly been quite the journey.

Jacob Youngs, Nottingham,

August 2023

ANGELS OF ANOTHER AGE

JOHN FRENCH

‘Pity the dead. Pity that they will not see the ages to come, and all the wonders that their acts have wrought.’

– Words etched on the Stones of Remembrance,

Dome of Unity, the Imperial Palace, Terra

Kystos Gaellon is on the remains of Marmax South, Section 52, Hold Point 78, when his father dies. He’s been there for thirty-five minutes. That time is an estimate. Everything in the Wasteland is an estimate. He has started to think of the Wasteland as a state rather than a description: a land wasted, burnt, and starved, and cut, and beaten down to the root. A place where dead souls walked.

Gaellon came to Hold Point 78 with two other warriors. Neither of them is of his Legion. There is… There is Su’lok of the White Scars, and Nerron of the Imperial Fists. Gaellon must repeat their names under his breath to remember them. The Wasteland takes names, just like it takes everything else. None of them have any ammunition left. Gaellon is a Blood Angel. He has been killing with his sword alone for… a length of time that he cannot estimate. Su’lok has a chainglaive, but the teeth have broken and the mechanism that turns them has jammed. Nerron has a mace that hangs in his one arm. The other side of the son of Dorn’s body is a ruin. Every armour plate from thigh to shoulder is shattered. Burnt flesh is visible in the

gaps, and bits of bone through the flesh. He has no arm from the shoulder down – the Wasteland took it. Soon it will come for the rest of him.

Hold Point 78 was one of the many emplacements built during Rogal Dorn’s fortification of the Palace. It was part of the line of battlements called Marmax South. It had been a district of habs and institutes for the mortals who studied the Great Crusade. The war masons kept the shells of the buildings and filled them with rockcrete to make a string of artificial cliffs. On top of those they set crenellations and gun emplacements. Now the whole line is rubble, and Hold Point 78 is a tor of smashed rockcrete and girders rising from the cratered ground. The only reason Gaellon knows where they are is because one of the remaining wall sections still has its line-location code stencilled on it.

‘You know this place?’ asks Su’lok. The White Scar has come to stand beside Gaellon.

‘I was here before,’ says Gaellon without looking around. ‘It’s part of the Southern Marmax line.’

Su’lok grunts at that. In the recent past he would have asked how it was possible that they had found themselves on the edge of the Anterior defences that were several hundred kilometres from where they had been fighting. Now all of them know there is no point asking the question. This is the Wasteland. Time, space and distance no longer mean what they once did here.

‘I was on this section of the line,’ says Gaellon, quietly, half to himself.

For a second he thinks of Baeron. If this really is Hold Point 78, then his brother died near here. The thought should not surprise him; Gaellon is rarer now for being amongst the living. The Imperial Palace that was, and the Wasteland it has become are a land of dead angels. To be alive here and now is the aberration.

The land around them is rippled ochre as though a soft blanket of dust has been laid over the devastation. The sky is a rust haze which blends with the land at the point where there should be a horizon. Gaellon lifts a finger and slides it across the distance. In his mind he sees a brush dip into ink and then drag across parchment.

‘What are you doing?’ asks Su’lok. The White Scar is looking hard at Gaellon. He’s watching to see if the Blood Angel is still on the right side of sanity. That’s what the Wasteland does – it eats reality and then it eats trust.

‘A brother died close to here,’ says Gaellon. ‘I was thinking how he would have looked at this.’

In his mind the brush dips in another shade of ink.

‘Kinder to have died already than to see things come to this,’ says Su’lok, and spits. The White Scar has not had a helm since they broke out of Hasgard Fort. Tracks of dried blood mark his scalp and cheeks.

‘Something is coming!’ It’s Nerron, who is looking out from next to a slumped firing lip. The son of Dorn is standing straight, refusing the offer of the tumbled wall as a support. Blood is slowly oozing from his wounded side. Gaellon and Su’lok go to stand beside him.

‘I don’t see anything,’ says Su’lok.

Nerron does not answer. He is scanning the murk, helm moving from side to side. There are cracks in his eye-lenses, and a cobweb of fractures across the helm’s crown. Whatever he saw before is gone now. That does not mean it was not there, or that it’s not there now. All it means is that the Wasteland won’t let them see it yet.

The world has been empty and still for Gaellon for the last three hours.

Both the emptiness and time are subjective, he knows. They could have walked past battle and slaughter and not realised it. Similarly, it is not actually quiet. It just seems that way to them. These are the last moments of the greatest battle ever fought by humanity. The Eternity Gate has closed.

The Legions and allies of Horus are in ascendancy. Bombs are falling in a deluge. Titans are roaming the maze of ruins that were once cities. Billions remain alive outside the last defences, waiting to die or fighting on in defiance. All that slaughter comes with noise: the screams of the dying, the shriek of weapons inhaling to fire, the thunder of falling towers. That sound is not here. Not in this part of the Wasteland.

Gaellon squints at the distance, and murmurs to himself.

‘A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives not shelter…’

‘What?’ snaps Su’lok.

Gaellon shakes his head but does not look around.

‘A fragment of ancient poetry,’ he said. ‘It came to mind. I am not sure why.’

Su’lok grunts.

‘The sons of Sanguinius are a strange breed.’

‘I recall many poets of great worth amongst the Fifth Legion,’ says Gaellon.

‘There are, but this war demands laughter and scorn and nothing else.’

‘There must always be art and beauty, even when all seems broken.’

‘Are all of your kind high-minded poets then?’

‘No,’ says Gaellon dryly. ‘Some of us are painters.’

Su’lok laughs then. The sound cracks through the quiet like the fall of a lightning bolt.

Gaellon is about to speak again when he sees movement in the distance.

Su’lok sees it at the same time and points.

‘There!’ says the White Scar.

Six hundred and forty metres out, a ripple rises in the ochre-dust softness of the landscape. Gaellon activates the power field on his sword. The lightning crackles down the tongue of steel. Nerron and Su’lok do not move. Their weapons have no power. None of them posture or seek cover.

They are here to sell their lives.

The ripple in the dust is gathering pace, broadening, curling into a crest of powdered red.

Gaellon feels the need to say something, to add a frayed piece of poetry to the moment. He is a poet as well as a warrior. All the Blood Angels are masters of a craft or art. Words are his, and to give them voice now, in the face of the slow murder of this world, seems as great an act of defiance as drawing a sword.

He opens his mouth…

Then he feels his father die.

Black fills his sight. Pain steals his words.

There is blood falling in the dark somewhere far away. Blood and feathers.

‘May I confess something?’ Baeron asked. The vox crackled with static. It had been doing that more and more in the last few days. The cheers for the victory at Saturnine were only a few hours old, but there had already been an assault on the lines since then. The fresh dead lay in steaming heaps on the maze of obstacles and wire at the base of the Marmax South fortifications. Two kilometres of crenellated wall separated the two Blood Angels, but the vox let them talk and their helm sight let them pick each

other out across the distance. Two figures in scuffed and scratched crimson amid the grey rockcrete and clusters of drab human troopers.

‘Confess what?’ Gaellon asked. Baeron cocked his head and looked away.

It was a gesture that he had made when they were both youths scrabbling for survival in the dust of Baal. It meant the same now as it had then. ‘You are thinking of the future again,’ Gaellon said. Baeron did not answer and kept his gaze on the horizon.

It was dawn. The clouds and dust had peeled back from the fresh blue of the sky. The towers and buildings of the Anterior stood out against the gold of the new day. Plumes of smoke rose to smudge the sun, as if someone had trailed black ink into orange. It was as though the skies of Terra were gilding the victories of the day before. Even the smell had changed. A fresh wind had diluted the reek of spilled fuel, corpses and burning plastek. For this small slice of time, one could almost dream of peace. It would be a brief moment, Gaellon knew. Another attack would come soon. As line adjutants both Baeron and Gaellon were linked into the main command interface. They knew that the analysts for this section had said that it was likely to suffer persistent main-force attacks in perpetuity. In perpetuity –

the battle had given the phrase a new meaning: for the duration of conflict, until the enemy broke through, or were defeated. The war had redefined eternity just as it had everything else.

There were not enough Legion warriors to hold this line. That was a fact.

So, Sanguinius had placed hundreds of his veterans amongst the human units. One angel to ten thousand humans, sometimes more. They were there to ensure smooth execution of commands, but more than anything else they were there to fight and be seen. The soldiers in their trenches and gun emplacements would hear the war cries of Baal, and see that angels fought beside them. The moments where the line adjutants would see each other were rare. The dawn of that morning was one such moment.

‘I am still waiting for a confession,’ said Gaellon.

‘I find myself thinking what the echo of these times shall be,’ Baeron said.

‘All times have an echo. The plagues that almost killed mankind before it had even left this earth led to the flowering of art that we struggle to match.

Even the Imperium is a work of art crafted from the trauma of Old Night.’

‘And you are wondering what will come from these times?’

‘Attack incoming.’ The voice from the command bastion came from the vox. The human officer’s voice was calm, but the signal squawked with static. ‘All line sections. Marmax South. Attack incoming. Main force, infantry, armour, full air-support element. Expect contact imminent.’

The only answer that Baeron would give to the last question Gaellon asked him was an echo of the shout he bellowed to the human soldiers around him.

‘Rise! Weapons ready! Rise!’

Can a death echo across the sky? Can it fill an instant, and an eternity? An absence that collapses the world around it. An implosion in being.

To others, the death of Sanguinius, primarch of the IX Legion, the Archangel of Baal, is not yet a fact. It will become real to them soon. Rogal Dorn and the Emperor will see the broken Angel, and the blood that flows from the wounds. For others, it will never be a physical truth. It will be words coming from a mouth struggling to speak…

‘Sanguinius is dead…’

It will become a fact printed on a signal scroll…

The primarch of the IX has fallen…

It will become a story blurred by time into myth.

‘Horus slew the Angel who had been his closest kin…’

To Gaellon, the death of his father is a physical fact.

The link between the primarchs and their warrior sons is a mystery that will soon pass beyond living knowledge. The Blood Angels, like all the Legiones Astartes, were once human. The organs implanted into them changed them, melding their flesh with traits of the primarch from whom they were templated. The organs and process that created a warrior of the Blood Angels caused changes at the genetic level. The effect on the mind, and the soul? Those were mysteries that not even the primarchs knew the truth of. A bond was formed between primarch and Space Marine at the level of the spirit that went beyond flesh. Body and soul. For some, that link might be distant. To the Blood Angels, the depth of their bond with their father is revealed only as it is severed. For Gaellon, it is a revelation of pain.

Black.

White edges of pain tearing through him.

Black.

Copper and iron on his tongue.

Black.

No… No, this can’t be. This cannot be.

Black.

Falling, always falling, without wings to catch his descent.

Black.

A brush dipped into red ink…

Black.

A crimson smear across white…

Black.

He is dead…

Black.

I am dead…

White.

Gaellon is standing. In front of him the ripple in the ochre dust breaks like a wave running to the shore. Things burst from under the murk. They are daemons. They are shaped by ideas of rage and hate and fury. Their skin is red and glossed. Smoke fumes from them. They roar as they come.

Su’lok is shouting. Nerron has braced, mace ready. Gaellon sees and hears none of this. He is feeling his heart ripped out by silver claws, and the strand holding the soul to the body snap. He is seeing red and black ink run down the face of a blank canvas in a memory that never happened.

Calm…

Stillness…

The sigh of brush on parchment…

Gaellon stood on a floor of pale stone under a wooden canopy. The floor is marble taken from the last bones of a mountain that once gave its stone to the temples of Terra’s long-dead gods. The pillars that support the canopy are not from Terra but Caliban, chosen, felled, and shipped to the Throneworld as a gift of the Lion. It was raining. Water drummed steadily on the stones beyond the canopy’s shelter. Curtains of grey shifted across a view of bridges spanning streams which ran between blossom-heavy trees.

The rain was semi-artificial, of course, just as the scene it moved over was.

This was one of the decorative domes of Hatay-Antakya, Spire of a Thousand Gardens, Terra’s Emerald Hive. Gaellon blinked as he looked at the gravel paths and the pink petals dancing on the grey surface of the pools.

‘The past…’ he said to himself. ‘I have fallen from pain into the past.’

This was a memory of the time that he and a hundred of his brothers had been granted leave to see the gardens of Hatay-Antakya while serving as an honour guard to Sanguinius when the primarch came to Terra. It had been a rare moment. Each of the hundred had spent their time in the gardens working on pieces of art to present to the primarch. All Blood Angels were craftsmen and artists. Gaellon had turned his will and hand to several creative disciplines – sculpture in stone and wax, lacquering, and glass making – but in his heart he was the poet he had been when he first ascended to the Legion. Baeron had been a painter. Watercolour and ink had been his mediums, and with them he had seemed to reach the truth under the surface of the world. Gaellon watched the memory of his brother tapping small piles of pigment into bowls beside his palette. A stretched rectangle of parchment sat on a frame in front of the view.

‘I am dead,’ said Baeron, without looking around.

Gaellon nodded reflexively.

‘On the line at Marmax South, three weeks ago…’

Baeron frowned and removed the lid from a flask of ink.

‘Did I die well?’

Gaellon thought of the Death Guard lumbering out of the gas-fog, of the bolt-rounds buzzing through the air, as thick as the clouds of flies swarming over the corpses. He thought of the last time he had seen Baeron alive, wading into a tide of bloated figures, rounds exploding on the remains of his armour, axes and cleavers hacking at him as he fired and struck, and kept going forwards as he was torn apart.

‘You died with honour,’ said Gaellon. Then closed his mouth, for a second.

‘I am sorry, my brother,’ he said at last.

‘Why?’

‘I would have liked to have seen you again in life.’ Baeron’s expression did not change.

‘We were all made to die, brother. I was lucky to reach that end when I did.’

‘How so?’

Baeron looked at the parchment, considering. Then he took a brush with a fat, tapered head. He dipped it into water then splashed it into the ochre pigment on the palette, swirled the liquid into the dust then dipped the brush back into the water flask. Yellow murk spread through the clear liquid. Baeron mixed more water into the pigment. His movements were relaxed, fluid, as though he were in tune with the spin and flow of the water in the flask.

‘I died in the past,’ he said, and raised the brush to the parchment. ‘I died in an age of sorrow, and betrayal, and bitterness…’ The brush swept across the white surface of the parchment. Yellow fog spread across the image. The brush moved again, dabbing, flicking, moving back between palette and parchment. ‘I died knowing that the Imperium that we believed in would never be as it was…’ The brush dipped and water swirled into a heap of red pigment. The remains of the ochre blended with the red, and now Baeron’s movements were a blur. Red ran into yellow, images formed brush stroke by brush stroke, and suddenly Gaellon was not looking at a picture, but the view from the Marmax South line as the sun rose and the enemy came.

The Death Guard came closer, growing in smudges of black – bloated, rolling figures, haloed in flies. ‘I died as an angel of a past age,’ said Baeron’s voice. And Gaellon felt the watercolour blur of dust and poison gas roll over him. He was there again on the line, moving, driven by memory, watching the last time he had seen his brother alive.

Baeron came around the edge of a ridge of rubble. Six figures were on the other side. They were human. All of them wore the gas-hoods issued to troops in the Anterior warzone. Some of them still had the aquila stamped on the remains of their gear. Rust pocked every buckle and plate of their uniforms. Mould speckled the inside of their eyepieces. The guns in their hands should not have been able to function, but they would fire despite the muck coating them. Baeron fired. A bolt-round hit the figure at the centre of the ragged group. It was a metal-storm round, made to create a sphere of shrapnel. It hit the trooper in the torso and blew them apart. Shards of metal and bone ripped into the two nearest troopers. They fell. The others flinched. Then Baeron was amongst them. He did not shoot the rest.

Ammunition and supplies had already become scarce, and besides there was no need. He took the first at a run, the knife blow rising to slice from

groin to shoulder. The trooper came apart, all physical integrity vanishing in a burst of bowel fluid and blood. Then he was into the next one and the next, red spattering the dust of his armour. Behind him, the eyes of the human troopers watching him from the gun loops and firing steps. He cut the last trooper down and held his blade high as the gore pattered on his armour… In his mind, Gaellon could hear the cheer from the lines.

And then his memory and sight pulled back, so he saw Baeron at the centre of the painted image, a crimson angel with sword raised against a washed field of yellow and green. The shots of the soldiers firing from the lines were white dashes in the blur of ink, their shouts almost audible in the ripple of dried pigment and water.

Stillness.

A single moment of time inked and framed.

‘I died and do not have to live with the future that is to come…’

White…

Blinding…

Falling…

Heat jolts through Gaellon’s arm. The horned skull parts to the sword edge.

The power field discharges with a blink of lightning. Blood jelly and red ectoplasm spatter his armour. He is screaming, shouting, roaring. The sound is pouring from inside him. He is in the middle of the daemons. They surround him. Their bodies are taut muscle and blood-slick skin. They hold swords of black iron which trail sparks as they cut. Their faces are skull grins of rage and slaughter-joy. They are of the Neverborn, bred by life’s violence: by predation, by murder, by war. Fury, hate, and the joy of killing bleeds from living minds into the warp and gives them power. Normally they cannot come from the warp into reality, but the war, this last battle of battles, has broken the barriers between worlds. The Wasteland is a daemon realm.

Gaellon is far from the ruins of Hold Point 78 now. It lies in the distance behind him. He has waded out from that island of rubble, into the ochre dust and the tide of daemons. He is alone. If Su’lok and Nerron call to him from the shore he does not hear them. He kills.

The daemon he has just cut collapses into smoke and skin. Another takes its place. It is laughing, and the laughter is the sound of claws shredding feathers from an angel as it dies. Gaellon cuts it down. Then another and another. Swords find him. Claws open his armour. His blood is running to mix with the dust of the ground. But he does not stop. He cuts and hacks and roars and wades deeper into the tide, further from the shore.

His father is dead. The fact fills his mind. The pain of it reverberates through him, bouncing off the sides of the void it has opened in his soul. He is feeling the claws. He is rushing down through the last instant of existence into the maw of oblivion.

His father is dead.

Gaellon is dead.

The Blood Angels are dead.

There is nothing else. No other sound or sensation. The world is cold black and red rage.

Except, in this red-and-black-daubed world, the memory of Baeron speaks to him. A warrior who chose to see the world in the wash of colour under a brush and the bloom of ink on a blank parchment.

‘It is better that I fell when I did…’ says Baeron’s voice.

A sword strikes Gaellon in the side. The black iron breaks the ceramite, cuts through to the meat and bone beneath. The pain of the wound vanishes into the abyss inside him.

‘I will always be as I was. I will not live with what you must…’

Gaellon feels the blood pouring from the wound as the iron sword rips free of his side. It is a mortal wound, a death cut, but he is already dying, and his blood has already poured out to stain white feathers red.

He cuts the daemon’s grin in half. Black jelly and ash fall from his sword, and the blow keeps going, cutting down through spine and torso. The pieces of the daemon fall, and Gaellon is already turning his sword to cut into another.

Red and black… Soot and blood, a bed of white feathers painted with the red of life.

The power field on Gaellon’s sword fails. The lightning vanishes from the edge. A hound leaps at him. Its body is flayed muscle. Its mouth is a cave of splintered knives. Forge heat bleeds from the collar on its neck. Gaellon rams the tip of his sword up through the roof of its mouth. The tip punches

out of the top of its skull. The hound’s momentum pushes the blade down through the back of the skull and into its neck. The cutting edge meets the brass collar with a sound like a shattering bell.

Claws score into his shoulder through shattered ceramite. The pain of their touch is barely a note in the storm roar of pain and grief. The future is murder, here in the Wasteland where angels are corpses and rage drowns out all.

He has cut another three daemons down. He does not know how. He strikes another. A fanged skull shatters. Ichor has lacquered his armour from head to foot. He is aware of the island of rubble that is Hold Point 78

moving further away, growing smaller. Do Nerron and Su’lok still stand there? Had it been their voices he had heard calling above the roars of the daemons? Or was it another voice calling to him as he went deeper into the tide. His father? His brothers? Baeron? All of them gone, all of them calling to him from the grave, all on the shore beyond the black sea of death. He wants to join them. He wants this moment to end, for the world to return to a place where warriors mark parchment with ink, and dream in poetry, and where there is more truth in art than slaughter. A world where there are angels still.

Will he always be here? Will all the Blood Angels always be here? Red angels in the Wasteland, hearing the echoes of their father’s slaughter? Will they ever reach the shore, or will they be dying for all eternity even if they live?

Cut and bleeding, Gaellon wades on. His sword has broken, but he does not stop. Daemons fall around him. His body is a ruin. The place where Baeron fell is out of sight behind him. The Wasteland has him now. Still he goes on, cutting, hacking, stamping, spilling blood into ochre dust. On and on, out of sight to where the red fades into a smudged horizon.

Gaellon descends into the Black Rage.

FULGURITE

NICK KYME

The vehicle column came into view through his scope. A chugging, fitting procession of battered Tauroxes, freight carriers and bulky Cargo-8s, fourteen in all, their fading paint abraded by the weather. Thick smoke plumed from their chimney stacks. Gunmetal shone in anaemic daylight. Or what passed for day. Even on the ridge overlooking the distant gulley, it was hard to tell precisely what hour it was. Light, dark, night, day; it had little meaning in the cyanotic pall over Terra. Even in these outer wastelands.

The Palace was many kilometres distant, a muddy silhouette thronged by smoke threaded with flashes of fire. Like a world ending. And a strange aura that the scope and his Astartesian eyesight could not penetrate. He saw faces there, just the impression, and knew they knew he was watching them.

He turned away, recognising this madness, and the ones who served it. His zealot brothers. Those who bore the Word. It was known to him, the one on the ridge. It was known to him the moment he touched the fulgurite, that innocuous piece of stone that had the power to kill gods or men that pretended to be gods. He had felt divinity then, true divinity, and in that

moment of revelation known that his kin were false and unclean things.

Aberrant.

He had but one answer to that.

The column was getting closer, the rattling cough of abused engines and starving fuel tanks patently loud. They would be passing through the canyon soon. He needed one of those vehicles, decrepit as they were. He needed to get to the war.

And as Barthusa Narek began to climb down from his vantage point, he glanced at the distant wreckage of the drop-ship behind him. He remembered the brothers he had killed, as the siege was reaching its dreadful culmination, and thought of the one he had come here to kill, the one called Aurelian.

They were screaming again, howling for death. For their false gods. It came from below, from the deepest part of the hold, the part usually reserved for cargo. Deeper still, behind a locked cage, the beasts had started up. Left over from the opening assaults, their reek swept through the ship’s recyclers, infecting every nook and cranny. Bovine, caprine, and some that defied definition. Bleating and braying, as they rutted and fought, and ate the weakest. True children of the Four, the beastmen carried their marks branded onto flesh.

A guttural siren blurted. A series of lamps in the upper hold would be turning from dirty amber to red. The ship’s chief ‘muleskinner’ was using gas to spur the bestial masses into feral insanity. It had many names.

’Slaught, psyk, frenzon. A melange of psychotropics chemically crafted to instil resilience and violence. Before the next assault run, before the murdering could begin anew.

It took effect quickly, a reddish fog swirling like churned milk. They drank it in, eager, hungry, afraid. It was pandemonium now, redoubled and compounded by thick steel and ceramite. A hotbox of uncontrolled wrath.

They would blink and cry out as the light of Terran day hit their eyes. Blind, in pain and afraid, these unwashed hordes would fall upon the remnants of the terrified defenders, goring, chomping and stabbing. They would absorb the bullets, the las-bolts, the bayonets. They would storm the last redoubts, bereft of pain, of conscience, of basic humanity.

Then came the jolt, the steel-shrieking lurch of a sudden manoeuvre, and Barthusa Narek opened his eyes.

Battery fire. The defenders had sighted the drop-ship.

A small room came into focus, little more than a cell. A piece of stone lay in his outstretched hand, resting on the palm of his armoured glove. It gently vibrated, a subtle etheric murmur like a compass. Both guide and tool of destruction. He was sitting, his helmet to one side, eye-lenses facing the door.

A light was flashing, calling him to the hold. They were making ready for the attack.

Narek took up the Brontos-pattern rifle lying on the floor in front of him as he rose to his feet. He returned the piece of stone to a pouch on his belt. The helm he mag-locked to his hip. He’d need it soon, but for now he wanted to see with his own eyes. He took his knife, too, and sheathed it. Achingly sharp, it had sat alongside the rifle, his weapons arrayed beside him as he meditated. Concentration was paramount when you were planning on killing a demigod. Flak-fire rocked the ship.

But first he had to kill everyone else.

They looked scared. Scared and exhausted. The ones riding in the column.

Army deserters, criminals and civilians by their uniforms and attire. Narek thought he saw a Palace enforcer in their midst too. He wondered how they got here, how they had escaped the opening salvos of the war. Or thought they had. The deserters were so weary they hadn’t seen the hunters, the lupine forms capering silently behind them through the thickening sand drifts. A storm was brewing. A bad one. Narek had seen this too, in the eddies and whorls out in the desert. Farther still, he saw a half-hidden bunker entrance to some forgotten and disused silo. Perhaps it once held a stockpile of weapons or other materiel. He doubted it did any more. Terra would have been stripped for every resource, every weapon, even here in these hellish wastes. He was certain he had crashed somewhere west of the Thar. He was no expert in Terran geography, but felt confident of his reckoning. Sand-whips lashed the bunker, its badly abraded entrance like polished silver. The growing storm was obscuring sensorium and augur alike. Blind, deaf, mind-fatigued, it was little wonder the deserters had failed to see their doom approaching.

Halfway down the ridge Narek found a cranny, and with the Brontos strapped across his back he turned his body and pressed the scope back to his eye.

First he took in the column, humping and jostling over the undulating dunes. Their chassis worn down by sand and a rime of dirt gumming the edges of the armour plating. They had sealed their hatches now, the last of the passengers retreating into the relative cool of the interior as the wind brewed up. Blinder still, ignorant of the threat that came at them on all fours but was armoured like an Astartes and clad in legionary colours. Narek knew the panoply. Had fought beside warriors wearing those colours before. Emperor’s Children. But not as he remembered them. There was nothing pristine or perfect about the malformed creatures he saw through the scope.

They ran on claws and talons that had pierced right through their armour, bounding bestially on splayed toes and fingers. Once men, they had been reconfigured, mutated. Remade. Unmade. Narek counted six. If even one reached the vehicle column… They moved easily through the desert and the shimmering heat, heads turned to the wind, scenting. Their faces had changed, too – that noble, haughty countenance, that decadent beauty.

Transformed, malformed. Canine, caprine, ursine; only hairless and possessed of post-animalistic intellect. Creatures, not legionaries. Not any more.

God-Emperor, what have we done to ourselves?

He had been thinking it ever since his arrival on Terra, all those months ago.

Tucked into the side of the ridge, it took most of Narek’s resolve not to try to kill them on sight, but he needed a vehicle and that meant not spooking the prey. He had selected one that looked the most hale and hardy, a Taurox, leading the pack.

The monsters in the drifts were still a few kilometres out. Stalking. They hadn’t seen him. He had time. Climbing down the last stretch of the ridge, Narek reached the desert floor and took up the position he had prepared on the ground and laid his ambush. His second of the day so far.

The iron-sights blurred then snapped into sharp focus. He had the legionary in his crosshairs. A slow trigger pull, a gentle exhale as he squeezed, and

Eheruk’s head exploded like a frag grenade, spraying his warriors in blood and bone.

Vahreth turned at the death of his commanding officer, slowed by injury, his reactions blunted.

Ever serious was Vahreth, and devout as they came. He had not stopped murmuring his dark scripture throughout transit. The drop-ship was burning now, half buried in the desert, the beastmen Narek had unleashed still rampaging throughout the hold. Firefights had echoed from within before the ruptured fuel tanks cooked off, and the resulting explosion had killed almost everyone and everything inside.

Only a handful left. Like Vahreth.

Narek had not hated Vahreth; the zealot had kept his ravings to himself, which was more than could be said for many. He loaded another round into the breech with a satisfying snap of the mechanism. He fired, a soft sigh promising death. Vahreth, who had yet to fully conceive of the danger, fell with his chest torn open. A high-explosive round. Good for killing Astartes.

Good for killing most things.

Vahreth joined six others Narek had already executed. They had staggered from the ragged tear in the hold, dazed and bloody. One of the Word Bearers had been creative and used grenades to blast a hole and escape the furnace. Because of that ingenuity, Narek reckoned maybe ten more would emerge, having survived the crash and the berserk beasts.

He shot another four before the other survivors finally caught on to the fact they were being picked off. Narek had never reached the hold. Instead, he had made for a saviour hatch and used it to exit the ship before it touched down, fusing shut the release mechanism with an incendiary charge after he made his escape. Sand made for a hard landing when struck at pace, but his armour and body had compensated. From there, he merely had to watch the lander’s remaining trajectory and get set up for the killing to follow.

The fifth of his brothers, Utal, took cover, skidding behind a piece of fuselage broken off from the main hull. Narek could see the legionary trying to find the shooter. He’d even managed to draw a weapon, poking the bolt pistol’s muzzle through a small gap in the fire-blackened metal. Snapping the scope to the rifle’s stock, Narek tweaked the focus through the sighting lens and fired through the gap, hitting Utal in the eye as he tried to line up a

target. The last of the Word Bearers came out guns blazing, firing indiscriminately into the desert murk, crying out the names of Neverborn and calling down curses.

Their hurled maledictions ceased after the fourth hiss from Narek’s rifle.

Hearts and heads. All kill-shots.

He racked the Brontos’ slide, ejecting the brass casing, slung the rifle over his shoulder and began to trudge through the desert. The Palace was far off. He needed transport. Putting the scope to his eye, he saw a column of dust on the horizon heading east.

The trap was improvised. A line of frag grenades, shallowly buried under the sand, strung together by thin wire and connected to a rudimentary trigger plate. It was all he’d had time to rig up. But it would serve. Soon, as the lead vehicle hit the plate, a short timer would start; just long enough for maybe two or three more transports to pass through. The explosion would halt the rest and dig a deep enough trench that they couldn’t easily follow.

The narrow canyon, the quickest way through the kilometres-long crag where Narek had laid his trap, would keep the column in single file. As the deserters foundered, still wondering what had happened, he’d kill the drivers. If any passengers resisted, he’d kill them too. Then take the Taurox.

Not far off now… The vehicle column was gunning hard for the canyon mouth, unaware of what awaited them. They had no idea of what hunted behind them either.

Narek tracked the scope west, narrowing focus until the creatures resolved in his circle of vision. Closer, he discerned details. Markings, tarnished battle honours. Heliotrope armour buckled around gene-swollen bodies in half-split scraps. Sweat and slather splashed from hot bodies. Grotesque, depraved, howling in crazed relish of the hunt.

No, not howling…

Planning. Coordinating.

The creatures paired off, flanking left and right, whilst another two stayed in the middle. Even stripped of their honour and humanity, the Emperor’s Children retained some of their tactical acumen. They were encircling their prey, cutting off any chance of escape.

He swung the scope back to the vehicle column. Still ignorant of the threat, still ahead.

Closer, ever closer… Narek gauged he’d have just enough time to take the Taurox and be on his way before the creatures caught up to the column. He gambled they’d be occupied eating, killing, or whatever they were planning for the passengers for long enough that he could slip away unnoticed. But if they sought him out, Narek had an answer to that too. He braced his rifle, preparing to line up a shot.

One hundred and fifty metres to the trigger plate.

Then the lead vehicle began to slow. Narek frowned, wiping grit from the lens before looking again.

Definitely slowing. The entire column decelerated. A Cargo-8 towards the back of the formation was ailing, black smoke spewing from its engine stack. They were really slowing now, reacting to the stricken vehicle. Then they did stop. A few feet short of the trap in the long shadow of the canyon mouth.

Narek cursed, still hidden in his nook, rifle braced.

A hatch opened in the lead Taurox and a woman leaned out, her head wrapped in a thick scarf, wearing goggles to keep out the sand lashing against the column. She was the enforcer he had noted earlier and spoke into a vox-unit held in one hand whilst pressing a pair of magnoculars to her eyes with the other. She looked in Narek’s direction, but he was well enough concealed by the ridge to be certain of giving away no sign of his presence. Then she moved her gaze west.

And saw what hunted in their wake.

A panicked shout brought others from their vehicles, the entire column now slewed to a complete halt, engines idling. A rider at the back brought out a rifle with a targeter and looked behind them. He paled as he lowered the weapon, turning back to the woman to shout his confirmation.

The front vehicles started up again, sputtering and shuddering into an agonised crawl that pulled them out of column. The ones at the back filled in until the motorcade had reassembled into a defensive laager with the canyon at their backs. More and more hatches opened, both turrets and gang ramps. Men and women armed with carbines, shotcannons and pistols clambered out. They were draped in ragged cloaks that might once have served as blankets or sacking. Arms and legs were wrapped in cloth like a leper’s bandages to keep out the sand. Some had goggles like the enforcer’s, their heads and faces bound up the same. They had left one war and found

another, perhaps something worse. Terra was hell now. There were no safe havens left. But they didn’t know that.

Narek counted more than a hundred amongst the throng. A desperate expedition with no true understanding of what they faced.

Slaughter. And darker deeds besides.

He could wait, let the monsters have their fill, but the storm was coming, a fell promise on the horizon. At least, he told himself this was why he acted as he did.

Letting out another curse, longer and louder, Narek remotely deactivated the sensor plate on the trap and headed for where the deserters made their last stand.

The snap and crack of lasguns firing in concert with solid-shot weapons echoed across the desert plain as the laager’s defenders did their best to fend off their attackers. Bullets and superheated beams rained down, but the creatures shrugged it all off, their armour scraps alight with sparking, ineffectual missiles. Even their flesh proved inviolable, readily suffering burns and shallow gouges. It didn’t even slow them down.

As they closed an eager hunger flashed in their eyes, speaking of appetites too depraved to utter. An inhuman, ululating cry raked the air and Narek saw a legionary spring from its haunches and launch at a man with convict tattoos standing in a turret. He roared, the man, firing off an autogun. Shout turned to scream as the convict was ripped from the hauler and borne to the ground to be dismembered.

There was no time to be appalled as a second creature had reached the column and was amongst them. Rending, flensing.

Sustained defensive fire continued for a few more seconds as the deserters not currently being ripped to pieces by the legionaries tried to kill their attackers. Then even that failed as a blood-flecked conscript cried out and started running. He wasn’t alone. More of the defenders broke ranks and headed for the open desert. Gaps appeared in an already fragile line as the last of the Emperor’s Children struck at either flank. One man was split from crotch to crown, torn open and spraying his comrades with his blood.

Organs wrenched from still-warm bodies were left to rot in the sun. A woman gave out a wail, choked off as a hulking thing in piecemeal ceramite

leapt on her with fangs bared. Her short-lived screaming gave way to the sound of crunching bone.

Too late, the deserters realised the trap they were in. The enforcer, still fighting, tried to restore some order, but her troops either milled around in panic or ran.

Narek ran too. It had been seconds, but the laager was already a bloodbath.

He slewed to a stop, dropping to one knee, and raised the Brontos. As a legionary capered into his sight, carrying in its claws the gory spine of some poor bastard, he fired. The round took it in the chest, shattering what remained of its breastplate and gouging a hunk of flesh. He was about to relocate to his next target when the creature, which had been lying on its back presumed dead, pulled itself up.

‘Shit…’

Ejecting the spent casing, Narek loaded another round.

His second shot struck its head, blowing out a chiropteran ear and half of the legionary’s face. It fell, dead at last. Narek spat in the dust. Others in its brood reacted, sniffing at the air and turning towards the threat. Narek moved, trying to get lost amongst the laager. Wind shrieked between vehicles, hot sand peppering metal as the storm rose up. Overhead, the sky had begun to darken. Hurrying between two Cargo-8s, he heard a chassis buckle as if from a heavy weight and raised his rifle just as a legionary sprang at him from a roof. The round struck it in mid-air, through the neck, and it landed hard in the gap between vehicles. Narek quickly put another in its head just to be sure. Then he broke through the laager and into open ground.

Grit scythed his armour, a great squall of dirt that lashed in a frenzy.

Through the maelstrom, he caught sight of the enforcer. Scarf drawn up over her face, she was firing into the storm, the dulled flashes of her shotcannon like starbursts. He swore she glanced at him as he was glancing at her, something like hesitation and cautious hope hinted at in her body language.

Another legionary emerged through the darkening storm, seemingly unfazed by the gyrating whips of sand slowly cutting into its exposed flesh.

It loped on four limbs, baying for Narek’s blood.

He stood, angling his body slightly as he took aim. Airborne matter was fouling his scope, so he quickly disengaged it and lined up over the rifle’s

iron-sights. The crosshairs alighted on the creature’s centre-mass. Even if he didn’t kill it, the high-ex round would stop its charge.

Skin prickling at the back of his neck, Narek turned his head too late as a second creature barrelled into him and his shot went wild.

It was slashing at his armour before they’d even hit the ground, both wrapped in a ferocious embrace. He felt a stab in his flank, a dull alert chime in his ear from his armour’s biological monitoring system. His sight blurred, the retinal lenses in his helm suddenly cracked, and his vision crazed with ocular static. Narek fended off hectic attacks with his arm as he pulled a bolt pistol from the holster on his belt. Pushing the muzzle of the weapon up against the thrashing creature’s body, he held the trigger. Rapid-fire rounds punched upwards, hammering through plate, then through toughened skin. They broke the legionary apart, scattering it in various dismembered pieces. Shrugging off the wreckage of flesh and bone, Narek rose unsteadily. The Brontos lay nearby, but the other creature was already on him. He’d emptied the pistol clip into the shredded thing festering in the dirt and had no time to refresh another. He was also bleeding.

Trusting his soul to the Emperor, Narek drew his knife.

An explosion hit the other legionary, struck it in the side and sent it sprawling. A quick glance and Narek saw the enforcer, a tube launcher still smoking in her grasp. Elsewhere, everywhere, the few remaining survivors fought for their lives. As would he.

Snatching up the rifle, feeding a round into the breech, Narek took aim again as the creature scrambled to its feet like a canid briefly knocked off balance. It brayed, starved and lascivious at the same time. He shot it through the heart.

Four down…

He trudged on, siphoning off the pain of his injury into a vault of his mind.

He didn’t see the enforcer. She was either dead or had left her tank for better prospects elsewhere. There were plenty of others, though; their corpses littered the ground in charnel heaps, a hecatomb slowly consumed by the growing storm.

Rasping grit hit Narek across the body, the shoulders. He had to wrench off his helm; the retinal lenses were damaged and made him half blind. The improvement was marginal as he narrowed his eyes against the stinging sand, the tumult building to a roar.

Following the screaming, he found the fifth legionary. It had a man by the throat, its long clawed fingers tenderly caressing his bleeding scalp as it devoured his lower half. It convulsed as Narek shot it between the shoulder blades, its back arching, shreds of flesh and gristle hanging from its jaws as it bleated in agony.

Narek ended its misery with a shot through the ear, blowing out cranium and matter in a reddish stream.

The last one fled; he saw it capering off before the storm swallowed it and only dirt and shadow remained. Then a final cry just audible above the tumult… of rage, defeat? A second call, even more distant than the first, answered it. Then a third. Fourth. Many calls.

Narek let out an exhausted breath, his hurts rekindled like barbs in his flesh. He tried not to sag where he stood. Warnings sounded from his armour. He silenced them. Retreating to the relative cover of the laager, he crouched in the lee of a Taurox, its sides already banked with gathering sand, and checked ammo. He frowned as the gauge revealed the depth of his predicament.

He turned suddenly, pistol loaded and drawn at the figure standing at the other end of the vehicular corridor where he was taking refuge. A shotcannon cradled across her body, the enforcer looked back at him, wide-eyed through her goggles. A handful of deserters cowered behind her.

Terrified, desperate.

‘Can you help us?’ The voice came from a vox-unit on her belt, distorted by the conditions and barely audible.

Narek wasn’t here for them. He wasn’t even here for the by-blows of degenerative science that had just tried to kill him. He needed transport, and a place to hide out the storm where the hunters would lose his scent.

Scowling at the survivors, Narek headed off into howling darkness.

And they followed.

Limping, Narek glanced back over his shoulder and saw the deserters still in his wake. He trudged on, head down, enduring the storm’s wrath.

Visibility was almost down to nothing, but he could just make out the fringes of the bunker up ahead. Every sense yielded to the churning swathes of sand. Every footfall brought agony, despite the efforts of his enhanced physiology to stymie it. He had slowed, but each step brought him closer to salvation. The krak grenades on his belt would have to be enough to break

open the bunker. If not… Well, then nothing much would matter. He clutched the shard, not realising he had taken it from his belt, and felt the fulgurite’s faint resonance against his armoured palm.

Feet dragging through the sand, an anchor dredged with every metre, Narek reached the bunker. He had primed the krak grenade, realising his consciousness was slipping. Blood loss, despite his Larraman’s organ, and grievous physical injury had pushed his body to its limit. He’d place the grenade, the movement automatic. Then regroup.

I just need to regroup…

It took Narek a moment to realise the bunker door, emblazoned with the old sigil of Unity, was already open. The grenade fell.

Then so did he.

Cool, musty air touched his face and Narek opened his eyes.

A corridor resolved, deep, wide, dark. Metal walls, iron-grey. A distant shaft of light, the muffled howling of wind.

He rasped a laugh, despite himself. Still alive.

Four silhouettes resolved in the light. They were trying to push the bunker door shut. The survivors from the vehicle column, four out of more than a hundred. Two convicts in penal battalion garb, an Army deserter in an olive drab, and the enforcer in dirty grey armour he had seen earlier.

They must have dragged him. His rifle and pistol lay nearby within reach, knife still in its sheath.

He lurched to his feet, feeling his body reacting to trauma. Reknitting, mending, the furnace heat of accelerated healing dappling his leathery skin with sweat.

‘Stand aside…’ he growled, laboured steps taking him to the bunker door.

They parted. He pushed hard and felt the pain of his wounds anew as he strained. It closed with an ominous metal clang and the darkness became nearly absolute.

A lume-stick flared and the enforcer stepped forwards, casting a pearlescent light over herself and the other survivors. They looked wary, afraid. She was pale-skinned but stocky.

‘I’m Ebba Renski. This is Detof and Klena.’

She gestured to the convicts, rangy and tattooed specimens, red weals around their necks from where they’d removed their explosive collars.

‘And the scruffy-looking soldier is Vuko.’

A bearded man with dark skin nodded, wearing the uniform of some obscure regiment. It had been painted in urban camo. Ill-suited to the desert.

He had a lascarbine, a knife strapped to his thigh. They had ditched the scarves and cloaks, and stood in their travel-worn clothes. The two penal battalion conscripts wore convict yellow and Munitorum-issue flak armour.

It was cheap, barely serviceable. Crude autoguns were clutched in thin hands. The enforcer had decent enough kit, well-tended. Carapace armour over black fatigues, a functional tactical helmet. Shotcannon. No grenade launcher. He assumed she’d spent it during the fight in the desert.

Narek grunted. He cared little for their names or their attire. They’d be dead soon, anyway. Everyone on this cursed battlefield would be. He sagged against the door as if the world’s gravity had redoubled and was pulling him down.

‘You’re injured,’ said Renski, the enforcer.

She trembled, despite her best efforts not to – that heady blend of awe and fear that all unaugmented humans felt in the presence of an Astartes. The shotcannon in her grasp was loaded, but it was obvious she wished desperately not to have to use it. Passing the lumen-stick to Vuko, the soldier, she reached for a med-kit instead. The caduceus on the front caught the light.

‘Sealant, stimms…’ breathed Narek, feeling bones grate.

She rummaged around in the kit and came up with both. She pulled out gauze and bandages too.

‘I don’t need that,’ Narek snarled. ‘No use.’ He took the sealant, using it to glue the gaps in his armour, laying the adhesive directly over skin and blood where he had to. The stimms he jabbed in his neck. Then another in his arm where the plate had been ripped away and was left ragged, half-chewed. He absorbed the concoction quickly, and felt the pain ebb to a distant thrum.

Awareness sharpening, he took stock of his surroundings. The door led to the storm and what hunted within it. Nothing to be gained that way. The other direction promised darkness and the vague impression of a chamber and more corridors beyond. Narek considered what this place was – a silo, perhaps a depot of some kind. Larger than it looked from the outside, and deeper. The shaft ahead sloped downwards. Hot air pricked his nostrils, and something else. Like meat left to sweat in the sun too long.

He felt the fulgurite shard throb in his hand, the fingers clenched around it like a vice. It was the Emperor’s grace, a fork of psychic lightning crystallised in sand, fire turned into earth. Elemental transformation.

‘Who are you?’ asked the enforcer.

‘Narek,’ murmured Narek, taking up his weapons, making sure they still functioned.

‘And…’ she said, faltering, ‘whom do you serve?’

He looked down, seeing the armour, the iconography and the sigils he despised.

‘I serve myself. And I owe a debt of the killing kind.’

He trudged off, stiff-legged and raw with pain.

‘I thought you’d kill us,’ she called after. ‘For leaving the defences. I thought that’s why you had come.’

‘Either die at the wall, if there are any walls left now, or die out here. It matters little to me,’ said Narek, his voice echoing as he headed into the darkness.

‘Then why help us?’

‘I haven’t. I needed a vehicle and would have taken one of yours if you hadn’t slowed down. Don’t see that for something it isn’t.’

‘Please,’ she uttered, ‘we can’t survive alone. Not now. But we can be useful. We have weapons.’

Narek stopped, stared at her.

‘So now you want to fight?’

‘We want to live. If that means travelling by your side, then we’ll fight.’

‘Don’t expect to live long,’ Narek growled as he carried on his way, but he didn’t stop them.

They found a generator, dust-caked and rusted with disuse, but it had power still. Weak lumens activated and threw wan light across old machineries, empty crates and other detritus. Servitors, crudely made, their remains calcified, stood around like petrified ghouls, trapped in whatever meaningless task they had been performing when they died. Several oozed a gluey mixture of blood, proteins, and whatever else was pumped into their cyborganic bodies to make them persist. Until they hadn’t any more.

Narek gave them little heed. He had the shard and would follow its vibrations.

He will bring me to you, father…

A corridor ahead opened out into a large, circular chamber. In the deep and the chill, condensation glittered slickly on the walls, trickling down into a half-empty basin of brackish water. It was still deep. A cooling chamber. He had seen them before, used to prevent generators from overheating.

Whatever this place had been for, it wasn’t merely storage. A bridge had once spanned the basin but now jutted in a few broken pieces from the bottom of the half-drowned circular shaft.

A decent leap. Narek jumped, his legs leaden, and scarcely made it to the other side. He scrambled, the fingers of one hand dug into the shaft’s edge, and hauled himself up and over. Pain flared, a familiar sting, and he took a breath. On his hands and knees, he glanced back and saw the deserters edging around the lip of the shaft, backs flat to the wall, taking narrow, perilous steps.

‘Tenacious,’ he muttered, and stood up.

Facing his father in such a state, he’d need to be sure of the kill. And then?

Narek had given little thought to ‘then’, if even such a possibility existed.

He knew from the skies and the hell unleashed through innumerable city districts that this was the end war. The last war. The death of everything.

Not far off now.

The deserters met him on the other side, Renski first across.

‘As I said,’ she remarked, ‘we want to live. Never underestimate a human’s will to survive.’

‘Survive…’ muttered Narek with a wry yet rueful smile. ‘Yes, that’s what it’s come down to, hasn’t it?’ He looked to the sickly light ahead, the seeming labyrinth into which they had blindly wandered. That smell again.

Sweating meat. Spoiled. Rancid.

‘Stay close,’ he rasped.

The door would not budge. Narek readjusted his grip, hoping he could force the mechanism enough to widen the crack. He heaved, feeling bone fractures deepen, half-knitted skin and flesh reopen.

They had passed through several corridors and empty chambers, old stores and decrepit engines. All the while, Narek had followed the fulgurite shard, listening to its gentle tremors, smelled the sulphuric tang it exuded. It was not a compass in the traditional sense; this was more like scapulimancy or

haruspicy. It required interpretation. Either he had divined poorly or he needed to pass through the door currently barring his path.

His last krak grenade lay primed somewhere in the desert, far from here now. The Brontos was an impressive weapon, but it couldn’t shear bulkhead steel. The door’s access panel was broken, inoperable. He’d levered off the face of the panel already, using the tip of his knife, but the wiring was burnt, its circuits broken. And he was no tech-priest.

He tried again, reaching under the door, searching for a release lever or a clamp. Something.

A hand touched his shoulder and he turned, biting back a curse.

‘I think I can get under there.’

It was one of the convicts. Klena. She was rake-thin with narco-abuse, her frame skeletal and prematurely aged. Her lank white hair was like bleached straw, her rheumy eyes afraid but determined.

Narek glanced at the enforcer, who gave a nod that the woman could be trusted. Odd comrades, but then months of hell-war will breed desperate alliances. He stepped back. The stench was stronger here, emanating from somewhere beyond the door.

‘A panel like this one,’ he told her, ‘or a lever. You will need two hands to move it.’

She nodded, about to get down onto the floor when he gently gripped her arm. He had to be gentle lest he break it by mistake.

‘Do not linger,’ Narek warned her.

Another nod, shaking now. Terrified. Of him, of this place. It scarcely mattered.

Klena disappeared through the narrow crack beneath the door.

It took several minutes, the humans fretting while Narek stood still as a statue, willing his body to heal, his strength to return. Then they heard a dull thunk of metal shifting and resetting, and the mechanism began to grind and turn. The door lifted, a few centimetres at first but then faster, until it stopped a third of the way up, the rusted gears unable to go any further.

Narek had to crouch low, as the others passed underneath barely needing to stoop. Whatever this place had been made for, it was large. Very large.

The door led to another chamber, this one much bigger than the others.

Several lines of vats filled the expanse, brimming with viscous, briny fluids.

The glass had fogged in the chill, ice-rimed and smeared with dirt. Several

had smashed, and they found Klena standing in front of one of the broken vats, rigid with fear.

Something lurked within – fleshy, distinctly biological, sheened with frost, its eyes glassy with death. A huge thing, anthropomorphic but grotesquely so. Musculature too large for its frame strained the skin. The cranium looked overlarge, hooded. It had… claws. Chitinous plates bulged under its stretched flesh. And as Narek regarded it, he felt his gorge rise. An instinct, ingrained, atavistic, pulled at him to destroy this abomination. To cleanse this place with fire and see it turned to ash.

He went to one of the other vats, wider than him, much taller. Encrusted dirt and ice yielded to his touch as he cleared a palm-width window into the depths within.

Matter lay suspended in the fluid: the approximation of faces, only distorted, strange. Distended limbs, some swollen, others pathetically wizened into drifting ropes of skin. Legs that ended in stumps or trailed into fleshy tendrils. Gene-craft. Narek pictured the monstrosities from the desert and saw in this horror before him something of their origins. In part, at least. This place had been remote and sealed away for a reason.

‘What is it?’ hissed Renski, a tremor in her voice. Behind her, the convict stared ahead, unmanned by the experience of looking into the shattered vat.

The others stayed back, not wanting to look.

‘Nothing good,’ uttered Narek, and wondered if he should have chosen the desert.

That meat smell again. It was potent here, leading his eyes ahead to an archway and an antechamber. The fulgurite burned hot, its vibrations urgent.

Returning the shard to the pouch on his belt, Narek unslung his rifle.

‘We are not alone.’

He advanced on the archway, moving quietly through the rows of abominations. In his periphery, he caught glimpses of leathern wings, a long proboscis-like tongue, scaled flesh. Several of the vats had been thawed, their contents excised. A gelatinous pool of fluids spilled outwards. In it, Narek saw footprints leading towards the arch. Homo sapiens, very large.

He heard the deserters follow, their fear of this place overriding their fear of him. Their rasped murmurings hissed like secrets as they saw the contents of the vats, and he suspected he was leading them to their deaths.

A twinge. A clench of the jaw. What was that? Regret?

Another door here. It had slid aside, bypassed, its locks eaten by acid.

Narek crossed the threshold, passing beneath the arch.

He raised the rifle to his eye when he saw the legionary. The figure had his back to him, the fluted pack and gaudy heliotrope armour giving the Astartes’ provenance away. A gilded eagle’s wing glittered on the left pauldron. III Legion. Emperor’s Children.

A haunting flash of revelation came swiftly. He had assumed the altered legionaries in the storm had been hunting. But what if they weren’t… What if they were guarding something, or someone?

Edging closer to the figure, who yet appeared oblivious to his presence, Narek started to step obliquely to one side, trying to see what the legionary was doing. His back was arched as he leaned over a surgical table. There were more specimens here in this room, smaller. Organs and parts that were held in jars filled with aspic sat on rows of shelving. A more intimate space, a laboratory. There was equipment, much of it unfathomable to Narek. And tools on racks, both the mundane and the esoteric. A vault lined one wall, more than a hundred separate chambers, each stamped with an ident. Cold air drooled from a handful of these lockers, their contents ransacked.

Parchment littered the floor, as if frantically read and then discarded. Scrolls lay piled on the table, their edges fringed in blood as the butcher-surgeon worked messily next to them.

Closer now, Narek beheld the razor-saw, the injectors, the red-rimed scalpels. There were basins. Organs, recently excised, steamed within. He stitched, the legionary, his narthecium vambrace to one side. An Apothecary’s tool. The caduceus again, etched in red over white.

Each pull of thread was almost symphonic, the expert conductor at his podium. Here, the orchestra was a body: something huge, herculean. It barely fit on the surgical table. Its face, the parts of it which were not horribly disfigured, reminded Narek of something. Someone. White hair, pale skin like marble…

‘It is not my father,’ uttered the Apothecary, pausing at the apex of a pull, the thread taut like piano wire in his bare hand. ‘Though it does bear some of his likeness.’

‘What?’ Narek heard himself say, mind and body warring with morbid fascination at the thing on the table. He had lowered his rifle without

realising.

The Apothecary went on sewing.

‘He did ask me once,’ he said, his voice low and wistful, ‘to remake one of them. Not him, of course, never him. The Phoenician is a perfect specimen, after all, what would be the point?’ He spoke then against the side of his bloodied hand, as if he was sharing a joke or some scurrilous truth too heinous to utter openly: ‘At least, that’s what he claimed.’

He gave a dry chuckle, an awful dying-man’s rasp.

‘No, he wanted the other one. His brother. The dull, iron one. It was a flawed replication, I’m afraid. I required better materials. Something original.’ He waved a hand, flicking drops of blood, the other still focused on its macabre art.

Narek found himself transfixed. Only when he felt Renski’s hand upon his arm did he regain his senses. Her eyes implored him, leave, leave this place now…

But he couldn’t leave. He had a mission, only he hadn’t known this was part of it. The will of Him moving through Narek.

‘All of this,’ remarked the Apothecary. ‘It is His. My father’s father. They have a name for Him. They call him the Anathema. Puerile, if you ask me.

He is a scientist. I can appreciate that as a vocation. To think, to create, to will that creation into being.’

He coughed, a seizure wracking his body that split the thread with the violence of his convulsions. Wiping a hand across his mouth, setting down his tools, the Apothecary turned to face them. Blood and other organic matter lathered his armour.

‘Interesting…’ He frowned. His arms were elbow-deep in crimson. Flecks of arterial red slashed a sharp face: intelligent, gaunt, all at once curious and cruel. ‘Brutish countenance, thick brow and flat nose. Scarred, but not ritualistically. You don’t look like one of them. A scholar. A priest. No, wait, what’s the name they’re using…’ He paused, thinking. ‘ Apostle. Are you an apostle, son of Lorgar, Bearer of the Word?’ He read the ident on Narek’s armour. ‘Narek. I cannot say I have heard of you.’

Narek snarled, ‘What are you doing here, legionary?’

‘It’s Apothecary, to be precise. I value precision. Apothecary Fabius.’

‘I don’t care.’ Narek raised the rifle. ‘Answer me.’

The Apothecary’s gaze travelled to the humans. His eyes widened a fraction, hungry, lascivious like the creatures in the desert, though this one wore his deformities on the inside.

‘I like its skin,’ he said, referring to the enforcer. She retreated a step.

‘Much suppler than yours, Narek. I think I’ll take it, wear it as a coat.’

‘You’re insane.’

He should kill him, but Narek stayed his hand. Despite himself, he wanted to know what the Apothecary had been doing.

‘Perhaps… but have you seen what’s happening out there? Literal bleeding skies, Narek. Murder and nightmare made manifest. I prefer the biological over the etherical.’ His eye drifted, ever evaluating. It alighted on Narek’s wound. ‘That looks painful,’ said Fabius. ‘Is it? Did you happen to meet my brothers out there in the desert?’

An ugly scowl curled Narek’s lip. ‘Those things are not Astartes.’

‘They were. Flawed, like all of us, like all of His creations. My father thought so and tried to perfect himself. I wonder if he’s happier now?’

‘You made abominations.’

‘I made them better. Stronger, faster, more ferocious. I am a healer, after all. Mankind must adapt if it is to survive.’ Fabius coughed again, spitting up blood into his hand. He regarded it, displeased, before shaking it loose.

‘But adaptation requires iteration.’

He stepped aside, Narek tracking his every movement. The thing upon the surgical table was revealed entire.

Naked, grotesque, its flesh a tapestry of scars and stitching. Tumours and obscene growths riddled its body. Swollen muscle shone sickly in the light.

A monster.

‘You’re a madman…’ Narek breathed, readying to fire.

‘I’m a scientist.’

The fingers of the creature twitched and Narek turned his aim.

‘You’ve inconvenienced me, coming here,’ said Fabius.

A nerve tremor like a viper spasmed under the creature’s skin, its arm slowly rising. Its mouth opened, releasing a tortured breath. Its first. Then it lurched to its feet, veiled in feverish sweat, clumps of amniotic jelly sloughing off its body.

‘Emperor protect us…’ Narek heard Detof mutter. He could not disagree.

He fired, but his shot skewed wide, catching the Apothecary in the shoulder as he vaulted the surgical table, taking cover. Fabius grunted in pain.

But now the creature from the slab was coming, steps faltering and unhurried at first, as it blinked in the light. Hurting. Trying to work out how to walk. One eye a perfect violet, the other a horrid, nacreous orb too large for the socket. Its pace increased, turning into long, loping strides, agony with every step.

It came for Narek, who fired again. The high-ex round tore away chunks of flesh that flopped and sizzled when separated from the host. He got off three shots before it was upon him, Narek already drawing his pistol even as he let the rifle fall from his grasp.

It hit him like a battering ram, lifting Narek up off his feet. His battle plate screamed a dozen integrity warnings, the metal shrieking as the creature squeezed. Huge beyond reason, it towered over Narek and was half as wide again, even in his armour. The pistol was gone, wrenched away as the creature bore him halfway across the next chamber. Back amongst the vats.

Amongst further horrors.

Klena had been standing in its path, too afraid to move. She gave a stifled yelp before the creature crushed her like it was standing on an egg. The others scattered.

Narek’s hand slid around his knife, his last weapon, and he stabbed downward, into the neck, searching for the carotid artery. Cascades of blood painted his armour. He could no longer breathe and felt his fused ribcage cracking under the extreme pressure.

Gunfire cracked nearby, solid shot rippling against the creature’s skin. An irritant, nothing more. But as a burst of shot raked its face, the creature snarled and its grip loosened. Narek turned, drove his knife into the eye –

that bulging, wretched orb.

It screamed, a low, ululating cry, and Narek fell, discarded, as the creature saw to its own pain. He scrambled backwards, his eyes on the thing as it clutched at its face, vitreous humour leaking down its cheek like wax. It was hurt. Angry.

Pain lancing through his own body, Narek dragged himself up, staggered.

Unarmed, he had no chance.

Gunfire came again, left and right. The deserters had some fight in them after all. The creature turned, an arm raised to fend off the insect-sting of ineffectual bullets. It charged at Vuko, flinging out an arm and sending the soldier flailing into the vats. Glass shattered, fluids sluicing free, carrying with them the matter inside, a flood of offal and necrotised filth.

A desperate cry echoed from the other side of the chamber, bright muzzle flare from an autocarbine at highest rapidity lifting the shadows. Detof stood his ground, shouting vengeance for Klena. His volley hammered the creature’s chest as it reached out for him. Then the convict was screaming, seized by both arms and ripped in two. The creature cast the bifurcated pieces aside like an unwanted meal before it advanced on Renski.

She ran. The creature loped after her, following some predatory instinct.

Eager to chase.

Instead of running away, Renski drew the creature around the vats. Its rudimentary intelligence was too slow to realise it was being goaded. At least at first… until it roared, crashing through the vats in a shower of vital fluids and shattering glass. It paused to stare at the moist and shiny matter and alighted on a face, not so unlike its own, although more horribly deformed. It reached out with quivering fingers to touch its kin, something like melancholy hideously twisting its features…

It gave Narek time to retrieve his rifle and other weapons. Of the Apothecary, he saw no sign. His ambitions thwarted, perhaps Fabius had fled. More likely, he was observing from some hidden vantage, taking notes on his creation’s performance.

About to load the rifle, Narek’s fingers brushed the edge of the fulgurite shard.

The last of its kind. He had killed so-called immortals with the others. And now he could use this one to kill this creature.

He chose a high-ex round instead. The fulgurite shard had a name on it; Narek had etched it in his mind and it could be used to fell no other. Else everything he had done, everything he had become, would be for nothing.

He needed another way.

He fired.

The explosive round hit the creature in the side of the head, splitting its ear, detonating in a shower of gore. A graze. Bellowing its hurts, ripped

from the confusing pathos of seeing its malformed decedents, it turned on Narek with renewed vigour.

Out of the creature’s eyeline, Renski had crept over to Vuko and was hauling him up, his arm over her shoulder, the enforcer taking most of the soldier’s weight. She nodded when Narek caught her eye and he nodded back. Kinship of a sort. It had been a long time since he felt that, even this pale facsimile.

He tossed a frag grenade, leaving his bandolier empty barring one crude incendiary. It was used for fusing metal and it would not start a fire alone, although he did not doubt the fluid in the vats would provide a powerful accelerant…

The grenade blew a chunk out of the creature, staggering it and allowing Narek to run clear. He followed Renski and Vuko, who were struggling and limping. Back out of the vat chamber they went, under the partially open bulkhead door and towards the tunnels.

Narek scrambled under after them, his backpack scraping against metal.

He shared a look with the enforcer. Showed her the incendiary.

‘I’ll hold it off,’ he said, probably about to die for these humans. Gallant.

Stupid.

Renski nodded, the soldier scarcely conscious in her arms. They carried on. And Narek backed away from the half-open door, turning to face the creature.

How noble you are, brother… The voice of Valdrekk Elias returned like a revenant.

Distended claws wrapped themselves underneath the door, the creature’s crude mind too dull to navigate by guile, and pulled. Wrenched metal began screaming and the door edged upwards, inch by shrieking inch.

Having waited as long as he could, Narek unclipped the incendiary and threw it under the door. It had a short fuse, but his aim was good and it rolled amongst the smashed vats, the spilled fluids lapping at its sides.

Then Narek ran. Back down the tunnels and through the darkness.

An eruption shook the laboratory complex behind him. It threw him against the wall, but he recovered quickly and kept on running as an ocean-roar grew behind him. The heat grew too, along with the stench of burning.

Of chemicals. Of flesh.

A distant keening, half-swallowed by the tumult of fire, could faintly be heard.

The creature, dying.

He threw a glance over his shoulder as the sound of agony became louder, and he saw it then. Ablaze head to foot, skin sizzling… dripping, its gaping mouth a vortex of flame. But still coming, even as its flesh cooked and its bones baked to black.

Ahead of him, the circular room, the cooling chamber.

Behind, the creature chased by a rolling surge of fire.

Narek reached the chamber and leapt, straight down this time, into the brackish water. He found Renski and Vuko there, shoulders poking above the murk, alive but unable to clamber out. Renski gave him a fearful glance.

‘Shut your eyes,’ Narek told her, raising his rifle to his shoulder and aiming up at the lip of the basin.

He didn’t have long to wait.

The creature appeared, a burning effigy now.

He shot it in the leg, and it faltered. Then another in the chest pushed it back.

And the roar grew, apocalyptic, deafening.

The rolling flame surge hit the creature, engulfing it, destroying it utterly and Narek dove down beneath the water, dragging Renski and Vuko with him.

Swallowed below as the fire raged above.

They found the vehicles again, half-buried in the sand. The storm had eased to a whisper and the Apothecary, wherever he had gone, had taken his hounds with him. No legionaries or things that had once been legionaries stalked this particular stretch of desert.

Fire had gutted the laboratory by the time they emerged from the cooling basin. Narek had scrambled to the lip and climbed out. Then he had reached down and pulled the others out too. The slow traverse through the still-burning, flame-scarred tunnels had been treacherous, but nothing had come after them. They were, it seemed, alone.

A silent trek through the sands followed, weariness stealing voices. And shock. At least for the deserters.

Narek preferred the silence. Inane chatter riled him, although he had become tolerant of a great many things, he realised. He had the fulgurite shard in his hand, its vibrations low but discernible. It had brought him to the Apothecary, he felt certain of that. Some animus of His will had led him there. To Fabius. But it wasn’t over.

Father had yet to pay his due.

They managed to get two of the vehicles started, most of the others too sand-logged to function. Narek took the Taurox, as he had always planned to do, and Renski loaded Vuko onto the back of a Cargo-8. As she climbed into the front cab, engine sputtering as it idled in the heat, she made to catch Narek’s eye. Her mouth shaped as if she were about to say something. Her thanks. Her prayers.

Narek turned away before she could utter them.

He wasn’t here for her, for them. He started up the Taurox, turning it in a wide arc, and headed for the Palace. Towards the war.

The Taurox expired twenty-five kilometres north of the Palace outskirts. It slewed to an ungainly halt, hissing and groaning until it stopped entirely and did not start up again. On foot, Narek slogged for the front lines, but far from any kind of cohesion or strategy, he found only chaos. Madness.

Strange lightning flickered in the firmament. Voices hissed and cackled on the wind.

Neverborn lurked in shadows, haunting the ruined places. They whispered to him, called his name, but none dared to creep close. Not with the fulgurite. He passed the outer precincts, staying away from the worst of the battle zones, his armour and his icons leaving him largely unmolested. Any who did come across his path, he either avoided or, if there were few, eliminated. Kill-gangs roamed in packs, hammering bodies to eight-pointed stars or hanging them in droves by the neck to jerk and dangle. They called out names into the darkness, names from languages unspeakable by human tongues. Chanting murmured on the air and the air murmured back.

Narek steered well clear.

He circumnavigated a vast slick of burning promethium, the flames clawing and black as they reached, trying to escape the horror. A Custodian stood staked to the ground like a crude scarecrow, impaled with sixteen spears. Its eyes had been put out and dirty iron nails rammed in their stead.

He passed a graveyard of tanks, their crews curiously absent with no sign of their bodies. The tanks were seemingly untouched, purple ash piled in their interiors.

A felled Titan, its metal pitted and rotted through as if by contagion, made a bridge across a burning ravine that had once been a civilian square. Narek climbed upon its back, glimpsing between the gaps in its gargantuan limbs as he crossed. At the burning skulls in the ravine, their rictus mouths still screaming.

He followed the trails of the dead, the dismembered and crucified bodies, the rune-etched sacrifices laid out in ritual circles daubed in blood on the earth. The breeze had an unnatural flavour around such sites. It shimmered like oil on water, and Narek knew to stay well away.

Distant battles, skirmishes and larger more desperate conflicts, cracked and rattled on the air. He stayed away from these too.

And the fulgurite led Narek on, His will shepherding him.

To the Bearer of the Word, to his father. To Lorgar.

For a time, he hid, watching Terra burn from the shattered fortifications raised and then razed in its defence. He waited out a large battalion of loyalist fighters tramping by in battered tanks and on foot. Mainly Imperial Army, more conscripts like Vuko, and a handful of legionaries in dirty red and blood-flecked yellow. A grim assemblage, heading off to fight and die.

As they passed, Narek waited to ensure there were no stragglers and moved on.

The fulgurite thrummed in his palm.

And then stopped.

It had never done that before, not since he had arrived on the Throneworld.

Hackles raised on his neck, the faint beading of sweat. Instinct reacting before thought…

…just a fraction too slowly.

He heard the blade before he felt it, that slick, impossible scrape through armour and mesh and then him.

Narek tried to draw his pistol, but he was sinking and his nerves dulling, hand slipping. On his knees, the fulgurite held in a clenched fist, head bowed.

Not a normal knife, he realised, nothing innocent about it.

Its wielder came to stand before him, there on the killing fields, amongst the dead places, in the shadow of once-impregnable bastions laid to ruin.

‘I wonder,’ said Erebus, his face arrogant, conceited, his bald scalp etched in Colchisian cuneiform, ‘what you think you’re doing here, Barthusa?’

Narek didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. The blade had left something behind in the wound. In his blood. It spread like ice.

He managed to scowl.

‘I cannot let it come to pass, whatever it is,’ said Erebus. ‘It ends here in your death.’

‘Lorgar…’ Narek rasped, teeth clenching, the taste of copper in his mouth.

‘He is not here, brother. He never was. You have been following a false trail.’

The revelation of that stung, colder than the knife.

‘Impossible, I was… it was…’ The fulgurite felt cold, inert, in his grasp.

How could he have come this far, done all that he had done for it to end here? In failure?

‘None can contest the will of the gods, Barthusa. Not you, not even Him. A king will rise from darkness and all will be as it should be. As it was ordained. It has been spoken by their emissaries. I am merely their conduit.’

‘You are a…’ Narek spat blood, his wrath impotent but burning. ‘A demagogue, a heretic…’

‘The first, or so it has been claimed.’

Narek raged, he fought to stand, to reach for a weapon, but he was beyond that now and no amount of disbelief could change that.

‘This isn’t… it isn’t… can’t be…’

‘Over? It has been over since the earliest millennia, since the primordial gods first enticed mankind. Such wilful, impressionable creatures we are, slaves to uncounted vices. How can a warrior, even one as determined as you, Barthusa, contest against that? Elias – you remember Elias, don’t you?

– he learned that lesson to his death. And so the lesson comes full circle to the servant.’

‘I am no servant… I am…’ Narek spoke through gritted teeth, but his throat had begun to lock up, his tongue like stone in his mouth. He trembled, trying to fight his imminent death.

Erebus looked upon the other Word Bearer, his eyes pitying. ‘Such vengeful spirits,’ he said, ‘raging against the night…’

Narek watched the Dark Apostle turn and slowly walk away. The air changed, thinned, the scent of foulness fomented on the breeze, and fell voices thickened. Only for a brief moment and then gone.

And so was Erebus.

He left Narek to the cold spreading through his limbs, his back, his chest, his mind. The chill of unmaking. A deep plunge into primordial ice, the untethering of soul and the gentle bicker of daemons slowly returning, eager for their piece.

Another voice insinuated itself amongst the throng, weak at first, then louder.

Narek’s fist tightened around the fulgurite shard, and he felt the faintest ember of warmth.

FRAGMENTS (ALL WE HAVE LEFT)

DAN ABNETT

All we have left now are stories.

There is no escape from this fate. There is no escape from this building. The enemy throngs at every exit and every entrance. There is no way out of here, so we will fight where we stand, and die where we fight.

Even if, by some chance, we fight clear of this hall, we would die in the courtyard outside, or in the street beyond, or perhaps the main processional beyond that. We will never escape the Palace. There is nowhere on Terra to escape to. We will never reach a port, or a ship, or make our way off the Throneworld. We will never escape this world to another planet, or some dim corner of far away, or an empty moorland where the air is fresh and clean. We will never make it to safety, or another life.

We have been going backwards for months, step by step, street by street. As the traitor Warmaster’s grip on the planet tightens, our world grows smaller.

We draw inwards as the walls fall, one by one, throttled by his grasp, our

boundaries shrinking. Now all that remains is the Sanctum itself, and that is being choked too, squeezed shut. There is no escape.

Because my life is about to end, I can appreciate the whole of it. I can measure its highs and lows, because I can see it as a complete thing. There is no future in which other things might happen. I can see my whole story.

All we have left now are stories.

Some may say there is no time for stories, but what is time? The traitor Warmaster has crushed time flat too. It is lifeless and does not move. I no longer need time to tell a story.

I will tell you one. My name is Aphone. The ‘Ire’ part came later. I do not know if my birth-mother chose a name for me, for I never knew her.

Because of what I am, she rejected me soon after my birth. I do not know if my biological father had thought of a name for me, for he was long gone by the time I was born, unable to bear the void of me growing inside his wife’s belly. At least, I assume she was his wife. I know nothing about it. My father couldn’t bear me, and my mother bore me only because she had to, and had rid of me as soon as I was in the world. I was taken in by the Sisterhood, not out of kindness but, again, because of what I am. Thus I was raised in the order of the Silent Sisterhood, and they gave me the name Aphone. It was not chosen for any sentimental reason, or because it suited me. It was simply the next name on the list. They have a list of names, and those names are recycled when someone dies. I am not the Sisterhood’s first Aphone, nor would I have been the last, but for the traitor Warmaster’s uprising.

So ‘Aphone’ is, I suppose, more a label than a name. A means of identification, picked from a list. My mentor, Jenetia, once said that she had known an Aphone once. That’s all. She seldom spoke – by which I mean used thoughtmark, as we all do, according to our Oath of Tranquillity – and shared her own stories even less often. But from the comment, I got the feeling that Aphone had been her sister, perhaps, or her daughter. Why would someone who said so little mention it at all if it didn’t matter?

I don’t know. Jenetia is dead, so I can’t ask her. Perhaps this implied connection to another Aphone to whom she felt affection is just a part of my

story that my imagination has embellished to make it more interesting.

Perhaps she never liked me at all.

With us, it is always hard to tell.

But I liked that my mentor had mentioned it to me. It was something to cherish, something, if only imagined, that seemed personal. My mentor had lived a life of her own, a whole life, before she was inducted into the Sisterhood. Jenetia Krole… that was her actual name, not something chosen off a list. I envied her that. I envied the life she had led, however hard, before her induction.

I was simply Aphone for a long time, as I trained and rose through the ranks. After my first proper undertaking as a Talon of the Emperor, I was dubbed ‘Ire’. Aphone Ire. This second name was given to me by my mentor, presumably to reflect the ferocity I had displayed during the mission. I can only guess. She never said so. But ‘Ire’ did not come from a list. Thus I prize that part of my name, because it is properly mine and was given to me.

That, then, is the story of my name. It is not a great story, I admit, but it is mine. I treasure it because it reminds me of my early years in the Sisterhood. They were not happy years. Our lives are bleak and friendless.

But compared to what we are enduring now, those early years seem warm and reassuring, so I cling to my story. It is a tiny escape from this moment.

I have never told it to anyone. I only tell it now, Emil, because stories are all we have left.

The Archenemy bays outside and howls at the doors. I hear war-horns and chanting, louder than the roar of flames gutting the buildings around us. We are caught here, cornered. There is no escape.

The enemy soldiers are of the Tygris 14th Hussars, who turned to the traitor cause after the fall of Prospero. I know this from debased insignia I have seen on their corpses. They are drawn up in division strength. They were fine soldiers once, elite Excertus, trained and equipped to the highest standards of the Imperial Grand Army, but they are maniac berserkers now, so eroded by the action of Chaos that few of them wear human faces any more. Amongst them, there are other things. Rogue Traitor Astartes of the XII Legion World Eaters, who rage in like ambush predators, and dark horrors of the XIV Legion Death Guard, who plod through the smoke like

rotting statues. There are other things too, worse things, things that were never born. My presence holds those things at bay, for now at least. The inert blankness of my kind is hard for anyone to bear, and to the Neverborn, it is anathema.

Thus, I am needed. For the very first time in my life, I find myself wanted.

Tolerated. Almost welcomed. This is very strange to me. The loyal soldiers defending this building – almost all from the 24th PanPac or the Jorvio Milguard – were pleased to see me when I arrived.

I was not shunned, or regarded with disgust, or avoided, which has been the pattern of most encounters in my life. They saw me, and came to me, and smiled. They knew what I was from my vratine armour. Before that, even, they could smell and feel what I was from the emptiness in the air.

But they weren’t afraid of me any more. It is a mark of how atrocious this ending has become that the likes of me is greeted with a smile. I am hard to bear, but infinitely preferable to what is outside. Our fear is exhausted.

‘What is your name, mistress?’ the commander of the PanPac asked me when I first arrived. I could see the mild discomfort in him, the involuntary discomfort all sentients experience when they encounter my kind. But I could also see his smile, and the effort he was making to overcome his apprehension.

I am Aphone Ire, I replied. I made my reply in thoughtmark, which he could read easily, but I saw how he had focused his attention on me. Some of us, and my mentor Jenetia was one, are so profoundly null that it is hard for a sentient to even register them visually without trying. They pass by, all but invisible, but for the shiver of unease they leave in their wake. Most of us, like me, are less absent, but still I am often overlooked, or glimpsed only as a shadow. This man saw me, and saw me clearly.

‘The Vigil Commander?’ he replied. ‘We are honoured.’

The news of my appointment had spread. It had been weeks since my mentor’s demise. She had passed her rank and responsibility to me, personally.

‘Do you come alone?’ he asked. I could see him peering into the dusty air behind me, perhaps hoping there were others like me that had so far evaded his human eyes.

I do, my hands replied.

‘So be it,’ he replied, nodding. ‘We are glad of you. Were you sent to us by the Praetorian–’

No, I responded. I didn’t want to tell him that no one knew where the Praetorian was, or that he and the Great Angel and the captain-general had left this world at the Emperor’s side to face the traitor Warmaster on his flagship. Nor did I want to say that they were all, most likely, dead, and that no one was in command, not even Lord Vulkan in the Throne Room. I didn’t want to tell him that all was lost, and that no hope remained, and that all that remained of our stories was a fight to the death. We had to make good deaths, and so morale had to be preserved. I was close by, I said instead, and saw this position under assault. I came to assist.

‘Close by?’ he echoed.

A securement operation, at the Sigillite’s Retreat, I explained in gesture. I did not elaborate. I could not say how I had assisted Hassan, Chosen of Malcador, in the recovery of the Terminus Weapon built by the abomination Basilio Fo. I did not say that the weapon was now being brought to Lord Vulkan for potential deployment. There was no telling if the device would be used, or if it would even work, and false hope can destroy morale as surely as grim tidings. It is accomplished now, I signed, so I have returned to the field to do what good I can.

He began to tell me how hard pressed they were, and the numbers in his cohort, and how they were deployed through the annex. He spoke so easily to me. I had never been addressed that way by humans of the rank and file, just as a person, not as an abhorrence. It was, I supposed, the sort of normal conversation that normal people have throughout their lives. It was alien to me.

What is your name? I asked him.

‘Clade-Captain Emil Bleth,’ he replied.

I am pleased to meet you, my hands said. Continue.

The Archenemy comes at us in waves, stirring up and then crashing at the walls. They assault the entrances and the windows. Bleth has built barricades across the atrium and the west postern. The facade of the annex has been so cratered by shelling it looks like the surface of a dead moon.

Within minutes of my arrival, the next wave of assault comes. The sound of gunfire and screaming echoes from the atrium. We rush there at once.

Bleth glances over his shoulder to see if I am following him, but I am not there. I am leading the way.

The Jorvio defending the entrance have been overwhelmed, and the enemy is already on the main staircase. Curtains of chain have been strung across the atrium space and the stairhead to block shrapnel and beam-fire. Some are holed and ragged, sections of chain-link glowing gold-hot along their edges. I meet the enemy troopers on the stairs as they plough up, hacking their way over the Jorvio dead. I am light of foot and fast, hard as steel and quick as a hawk. They do not really see me coming, but I see them flinch and baulk as they feel the numbing rush of my proximity, as though the air has been pushed from their lungs.

I hold a longsword, and have a short sabre on my back, and an autopistol on my hip. None of them are the weapons I began this war with. Those are lost and gone. Blades break, guns jam, munitions run out, and powercells deplete. War degrades and erodes resources, materiel and human. The longsword was made for a section leader of the Hort Palatine. It is straight and viciously sharp, and has a hand-and-a-half grip. I took it from the body of its previous owner after my last sword snapped off in the torso of a Word Bearer. It is a ceremonial blade, ornate and beautifully wrought, designed to be displayed on parade, and handed down as an emblem from one holder of the office to the next. I wonder that such quality is put into swords that are designed to be shown, not used. That seems a waste. It matters how things use, not how they look.

This uses well. Its reach is longer than the bayonets and trench mauls that the Tygris carry. I leap down the steps, whirling it. Soldiers topple away on either side of me, gut-cut, de-limbed, beheaded. Each contact puffs blood into the air, and the shock of each impact travels back along my moving arm. A man tries to spear me. I spin out of his thrust, and let momentum carry the longsword’s edge around into the back of his skull. As he drops, I catch his falling spear in my free hand. I snap the captured spear backwards, and the knurled butt of the haft jabs the face of another Tygris, folding his nasal bone up under his forehead. I turn the spear as he falls, fore-haft along my forearm and the rest clamped under my armpit, and jab again, filling the howling mouth of a third Hussar with all sixteen inches of the spearhead.

He jerks forward as I snatch the spear back out.

My sword blocks the down-strike of a Hussar officer. His sabre chimes against it. I shrug him off, and make a hard rotation on the blood-slick steps so that the trailing head of the spear sweeps the officer’s legs out from under him. He lands hard on the edge of a stone stair, hard enough to crack his pelvis. I spike the sword down through his chest to make certain he will not rise again.

Some start to fall back from me, dismayed by the losses and unnerved by my vacancy. Others are too deranged by warp-madness to care, and bound up the steps, swinging. My longsword sends one off sideways, twisting, but another knocks me back onto the steps. I am prone as he lunges for me. I tilt the spear up, and he runs onto it in his glee. No one ever comes close to me except to try and kill me. My hold on the haft is not firm, but the butt of the spear is jammed against the step beneath me and cannot be pushed back.

Yelling and snorting blood, he gets a third of the way down the spear before it kills him and he falls. I let the spear go with him. I do not have the grip to yank it free.

There is no time to fully rise. I roll up, one knee on a step, my other foot planted on a stair three steps lower. A Hussar runs at me with a trench pick.

I swing the sword with both hands, low and lateral, and the blade severs both of his thighs. He is still screaming as I stand to kill the next man up.

Gunfire rakes from the stairhead above, cutting down soldiers in the well of the atrium and driving the invader mob back. I have held the stairs long enough for Bleth to rally his defenders.

I see some of his soldiers murmuring to each other as we regroup. They are talking about me. They have seen what I have done on the steps of the atrium. I have become a story to tell. But from the roar outside, it will not be a story that will last long.

All we have left are stories. The annex we are defending was once the record hall of the Symposium Geographica. Its inner chambers are lined with shelves full of atlases and portlans, treatises on Terra’s geological history, and books that describe earlier periods of the Throneworld, its nations, continents and habitats. These works are scattered everywhere, torn and trodden, as worthless as our lives.

Between the waves of assault, Bleth’s defenders huddle and try to steal what rest they can. Stress and fatigue have hollowed them out. Few are able

to sleep at all, for the Archenemy besieges their dreams too. I see many of them at rest, hunched in corners, reading the books and files that have fallen from the shelves. I realise they are not reading to learn about the world, they are reading to escape it.

They read anything, everything, without discrimination. Scholarly essays on thousand-year-old tidal patterns, studious descriptions of mountain range formation, dry-as-dust texts about agricultural economies or fenland conservation. These are not books that any of them would have read willingly or voluntarily in the course of their lives. The works are academically demanding and dull, filled with charts of annual rainfall and tables of mineralogical comparatives.

Yet they read them, and they read them attentively. They read them because they are about places that are not here and now. They read them to shut out the world as it is and lose themselves, just for a minute or two, in some imagined other place. The prose may be rigid and formalistic, and often impenetrable, but in a colourless account of forestation, they glimpse the colours of an old forest, and in the indigestible record of river deltas, they visit lost rivers and extinct coastlines.

They read them to escape.

I understand this mechanism. The Sisterhood taught me to read, and I have escaped into books my entire life. A null like me has little exterior life at all, apart from our service. The world is cold to us, and unfriendly. It turns away and deprives us of social interaction or community. We learn, early on, that we will not have normal lives. We will not have friends or families.

We will not know casual conversation or interaction, the warmth of company, the pains and pleasures of affection.

The silence enforced on us is eased by escape. In books, we find the solace of an interior life instead. We read of the things we will never be allowed to know, and experience them second-hand, and imagine them so fiercely that they seem real. The touch of another’s hand. The tenderness of a parent.

The delight in the face of a friend when they see us approach. The laughter of good companions. The kiss of a true love. True love itself.

Books have always been my escape. In stories, I can briefly feel what it is like to be the woman I can never be. I have yet to meet another in the Sisterhood who does not, like me, read voraciously, whenever they can. To

us, books and stories are dispatches from a world denied to us, foreign correspondence from places we cannot travel to. They are minutes from meetings we did not attend, or mementos of events we did not experience.

Then again, I have yet to truly meet another in the Sisterhood. We are together, but apart.

As we wait for the next wave to break, I pick a book from a shelf, and open it.

The enemy comes at the west postern. I go to it and join the PanPac dug in behind the gate. Under fire, they seem glad to see me. My story – the story of me at the atrium steps – has reached them. Where they would normally be fearful and wary, they call out my name. Our plight is such that I am no longer the worst thing they will meet today. Extremity makes me not a monster.

I lay in beside them. An enemy bolt kills a PanPac gunner close by. I sheathe my sword, and pick up her stubber and her satchel of drum magazines. The stubber is a heavy thing. I loop the carry-strap over my shoulder, and brace it against my hip. I advance, firing, feeling its juddering weight, and the sting of hot casings as they fly out of it. When the drum is spent, I cast it aside and lock in another.

I walk into the mouth of the postern. I am an open target, but the enemy’s shots go wide. It will take a few moments for them to understand me as a target, to draw a decent aim. They are flinching from my approach, distracted, unsettled, sighting badly.

I spray them with gunfire. I cut down Hussars as they advance through the gate. I rake them back against the postern’s heavy walls, jerking and destroyed. I riddle the walls too, for the stubber has no finesse. The air fills with stone dust and grit flies in all directions. The marble and ouslite stipple with holes, and crack, and craze, and chip. Men are thrown back hard, shot through, and leave smears of blood down the walls as they slide to the ground. There is blood in the air, a vapour, and splashes on every hard surface, and droplets clinging to eyelashes and exposed rebar. In the powder dust at my feet, it soaks like spots of ink. I leave a trail of smoking brass behind me.

This cannot be sustained. But it doesn’t have to be. Before the enemy can rally and draw a bead on me, before my last drum is spent, the PanPac surge forward, for the gateway is clear and the incoming fire reduced. They crowd in around me, firing, shouting, stabbing with their bayonets.

We focus our repulse, the impetus now on our side. The stubber grinds dry.

I throw it at a Tygris coming at me, and the weight of it knocks him back long enough for me to draw my pistol and put a round into his face. The gateway space is close, and there are bodies churning and milling all around me. I draw my sabre, for the longsword is impractical in these conditions. I advance, one step at a time, shooting with one hand, and slashing with the other. The PanPac move with me, blasting, thrusting. Some are pushed back, grappling with the foe. Some drop from the line, caught by stray shots.

We drive the enemy out into the yard, and hold them at bay for a few long minutes, then draw back and re-barricade the postern with flakboard sheets and sections of the fallen gate.

‘We would be dead but for you,’ a PanPac corporal says to me.

You would have fought as you fought before I came, I reply to her in thoughtmark.

‘So we would be dead,’ she says.

I fear death awaits us anyway, my hands answer.

‘These are better deaths,’ she says.

They are not afraid, not any more. Everything they should have ever been afraid of is here, and they are no longer scared. We have passed that point.

We have passed terror and anguish, dread and grief. Fear is exhausted. All we have left now are stories.

I cannot find the book I was reading before. It is lost in the dusty piles strewn across the annex floor, a cartography of geographies. I pick another.

It is old, and in it a place called Albia is mentioned. Albia was part of my mentor’s story, though she kept most of her story to herself, right up to the end.

I still wonder what her end was. She came to me, shortly before the infamous Saturnine Defence took place, and told me she was leaving. It was a private meeting, just the two of us. Jenetia told me she was going to aid

the defence of Eternity Port. This, I understood, was her own decision. It was not an order she had been given.

She already knew her story was coming to an end. She appointed me Vigil Commander, and handed her duties to me. She did not expect to return.

I do not know why she had made this choice. I felt it was important to her, so I did not question it. I prefer to believe that, like all of us, she went to the place she thought she could do the most good.

My last words to her were, Come back.

Her last words to me, spoken by her hands in thoughtmark as is our way, were, I will.

She never did. I like to think that she has simply not come back yet, but I am no fool. Eternity Port has long since fallen, and all there exterminated.

Nothing and no one is surviving this.

Jenetia Krole always kept her promises, so to have broken one to me means she is no longer alive to fulfil it. I wonder, often, how her story ended. I doubt anybody knows. Our deaths are often unwitnessed, or overlooked, and they are never mourned, except by us. The end of her story, like the rest of her story, will never be told. It is a blank. An emptiness. No one saw it, so no one wrote it down. It is not in a book somewhere, to be read and wondered at. Our kind do not become myths, like the Astartes or the gene-sons of the Emperor. Our stories are never written, so that in books we might live on forever. I wish there was a book with the story of her end in it, so that I could escape into it and be with her. But there is none. Stories are all we have left, but there are no stories about us.

I read about Albia. The book talks only about its granite and its feldspar, its igneous formations and its alluvial deposits. But in those sparse words, I imagine empty moorland and breathe the fresh, clean air. I see wildflowers nodding in the cold wind, and a broad roof of sky filled with grey, rain-shot clouds. I see her standing there, on the granite and the feldspar. She is not smiling. She never smiled. That is all I have left of her.

Books are our only escape.

Bleth calls out and I am drawn back from the hills of Albia. There is a breach on the level above. The Archenemy has gained access because a

neighbouring structure, a vestry, has slumped against the annex and formed a bridge of rubble they can scale.

Tygris breacher-troops have led the way in. They are more heavily armoured than the Hussars. They advance in the smoke-choked gloom of the upper floors like trolls in folklore. As the Milguard and PanPac start to fire from the stairwells, I advance into the smoke and my longsword leaves billowing lines in the thick air as I begin to slay the invader-trolls.

I read folklore too, when I was younger. Tales of giants and ogres and dragons. Stories of danger and peril. It seems strange to me now that there was ever escape in such tales. Who would wish to escape into books where death and monsters lurked at every turn? I did. I would have given anything to not be me in the cold and silent cloisters of the Sisterhood, but instead become some valiant peasant farmer or lone warrior facing trolls in a misty forest. My imagination let me.

There will be no remembrancers or witnesses left alive when this siege is finished to write our actions down so that they may be read by future generations, and there will be no future generations either. But if there were, but if… who would want to read them? Who would want to be here rather than wherever they are? Who would find escape in this bleak moment that I inhabit? I would rather be anywhere else but here.

The dark air is so full of dust and soot it seems solid. There is a glow of flames between the rows of stone columns. Everything is muffled and echoing. Everything is cold, except the blood that spatters on me. Shots scream past in the gloom, carving the smoke, tracer rounds and bright las-bolts. Each one is death and pain. The Tygris breachers are snarling animals that lunge from the shadows. My sword, hard and heavy, truncates limbs and lops heads. There is no escape here. There is nothing wonderful that the imagination can seize or long for. Even the beasts I am killing have no wish to be present, I am sure of that. This is a dull and gruelling hell. Every thing is bitter and leaden, cold and hot, hard and cruel, indistinct and stark, loud and random. There is no story to follow, just a succession of impacts, a sustained terror, a catalogue of pain and exertion, a series of ghastly wounds, each one shocking in the chance originality of its trauma.

The breacher-troops have not come in alone. I smell an ogre with them. A World Eater. The rancid stink of it makes me gag. It turns from the scattered body parts of the Milguard squad it has just obliterated, flecks of meat

spitting from its whirring chainsword. It can sense me. I am a space in the smoke it doesn’t like. Its revulsion for me makes it frenzied.

The squealing chainsword clips a column in its haste to reach me. I duck and retreat, fragments of stone pinging off my wargear. The next swing catches my trailing cloak, and the cycling blade snags and snatches me backwards. I almost choke, throttled by my own cloak, but it shreds free, fibres billowing from the chainsword.

I spring and roll clear, but the ogre is fast. It lunges, roaring, crushing fallen stones and bursting the torsos of the dead under its stamping feet. It thinks I will run. I do not. I make my pass, and drive the longsword through its shoulder. The blade wedges fast in the ceramite, black blood pouring down the blade onto the hilt and my hands. It is scalding hot. I cannot free the sword. The ogre lashes with a fist. I let go of the sword and try to evade, but the armoured knuckles graze me and throw me across a heap of rubble in a clumsy cartwheel.

I am dizzy with concussion, and the pain of numerous contusions. I don’t know if I can get up. The Traitor Astartes looms. It is laughing, sword raised.

Even if it will never be told, my story will not end this way. On my back, upside down, I fire my autopistol up at its groin and belly. It staggers, barely scratched, but the delay gives me time to scramble clear.

My destruction is the only purpose in its feral brain now. I cast my pistol aside. It is less than useless against such a foe, and it is spent anyway. I sweep out my sabre, but there is no great reach to it. How would my mentor win a fight like this? How would a peasant farmer, in a misty wood, in a story?

Stories have courage in them. Luck. Unlikely twists. Unexpected reversals.

Million-to-one chances. That’s why they are stories. There are none of those things here. I have nothing. All we have left now is nothing.

I break my silence and my oath. I scream. I have never raised my voice, not once in a life spent barely speaking at all. I scream in desperation at it as it kills me, a scream made of my anger and fear and disappointment and helpless frustration.

The ogre wavers. It knows what I am, and a scream was the last thing it expected from a silent null. My scream seems to amplify my blankness, to

make it colder and more abrasive, to chill the heart of this black-hearted beast and make it recoil.

Just for a second. Less than a second.

I hook my sabre into its neck seal and tear out its throat.

It drops the chainsword, reaching for its neck, out of which a great quantity of blood is pumping. You have my sword, ogre, stuck through your shoulder. Now I have yours.

It is very heavy. Almost too heavy, the handgrip slick with grease. But once it is pressed against ceramite, the howling blade does not stop cutting.

When I am done, and the beast is dead, I heave the chainsword free, deactivate it, and toss it aside. I am strong, but I cannot throw such a heavy thing far, even when fired by adrenaline. It crunches onto the rubble beside us, and the black blood, flowing like oil, slowly glides through the dust to reach it.

No one has seen this happen. The smoke is too thick, and the confusion too wild. No one has seen this to make a story of it.

So I saw off the World Eater’s head with my sabre and lift it up by the matted hair. It is heavy, unnaturally heavy, like the chainsword was. I walk through the smoke with it held aloft like a lantern. Head clutched in one hand, sabre in the other, drenched in the ogre’s blood.

‘Look at me!’ I shout. It hurts my unused vocal cords to shout so. ‘Look at me!’

I do not want their respect. I do not want glory. I want their fear. Fear is all we have left. We have spent too long living in fear of the Warmaster’s menace. We have forgotten that fear can be a weapon that we can use too.

Our fear is long since exhausted, but the enemy’s is not. They have not felt it of late, and they have forgotten what it tastes like. Fear has not spoken to them for a while.

The defenders start back from the sight of me. The Tygris, the Hussars and breacher-troops, the Archenemy… They shrink from the blood-drenched revenant and her swinging trophy. They recoil from the thing that should not speak. They do not really understand what they are seeing, but it is enough to flood their guts with ice, and loosen their bowels, and make them understand that the Palace will not die without a fight.

There is no escape for us, but there is for them. They flee. They flee like rats, back the way they have come.

Clade-Captain Bleth has been shot in the fight. His troops have carried him downstairs and made him as comfortable as possible on a bed of books and charts. I can see that he is dying.

‘You turned them,’ he says. ‘A third time, you turned them back.’

I will keep doing so, I reply. Until I can’t.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘But you are all we have left.’

He sighs and briefly closes his eyes. Blood in his mouth has stained his teeth pink.

‘There is no escape,’ he murmurs.

I think, sadly, you have found a way, Emil, I reply.

This makes him laugh. He laughs so hard I have to hold him steady as he coughs up blood. I have never made anybody laugh before. This is not how I imagined it.

‘Talk to me,’ he says. ‘Tell me something.’

Like what?

‘Anything. A story. Take my mind off… off this.’

I don’t know any, my hands confess.

‘You know your own,’ he says. ‘Tell me that. I know nothing about your…

your kind. I have never even heard one of you speak.’

I shrug.

I will tell you one, I say. My name is Aphone. The ‘Ire’ part came later. I do not know if my birth-mother chose a name for me, for I never knew her.

He listens. He watches my hands intently as they talk. He does not speak or interrupt until I am finished.

That, then, is the story of my name, I sign.

He nods.

It is not a great story, I admit, I add, but it is mine. I treasure it because it reminds me of my early years in the Sisterhood. They were not happy years.

Our lives are bleak and friendless. But compared to what we are enduring now, those early years seem warm and reassuring, so I cling to my story. It is a tiny escape from this moment.

‘I am grateful for it, Aphone,’ he says.

I have never told it to anyone. I only tell it now, Emil, because stories are all we have left.

A call goes up. Another wave of assault is coming at the atrium. I get to my feet.

‘Come back,’ Bleth says, looking up at me.

I will, I tell him. He will not be alive when I return, but I will keep my promise. No one has ever wanted my company before.

When I come back, he is gone and his story over. I sit beside him, and read a page or two from the book about Albia. For a moment, I stand on the empty moorland and breathe the fresh, clean air. I tell him what it feels like, even though he can’t hear me.

There is no escape. He was right. The next wave, or the one after that, will be the one that crushes us. Not even the memory of us will survive. The future is sworn to silence, an elective mute like me.

No one is going to save us now. All we have left are stories, and mine will end here, in silence, as it began.

Aphone Ire among the soldiers.

EX LIBRIS

JOHN FRENCH

‘ Flashbulb memory – phrase from archaeo-psychology, denoting a memory of notable vividity and persistence triggered by a sudden shocking event.’

– From the Lexicon Psychologica, only complete copy lost in the damage to Archive Collection 888 during the Siege of Terra

Ahzek Ahriman is leaving Archive Collection 888 in the Imperial Palace when the cataclysm takes place. He knows what has happened at the moment it begins. It is a psychic event, and because of that Ahriman understands it absolutely and instantly.

Horus has ended.

Ahriman is a psyker, perhaps one of the most powerful mortal psykers that has ever existed, or shall ever exist. He is the Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons, and that is a role that makes him both a warrior and scholar supreme. He has great knowledge of both the occult and all the events that have led to this moment. He is also located in the Imperial Palace, close to the centre of the cataclysm. He is not at the zero point, but he is within the inner sphere of effect. If it were a bomb detonation then he would be so close that he would feel the blast wave strip flesh from his bones before he saw the flash. He is also partially in the warp.

Collection 888 is a library, perhaps the greatest library of occult works ever assembled. Physically it is located under the Hall of Leng in the

Imperial Palace’s Inner Sanctum. That has always only been mostly true.

Now, at the end, it is most certainly a lie. The warp is in ascendancy.

Reality has become subordinate to the powers of dreams and the whims of nightmare. Time’s cog has jumped its teeth. Past and present have become the eternal now. The corridors of shelves in Collection 888 no longer join as they should or to where they should. Ahriman is trying to leave the library.

He realised what was about to happen just before it occurred. Before the cataclysm came.

He is in a passage between shelves of books. Ahead of him is a door. The door is a frame of cut stone around a black rectangle. No light passes into or comes from the opening. It is a way out of the library, and the Imperial Palace. It leads to somewhere far away, to safety. All he needs to do is reach it.

All these things are facts. They make up the situation, the place and considerations. Ahriman knows them. Just as he knows, or maybe only fears, what is about to happen.

He is two strides from the black door.

There are candles burning on stands attached to the shelves on either side.

The flame light reflects off the gilded titles of volumes tucked onto the shelves.

The display in his helm visor is a simple set of golden icons showing his armour’s power, the external air quality, and threat status.

Ahriman’s foot rises to take the first of the two steps that will take him to the door. His armour whirs as it accentuates his movement.

Then…

… Now.

Everything is now.

Now is all there is.

Nothing is moving. Not the flames of the candles. Not Ahriman’s step unfolding towards the door. Not the beat of blood in his veins.

This is what has happened.

Horus has died.

Ahriman knows it. He knows it because he just felt time and destiny jump the rails. He knows that the only thing now keeping him alive is that he hasn’t arrived at the future. He is suspended in mid stride. His armour’s

power is suddenly about to fail. The physical reality of the shelves he is running past, and the floor under his feet, and the door ahead of him, are about to collapse into nothing.

The warp has rolled back from reality. All at once. Like a cloth snapped back from a table.

He is suddenly aware of every detail of his situation and his thoughts spiral out of control. He sees the frayed twist of the wick in the nearest candle flame, the gilt that is flaking from the spine of the copy of Angelica Mystica et Incantartus that sits on a shelf level with his right eye. It is not straight but tilted against the volume beside it. The angle made by the covers of the two books is twenty-two point two two degrees. Strange…

What is the significance of the number? Or is it the shape the angle makes? Or the books themselves?

He read Angelica Mystica once, but that was long ago, and he found that its insights were few, and its fabrications and errors many…

The candlewick? The shape of it resembles a serpent’s head. A serpent’s head in fire?

Simple, the serpent denotes the occult arts and the fire the power of the will. Yes, the symbolism is simple. Elementary. But does the fire spring from the snake, or consume it?

Or both?

Both, of course, but what is the correct interpretation to take?

Which to take…

Which way through the door?

He can feel his thoughts sliding down a spiral. His mind is babbling.

Serpents in the flame, gilded truths of angels, bound in pages… Gilded words… Angels… Burning…

Cannot hear the right way to touch the book and choose the snake…

before… burning…

The book has as many errors as truths, so which to choose? Which way to choose… out of the library…

‘You need to stop that.’ Amon steps from behind Ahriman. He looks as he did before he died, a warrior of the Thousand Sons in crimson armour, edged by ivory. His face is bare. His eyes are bright blue. He looks at Ahriman and shakes his head. ‘You need to stop thinking. If you can.’

Ahriman just looks at Amon. His true-born brother has been dead for decades, yet here he is, as real as the candles and books, more real in fact.

His presence is vivid, hard-edged, a solid fact in a contingent world. He looks directly at Ahriman and shakes his head.

‘Your mental processes are not functioning,’ he says. ‘Your mind cannot dip into the warp. Your intellect has become so dependent on its presence that you struggle to function without it, and you are now drowning in simple reality.’ Amon looks around at the surrounding shelves and books.

He nods, shrugs. ‘Like a fish left on the sand after the sea vanishes.’

Amon looks at Ahriman, smiling.

‘I am not here, brother. I do not exist.’ He moves to the candle flame and runs his finger through it. The flame does not move. He rubs his finger and thumb and looks at them. They are clean of soot and unburned. ‘You know what a hypoxia hallucination is, of course – an acute lack of oxygen sparking images and delirium in the mind. Naturally, we are not talking about oxygen, but the analogy stands… up to a point. Your mind is reacting to the sudden lack of connection to the ether. It is disassociating, and trying to make sense of what is happening.’ He turns and comes close to Ahriman.

‘Hence my presence. I am your thoughts and experience of this moment pushed out in the shape of a memory, like a blister formed on the skin by impact. That’s where we are, you see. In the instant when Horus ends, and just before the consequences really start to manifest. Would you like to see?’

Ahriman cannot move to reply. He cannot do anything.

Amon reaches out and pulls a book off the shelf. He does not look at the cover or spine, but simply opens it and holds it up. It’s an image. It is a reproduction of the original, photo-mimetically printed onto the plasfilm pages. The book is 5th millennium, but the image on the page is far older. It blurs the deeper the eye travels along the lines of perspective. There are columns supporting balconies that run down the side of what might be a processional. Figures crowd the balconies. At a glance they might be human. It might be the quality of the reproduction, or a feature of the original brushwork, but there are hints of shapes that might be wings, or horns, or hunched cowls. Bronze-bodied serpents curl around the pillars, and breathe fire into the air. Are they supposed to be real or part of the architecture? Ahriman cannot tell. At the far end of the processional a red

canopy spreads through the air. Here the image is little more than a series of smudged shapes and folds of colour. Every figure in the picture is looking to the point under that red canopy. A white figure stands there, arms raised.

Even on the printed page they seem to glow, as though the light of the image were coming from within them. There are hints of wings on their back, of a crown on their head. The figures in the middle ground are raising their hands towards the luminous figure. Are they in ecstasy or torment?

Praising or pleading?

Amon closes the book.

‘Horus is…’ he begins, then stops. His lips twitch in amusement. ‘Horus was exalted by the powers of the warp. The false gods of the immaterium hungered so much for victory over the Emperor that they poured more and more of their power into him. He became their illuminated champion, a bright and shining tyrant through which the Great Ocean poured and poured. He became a conduit for all their might.’

Amon picks another volume off the shelf. Again he does not look at it. It’s a holo-volume bound in brass, and its covers open with a click of cogs. The crystal leaves inside riffle like a set of cards in a rogue’s hands before he deals. Light sparkles around them until they settle, and an image appears in the air above them. It’s a picture of the galaxy, picked out in jewel-bright light, turning slowly.

‘Everything has a centre. Just as planets turn around stars, and stars around the great dark heart of the galaxy, so too did everything revolve around Horus. Every ounce of immaterial power pressing in on the Emperor’s mind, every daemon that danced on the burning walls, every nightmare in the minds of mortals, every crack forced in reality, every bolt of lightning pulled from the sky – all of it flowed from Horus. He is and was the core of this moment, the dark lodestar at the centre of all that has occurred… But the false gods overreached. They put too much of their power in Horus. And now, Horus is gone.’

Amon shuts the book with a snap. The image of the galaxy vanishes.

Amon keeps pressing on the book’s covers. The brass casing begins to bend. There’s a sound of creaking metal and splintering crystal as the pages inside shatter. Amon keeps pressing. His face is twisted. His armoured fingers squeeze. The book’s casing bursts. Shards of crystal and dust spill out, and Amon is still squeezing, pressing the brass into a ragged ball.

‘Pressure,’ he snarls. ‘Pressure and more pressure, all constricting around one place, one moment, one entity… Pressure enough to break time, to remake existence.’

And now the candle seems to flicker and dim. The shadows in the shelves are deepening, flowing. Ahriman’s view contracts so that now all he can see are his brother’s hands and face. Light is shining from between Amon’s fingers where they clamp around the remains of the book. The light is flickering as though the book’s holo-projector is still functioning inside the crushed case. Images strobe in the beams: figures with hunched bodies and animal heads. There is a hound. Blood drools from its open jaws. Its tongue lolls over its teeth. Another has a crow head under a deep hood. Another is a skeletal vulture with strips of rotting flesh hanging from the bone. The last has the head of a snake with pearlescent scales. They reach towards the light coming from Amon’s hands, pawing, eager, their eyes intent. Ahriman knows what the images represent. The symbolism is simple, but even so he feels the instinct to shiver. Amon voices his thoughts.

‘These images are of the false gods of the Great Ocean, intent on the death of the Emperor, hungry for the souls of mankind. Can gods be blind? These are. All they have been able to see is victory, and so like all of the rest of us they haven’t seen the true threat of failure…’

Ahriman does not need the explanation. He knows what is happening. He needs to reach the door. He needs to get out of the library. Two more steps, that’s all he needs. But he cannot move, and Amon’s voice presses on, insistent, louder.

‘What happens when an object is placed under pressure and then that object vanishes?’

The light between his fingers vanishes.

‘Implosion,’ says Amon.

Then everything is rushing into the point where the crushed book was.

Amon crumples, vanishing between his own hands. Ahriman’s view cascades into the same point.

Blackness. Crushing blackness. As though the weight of an ocean were piled above him.

‘Horus is dead,’ says Amon’s voice. ‘The psychic pressure exerted through him by the false gods has collapsed into the void he occupied, resulting in an etheric implosion on a scale that has never been known. The psychic

might that has flooded the Imperial Palace, Terra, the Solar System, all of it is in the process of pouring into the absence where the Warmaster was…

Like a bomb detonation that sucks in oxygen and douses the flames around it…’

Ahriman could see the library again. Books were burning. Pages combusted. Scrolls became torches. Data-slates dissolved into ash.

‘Or the earthquake that drains the water from the coast and leaves the fish dying on the bottom of the sea…’

Spines of books burst apart. Pages flutter into the air. Ahriman sees pictograms inked onto pages of skin flare to blue flame. He sees images of dead cities and falling skies shred to dust. Lines of poetry unravel into smoke. This was a library of works inspired by the warp. Every line of rhyme or lexicon of dead language was in some way linked to the Great Ocean of souls and dreams.

‘Everything that is bound to the warp is now without it,’ says Amon’s voice.

Then Ahriman’s view is moving out and up. Through the ceiling and layers of rock and metal of the Palace. The structure is coming apart. Time and space have become fluid as the warp power reaches its peak. The joins between place and time have found new configurations. Doors open into the past. The stairs of towers rise until they meet the ground. Broken bastions jut from the faces of great walls. The sky is red and ochre, and shivers like a sheet of bloody meat. As Ahriman watches, reality returns in a thunderclap.

Time and space realign. Explosions light off as matter occupying the same space annihilates itself.

Ahriman sees it all in a single blink as his mind’s eye rushes from his body. He cannot stop or control the vision. He is flying up and up into the vast shadow of the Vengeful Spirit. With him comes the warp, a great rolling ebb tide of psychic power, streaked with the colours of nightmare. Scraps of daemon essence fly past. Things made of eyes and claws and feathers wither as they tumble.

Down amongst the ruins of the Palace, Ahriman sees a daemon claw over a lip of red rock. The human troopers sheltering behind it are on their knees, weeping, gasping foolish prayers. The daemon is a bloated shadow above them. Antlers spiral from its skull. Fronds of mould and rot hang from its shoulders. Its bulk shivers like jelly. Its taloned arm rises to strike down.

Then the implosion wave strikes it. Its essence blasts into smoke. Its body unravels in an eye-blink. It thrashes as it dissolves into black mist. Its screams are the cries of dying birds. The soldiers sheltering in the shadow of the rock do not look up but keep on praying. They will live for a little longer, but their souls are already broken, and they will never leave this moment behind.

On the remains of battlements, warriors in the colours of the Sons of Horus slump, suddenly weak. The Neverborn that they share their skin with have gone and now they are just shells of meat, bleeding pain from torn souls.

On and on it goes. Ahriman can see every individual detail and the full sphere of what is occurring. He is part of it, a watching eye spun by the currents of the draining ocean. It is beautiful, he realises, the most beautiful and terrible thing he will ever witness. Wave patterns shiver through matter and ether. As survivors move through the debris in weeks to come, they will find the implosion’s mark left on everything, like a murderer’s bloody fingerprints. They will find jagged ripples in blocks of stone that will cause anyone who runs their fingers over them to scream. The wind will blow through holes left in blast doors, and the sound will seem like laughter coming from far away. There will be water cisterns where the water will always be scalding even though there is no source of heat. Spirals of words in dead languages will appear on the pages of notebooks and sheets of parchment.

From his vantage point in the rip tide, Ahriman sees it all, sees the singularity at its centre. The hole in existence that was once Horus. A vortex. A spiral of unmaking. It will not last. It is an instant, a vast and echoing instant of eternity. When it does end there will just be dust and the echo of silence in the souls of the survivors. Ahriman will not be one of them, he knows. His being will vanish into the heart of the vortex. His body will rip apart. What of him will survive? Dust, perhaps. A thread of dust falling through darkness but never finding a place to land.

‘This is the end, my brother,’ says Amon’s voice, so close that it feels like a whisper in his ear. Except it is not his brother. It is his own voice.

He is back in the library, back in the narrow space between the shelves with the candle flames. The door is there in front of him, still open. The darkness beyond is a promise of survival if he can step through. The door,

though, is a conjuring, an opening to a corridor in the warp, and it is about to vanish. Time lurches forwards. The candle flames splutter. The stone frame of the door cracks. The opening narrows.

Ahriman feels his limbs inside his armour. They are heavy, drained. The servos that aid his muscles whine as they try to compensate, then they fail too. He draws a breath. The sound echoes inside his helmet. It is the only sound. Every movement is a slow creak of muscles and will pushing against the reality that wants to hold him in place.

Breathe in.

His foot shifts forwards.

The shelves bend inwards towards him.

His mind is spinning, rolling with images and thoughts that feel like they do not belong to him. Is anything he sees or senses now real, or is it all in his mind? Is there a difference? Does the difference matter?

He sees the collection. He sees the racks of scrolls and the lines of books, the recording devices and data readers, the wax cylinders and ceramic discs, the tablets and woven pictograms. All ideas, all boats set on the sea of changing human knowledge and sent into the future. The pages of the books open and split, and the scrolls unwind without end. Needles catch dead voices from the grooves in cylinders. Images flash from turning pages, like the shell fire of dreams.

‘This is a record made at the turning of the moon. I do not know if I will survive this endeavour…’

Green flowers opening on spring boughs that bend under the weight of birds with the heads of children…

A man with a burden on his back climbing towards a tower…

‘Shall I speak of the place where the dead lie amongst, and the lemon blossoms bloom?’

Ahriman is a scrap of flotsam on the sea of knowledge, a piece of cargo jettisoned from the present by the cataclysm.

Yes… he thinks. All human achievement, mastery and failure is an ocean, a single pool of knowledge from which all thought flows and to which all returns. Collection 888, his own mind, the Emperor’s failed vision, all of it is just a part of that great sea, a handful of dreams scooped from the waves, scattering droplets, already running through the fingers as it rises.

All thought is transient. All knowledge fleeting. To fail to see that was the great mistake. The Emperor and Horus thought themselves the end of knowledge. After them there would be no change, no alteration that was not part of their vision, and their will. They would become the ocean, the limits of their minds the horizon. Ahriman realises then that for all he has done to serve the visions of both Warmaster and Emperor, he shared neither viewpoint. There were no limits to knowledge, and to try to make it so was to make failure a certainty. And now, inevitably, here they are… Those dreams of tyranny, like all the rest, have failed. In a single flash of annihilation everything is returning to the sea. How much will be lost? How much will drown and never surface from the vortex?

Not I. The thought is a thunderbolt in his skull. He will not end. His brothers need him, his Legion needs him. He will not end with Horus.

The passage in the library fills his sight. The door is still visible at the other end. He wills his body to move…

The books on the shelves explode into multicoloured flame. They form images drawn from the dreams of the writers and artists who made them.

A ghost of a man in the robes of an ancient empire turns and reaches out a hand. His face is a ripple of blue flame. His eyes are holes. He beckons and behind him the shades of the underworld wait and shriek in torment…

‘If from this savage place thou wouldst escape…’

A half-man, half-dragon uncoils in a brief inferno…

‘What beast hath form’d this abominable void, this soul-shudd’ring vacuum…’

The stone feet of a dead and proud king who stands again in a blink of sparks, the darkness around him a desolation…

‘Look on my works… and despair…’

Ahriman’s foot touches the floor.

Breathe out…

Two more strides to the door.

The library is still shrieking as it burns.

Breathe in…

The candles burn down in an instant. Wax spatters on the paving slabs.

Ahriman pulls his foot from the floor. The shelves are not there any more.

He cannot see the floor now. The door is in front of him. It is becoming

narrower and narrower. The fire of the burning books gives no light as their voices reach for him…

‘Worse than stagnation is the possibility of ascension…’ speaks a voice from the flames. He knows that voice, those words. It is Hyposilia, a scholar of the 11th millennium whose writings were the only thing to survive from three thousand years of absolute darkness. ‘At its simplest, consider that if you fall from a stool you may suffer bruises, but scale the side of a tower and the same fall will be final. The higher we climb, the greater the consequences of our failures…’

Horus, the Emperor… Two figures who climbed to the top of the tower while only looking up at the heights, never at the drop, never at what failure would cost…

Be silent! He pulls his own thoughts back into focus.

Breathe out…

His foot has reached the floor. The muscles in his lower leg tense to take his weight. Slow… Everything is being pulled out… Time stretches over an instant that is an age… The voices follow his slow tread and breath.

‘And for that age there was a king, and with justice did he rule, and light from his throne shone across the land…’ The Aquarian King… 20th millennium… based on the works of a previous age…

Breathe in…

‘But there came another age, where suffering and loss were the kingdom’s shroud…’

The arch of the door begins to crumble. Pieces of stone break free and fly past Ahriman as though he were climbing the wall of a crumbling tower and the drop were behind him.

‘Oh, you who turn the wheel…’

Pieces of stone strike his armour. The sound of impacts chime in his ears.

He thinks of rain falling…

‘And the heavens poured forth…’

He raises his hands, reaching forwards. The doorway is a ragged hole now.

The archway is crumpling inwards, crushed.

Breathe out…

His foot rises.

What will come next? What can come next? This moment is the knife-edge that cuts the chain of cause and consequence. All reading of the future

from here is speculation. Blind luck, chance…

Two figures falling from a lightning-struck tower…

‘We are in the moment after the thunder flash,’ comes the voice at the back of his head. ‘The moment when the tower falls.’

The voices of the books fall silent. The library is not there. He is alone.

Black oblivion surrounds him. In a moment that darkness too will vanish.

He can’t feel the floor under his foot as it descends.

Is he… falling?

There is nothing more beyond the next second.

He hears his inhalation inside his helm, slow air dragging between teeth and into lungs.

In front of him. The arch of the door comes apart just in front of his reaching hand. Pieces of rock begin to spin outwards. The doorway is a blurred hole at the centre of the cloud of grey shards. The edge of the implosion wave from Horus’ death has hit. The full force of it is there, looming in the darkness, a tsunami of unmaking.

Breathe in…

One more step… His stride reaches for the darkness between the shattered arch.

Horus got what he wanted in the end… he thinks. In death he has broken everything that the Emperor made. He has remade everything. The age that will come – if it comes – will not belong to the Emperor’s dream. It will be an age shaped by this one moment, by what is left after death. It will be Horus’ age.

Ahriman hears his breath leave his lungs.

Is it better to survive to see what will happen, or better to end now?

Oblivion a kindness. Life a punishment for the living.

Perhaps… But in uncertainty there is always hope.

The closing mouth of the door swallows him.

In Collection 888 the books are burning.

Far away, Ahriman half steps, half falls from a hole in reality. He drops to his knees and draws the first breath of an unwritten future.

SYSTEM PURGE

GAV THORPE

The scratching of dust and grit skittering against the hull of the ornithopter almost drowned out the strained whine of its engines as it fought through the storm. The gilding of its dragonfly wings had been flayed off just a few minutes into the flight from Station Nu-Zeta to Lion’s Gate, and the thrash of their passage among the aerial debris made Pherezides-Qorph wince to hear it. Still, it was better than plunging three kilometres to the broken ground with clogged jets, or creeping across the wracked, ruin-broken, ashen wasteland that separated the great gate of the wall from the Lion’s Gate space port. Plasma pools, radiation pockets, and rivers of slowly cooling molten ferrocrete made the surface as hazardous as flight. Not to mention the lingering threat of Horus’ traitors, even now, just days after the Omnissiah’s great victory over the Dark Architect.

‘Your concern is unwarranted,’ his companion told him, her voice slow and assured. It sounded human enough, but its measured tone betrayed a more mechanical intellect guiding the thought processes behind it. Sat in their secure harnesses, Magos Theokleia was a head taller than Qorph, her

humanoid form extended by a metre, though gaining no bulk, so that she had the look of a lathe spindle. The cowl of her red robes – stained and patched from recent woes – was down, revealing a silvery head fashioned in the likeness of a woman’s face. Not her own, he had learned. This was no death mask, but a homage to the great thinker Adaelion Akretes-Sigma-7.

Hundreds of small mechadendrites cascaded from the scalp in an imitation of hair, each filled with a twitching life of its own. The neck was long, reticulated like an armoured power cable, and capable of rotating a full three hundred and sixty degrees in a manner that was quite disturbing even to one used to the physical eccentricities of his superiors. The neck disappeared into the folds of the robe, and the hands that protruded from the sleeves were likewise made out of carefully constructed banded digits, with data-plugs and other connectors for fingertips.

Qorph, lowly Second Beta in the Temple of the Matrix Watchers, was barely augmented at all. His brain had been fitted with neuro-filters to aid memetic assimilation and data processing, his lungs and heart cybernetically enhanced to survive on Mars – the beautiful plains and cities left behind when the Dark Mechanicum had usurped the Fabricator General.

The only cybernetic of real note was his noospheric system, which overlapped his entire nervous system to add a digital extrasensory perception.

‘The odds of arriving at Lion’s Gate space port without dramatic incident are less than forty per cent,’ Qorph reminded the magos. ‘Worse if the operating malaise that befouls the systems of the space port and the inner defences has made its way into the systems of our craft.’

A burst of remonstration flickered across their noospheric connection as the magos replied, causing Qorph a tremor of discomfort in his cogitation cells.

‘I personally inspected all code and machine script, and installed my latest purity remarks. These are backed up by double-blind thresholds between our navigational systems and the space port’s guidance algorithms. Not a single character of infectious code can infiltrate our craft.’

‘Others made similar claims for the systems on the wall and in the space port, yet the malaise found a way to circumvent their protections. If my theories about metapsykinetics are tr–’

‘Your theories, if I must besmirch that word by associating it with your poorly conceived notions, have no basis in the realm of the Machine God.’

‘Surely the Omnissiah Himself proves that there is more than just the physical and the spirit of the machine, but something betwixt th–’

‘Enough prattling, Qorph. I have indulged these thoughts in private only to exorcise them from your processes by proving their error, but you will not mention this to our allies in the Emperor’s service. We will locate the transgressive code and excise it from the Lion’s Gate protocols as our Order are doing with the other systems still functional in the Imperial capital.

Roboute Guilliman’s reinforcements will be in orbit within days, and if they are to make swift planetfall the docks of Lion’s Gate must be purged.’

‘As you told me, magos. Delay risks the traitors recovering from the loss of Horus and striking again while we are still in disarray.’

‘Yes. Such is our urgency that we risk this flight. But you are wrong. My calculations put our odds of directly reaching Lion’s Gate at greater than fifty per cent. Be content.’

Yet it was not the calculations or even his theories that gave Qorph misgivings, but a very human dread of plunging into the unknown.

Qorph did not need an olfactory analyser to pick out the distinctive musty smell of mould and fuel that permeated the landing chamber. There was another smell too, stronger than the tang of disinfectants that had been used in an attempt to hide it. Faeces and vomit. Theokleia seemed unaffected as the pair walked down the ramp of the ornithopter, but Qorph’s stomach clenched in threat of sympathetic ejection. The creak of the craft’s settling blades added to a background noise of constant industry, but the hangar itself was silent. A hundred gunships could have been parked within the massive bay, but only the Adeptus Mechanicus lighter and a couple of other small craft were present.

A single figure in a dirty white robe waited for the magos and her novice.

Qorph could see cyber-augmentation and recognised the symbol of the forge world of Metalica embossed into a brassy chestplate between the folds. Followers of the Machine God had been swept up from across the fledgling Imperium and brought to Terra by the treachery of Horus and his cohort. In earlier years the gradual reunification of the old Martian empire had been a cause of celebration, like long-lost relations brought back into

the house of their great matriarch. Now it was fraught with the peril posed by the Dark Mechanicum and their perfidious ideas that were anathema to the Omnissiah and the Machine God. Qorph presumed their host had been properly certified to liaise with the incoming contingent.

‘Magos Theokleia, apologies for the last turbulent minutes of your journey.

The great upthrust of the space port creates immense vortices that were previously suppressed by artificial means, but they are not currently functioning.’

‘There is very little that is in order, as I understand it, Magos Rakhbani. A malignant codeware is running rampant through the space port systems, corrupting everything from conveyor operation to environmental support.

Most importantly, it has disabled the suborbital landing systems, rendering the upper decks virtually unreachable by large void craft. We are here to amend that.’

The other priest gave a small bow as Theokleia stepped off the ramp, ignoring Qorph altogether. Rakhbani was a short man, shorter even than Qorph, and below the chestplate his body splayed into six multijointed limbs, two tipped with manipulative appendages, the others with wheels that gleamed with a magnetic axle system. As he turned to fall in beside Theokleia, who did not check her advance in the slightest, he moved with a combination of rolling and striding.

Theokleia started asking detailed questions about the port’s broken systems and the two magi switched to a shielded noospheric conference to speed up the discussion.

Qorph followed on, seemingly forgotten.

Theokleia and Rakhbani continued their private exchange as the latter led them deeper into the spire of the space port along corridors scoured by fire.

Qorph recognised the telltale swirls of promethium on the metal floors, here and there criss-crossed by the jagged trails of phosphex. His olfactory filters detected high levels of anti-contaminant incense in the air and he noticed that Rakhbani had a censer hanging from one of his appendages, dribbling oily purple smoke. All hint of the Death Guard and their incorporeal allies was being cleansed, but Qorph could feel something was amiss.

The lingering silence of data-death hung around him as obvious as the stench of cleansing and the bullet and bolt scars on the walls. The few

augmentations he possessed were geared towards a particular purpose, one that might prove essential here. Qorph was highly attuned to the spirits of machines both latent and active. To his data-sense, the conversation of his superiors was a faint buzzing at the edge of detection. Various devices about his person and his companions gave off a glimmer of artificial life. Until he had moved too far away, the systems of the ornithopter had been a melange of colours and noises.

But here… everything was dead. His awareness stretched for up to five hundred metres, but within that sensory sphere he detected nothing. Only the lifeless magnetism of dead cables; the sparkless silicon of dormant circuits; a gnawing hollowness of cogitators thrumming with electricity but no life. To walk these corridors was to tread among the graves of a thousand deceased machines. Their absence weighed on Qorph’s shoulders, crushing him down as they proceeded further into the port.

After another few minutes Qorph felt something flickering ahead, thrumming in tune with the frequency of the lighting strips. He hurried past the two magi, following the scent like a lord’s bloodhound, picking up noospheric echoes from distant networks within the walls. Heat, light, life.

Data. Not just one functioning spirit but a host of them, exchanging information, pulses of intelligence travelling at the speed of light along optical conductors. It was as though he had emerged from a dark, forbidding cave into a beautiful sunrise.

He spied a functioning terminal – the first since leaving the hangar – and allowed his noospheric presence to interrogate it. He expected to find some small trace of the malignant code that Theokleia had been dispatched to eradicate but found nothing. Not a single command or line of programming out of place. There was no evidence of reprogramming either. He basked in the pale gleam and warm stuttering of its harmonious computations.

‘Magos!’

Theokleia and the other tech-priest had continued past as Qorph had lost himself briefly in the data flow. She turned at his call, her mask fixed in its expression of serene contemplation. Her tone was far from tranquil.

‘You have interrupted a very important joint calculus. This had better be important.’

‘This terminal… It is uninfected. There may be something to learn of the malaise by studying why that is so.’

‘Curious.’ Theokleia stepped back towards her acolyte, her noospheric field detaching from Rakhbani to extend towards the small antenna module of the terminal.

‘There is no mystery,’ declared Rakhbani, rolling backwards to keep abreast of Theokleia. ‘Certain key areas were isolated by my companions during the siege. This docking level was one such area. All connections to the upper port were severed to create a local network.’

‘That is unfortunate,’ said Qorph. ‘If the port is to be returned to any semblance of full functionality in time for the arrival of Lord Guilliman’s fleet, we will need to re-establish integration from the highest docks to the command levels.’

‘So?’ Rakhbani’s spindly limbs turned him a half-circle to face the acolyte.

‘It is a matter of a few hours to reverse the protocols.’

‘But we cannot access the main port systems remotely,’ explained Theokleia. ‘We will have to interface with an infected system directly. To open any network into the corrupted region will risk the quarantine you have created.’

‘You intend to ascend into the Starspear?’ Rakhbani’s tone suggested this was a mistake of the highest order.

‘If you mean the mesophex, then yes, that seems our only recourse to address the problem.’ Theokleia loomed over the other magos, the gleam of the terminal screen throwing a jade cast across her impassive mask. ‘We must encounter the code in its native state in order to devise a system of purging and inoculation.’

‘The Fifth Legion are still conducting full combat operations to secure the Starspear.’

‘Then we shall need to request their permission to proceed upwards, magos,’ Qorph interjected. ‘It would be unwise to enter a battle zone without first notifying the White Scars of our presence and intent. I trust you still have battle-automata available to provide escort.’

‘Battle-automata?’ Rakhbani looked from Qorph to his mistress and back again. ‘We have a few, but I am not qualified for combat!’

Theokleia shook her head and turned away.

‘Begin the protocols with the Fifth Legion immediately, Magos Rakhbani.

Qorph and I will attend to the other preparations.’ Theokleia’s statement seemed to settle Rakhbani.

‘That would be more reasonable, magos. I am happy to coordinate your access.’

‘ Our access, magos,’ Theokleia told him sternly. ‘I am shocked you have managed to pass this last year without seeing direct conflict, but that will no longer be the case. Perhaps you viewed things differently on Metalica, but in the Solar System our duties are very clear. The moment the traitors drove us from the red sands of Mars, all tech-priests were qualified for combat.

We will need your expertise.’

Rakhbani’s limbs folded inwards, lowering him almost to the ground.

Qorph was not sure whether it was a pose of submission or resignation, but it didn’t matter.

‘Look at it this way,’ Qorph told him cheerily. ‘Whatever happens to you in the mesophex, it won’t be as bad as your fate if you’re the reason Magos Theokleia fails in her mission. By the time she was finished, you would be begging her to make you into a servitor. At least this way you have a fighting chance. That’s more than many of our Order were given.’

The scent of grease and fuel were to Tetzhou as grass and summer storms to his brethren. He dipped a broad, flat fingertip into the pot of unguent on the floor of the makeshift armoury and smeared it over the metal rein belt held in his other hand. He fed the newly oiled linkages back into the steering gullet of the jetbike, as carefully as his forefathers had nurtured a young foal or painstakingly riveted the links on a suit of armour.

‘Whispers to Iron!’

Tetzhou chuckled as he heard Khulan Khan call his unofficial title. He snapped the last linkage in place and turned his head to see his commander stalking across the garage floor accompanied by a trio of tech-priests. One he knew. Rakhbani. The other two were newcomers, a magos and an acolyte by clothing and bearing, wearing the red of Mars and symbols of Fabricator General Kane. Other sigils about their person he did not know even though he had made it his business to study the machine-worshippers for several years.

‘Time to ride the storm again, Tetzhou,’ Khulan told him in Chogorian, coming to a stop a few paces away. He glanced back towards the great gates, already impatient to leave his charges in someone else’s care. ‘The servants of Mars wish to enter the Starspear.’

With a wince, Tetzhou pushed himself to his feet, the rough implants in his left thigh and lower back grinding against bone, tugging where they were crudely wired into nerve and muscle.

‘You said I was more useful now with this.’ He lifted the adjustable link binder in one hand. His other hand moved to the long curved dagger at his waist. ‘Better than with this.’

‘We each fly the wind that comes to us, you know that,’ Khulan replied, his expression sombre. ‘Had one of these metal-minded acolytes been on hand to tend your injuries, perhaps you would not be crippled.’

The khan meant nothing by the term, for the wounds that had severed Tetzhou’s spine had been gloriously received, and moments later he had avenged himself on the Iron Warrior that had dealt them, but still it felt like a harsh judgement. There was no arguing though; Khulan was already turning to leave.

‘Techmarine Tetzhou will be your guide,’ he told the priests, switching to Imperial Gothic with a small bow of obedience. His last words were Chogorian again, tossed at Tetzhou as the khan departed. ‘Don’t get yourself killed for them, Whispers to Iron.’

Rakhbani roll-stepped forward but was overtaken by the other magos, whose mood was inscrutable, her face covered by an exquisitely rendered mask.

‘You have your orders, Brother Tetzhou,’ she said in quiet, clipped tones.

‘We require to enter and ascend the Starspear immediately.’

‘I see.’ Tetzhou gestured to one of his servitors. The half-man half-machine waddled over, face slack with unintelligence, eyes replaced with focusing lenses. It held out a cloth and cleanser, which Tetzhou took to remove the grease from his hands while he regarded the tech-priests in silence.

‘I was led to believe the Fifth Legion were as swift as a bullet, yet you dawdle and gawp like your lackwit servitor,’ rasped the magos. She turned her face towards the half-man, and Tetzhou could imagine an expression of distaste beneath the bronze. ‘Was this thing cobbled together by the same idiot that threw augmetics into your body?’

Tetzhou smiled, her irritation fuelling his own placidity. He had something of the measure of her already. Her reaction spoke to a human mind, not some cogitator wearing flesh. She was clearly of rank, and accustomed to

being attended without question. Such folk had taught him the way of machines.

‘You are astute, magos. What is your purpose in the Starspear, so that I might better judge where to guide you?’

‘We have arrived to remove the pervasive scrap code that has been plaguing the mesophex systems, in preparation for Primarch Roboute Guilliman. As you must be aware, his arrival is imminent and you have yet to return the Lion’s Gate space port to low-orbit operation. We must ascend the mesophex without delay.’

‘If by that you mean we are still fighting, you are correct.’ Tetzhou gestured again to his mute servitor, which ambled away. He dropped the rag next to the open carcass of the jetbike. ‘And it is interesting that you say

“plaguing” given that the Death Guard have left their mark on this place very deeply. But I do not think your problem is scrap code. You see, the khan brought you to me because I’ve seen the shadow that makes its home in the cable forests of the Starspear. If you want to kill it, I am happy to help. But if that is the case, we will not ascend. No. To reach the lair of that beast it is far quicker to travel to the pinnacle and move downwards.’

The servitor returned with Tetzhou’s gauntlets and assisted him in replacing them, locking the armoured gloves to his plate with a hex-driver fingertip. The Techmarine’s ceramite-clad fingers moved and the machine-man slumped into its standby stupor.

‘We have already travelled some distance from the magos’ transport,’

Rakhbani said apologetically. ‘To return with the battle-servitors will take some time.’

‘Worry not, magos.’ Tetzhou looked around, his gaze encompassing the open space full of rundown war machines and half-built vehicles. ‘I’m certain I can find us something suitable.’

That the battered cargo lighter that Tetzhou commandeered made it into the upper atmosphere on only one of its three engines was testament to the durability of the Machine God’s will and the spirit of the craft; that the White Scars legionary was able to land it on one of the outer aprons of the suborbital port was testament to his skill at the controls. It was only in retrospect as he hastily followed the two magi down the loading ramp,

uncomfortable and ungainly in a bulky, all-encompassing pressure suit, that Qorph appreciated both.

Having both feet planted on a firm surface was not much better. From this altitude, where Terra’s atmosphere thinned and the void felt within reach of an outstretched hand, the sky was a deep blue in all directions save above.

Looking up, Qorph could not see stars. In orbit over Terra was a litter of plasma clouds and debris, billions of pieces of broken ships and detonated reactors from the fierce void battles that had raged. Somewhere just beyond the cover of glittering shrapnel and multicoloured fog approached the immense fleet of the Ultramarines, guided by Roboute Guilliman.

Too late, thought Qorph, looking at the shattered hulls and broken starships that littered the thousand square kilometres of the space port’s major landing area. Terra had held, but the cost had been too much. He had seen the powers of the traitors first-hand, witnessed unreal entities conjured from hate and despair. Somehow, by the grace and protection of the Machine God, he had been spared – for now.

‘You say you saw a creature?’ he asked Tetzhou when the White Scars legionary joined them. Rakhbani had moved to the back of the transport to usher out a quintet of bulky servitors armed with jagged motorised saw blades and heavy lasweapons.

‘Yes. I saw it once, when I was fighting about four kilometres down from where we now stand,’ said the Techmarine. ‘A jin-jiva, metal made flesh and soul. One of your machine spirits given form.’

‘Do not entertain such nonsense.’ Theokleia slashed a hand as though cutting down Tetzhou’s statements. ‘We have both seen the depths to which the Dark Mechanicum have plummeted and the heresies they have committed. Doubtless this warrior saw some strange but wholly explicable construct, the workings of which are beyond a brain adapted for violence more than study.’

Tetzhou’s laugh was distorted by his helm’s vocaliser.

‘You may be right, magos. On Chogoris, my world of birth, I was known to be gifted in the art of wa-yangse-oh.’

‘A Chogorian battle technique?’ asked Qorph.

With crashing feet and hissing pistons, the battle-automata arrived with Rakhbani herding them by short blasts of clicking, screeching binharic.

Tetzhou hissed in distaste at the sharp noise, then turned to address Qorph.

‘It is not a combat form, adept, but one of artistic writing. As a youth I used to compose poems, the letter forms inspired by the shadow-shapes the clouds painted onto the broad plains. Just child’s rhymes, really. Before the brotherhood took me to the stars.’

‘We are not here to chase shadows,’ snapped Theokleia. ‘An intrusive, self-replicating scrap code was introduced to the facilities of the Lion’s Gate space port. First reports of its presence coincide with the arrival of the Iron Warriors’ low-orbit assault, which to me suggests that its origin point would be somewhere close to your perceived encounter. It is my theory that if we can locate the source input of the scrap code and identify it, we can then use purification algorithms that I have prepared to revert the scrap code to its normal behaviour. By inverting the scrap code, it will replicate along similar pathways, cleansing the system by itself. Isolated pockets may remain, but we can quarantine and deal with them once the suborbital port is operational again.’

‘We have seen the anticode work in the Lion’s Gate itself, and a permutation of it is being used to safeguard the inner sanctum of the High Lords even now,’ Qorph told Tetzhou, feeling he should support his magos.

They advanced across the pitted ferrocrete apron of the landing zone, heading towards one of the smaller conveyor shafts that were used to carry goods and people to and from the upper docks. The machine life here was fitful. Most of it was of standard nature, without noospheric resonance or links. Such mechanisms were barely more alive than a spanner, but still gave off the barest hint of signal here and there, like a crackle of distant static in Qorph’s noospheric sense.

Tetzhou set a swift pace despite the inconvenience of his crude augmetics, putting himself ahead by a few dozen metres as the automata lumbered after, the two magi hanging back with their semi-human bodyguards. Qorph hurried ahead to speak with the White Scars legionary.

‘You know something of the ways of the Machine God,’ the adept said when he had caught up, out of hearing of his mistress. ‘I am not fluent, but I inloaded a rudimentary understanding of Chogorian before embarking on this mission. Your khan called you the Iron Whisperer. That speaks to some degree of connection to our machines.’

Tetzhou grunted, perhaps uncomfortable with the questioning.

‘I apologise if I am impertinent. Do not feel under any debt to answer my enquiries.’

‘No, I’m fine with your questions, adept. I am surprised by your interest.’

‘My mistress disapproves of my research, but I am fascinated by new lines of enquiry that have been revealed by the actions of the traitors, and in particular the hereteks you may know as the Dark Mechanicum. I seek to understand this new paradigm and that means I must collate information from the best sources. Given the reluctance of my Order to investigate, that means seeking knowledge from outsiders.’

‘The Dark Mechanicum created those terrible engines that broke the outer wall.’

‘Among many other disgusting and destructive artifices, yes. To do so they harnessed a power we do not widely understand.’

Tetzhou looked at Qorph with such suddenness that it made the tech-priest flinch. For a few seconds he felt himself scrutinised by the emotionless lenses of the legionary’s helm. He was no stranger to being the subject of an inhuman gaze, not with Theokleia as his magos, and many others of the Martian priesthood had visual sensors far different to the standard human eyeball, but there was something predatory in the legionary’s glare.

‘Be careful what you seek, adept. It may have been a similar curiosity that started your fallen tech-kin on their path to ruin. On Chogoris, if one finds a dead animal beside a pool, one does not drink the water.’

‘Because it may be tainted and thus the cause of the animal’s demise?’

‘Just so.’

Qorph glanced back. They were about a hundred metres ahead of the rest of the party and the tech-priest’s robes inside the void suit were wet with his perspiration. He wished he could wipe his face – salty sweat stung the freshest of his implant connections just beneath the right side of his jaw.

‘We should wait for the others,’ he suggested.

‘We’ll wait at the conveyor,’ replied Tetzhou, nodding towards the battle-marked upthrust of a building about thirty metres ahead. Qorph could feel a background hum of mechanical activity but nothing that suggested the conveyor was functional.

‘How do you know we can get down this way?’ he asked.

‘This is the route I followed when I came upon the jin-jiva. I used this conveyor only three days ago.’

Tetzhou’s confidence seemed misplaced when the conveyor call mechanism did not respond to his jabbed finger. No light or sound indicated the pad had registered the contact at all, and there was no sign beyond the heavy doors or in the engine housing above them that suggested the conveyor was on its way.

Tetzhou pressed the pad twice more, with increasing velocity, and Qorph intervened as he prepared for a third.

‘I do not think the mechanism will withstand further investigation in this manner.’

Tetzhou looked away as he stepped back, fingers flexing in annoyance.

‘It worked. Three days ago, it worked. Just came at the press of the button.’

‘If that is the case, which I have no reason to doubt, then something must have occurred in the interim.’

Before he could do anything else, the vox-unit in the hood of his suit crackled into life with the voice of Magos Rakhbani.

‘Is there some problem, Qorph?’

‘A momentary delay, I am sure. A temporary lapse of function in the conveyor that I shall investigate.’

‘No!’ The sharpness of Rakhbani’s injunction rang around inside the hood.

The magos continued in calmer tones. ‘This area is rife with the scrap code.

I have some experience, unfortunately. Do not interface with the system.

Await my arrival.’

Qorph looked back to see Rakhbani separating from the other group.

‘It seems your superiors do not trust your abilities, adept,’ Tetzhou said to him over his helm’s external address.

‘They are right to be cautious.’ Qorph gazed at the control panel, wishing he could prise it open and delve into its workings. He had yet to see an example of the fully operational scrap code and, protected by a buffer of Theokleia’s anticode, he was certain it would be safe.

Rakhbani arrived before obedience yielded to temptation, stepping past Qorph. A ribbed appendage snaked out and speared an interface key into a matching socket on the control panel.

A couple of seconds later the engine block growled into life. Qorph looked up in surprise, unable to see the workings behind the wall but aware via his noospheric sense that the conveyor was indeed operational. A chime

followed by the crunch of the doors opening themselves drew his attention back down to the conveyor.

The next thing he was aware of was Tetzhou’s massive frame slamming him sideways as something oil-slicked and jagged with blades whipped out of the conveyor cage.

Bolts from Tetzhou’s pistol exploded across the metal-laced creature hunched within the conveyor cage, their detonations creating fountains mixed of oil and blood. He dimly registered a cry of pain from the tech-priest but was fully fixed on the foe, parrying a claw-tipped tentacle with his blade as he fired another bolt into the nightmare’s midriff.

The thing inside the conveyor might have once been a legionary. It was about as tall as a warrior in Cataphractii Tactical Dreadnought armour, shoulders broad and chest covered in the remnants of what looked like a ceramite cuirass. Its exposed skin was thick with dark veins beneath stretched translucence, quivering with multiple pulses. Barbs of metal stuck through from within the muscle and exposed tendons glistening with fluid over reticulated metal bands.

The weapon-limbs were extruded from the beast’s hips, four of them coming at Tetzhou like flails. Between their writhing and snapping he saw the face of his opponent and his gut turned in disgust.

A pair of all-too-human eyes looked out from a shifting mass of brass-like scales, beneath which spun delicate gears and axles, as though the rest of the face were made of intricate clockwork. Small cogs whirred as fat lips drew back in a grimace, initiating another flurry of attacks.

Feeling slow and awkward with his augmetics, Tetzhou backed off two steps, firing again – though the bolts had so far had no more effect than a man’s fists against a steel door. One of the tentacles withdrew, coiling about itself. Impossibly the metal moulded with itself, forming a new shape: a muzzle, behind which now glared a generator that Tetzhou instantly recognised as a plasma chamber. He fancied he could feel the heat of it as his war plate systems detected the temperature rise and the whine of the charge building.

Lacking room to evade the coming shot Tetzhou launched forward again, driving his sword spear-like before him from inside the reach of the limb-gun. The blade pierced the widening eye of his foe and slid neatly into the

cavity behind, but he felt the rasp of metal against metal rather than the smooth slip of blade through bone and flesh.

Twisting both wrist and waist he tore the tulwar free, scattering broken pieces of machinery, bone shrapnel and gobbets of torn flesh.

The thing slumped, folding slowly like a lifter that had lost hydraulic power, toppling backwards with a crash onto the metal floor of the conveyor.

Tetzhou watched for a few more seconds. Not even a twitch moved its armoured form.

‘By the north winds, did you see that?’ he muttered, taking a step back but with bolt pistol and sword at the ready in case the demise of his foe was not yet truly administered.

‘I saw…’ the acolyte replied weakly. ‘It is as I thought. Met a psykinetics.’

Theokleia arrived at speed with the battle-servitors a few strides behind.

Air wheezed in and out of bulbous vascular tanks that had been fitted to their chests so that they could survive the near vacuum. Moisture crystalised in the freezing air and glistened as ice on their rubbery flesh.

‘A construct of the Dark Mechanicum,’ the magos snarled. ‘Waiting in ambush.’

‘More than a construct,’ said Tetzhou. He looked again at the remains, but now that they were robbed of animus they seemed more mundane – a legionary with numerous implants melded with the remains of his war plate.

‘Something else.’

‘I do not see anything particularly strange,’ said Theokleia. ‘A perversion of the Machine God’s will, doubtless, but rooted in the Major Mysteries of the cybernetica.’

‘A corruption,’ agreed Rakhbani, looking from the dead thing to the battle-servitors.

‘He was a legionary,’ argued Tetzhou. ‘Not some vat-grown lump of muscle. What did you call it, adept? Metapsykinetics?’

‘Superstition and…’ Theokleia’s remonstration trailed off as they turned their attention to the fallen tech-priest.

His faceplate was misted with condensation, but Tetzhou could see his face twisted in pain. A spasm of movement drew his eye to the left leg. It was pierced through and through with a blood-covered drill on the end of a long

prehensile limb. More crimson dribbled lazily from the wound and froze in the near void.

More urgently, a vapour cloud of escaping air was coalescing around the punctured suit.

‘Get something to clamp that thigh,’ Tetzhou barked, holstering his pistol.

He sheathed his sword and grabbed the inert form of the dead cyborg in the conveyor. With his own cybernetics grating inside he heaved the mass into the open, leaving enough room for three or four of them to enter.

Too slow, he chastised himself as he hauled the tech-priest over one shoulder. Half a second quicker and he would have been between the traitor and the adept rather than having to shove him aside. My khan was right to leave you off the front line, you clumsy oaf.

‘One of you with me, one comes down next with the servitors,’ he told the two magi. ‘Some of the levels have been resealed and pressurised, fortune has it that our goal is in such a place.’

‘I’ll remain with the automata,’ Rakhbani said immediately, withdrawing a couple of metres on his magnetic casters. The other magos offered no argument and stepped into the conveyor.

Tetzhou’s last glimpse of Rakhbani was of the magos looking at the broken machine-carcass of the dead legionary. The doors closed and they were plunged into darkness, the lamps no longer functioning. Suit lights sprang into life a moment later, cutting the gloomy interior with cones of yellow.

A thought occurred to Tetzhou as he lowered the tech-priest to the decking and placed a massive hand around the breach in the suit. Rakhbani had been standing at the controls, right next to the conveyor entrance. Yet the traitor had ignored him and attacked Qorph. It might mean nothing, but Tetzhou wasn’t happy to dismiss it just yet.

Numbness down his left side alerted Qorph to the fact that a suite of pain receptors had been switched off in his brain, presumably due to some trauma. As neurons fired into life, the recollection of the entity in the conveyor flooded back. He could hear the clank and wheeze of its movements, the crackle of energy weapons and discharge of bolt propellant followed by the crack of detonation.

As brain activity increased he came to the conclusion that the noises were not a memory. There was a firefight raging around him.

He forced an eye open, to be confronted with the slack-mouthed visage of a combat-servitor leering at him upside down. Alarmed, he opened his other eye and saw a dribble of saliva from the biomechanic’s mouth, foamed with pink blood. Its vacant gaze was not unintelligent – it was dead.

Moving his head slightly, wincing as bullets whipped past too close for his liking, Qorph moved his gaze to the torso of the servitor. The fist-sized holes revealed the remains of pulverised organs through the mesh armour that had covered its torso. Bionic enhancements still whirred and clattered around its cardiovascular system, but a severed artery simply vomited out the artificially circulated blood, creating a spreading pool that was about to reach Qorph.

Flushed with distaste, the tech-priest rolled to the other side and unsteadily regained his feet. His void suit had been removed, but the red of his robe by his left leg was far darker, heavy with blood. He had no recollection of suffering the injury, but the pain that threaded through the blockers was very real as he tried to put his weight on that side. Through a slit in the crimson he saw a binding of white – Rakhbani’s robe he realised – tight around his thigh.

Beyond the dead servitor was another, but it looked very different to the warriors Rakhbani had assembled, being of flatter, more brutish features, which he realised reminded him more of a legionary than a normal human.

Cybernetics pierced its flesh, its arms and one leg had been replaced with augmetics, and a heavy cannon connected to a backpack by a belt feed lay close by. The silvered armour and yellow-and-black stripes were reminiscent of the Iron Warriors – perhaps a failed aspirant to their ranks donated to the Dark Mechanicum as part of some unholy contract?

The small expedition was in a chamber about thirty metres long and five wide, erratically lit by malfunctioning lumen strips and muzzle flare. At the door at the far end were two more enemy constructs – armoured, human-sized, more metal than flesh – and three of their number lay broken across the floor of the chamber, likely charting the advance of Tetzhou as he had counter-attacked. Another allied servitor was missing a leg, leaning against pale, blue-painted ferrocrete to the left, its multi-laser tracking back and

forth while in the shelter of its bulk Rakhbani and Theokleia hunkered close to the wall.

‘Assistance would be good,’ shouted Tetzhou between Chogorian curses and battle cries. He smashed his bolt pistol into the face of one of his foes –

evidently unable to reload in the melee – and hacked into its reeling form with his sword.

‘We brought the servitors for a reason,’ Theokleia replied coolly.

‘I am not cleared for combat duties,’ Rakhbani reminded them.

Qorph staggered over to the pair just as Tetzhou spun away from his opponent. The nearest combat-servitor responded to the freshly revealed target, its multi-laser strafing red blasts across the traitor construct’s midriff and arm, flashing past into the corridor beyond. Tetzhou had reloaded in the two seconds of respite this brought him, firing a trio of shots directly into the head of the stumbling enemy, blasting its skull apart from within. A crackling mace wielded by another foe crashed into the chest of the legionary, throwing him backwards.

‘Late intervention will not preserve us,’ Qorph pointed out as another clanking monstrosity appeared at the doorway, a pair of triple-barrelled guns where arms would have been.

Through his noospheric awareness Qorph could tell there was something different about this new arrival. Its signature churned constantly, changing ratio and aspect every few milliseconds, stuttering like an indignant archmagos. He had seen similar activity in previous encounters during the siege and he pronounced his dis covery with a shudder.

‘Neverborn-infused construct,’ he warned the others. ‘Ignore the head!

Breach its soul chamber.’

Disturbing runes glowed with a melange of colours inside a ribwork of iron and bone. Tetzhou was separated from the horrifying creation by the mundane battle-servitors, resorting to crude hacking as he tried to sever a tree-thick limb pinning him against a wall.

An electronic sigh issued from Theokleia and she stepped out from the shadow of the bodyguard. Instantly, the possessed engine-warrior turned a many-lensed, insect-like face in her direction. She reached into her robes as the six barrels of its guns started to spin, pulling a thick-barrelled pistol from within.

A momentary glimmer preceded a blast of orange that struck the Neverborn engine square in the chest, melting the protective cage in an instant to punch through into the soul canister. Pierced, the canister cracked open from the warp pressure within, its runes separating like a mess of wires untangling itself, purplish light blazing from the breach.

Theokleia fired her volkite serpenta again, hitting almost exactly the same spot. Molten metal spumed from the back of the tottering creature and a wail erupted directly inside the head of Qorph, bypassing conventional sound waves. For a moment its noospheric aura took on the faint form of a Neverborn – a contorted, squat creature with no head, its raging face set into its torso, fangs of fire bared in a maw of void black.

Then it was gone, disappearing like autogun discharge, its animated mechanical body clattering to the ground in component parts.

Tetzhou burst free from his predicament as his attacker’s arm spun away trailing a mix of oil and blood, his bolt pistol firing into the exposed backs of its knees to sever the frayed metal ligaments. Unable to hold itself up, the combat-servitor tried to twist as it fell, ripping apart its own leg in the act.

A noospheric burst accompanied by a binharic command erupted from Rakhbani into one of the battle constructs. It responded by powering forwards, spinning saw blade slashing into the neck of the stricken Dark Mechanicum creation. Tetzhou leapt at the last foe as it exchanged shots with the other servitors, ramming his blade point first between two armoured plates on its lower back, severing the spine within. The legionary wrapped a ceramite-clad arm under the construct’s chin and twisted in what was obviously intended to be a throw. The servitor parted where the spine had been severed so that the White Scar ripped it in half instead, pulling thorax, head and arms away from the rest. Spinning, Tetzhou smashed the flailing upper half of the construct into the unyielding floor, contacting his arm so hard that its exposed jaw and skull shattered.

‘Where are we?’ Qorph asked, turning to Rakhbani. ‘What did I miss?’

It started as a presence, not a voice or sound. It pricked Tetzhou’s awareness like a change in the wind. A herald of something more significant to come.

As when he had ridden the plains of Chogoris his focus was on his surroundings, but he allowed instinct to monitor that other presence; to listen to the voice of the wind.

It sat uneasily in his subconscious as the group pushed through the zone secured over the previous days by the White Scars. The evidence of recent fighting was abundant: corpses, spent rounds, scars from bolt and laser. The festering dead of Mortarion’s servants had been burned, but the corpses of the Iron Warriors that had preceded them were everywhere, abandoned by their own and ignored by the Death Guard. This place had been changed rapidly by successive occupations of several masters, and their touch was layered over the Lion’s Gate space port like the paint on Tetzhou’s war plate. For decades it had been home to humans – regular people charged with the mundane but essential job of ushering goods and people to and from the Throneworld of the Imperium. Few of them remained, but pockets of survivors had been discovered in isolated boltholes, miraculously protected from the bombardments and assaults of the traitors, overlooked by Neverborn interlopers. Haggard and close to madness, if not already driven over the edge by their harrowing experiences, they perhaps suffered a worse fate than those that had perished.

The sons of Dorn had come next, fortifying, regimented and solid, breaking and erecting walls, phalanxes of gun and blade ready for when Perturabo and his Iron Warriors arrived. The White Scars had honoured the dead of the Emperor’s chosen as best they could, but the unnatural taint had been upon many of them and they had been turned to ash and blackened ceramite along with their corruptors. Malignant Neverborn and lethal poxes remained though Mortarion had fallen to the fury of the Great Khan, who even now still lay at the brink of slipping into the endless sleep, kept alive by the ministrations and machines of Terra’s finest chirurgeons.

But it was the Iron Warriors that now occupied his thoughts, and the legacy of their brief time as lords of the Lion’s Gate that drew Tetzhou and the others towards the core of the Starspear. And as they neared their destination, Tetzhou’s vigilance increased. Now he was no longer the rider on the plain sifting the whispers of the wind for signs: he was the mouse scurrying from shadow to shadow knowing that the hawk glided overhead –

and he was the hawk with eyes that saw all, searching for its prey.

While the half-knowledge of being observed nagged at Tetzhou, part of his brain registered the ongoing debate between the tech-priests. At times he understood none of it, spoken in sharp exchanges of their machine tongue that set his teeth on edge. Now and then they spoke plainly, but even then

he was able to follow the argument only occasionally, as now. They passed into a vast turbine hall, the five mammoth generators that provided power to this sector dormant, the light provided by his suit and lamps mounted upon the combat-servitor that advanced a pace behind him.

‘It was not the same,’ contested Qorph. ‘Though my recollection is fragmentary, and my sample of short duration, I am certain that the entity in the conveyor cage was closer to an exploited code system than a living being. It had a noospheric register different to both corrupted servitor and Neverborn-hosting engine.’

‘What you claim is simply not possible,’ replied Theokleia. ‘While there is a motive spark in flesh, machine and warp, the three are still separate. Even the sorcerous engines we have faced that are machine in build but powered by the immaterial denizen are animated matter. This is no different to a void-shield generator, in principle.’

‘An infection of the type you posit would be impossible to restrain,’

Rakhbani added as Tetzhou and the servitor came to the tall arch at the end of the turbine hall. It led into a room of monitoring stations, their screens dead and broken. Looking at splintered glass and shattered circuits made Tetzhou’s implants rasp at his flesh. The sensation was not pain in the normal sense, but it grated on his thoughts as he limped into the control chamber.

‘That is entirely my contention,’ said Qorph. His voice echoed from behind, still in the larger space. Tetzhou became aware of the far more cramped confines of the control room, narrow so that he had to take the lead, blocking the combat-servitor. ‘This is not merely scrap code we are dealing with, it is a power that has the ability to rewrite the physical makeup of any system it encounters, including genetic data and programs, treating them the same. The data is very raw, but in time we shall understand this as a new state of matter and energy.’

There was a harsh crackle, laughter from Theokleia, accompanied by the ring of their footsteps inside the control chamber. Their strange snaps, buzzes and creaks reminded Tetzhou of what they were: agents of an inhuman cult that believed machine was superior to human.

Could he trust them? The adepts of Mars certainly had kept their own agenda since being reunited with Terra. They considered legionaries to be a

strange, indulgent experiment of the Emperor – the Omnissiah, they called Him – that were inferior to their own cyberised military.

And that magos… So dismissive. So arrogant in her mechanical certainty.

Moving through the twisted remains of a blast door into a broad corridor, Tetzhou paused and allowed the combat-servitor to come up alongside him.

He glanced up at the mute. Built for violence. And servility. Is that how the magos saw him? A construct of flesh rather than metal.

They were getting closer to the lair of the creature.

‘Another five hundred metres ahead,’ Tetzhou told his companions. ‘A tertiary control chamber.’

‘The noospheric signature here is very different,’ remarked Qorph. Tetzhou glanced back to see the adept looking back and forth along the dead consoles as though his eyes were an auspex.

Which they probably were, the Techmarine realised.

The foreignness of the metal and plastek inside Tetzhou’s body made him wonder how the Martians tolerated it. For them perhaps it was an improvement, but his body had been forged by the artifice of the Emperor –

may the winds carry His name forever – already superior in every way to the unaugmented human form.

He recalled the thing in the conveyor cage, how it had blended machine and flesh as one. Not meshed, but seamless despite the protestations of the rude magos. Tetzhou wondered how his ravaged skeleton and muscles would feel if he had that kind of symbiosis with his own artificial parts.

‘Tetzhou!’

The Techmarine realised it was the third time Qorph had called his name.

The adept’s gaze was fixed on the hand of the legionary where he had paused for a moment, bracing himself on an out-thrust console of a terminal as his implants had spasmed.

Tiny tendrils of wire had wormed their way from beneath the rune pads and screen and were questing at the ceramite of his gauntlets, a few strands burrowing into the flexible interstitial layer. Like pin pricks he could feel them trying to pierce the thick skin of his fingers.

He pulled his hand away with a cry, stepping back as thicker cables ripped out of the console and lashed at him with sparking ends and flashing plugs.

Sheathed copper threw itself around his arm in quick coils as he tried to slash his blade through the serpentine mass. The glowing termini of optical

cables plinked against the lenses of his helm, trying to crack through to plunge into his eyes beyond. Around them the lumens flared and dimmed, creating an inconstant movement of light and shadow, the darkness itself seemingly alive.

Tetzhou’s bolt-round detonated inside the console. Glass and circuitry showered across the chamber, revealing innards that looked as much like the pulsing organs of a living creature as they did a construction of artifice and electricity.

The servitor lumbered around, its multi-laser swinging back and forth uselessly as it failed to identify a target, A pulse from the magos’ volkite pistol tore a blistering gash through the living machinery that caused its appendages to flex back in shock.

‘Go!’ bellowed Tetzhou, breaking into a run down the corridor. ‘We must tackle the machine shadow in its lair.’

‘The sanctum is secure-vaulted,’ barked Rakhbani. ‘I will overload the security protocols from the antechamber.’

Before anyone could object, the tech-priest rolled back into the room they had just left.

Clear of the thrashing cable-tentacles, Tetzhou slowed to a more tactical pace, his lopsided stride creating an offset double clang on the metal mesh underfoot. He glanced down, anxious of conduits and other machinery that might be beneath him, but there was nothing but ferrocrete below the ironwork.

The heavy clump and lighter treads of the adept and the magos followed him a few seconds behind, but his attention was focused on the space ahead.

The corridor opened into an octagonal chamber with a similar shaped vault within, the remnants of more broken machinery, hanging cables and pipes like gala flags criss-crossing the space between. The lumens flickered arrhythmically, crafting images that looked like faces from splinters of glass and ruptured cable housing. Sparks pulsed along exposed wires, their crackle and snap sounding like the machine language of the Martians.

The closest door to the inner sanctum wheezed open, the moist air within turning to vaporous cloud as it came into contact with the near-freezing atmosphere outside. Swirls of mist coiled from the vents of Tetzhou’s armour as he took up a balanced stance, bolt pistol leading, sword held out to one side.

Tetzhou thought he could see lit rune pads and data scrawling across screens within the sanctum, but after a moment a shadow eclipsed them.

The thing that came out of the doorway was impossible. Its whole form was neither fixed nor fluid – at one moment easing its way through the portal, at the next a thing of solid matter, bearing whirring saw blades and guns that gleamed with las and plasma power. Its innards glowed like a reactor, glimpsed between plates of metal and ceramite that shifted and locked as it moved, assuming a form as large as a Contemptor Dreadnought, more than twice as tall as Tetzhou and far broader and heavier. Exposed bone sheathed in molten ceramic hardened into curved and spiked surfaces.

The main sarcophagus on what must surely have once been a Dreadnought assumed the leering features of a horned Neverborn face, sculpted from cable and pneumatic pistons.

Pale-yellow lumens regarded the arriving group with what Tetzhou thought was interest rather than hostility.

‘We require a servitor of more mass,’ whispered Qorph, coming up to stop a few steps behind Tetzhou. A little further back, the rude magos’

intermittent bursts of machine tongue gave the impression of maddened babbling.

Prompted by the adept’s words, Tetzhou couldn’t hear the signature thud of the servitor. He dared not take his eyes from the monstrosity assembling itself in the outer chamber a few metres away, but the absence of the construct made him want to tear his gaze away to check on its whereabouts.

Instinct screamed at him that something was wrong.

‘Adept,’ he growled. ‘Where is the servitor?’

Confused by the legionary’s question Qorph turned, confident he would find the servitor just a few metres behind them.

The half-man construct was further back than he expected, about twenty metres away. Qorph found himself staring down the lenses of the multi-laser barrels, backlit by the flickering strobe of the corrupted lumen circuits in the ceiling. An aura of tainted noospheric data surrounded the combat-servitor, like a sickly melange of scrap code and nonsensical bursts that shrieked and blistered through Qorph’s noospheric awareness.

He could sense that the influence stretched back along the corridor, emanating from the command chamber where Rakhbani was operating the

controls. Concern for the magos spiked for a split second until realisation dawned on the acolyte.

‘Rakhbani is corrupted! He’s turned the servitor against us!’

With a speed possible only to the augmented and noospherically aware, Theokleia snapped a data-cordon out across a new noospheric connection, momentarily cutting off the baleful influence from the traitor magos.

‘A simple enough proof of concept,’ Theokleia calmly announced, packets of modified data-code streaming across the link even as the viral taint of Rakhbani’s control started to eat away at the quarantine. ‘Once the vessel is cleansed, I shall use the evolved data to purge the master system.’

<Foolish priests.>

The words rumbled out from the nightmare apparition in the sanctum in a combination of sonic and data-waves so as to nearly overwhelm the senses.

The bark of Tetzhou’s bolt pistol seemed tinny and distant. White armour blurred across Qorph’s vision as he looked back at the master-beast, to be swatted away by a still-forming limb made part of flesh but studded with metal barbs.

<I am beyond your petty alphanumeric bonds.> Tetzhou recovered with a roll, slow and awkward compared to the legionary Qorph had seen fighting within the inner walls of the Imperial Palace. With almost languid ease, twin whips of ribbed plasteel flexed out across the White Scars legionary’s chestplate, almost ripping it from its mountings as he again tumbled across the sanctum floor.

‘Empty boasts!’ Theokleia’s code was replicating at an exponential rate, burrowing into the combat-servitor’s systems like armour-piercing bullets against unprotected flesh. ‘Nothing stands outside the great Cosmic Artifice. All can be rendered to our knowledge through the wisdom of the Machine God.’

<You know that she is not right, young one.> Qorph couldn’t keep his attention on both the giant machine-creature and the ongoing data battle, flicking his senses from one to the other and back again. Each time he looked at the behemoth that had once been a Legion war engine, he caught glimpses of Tetzhou swinging his blade and firing his pistol, neither with any noticeable effect. Shields and phasing fields sprang into life around the creature, deflecting shots, absorbing the energy of the legionary’s blows.

<I am the obliterator. You cannot destroy me.> Broken screens flickered into life across the sanctum, displaying the same twisted Neverborn face but with varying expressions of joy, hate, anger and misery. The voice boomed from a dozen external address systems and crackled across a score of data-conduits.

<You cannot keep me at bay forever. I sense the approach of your ships. They do not know what awaits them. When they reach out, blindly pushing through the data-fog and the last of the warp storm, I shall be waiting for their signal. I will ride the data-waves and take command of them as I command this station. And as the messenger of the One Destroyer, I shall have your vessels to take obliteration across the void.>

‘Magos, your anticode will not work, you have to listen to me.’ Qorph grabbed Theokleia’s arm as he entreated her, earning himself a glance from her mask that managed to convey bottomless scorn despite its lack of expression.

‘Unhand me! You are no better than this misguided traitor.’

‘It’s not working!’

Qorph could see the obliterator infection gathering against the code-wall, not just pushing against it but becoming attuned to it, turning anticode into versions of itself. Even as Theokleia’s countermeasures weakened, it was growing stronger.

With a boom of laughter from the sanctum the obliterator presence gnawed through the last of Theokleia’s data-shield, racing back into the systems of the combat-servitor.

The barrels of the multi-laser glowed for a split second and then the magos disappeared amidst a hail of light beams, cut to pieces by the fusillade.

Qorph reacted without thinking, diving through the archway into the sanctum, closer to the obliterator fiend. It was the only place out of sight of the servitor. He heard its crashing tread as it advanced, impelled forward by the will of the obliterator via Rakhbani.

<The clumsy hybrid legionary would not listen to me, though I offered him the cure to his ailments.>

The obliterator had finished building its new form inside the sanctum’s outer chamber and turned its bulk towards Qorph. Broken faces on the

screens focused their attention on him, eyes glittering with scrolling lines of code.

<You understand the secret of obliteration, I can read it in your data-aura. Align with me and you will possess all the knowledge you seek, and great power to see your will is done.>

For a few moments the voice lulled Qorph into a data-dream, returning to Mars as herald of the obliterator, ripping open its archives of the forbidden, raising up mighty edifices to the glory of the Machine God as the One Creator. A million servile priests laboured at the data-mines for his enrichment and his name was spoken as one of the prophets of obliteration.

‘False promises,’ spat Tetzhou, hacking off a limb that had grown into a plasma muzzle. Superheated matter exploded across the floor, melting plasteel tiles. ‘The quest for knowledge has true meaning, not the finding of it. I am my pain and my weakness. In time it shall make me stronger.

Without effort there is no earned reward, just gratification. Its words are the shadows of clouds on the plains, do not give them form.’

A fist like a battering ram smashed the legionary from his feet, hurling him into a wall of terminals. Amidst the spray of sparks, Neverborn faces glowered at him from the cracked screens while wires slithered out of split plastek casing. On the obliterator a new plasma gun formed from the ruin of the old, coalescing into being from raw material made from regenerating flesh. In seconds it would blast the Techmarine into oblivion.

It would obliterate him.

‘I’ve seen your soul, Neverborn filth,’ snapped Qorph, running forward to spear a data-spine into an exposed part of the obliterator’s flank, just above an armoured hip. As the tip pierced matter, Qorph unleashed his own data-flood. Unlike Theokleia he had studied the metaphysical elements of the Neverborn closely and, with the last pieces provided by the tendrils of obliterator code that had been trying to invade his noospheric senses, he had the antivirus. Not just a cleansing of scrap code but a flex of warp-derived, ever-shifting algorithms. They quickly took on their own life, combining and feeding on the obliterator code itself.

The obliterator bellowed in frustration as Qorph hauled himself backwards. Confused, the combat-servitor opened fire, blasting lethal red beams into the sanctum, slashing wounds across the metal and flesh of the

beast. It responded against itself without thought, plasma and shells ripping apart the servitor.

Shrieking from back down the corridor announced that the antivirus had expanded through to the other chamber and was cleansing Rakhbani, shredding everything it found, data and biological consciousness combined.

The vectors of the obliterator contagion itself supplied the mapping for the new code to follow, Qorph’s antivirus now honed to delete this specific strain. It flowed into systems throughout the inner space port, leaping from terminal to terminal, turning the obliteration against itself. In Qorph’s senses it blossomed like a magnificent, destructive black flower.

Shuddering, the obliterator stumbled back, unable to keep one form, haphazardly growing limbs and faces, guns and blades, while vents gushed blood and oil spewed into the air from breaking blisters. Plasma fumes wreathed from a plethora of iron-fanged mouths.

A massively powerful hand grabbed Qorph’s cowl and yanked him from his feet. For a moment he feared Tetzhou had been turned.

‘We have to get clear of the blast,’ the legionary snapped, lifting Qorph to his shoulder and breaking into a lopsided run.

He looked back as Tetzhou raced along the corridor. Plasma glare grew brighter and brighter. The purge and the explosion would gut the heart of the space port – not exactly restoring the systems as they had been tasked to do. Even so, Qorph felt a moment of satisfaction as the brightness became white hot and his noospheric sense burned with the screams of fracturing meta-code.

They rounded a corner and kept going, the lumens falling dark around them, environment filters and fans becoming stationary. The whole level was dying around them.

‘Why did you not accept its offer?’ The question nagged Qorph, and if he were to die in the next few seconds he wanted to know that of all things.

‘And who cursed you with such crude bionics?’

‘I did,’ grunted Tetzhou. ‘Well, through my servitor. I used it to rig them out of war plate parts when I was the only survivor of an ambush. I would have died not far from here otherwise.’

‘If you get me out of this alive, I will get them replaced for you.’

‘We’ll live, and I’ll keep them. It’s good to remember that flesh and machine are meant to be separate.’

‘Though it will displease my Order, I feel I must agr–’

A boom and sudden noospheric static swept over them, followed by silence. Tetzhou slowed to a stop, keeling to one side in his discomfort like a holed sailing ship.

Qorph felt nothing. Not even simple electrical impulses, except for Tetzhou’s war plate and his own augmetics.

Total system purge.

AFTER THE DAWN, THE DARKNESS

GUY HALEY

To the south there was lightning of gold, purple, blue and black, unnatural colours. The sky was still tainted, and the refugees kept their heads downcast, eyes firmly on the dirt, not wishing to see. It could have been night, but the days were equally dark, except when the lightning flashed.

Then the shadow was stripped away, and ruin was revealed, broken hab-spires leaning in mourning on each other, mountains of rubble from which rose the sickly odours of decay, slumped mounds in place of Imperial glories. At least in the dark, the people could pretend not to see. The lightning mocked them, highlighting the wreck of Unity, of hope, of everything. It made them look at what they had lost.

As bad as the lighting was, for the ten thousand survivors in the camp the accompanying thunder was worse, for it recalled the war. When the thunder rolled, the survivors retreated into private hells, memories of when the walls of reality broke and nightmares spilled out from their proper places. Each crackle in the cloud brought a scream from somewhere, sometimes near, sometimes far, but consistently, like an echo.

Katsuhiro did not scream. He was on the move, doggedly picking his way across the uneven ground, placing his feet carefully to avoid sprawling legs.

Others were shuffling through the dark, those with enough energy to get up and move. There was precious little shelter in the camp. It was, in truth, a containment area, not a place to live. Three high fences of razor wire butted up against a scorched wall of rockcrete, the only surviving side of some building or other that had been atomised in the conflict. If you looked through the cracks in the wall out of the camp, there was a rippled field of glass behind, perfectly round, preserving the vitreous after-effect of an energy cannon fired from orbit.

‘Hush now, hush,’ Katsuhiro said to the bundle clutched to his chest, though the child was quiet, eyes shut, fingers twitching in his dreams. He seemed peaceful. The child slept soundly through the worst of the storms.

He had been born into this world after world’s end. Violence seemed not to affect him.

‘Hush now, hush,’ Katsuhiro said again, anyway.

The wall was ahead. Katsuhiro crept through the people on the floor with a slow tide of other ghosts, seeking shelter by the stone. He would not try the handful of tents bellying in the rising wind. Those already within might let him in. People knew him. Some cared that he carried the child. But status aside, kindness aside, the truth was that space, mass and time – all the things that made the universe work as it should – had once more become absolutes, and there would be no room.

There was not enough of anything. Not water, nor food, nor shelter. The war was over, the struggle went on.

Katsuhiro was half the man he had been, in the most literal sense. Never big, he was now a wisp, skin wrapped awkwardly over bone. The coat he wore had once fitted him, more or less. Now it was as voluminous as one of the shelters, and stiff with dirt, so that sometimes he had the bizarre idea it had grown into a suit of angel’s armour, and that he had not shrunken so.

He did not like to look at the sticks his limbs had become.

Within the coat, the child was warm. In the manner of fathers since the dawn of time, Katsuhiro rested his face on the top of the child’s soft head, breathing in his gentle scent. That was still there, under the grime and the filth of the camp. He wasn’t the child’s father. He often wondered who was, but he felt he had earned the right to take comfort in his smell.

‘Hush now,’ he muttered, though the child slept on.

The other bowed figures split off, they all had their favoured spots, like Katsuhiro. He always had somewhere, someone, something, often by chance. Maybe that was why he had survived when so many others had not.

Chance. Not the Emperor. Definitely not that.

‘He protects,’ Katsuhiro said. ‘Hah! They’re the biggest fools of them all.

If that were true, where is He now? He’s dead. He protects!’ Katsuhiro scoffed.

You’re still alive, said a more reasonable voice in his mind.

He ignored it.

The storm gave a terrific bang, and the child jerked in his sleep.

‘Hush now, just the storm,’ he said. ‘It’s moving in closer, off the plains to the south.’ The plains he had first fought on, when it all began. The plains where he had seen ancient hells disgorge all their evils.

This he did not say.

He reached a fan of rubble slipped down from the wall and started to climb, exaggerating his lean forward so that if he did fall he would catch himself, and not hurt the child. Up he went, lumps of rockcrete slithering away under his feet. Everything was bone dry. The dust sucked away what little moisture his skin had held onto. His hands were cracked and sore. He was severely dehydrated. He had given most of his water to the child, along with most of his food.

He got to the top. The wind was blowing strongly, uphill from the plains of Ind, a reverse of the usual direction. Nothing was as it had been.

There was a ledge at the top of the rubble, a part of a floor jutting out from the side. It was big enough for him to sit with his legs stretched out in front, while he rested his back on the wall. His boots scraped away the dust accumulated on the floor, revealing tiles of black and white. He was always surprised to see them. They were covered over each time he came.

He was tired. The climb, though short, had depleted his meagre stores of energy. At times like this, the child was the heaviest burden in the world, and when he put his head against the rockcrete of the wall, he thought he might never be able to lift it up again. But he could not close his eyes. They remained fixed on the skies to the south.

The lightning gave a terrific display. The colours were unnatural but beautiful, and he watched safe in the knowledge that there was nothing at

play in the heavens.

‘Look, look, no monsters in the sky,’ he said to himself. ‘They are gone.’

What awful being could overcome such creatures? Katsuhiro knew. He thought of the light in the Hollow Mountain, of Keeler’s ecstasy. That horrible, pressing presence. The lightning was a reminder of that. He wanted to turn away, as he had in the Astronomican, as he had turned away from worship, when he shut his eyes against that all-consuming fire.

He made himself watch the lightning.

They called the camp 1207-Alpha 23, Montagne Wall, though there was no wall left to speak of, only a mountain range of rubble. He wasn’t entirely sure where the camp was in relation to where things used to be. The Palace’s topography had been erased blast by blast. When the haze cleared enough, he could see what he thought was the Eternity Wall space port. Or perhaps it was Lion’s Gate? They were near one of them, he was sure of that. Sometimes he thought he had himself oriented, only for something huge and undeniable to loom up out of the murk to prove him wrong. If this were Montagne, he thought, and he faced it, then the Eternity Wall space port should be to his right, and Lion’s Gate to his left. But he could not be sure. One of the others had a compass, a simple device with a magnetically charged needle, a design as old as time. The needle had spun slowly round and round, like an old man with a failing mind who, disoriented, cannot find his way out of a familiar room.

In better weather, void-ships came down, emerging through the cloud base with unexpected roars and the glare of nav-lights. Many ships. Rumour had it they were bringing aid to the beleaguered capital world. Normally, he could hear them when he could not see them. Today was not one of those days. Too dangerous. The sky belonged to the lightning alone.

The wind picked up some more. Showers of grit pattered on the rockcrete

– the rain of this new, ruined world. There would be no liquid precipitation again, he feared. He huddled deeper into the coat, sinking out of the neck and pulling the collar tight, making a tent for him and the child.

Debris rattled off the dirt-stiff cloth. He and the baby were safe inside.

The child gave a little noise that reminded Katsuhiro of a faulty engine trying to start, failing, catching. He gave a thin wail, then he began to cry.

‘Hush now, hush,’ said Katsuhiro.

Katsuhiro had had a sister once. She had been alive and well when he had left the east, but he doubted that was still the case. When he was a boy, she had sung to him, back home in the Dragon Nations. Her song rose upon his lips.

‘Rose and rain, and petal on the bough,’ Katsuhiro rasped. ‘Oh, where will my heart find true home?’

The wind tugged at his coat. The storm boomed. Someone down on the ground was screaming loudly, ‘Stop! Stop! Make it stop!’

‘Rose and rain, leaves on the trees, oh, when shall my heart be yours?’

The child quietened.

‘Hush now, hush now, it will all be all right,’ he said. He tried to sing some more. ‘Rose and rain, rose and rain…’ His voice gave out. It was raw with dust. He attempted to clear it, failed. His mouth was too dry to muster a dribble of spit. ‘It will all be all right,’ he repeated.

Even as he said it, Katsuhiro knew he was lying. Nothing was all right, and never would be again.

He cried a little, dry tears in scratched eyes.

Curled over his charge, Katsuhiro felt his head nod. The tempest rumbled, and for him too, like for so many in the camp, the thunder became once more the roaring of guns.

Katsuhiro was back on the wall. The dead were coming in an endless mass.

Clouds of insects swarmed over them, each as long as his thumb. When he faced them, he had not faltered. He had not run. He had not stopped firing.

In his dream, the lasgun hung limply from his hand.

The dead staggered to the foot of the wall, hands outstretched, as if beseeching him. They were far away, but according to the logic of nightmares he could see their faces clearly: Captain Jainan, Steena, Runnecan… so many others he had fought beside and lost. All known to him. All calling to him.

A moan rose off the crowd.

‘Help us, help us.’

He stood, slack mouthed. He could do nothing. There were no other defenders, only him, the dead, and an infinity of insects. Close by, heavy guns boomed without effect. No explosions, no destruction, only the noise.

‘He protects, He protects!’ Katsuhiro said desperately.

But there was no Keeler, no angels, no light of the Emperor, only darkness and death. Nothing and no one was coming to save him. The dead mounted the wall as if it were a set of steps, and flowed upwards, a treacly tide of despair.

‘Help us, help us,’ they moaned.

‘I can’t help you. I can’t!’ Katsuhiro shouted.

Finally, he found the strength to turn and run.

He banged into a solid wall. An angel blocked his way: Baeron, a son of the IX Legion who had commanded on Marmax. He appeared as he had the moment he died, as a broken thing, war plate shattered, livery stripped back to a battered ceramite grey. Only in the crevices did it preserve some of its bold red lacquer. A horrific wound opened his chest wide. Dying organs twitched within.

‘You did not flee,’ Baeron said. He grabbed Katsuhiro’s shoulder with a mutilated hand. Only forefinger and thumb remained, smearing Katsuhiro with his blood. More blood poured from his mouth, painting his armour red once more. ‘You will hold this section!’

A gun roared nearby. A child cried in terror.

Katsuhiro awoke. The echo of the thunderclap was still bouncing off the ruins. The boy was wailing. Thin, grey light that signified day shone through the gaps in his coat.

In the camp, reveille clarions sounded. Groggily, Katsuhiro gripped the squalling infant, and staggered down to be counted.

The morning roll call revealed gaps in the ranks. A score of people had died in the night, more than a few by their own hand. The child wailed right through the shouting of names. Katsuhiro almost missed his being called out.

‘Here!’ he shouted. ‘Here!’

The commander, a man like the rest of them who dwelled in the camp but who had the distinction of having been an officer once, gave him a stern eye and moved on to the next name on the list. Responses marched off down the lines.

‘Can’t you keep the boy quiet?’ The woman who spoke was called Elantra Katamana. He knew this because they always stood in the same place for the calling of the roll, in alphabetical order. Elantra had one arm, the right.

Her left was a stump wrapped in dirty bandages. Her hair was prematurely grey under its coating of dust. Her eyes were sometimes wild, always sad.

The camp did not provide an atmosphere conducive to small talk. Katsuhiro knew nothing else about her.

‘He’s hungry. He needs feeding.’

‘You need to calm him down,’ Elantra said out of the corner of her mouth.

‘He doesn’t care about schedules,’ said Katsuhiro. ‘He’s just a baby. They understand that.’

The child wailed on.

‘They don’t,’ she said. ‘Look at them. There’s no humanity left here.’

Presently, the roll call finished, and the commander began to speak.

Katsuhiro caught none of it. The child’s cries drowned out every word.

Katsuhiro patted the boy and jiggled him up and down, earning him a glance from one of the camp enforcers patrolling the lines of refugees. The child would not be silent.

‘Give him to me before you earn yourself a beating,’ Elantra said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘He is my responsibility.’

‘Raising a child is too big a responsibility to carry alone at the best of times. Give him to me.’

Katsuhiro put a protective hand around the boy.

She pulled a face. ‘I’m not going to eat him,’ she said. ‘I know some tricks.’

Some in the camp would have eaten him. Katsuhiro shook his head.

‘I…’ Elantra began. Her eyes reddened, and bulged. Her head went at an odd angle, as if she was trying to keep something terrible from showing.

‘I… I was a mother. Before all this. I can help. I promise I won’t hurt him.

You’re doing it wrong.’

Carefully, unable to keep the suspicion off his face, Katsuhiro handed the boy over.

‘There, there,’ she said, taking the child awkwardly into the crook of her one arm. ‘There, there.’ A change came over her face, an inner light making it the brightest thing Katsuhiro had seen since the dark first fell on Terra.

The boy quietened.

An enforcer approached. Like the others, he had been chosen from among those who had been soldiers before the invasion, and he wore the remains

of his uniform still. It was a meaningless distinction. Every single person in that camp had fought. Everyone was a soldier.

The enforcer held a smooth baton in his hand. They all had them. They were among the only new things in the camp.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Katsuhiro, holding up his hands. He did not fear a beating, his worries were only for the child.

‘Shut up,’ said the enforcer. ‘You will have missed all that.’ He waved his stick at the commander.

‘I did. I’m… I’m sorry, sir.’ He dropped his head humbly.

‘Then listen now.’

A synthesised trumpet blast blared from the voxmitters set at regular intervals around the camp. The assembly began to break up. Katsuhiro and Elantra remained where they were, blocked by the guard.

‘Everyone’s being processed. You’ll get ration cards. You’ll be assigned work duties.’

‘Good,’ said Elantra, ‘I’m tired of sitting around.’

The enforcer looked at her with sad, tired eyes. He returned his attention to Katsuhiro.

‘Take the child with you tomorrow. Make sure you get a card for him too.

You look weak. Are you feeding him off your own allocation?’

‘What else am I supposed to do?’

‘You can’t protect him if you are weak, and you can’t work. Make sure you get him his own card.’

Katsuhiro stared.

‘Don’t you understand?’ He pointed with his baton at the boy. ‘That is the only child in this camp. It is a source of wonder that he has survived. He brings a little hope here.’

The word you are looking for is miracle, Katsuhiro thought.

‘You cannot let him die, is that clear?’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

‘Good,’ said the enforcer.

Katsuhiro took the baby back.

‘Maybe I’m wrong,’ said Elantra philosophically as the enforcer walked away. ‘Maybe there is some humanity left, after all.’

Processing took place a kilometre away at what had been a crossroads, but now resembled the meandering meeting of four mountain paths. Katsuhiro set out early, Elantra, unasked, at his side. There was nothing else to do. The walk was over quickly, even at their starved pace, and they came to a halt at the appointed place. More people were arriving from other camps, and the crowd grew into a great throng.

Functionaries gathered behind a cordon of chain looped over whatever would support it. As protection, it was a fiction. The refugees numbered in the thousands. They were hungry, and traumatised, yet some deference to authority remained. They made no move on the field office being set up in front of them, but waited in eerie, hopeful silence.

Battered Cargo-8s carried containers converted into mobile offices.

Exhausted scribes laboriously arranged three long desks on a patch of ground bulldozed more or less flat. They brought out cogitator terminals with dangling wires, and placed piles of plastek flimsies beside them. A few cyber constructs buzzed back and forth in the air. Some of the scribes even had functioning data-slates. They looked tired, but unharmed, and they were better fed than the crowd.

‘Where’d they unearth this lot from?’ Elantra said in amazement. ‘They look untouched.’

Katsuhiro shrugged. He was just as surprised, but for all matters excepting the child he felt only an unshakeable lethargy.

The near-total silence of the refugees was unnerving. The scribes glanced suspiciously at the ragged crowd as they set up, then kept looking off past them, up the street. Their leader had more iron in him, and chivvied his underlings along to little effect. It was plain they were waiting for something.

That something came soon enough. A steady thump of armoured feet grinding rubble to dust that Katsuhiro had not heard in weeks.

They all knew that sound. The crowd became agitated.

Space Marines.

There were four of them, jogging up the debris-choked street towards the processing office. They wore the deep blue of Lord Guilliman’s Legion, and their armour was dusty, but unmarked.

The crowd parted to let them through. When the warriors passed, the people shrank back in fear.

Their leader approached the chief scribe. The scribe wanted to put on a show of annoyance, it seemed, but it was tissue-thin. The warrior replied, his vox-grille harshening his voice.

‘We were delayed, you have my apologies.’

Katsuhiro had a flash of other voices like that, issuing from the armour of monsters. The roar of boltguns. A dying angel.

‘You will hold this section.’

He shook the image away.

‘What is the scribe saying?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘What is the scribe saying? I can’t hear him. You can hear better than me,’

said Katsuhiro. He tapped the side of his head. ‘A blast ruptured my eardrums at Marmax South. They’ve not been the same since.’

‘Oh,’ Elantra said. Unconsciously, she touched the stump of her left arm.

‘He’s complaining about the angels arriving late and that there should have been more.’

The Space Marine said something Katsuhiro did not catch. Now the scribe erupted in anger.

‘Wah, wah, wah-wah-wah,’ was all his anger sounded like to Katsuhiro.

He looked to Elantra.

‘He’s complaining that they’re only getting one guard,’ she explained.

A single word from the sergeant silenced the official, and the chief scribe shrank in on himself.

Katsuhiro looked behind him. The crowd resembled a stand of drowned trees – grey sticks rooted in inimical ground. They couldn’t fight off a dead canid.

‘One is enough,’ he said.

The sole Space Marine guard was directed to stand behind the scribes. The rest departed with their sergeant, jogging off at machine-boosted speed into the ruins of the city. It was bizarre to see technology that worked. He’d never expected to see such things again. Katsuhiro felt dazed by it, like walking into the past.

With their guardian watching over them, the scribes seemed to find more purpose. They arranged the crowd into lines. Six sat down in pairs at the desks, one behind a pile of flimsies, one behind a cogitator. Another scribe unclipped the chain and ushered the first of the survivors forward. Three

lines, three desks, thousands of the dispossessed. Soon the queues stretched back out of sight.

Katsuhiro was hundredth or so in line. Elantra somehow got further ahead.

Their conversation cut off.

The day was sultry. Katsuhiro figured that so much energy had been discharged into the atmosphere in the war that it had heated the world. He felt faint from it and the lack of food. The child jiggled in his harness on Katsuhiro’s chest. Only the pain as the straps dragged at his shoulders kept him from passing out.

Names were called. The line shuffled forward one painful metre at a time.

Katsuhiro’s entire world had narrowed to the calling of names, the making of lists. At least no one was shooting at him. He snorted with laughter at the thought. The man in the next line scowled.

Time stretched, drooped, boneless as melted plastek. The day grew hotter.

Katsuhiro raised his canteen to his lips, but it was empty. He had given all his water to the child.

‘Next! You there. Come forward.’

Somehow, he was at the head of the queue. The desk and the scribes were not three paces ahead.

‘That must be you, void head,’ said a voice behind. A hard hand pushed him forward. ‘Get on with it.’

Katsuhiro staggered with the blow towards the desk. ‘I don’t hear so well,’

he croaked.

‘I’m sorry?’ The clerk looked at him expectantly, electrostatic pen ready over a flimsy.

Katsuhiro knew what to do in these circumstances. He stood to attention.

‘Katsuhiro, conscript of the Kushtun Naganda, of the Old Hundred.’

The man behind the cogitator clattered some keys. The ritual begun, the first scribe played his part, asking questions and ticking boxes on the flimsy, the second staring at his device. On the screen of the cogitator Katsuhiro saw a grainy pict of himself, taken before the siege began. It didn’t look anything like him now, but that didn’t bother him. He was astounded. They had records, still? How?

‘No surname, family name, patronymic, demonym or other distinguishing marker?’

‘It’s just Katsuhiro. My clan only use the one name.’

The designation was on the screen. He wrote it down anyway.

‘Camp?’

This too was on the screen.

‘One-two-zero-seven-Alpha Twenty-three, Montagne Wall.’

‘Origin?’

‘Hokkaidan mega-hive, Dragon Nations.’

Another tick.

‘What was your profession before the war?’

‘Agricultural enumerator.’

‘Specialisation?’

‘My clan grew algae,’ Katsuhiro said. He had a sudden vision of the subterranean halls, and the vast glass tanks a hundred metres tall stretching off to a distant vanishing point, each filled with an ocean, each ocean full of life. He was there again, in the cool, underwater.

He supposed it was gone.

This was duly scribbled down. The second scribe seated behind the data-terminal took the sheet and began hammering his machine. Neither of them made any enquiry about the child, though the boy was clearly visible.

The scribe took out a thick sheet of card, slightly bigger than Katsuhiro’s palm, placed it on the table, stamped it twice with a red stamp. The card was such poor quality that the ink soaked into it.

‘Your ration card,’ the scribe said. ‘Do not lose it. Food and water can be claimed from the labourer’s kitchens at your work site.’ He handed it over.

‘Work site?’

‘We’ve no need for agricultural specialists right now. I am going to assign you to clearance duty.’

Another card, this one yellow, printed letters blurred by ink bleed.

Katsuhiro picked it up. He could make no sense of the data on there. All he saw was meaningless sequences of numbers and letters.

‘I can’t work.’

‘You must. Everyone must work.’

‘I want to, but I have other responsibilities.’ Katsuhiro opened his coat a little, to make sure the scribe had seen what he carried. ‘More important responsibilities.’

The child, bright-eyed, gurgled.

The scribe looked a little shifty. ‘That’s, ah, not my problem.’ He said so guiltily. Katsuhiro seized on that.

‘Aren’t you going to fill in a form for him?’

‘No need, citizen.’

‘I can’t work and look after him.’

‘Then leave him with someone who is too injured to work. There’s plenty of them,’ said the scribe.

‘It’s not safe.’

‘Nowhere is.’

‘Fine.’ Katsuhiro leant forward, far onto the desk. The child swiped at the flimsies with a pudgy fist, and missed. ‘Say I do find someone to look after him. I’m not going to leave until you give me a ration card for him. You can do that for me, at least.’

‘Get back,’ said the scribe.

‘Ration card,’ said Katsuhiro, planting his knuckles on the desk and leaning in closer.

The scribe looked over at the Space Marine standing guard. The data operator licked his lips. He looked scared. Katsuhiro realised then just how fragile the situation was. The scribe did too. He raised a hand.

‘Call for the angel if you want,’ said Katsuhiro quietly. ‘A lot of these people probably don’t care, but I’ll bet more of them care than don’t.

Imagine how it will look, you putting a babe in arms in danger after all we’ve been through. He’s the only child I have seen in this blasted wreck of a city. If you can’t help him, what’s the bloody point?’

The scribe did not call out. His hand dropped.

‘This is irregular.’ His protest was, however, feeble.

‘He needs feeding. He is a human being – therefore, he is entitled to aid.

How is it irregular?’

The scribe looked at the boy.

‘It’s irregular because there is no provision in the regulations for children.’

‘Why?’ said Katsuhiro.

The scribe lowered his voice, ashamed. ‘Because we did not expect any to have survived.’

‘This one’s alive,’ said Katsuhiro. ‘Help me keep him that way.’

The skin around the scribe’s eyes creased in thought. ‘All right. Just because there is no provision, I don’t see how he would not, as you say,

qualify. An oversight. That’s all.’ The man spoke with brittle authority, more to convince himself.

‘But, Klavius–’ his colleague began.

The scribe, Klavius, waved the other quiet, got up slowly on painful limbs, and went away. He was gone for several minutes. The line behind Katsuhiro got longer. Some of the people began to complain.

‘What’s all this about two cards?’ said the man behind, who’d crept close.

‘You getting two cards? Why?’

‘It’s for the child,’ Katsuhiro said, not turning. The hand that had pushed him grabbed his shoulder and spun him round. The owner was as rough as his voice suggested, tall, with cunning eyes that held no glint of pity.

‘What do you mean?’

‘For this child,’ said Katsuhiro. He rested his hand on the boy’s head. The man’s expression only became more wicked. Katsuhiro half turned, sheltering the boy. The man still had his muscles; he was better fed than anyone else in the queue, and that could only mean he’d taken more than his share. He looked like he’d have no moral qualms stealing from babes.

‘Get off me,’ Katsuhiro said, and shrugged the hand from his arm.

The burly man smirked. ‘Why don’t we split it, you and I? Two cards?

You’re going to need protection. I can give you that.’

‘It’s for the child,’ Katsuhiro reacted, harshly this time.

‘Him? He’s probably better off dead.’

A hot flush of anger took Katsuhiro.

‘Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.’ His fists clenched.

The man drew himself up, but something in Katsuhiro’s expression made him back down.

‘Fine,’ said the man. ‘You better watch yourself. No one round here likes freeloaders.’

‘I’m no freeloader,’ said Katsuhiro, and pointedly turned his back. ‘There are two of us. Two cards. One each.’

Back down the line people were stirring. ‘He’s got a baby!’ someone said.

The rest of what was spoken was indistinct. Katsuhiro ignored it.

The scribe came back. He sat down more quickly than he had got up, as if he hurried to give himself an air of legitimacy, or to get past an act that might get him into trouble.

He laid a second flimsy down.

‘What’s your son’s name?’

‘He doesn’t have one, and he’s not my son.’

‘When was he born?’

‘I don’t know.’

Klavius quickly scribbled something on the new flimsy in the box for the name. Katsuhiro did not see it.

‘He is your son now.’ The scribe put a sheet of rough card on the table, and stamped it twice. Once more, red ink bled into the rough pulp. He held it out.

‘Thank you,’ Katsuhiro said. He grasped the card, but the scribe did not release it.

Klavius’ face paled. His gaze flicked sideways to the Space Marine again.

‘He protects,’ the scribe whispered. ‘Your child is proof of that.’

Katsuhiro held Klavius’ eye for several seconds. ‘Does He?’ said Katsuhiro. ‘I thought so too, once. I’m not so sure now.’

Klavius let go of the card. ‘Next!’ he bawled.

Katsuhiro turned away. The burly man jounced his shoulder, making the child jump.

‘Watch your back, freeloader,’ the man hissed.

Katsuhiro hunched down and tucked the second card into his coat, hiding it away from jealous eyes.

‘They say I can’t do heavy work,’ Elantra said, cradling her stump. ‘So I convinced them my work should be looking after him.’

They’d approached each other with the same idea, that Elantra look after the boy while he worked. Even so, Katsuhiro did not want to give him up.

‘He’s being watched. I’m being watched.’ She nodded her head back at one of the enforcers. ‘They all know how important he is. He’ll be fine. He has friends here.’

He frowned.

‘You’ve changed your song,’ he said, but undid the knots in the ragged straps holding the boy to his chest anyway.

It felt like it would have been easier to hand over his own bloody heart than the boy, but then Elantra took him, and cooed over him, and Katsuhiro felt a little better.

‘What’s his name?’ she asked.

‘He doesn’t have one,’ said Katsuhiro defensively, annoyed about the scribe and his uninvited filling in of boxes. It felt strange not to have the child’s constant weight pulling at him, dragging him forward.

‘He has a tooth,’ said Elantra. ‘Yes he does!’ she said to the boy. ‘Yes he does!’

The child giggled.

‘He does have a tooth,’ Katsuhiro agreed.

‘If he has a tooth, then he needs a name.’

‘When I’m ready,’ said Katsuhiro. Work transports were pulling up at the gates to the camp, blaring their horns. Even he could hear that.

‘I think he’s ready,’ she said. ‘Think of him. Never mind how you feel.’

There was shouting, the clanging of metal loading gates.

‘I’m not ready,’ he said again. ‘It has to be the right name.’ He took out the child’s ration card from his coat and held it out. ‘Take this.’

Elantra held the child in the crook of her arm and took it with her single hand. She looked at Katsuhiro as if he had given her the most amazing treasure.

‘Don’t let anyone know you’ve got it, all right?’ he said. Clarions and horns sounded again, more urgent. Katsuhiro looked over his shoulder, to where people were piling into the trucks. ‘I have to go. Look after him until I return.’

He hurried away, unable to look back.

The workers were crammed into flatbeds more suited to carrying cargo.

Bars for covers arched over the bed, but they were bare of canvas, leaving the passengers exposed to the dust, the heat, the desolation. Katsuhiro felt every lump the truck crossed through the metal seats bolted to the deck, bashing himself hard against some man he didn’t know. The man didn’t react, staring ahead and muttering frightened nonsense the whole time.

The people were a mix from several camps. It had called at a couple of others before Katsuhiro’s, and called at four more afterwards. At the last stop, Katsuhiro noted the burly man from the processing centre. He saw Katsuhiro when he clambered aboard, and glared at him as he took his seat.

There were around a hundred people on the truck, and there were twenty trucks in the convoy, which then became hundreds as they filtered into other convoys. Dust hung heavy over them. Katsuhiro wrapped a tattered kerchief

about his mouth to keep it out – his respirator was long gone. Others had theirs though, and donned them. Those that opted for no protection were soon coughing.

The truck rumbled on man-high wheels through the wreck of humanity’s dreams for hours. Tall buildings had been cast down, their corpses filling the highways. New roads had been pounded into the rubble that the trucks were obliged to ascend like passes. Sometimes, when the truck reached a high vantage, Katsuhiro could see clusters of standing structures in the distance, some with glass still winking in the dim day. But where his truck drove, all was ruination. The heavy miasma of decaying flesh choked the streets. Only the walls had any form left, though much of them were eroded, and in places there were breaches in the fortifications, wide lacunae that left tower stumps as lonely mesas.

Definitely heading towards the Lion’s Gate space port, Katsuhiro thought.

Heading north.

Nobody spoke, except one man. There is always a talkative man in every group. Often, everyone wishes that man would be quiet.

The talkative man was oblivious to the signals conveying this sentiment.

He carried on talking, talking, even though he was obliged to shout over the grinding of the truck’s engines.

‘They say anything about that?’ The talkative man looked around the open truck bed. ‘Anyone meet anyone else who got a different job? Everyone I’ve spoken to was assigned to clearance duty! Why do they ask, that’s all!’

He laughed and shook his head – not entirely sanely, Katsuhiro thought. ‘So why do they ask, eh?’

‘Shut up,’ said the burly man.

‘I’m just saying.’

‘Don’t. No one wants to hear your blather.’

On that, Katsuhiro and the burly man could agree.

‘My name’s Irun,’ the talkative man said brightly, as if the burly man had said something altogether more pleasant.

The burly man hauled himself up from his seat. Using the bare cross supports he half walked, half swung his way across the bouncing flatbed.

He put his face aggressively close to the talkative man’s.

‘My name’s kick your face in if you don’t shut up!’

‘Funny name,’ said the talkative man, but he was cowed, and his quip came out weakly.

The burly man snorted, and ape-walked back to his seat.

After that, Irun ceased to speak.

Three hours passed. Katsuhiro grew worried. If they were driving so far, he might be expected to stay in a different camp, and so how would he get back to the child? He began to fidget and turn around in his seat. They were driving now along the foot of the Ultimate Wall, towards the Lion’s Gate itself.

There was a statue lying on the ground, a huge thing, forty metres tall, and that only a fragment. It was of a man, broken off at the waist, wearing archaic robes and carrying something Katsuhiro had always taken to be a book of laws. His other arm stuck out, jammed into the ground, but it had had an open-palmed hand on the end, a gesture to stop.

It had not stopped the enemy.

Katsuhiro knew all this because the statue was familiar. He had walked past it dozens of times upon the wall. That could only mean…

‘Marmax,’ he said.

Shadow swallowed the truck as it passed under the lawgiver. His blank stone eyes stared back with benevolent authority, for the statue did not know it had been toppled. His outstretched hand had singularly failed to stop anything; still he smiled on, as if nothing had changed at all.

With a snort of tired engines the truck heaved itself out from under the statue, and Katsuhiro’s eyes were drawn upwards.

The Marmax bastion soared skywards, hundreds of metres tall, yet humbled. Most of its features were sheared away, exposing the hyperdense core and adamantine rebar. The firing galleries, turrets, and gun platforms were gone. Scree slopes of architectural flinders skirted the base. As a vision of ruined strength, it reminded Katsuhiro horribly of Baeron.

It took a long time to drive past the tower. He kept staring at it until his neck hurt. When the slopes of rubble pulled in tight to the corner as the fortifications returned to the main wall, he twisted in his seat.

All that blood. All that death.

He thought of the child, now hours behind. The great massif of the Lion’s Gate reared ahead, battered, but unbowed.

He dropped his hands between his knees, and stared at the floor.

‘Where are we going?’ he said to himself.

The man to his left, who had not stopped muttering all the journey, turned his haunted face upon Katsuhiro.

‘The Inner Palace,’ he said. ‘They’re taking us beyond the Ultimate Wall.’

‘I have to go back,’ Katsuhiro said.

Another desk, this one of bare, dusty wooden boards. Another functionary, just as tired as the last, this one military rather than civilian. All the world had become one stage set of rubble and grit. All the players upon it were the same character.

‘You can’t go back. This is your work detail. Priority clearance is to be conducted here, within the Inner Palace, as a matter of priority.’ He repeated the sentiment mechanically.

‘You don’t understand. I have a child. He’s been left behind.’

‘Every man, woman and child of the Imperium is expected to make sacrifices to consolidate our great victory over the traitors.’

This same slogan blasted periodically out of voxmitters mounted on tall poles. Their cables hung loosely, just above ground level, snaring feet.

‘How many children have you seen?’

‘There are some,’ the man said. ‘They are our future.’

‘Then let me get back.’

‘He is your son?’

‘Yes. No. Sort of. You don’t understand. An angel gave him to me,’ said Katsuhiro. ‘He’s my responsibility.’

‘An angel?’ An expression passed over the officer’s face; it said that he realised Katsuhiro was mad. ‘Others will take on your responsibility, you have fresh ones.’ There was sympathy in his voice. ‘Go line up, we must serve the Emperor as we can.’

Katsuhiro opened his mouth, but he had nothing more to say.

He went across the yard.

He was in a new camp of different appearance but identical spirit. It was contained in a grand courtyard, the buildings around which had the appearance of grand corpses, pockmarked with bolt craters, and every window an eye put out. He reckoned they were in the far precincts of the senate. When he exited the courtyard he was upon a huge square, and from

it he could see the broken dome of the Senatorum Imperialis like a great cracked egg, dirty sky clearly visible through it.

It was dawn, though the atmosphere was still unbearably fuggy; there was no let up from the stifling heat of triumph. It had taken them days to arrive.

Katsuhiro had barely slept with worry. Men with shock goads herded the survivors together into squares thousands strong. The animal reek coming off them made Katsuhiro dizzy. Many were sick, or injured, or both.

More roll calls, more men ticking sheets, more directions. Vox-hailers barked orders and incomprehensible motivational speeches. Katsuhiro was moved from one place to another, until he found himself in a line of workers. There were even more dirty desks with more harried functionaries.

There were piles of boots and gloves on the table, all bearing the look of recent mass production; they were conspicuously clean.

‘Gloves, boots,’ a woman said – she almost sang it, like a lament. Another uniformed woman shoved the items at him. There was no attempt to check his size.

‘Have you ever used a lascutter?’ the next functionary asked him.

‘Not really,’ said Katsuhiro. He could not focus. All he could think of was the child.

‘You look relatively strong. Take a prybar.’

He was pushed along.

The gloves were too big. The boots were about right, which surprised him no end. They were badly made, mono-plastek extrusions. They probably had about a fortnight’s wear in them. Nevertheless, they were better than the boots he was wearing, and he swapped them gladly.

A pile of picks, shovels and pries waited in a tangled mess. He took a pry, as instructed. Nearby there was a rack of lascutters. When he thought of lascutters, he thought of the small scalpels that the medicae used, or the short-bladed industrial sort. These were enormous things. Katsuhiro was glad to be given a pry.

A man in adept’s robes blew a whistle.

‘Detail Four-zero-zero-three, form up. On me!’

A reluctant column formed.

Another peep on the whistle. ‘March!’

Apparently, they were going to walk wherever they were going. So Katsuhiro walked.

They were sent to clear the Via Principa heading towards the innermost Palace. It was vast, half a kilometre wide. The centre was almost clear, but rubble banked up to a depth of a hundred metres at the sides. Thousands upon thousands of people worked at clearing it, by hand. There did not seem to be any machines. Katsuhiro saw one giant dozer under machine spirit guidance trundle by, but it did not stop, and headed away to some more important rendezvous.

They worked without rest. The sound of picks on masonry blended into a continuous clattering. The lascutters were brought in to slice through plasteel. Circular saws chopped through blocks too large to move. Every so often a klaxon would wail and a whole section of workers would retreat from the rubble face. Explosions followed, bringing down sudden slips.

Soon Katsuhiro’s eyes were red with grit. His throat was raw. A tankbearer came by every hour, doling out ladles of water, but it was never enough, and it tasted of metal and death.

A dead giant rested on a bed made of a smashed-in monument: a Titan, its mechanical bones bigger than the world. To the north, the Bhab watched them, somehow whole, a rotten tooth in a ruined gum. Beyond that was the Eternity Gate, beyond that the Emperor. His presence dominated that part of the city, and it did not feel protective at all. Katsuhiro felt judged by Him.

He avoided looking in that direction.

The work was monotonous. Katsuhiro fell into a rhythm, prying huge blocks of stone out of the compacted rubble that were lifted up by others and dumped into the wheelbarrows of others still. Picks clattered. Looser material was shovelled. Miraculously, it seemed to work. The line of debris was nibbled back, centimetre by centimetre, uncovering the ground floors of buildings, toppled statues, broken lamps and vehicles – all the wreck of empire.

Corpses, oozing and black, were taken away by luckless teams. Katsuhiro pitied them. No consideration had been made to the corpse-bearers for the difficulty of their work, and they were filthy from it.

Katsuhiro slammed his pry into the wall, then hauled back upon it. Loose debris slithered down to be collected by waiting shovels, blocks by sweating men. He went to the next block, rammed in the pry, levered it back. Rubble fell, blocks slipped out. Step back. Step forward, ram, haul, step backward. Step, ram…

The iron point clanged on something. He saw a flash of colour. He reached down, cleared some little rocks away.

Lacquered ceramite.

He stepped back. Rubble fell after him. A Space Marine was entombed in the strata of war. Only his upper shoulders and helm were visible, as if he were tucked up in a stone bed. His armour was the green of deep alien seas.

The armour was whole, but the eye-lenses smashed. The unmistakable stench of death rose from them.

Work came to a halt around Katsuhiro. Upon the Space Marine’s pauldron was the hated Eye of Horus. Katsuhiro stared at it. A shoveler came forward and spat on the emblem. Someone else ran off shouting.

Katsuhiro looked at the Space Marine. He did not seem so terrifying dead.

He looked human, even. Katsuhiro wondered who he was, and why he had turned on the Emperor.

The runner came back with an overseer.

‘Right. Astartes,’ said the overseer, as if he had been expecting this event.

‘Clear this section. You, you and you, ten metres right. You,’ – he pointed at Katsuhiro – ‘you and you, ten metres left. Keep on working.’

A specialist team arrived to dig out the body. They had a machine equipped with industrial lifting claws. Katsuhiro watched them drag the giant out of the mess and up, so that he was dangling like a gargantuan marionette, until the overseer shouted at him to get back to work.

When night fell, they were taken back to the camp. The workers were separated by gender and directed into small cities of tents. A field kitchen served up watery stew. His ration card was stamped. They ate, then they were sent to their rest, twenty men to a tent.

The burly man was assigned to his group. Luckily, they were all too exhausted to talk or do anything else, like knife each other for ration cards, Katsuhiro thought.

He protects. Yeah, right.

They fell into their cots, and soon snores sawed and whimpers were called up by nightmares. In the distance, Katsuhiro heard the roar of void-ships descending. His cohort was resting, but work continued on elsewhere, giving the night a voice of constant hand-tool clatter and the grunting of

machines. Light from glaring lumens seeped through the thin plastek tent.

Katsuhiro was exhausted, but he could not sleep.

I have to get out of here, he thought. I have to get back to him. He’s my responsibility. If I stay here in this camp even one more night, the work will crush me. I will become a human automaton, and I will forget my responsibility. I have to leave now.

He was out of his bed before he had finished the thought. He stood silently, a shadow. Nobody moved. He decided to say he was visiting the ablutorial if anyone asked, but nobody did.

First, he went to the kitchen. There were guards on it, of course, but he had become wily and slipped past them, filling up his canteen quickly from the bowser behind the tents. The food was locked away in large steel cabinets, but he found a mesh box of root vegetables someone had left out. They were shrivelled almost to the point of inedibility, but they would have to do.

He stuffed as many into his pockets as he could, then he stole away.

He slipped through the tent city, heading for the perimeter. There were floodlights over the gates, but the chain-link fences were mostly unlit. He ran along it quietly, checking the joins in the fence panels for loose connections. Sure enough, he found a hole.

He was about to step through when the burly man emerged from behind a pallet of boxes to Katsuhiro’s front.

‘Quite the night you’ve had,’ he said.

The talkative man came out from a tent behind him. Two more men stepped into view to his side. All of them were carrying pick handles.

‘I wonder what reward I’ll get for turning in a thief like you?’ said the burly man. ‘Two ration cards, and now stealing food.’ He tutted. ‘You should have taken me up on my offer before. We’ll turn you over, once you’ve given me that other card.’

‘I don’t have it. It’s with the boy.’

‘Liar,’ said the burly man. ‘All that play-acting. I bet you murdered that kid. Sickening.’

Katsuhiro lunged for the gap, but it was narrow and the wire ends snagged his clothes, trapping him.

He cried out when the first blow hit. The pain was immense. A strike to his elbow filled his head with vicious stars. He was dragged roughly back from the hole. Another blow to the back of his knee made him drop to the floor,

and he curled into a ball as more rained down. Some detached part of him thought how ironic this was, to survive a war of gods only to be beaten to death by starving mortals.

Death did not come. Whistles blew. Stab-light beams punched the dark away. There was shouting. The crack of a las-blast fired overhead.

‘Drop your weapons!’

‘We caught him, we caught a thief!’ The burly man was so excited he sounded almost childlike, like a boy exulting in a petty act of cruelty in the scholam yard.

Lights shone down on Katsuhiro’s face. Hands grabbed his arms and dragged them off his head. He could see nothing beyond the glare.

‘You’ve beat him half to death,’ said a voice behind the light. ‘You’ll suffer for this.’

‘But we caught a thief–’

‘The giving of discipline is to be left to the appropriate authorities,’ the voice said. ‘We’ll let the commander deal with this.’

Katsuhiro was dragged up off his feet and taken away with the rest of them.

He was hooded, his hands bound behind his back, and then pushed into a truck. He was dizzy with pain, and though he did not pass out, the world retreated from him a little. When they stopped, he was dragged out of the truck and frogmarched into an undamaged building, the first he’d been in for weeks. He could smell the damp of poorly proofed plascrete, taste the effusions of bio-lumens. His poor hearing did little to fill in the rest of the picture, but after he’d been thrust into a chair he heard the whining growl of power armour, and he nearly soiled himself with fear.

The bonds were snapped. They were pointless. What chance had a mortal against an angel? He’d been taught that lesson over and over again.

The growl of active armour came close. He could smell the strange, semi-human odour of the Astartes under the scents of oil, lapping powder and hot machinery. A gentle tug pulled his hood free.

‘Katsuhiro,’ said a warrior he at once recognised. He had spent half a day with this man what seemed like a lifetime ago, but angels are by their nature memorable, and this one was unforgettable.

He wore the colours of the White Scars, and his hair was dressed in a topknot. He was heavily scarred and much of his body had been replaced with mechanical parts, including his left eye. He had a tanned face of a slightly golden hue, epicanthic folds around his remaining eye that recalled Katsuhiro’s own, as if their nations shared kinship – and maybe they did, thousands of years in the past. For the angel was of Chogoris, not Terra. He lowered himself into a squat so as not to tower over the seated Katsuhiro.

Even then, he was taller.

‘Shiban,’ Katsuhiro said incredulously. ‘Shiban Khan.’

‘That is who I am, yes. You are Katsuhiro,’ he said, as if gently reminding an amnesiac of his identity.

‘You remember me.’

‘I am of the Legions. I remember everything,’ Shiban said.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Katsuhiro. ‘My lord,’ he remembered to add. The Space Marine did not seem to mind.

‘The siege is over. We are needed everywhere. I and some of my kin have been placed in command of this area, for a little while at least.’

The White Scar was quiet, almost pensive.

‘I see.’

‘I ask the same of you. What are you doing here?’

‘Digging,’ said Katsuhiro with a shrug.

‘Ah,’ said the khan. He dropped his eyes to the metal table between them.

Five sorry-looking turnips were lined up. Katsuhiro shrugged again.

‘I gave you a duty. What became of it?’

‘Believe me, my lord, I have tried my utmost to fulfil my promise to you.’

‘Then where is he?’

‘The child was with me until a few days ago, at camp One-two-zero-seven-Alpha Twenty-three, Montagne Wall. We were separated.’ Katsuhiro pointed at the pathetic vegetables. ‘I was trying to get back to him. That’s what those were for.’

‘You would have died. It is hundreds of kilometres. All is waste between here and there.’

‘Maybe, but I made an oath to you.’

The khan looked at him appraisingly. ‘That is foolish, but it is also good and noble.’

‘I keep to what matters. The child matters,’ said Katsuhiro. ‘Can you help me?’

‘I will help as much as I can,’ said Shiban Khan. ‘It would honour me.

But–’

Katsuhiro gave a laugh that, on reflection, sounded just a little bit crazy. ‘I don’t want any more honour!’ he interrupted. ‘I am choking on honour, and there is no water anywhere to wash it out of my throat. I just want some help. Do you understand? I want to fetch the boy, and raise him. I want him to have some kind of future, even if I don’t, and…’ The catch in his voice surprised him. He didn’t want to start sobbing in front of this demigod, and he knew he would not be able to stop if he started. ‘I want to go home.’

‘Home?’

‘The Dragon Nations.’ His voice hitched. The request was as much of a surprise to him as it was to Shiban. He had not thought about home in so long, not properly. ‘I want to go home and see what is left of my clan, if anything, and if I can find anyone left at all of my people, I want to raise the child among them. Home.’

‘Katsuhiro,’ said Shiban Khan gravely. ‘All Terra is wounded.’ A troubled look settled onto his features. ‘I saw things outside the lines, before I met you. This world is not the same as it was. Your people are likely dead.

Everything has to be remade.’

‘Then what does it matter if I am here or there? At least the memories there include some good. Here there is only pain, and horror. I’ve had enough of it.’

‘You have been given a role. There are procedures to be followed, and orders to be obeyed. The fight is over, but the struggle is only beginning.’

‘You gave me a role,’ said Katsuhiro, getting to his feet. ‘A more important role than shifting rocks. What about that? Surely your command to me counts for something.’

‘It was not an order, it was a request.’

‘I’ve nearly died trying to fulfil it!’ Katsuhiro said. ‘Please, help me. Help the boy, once more, just once more. How long do you think the child will survive this hellhole?’

Shiban Khan smoothed down his long moustache and opened his mouth in thought, then he stood – a swift, unexpected movement that took Katsuhiro

unawares. For a moment, he’d forgotten how dangerous the transhumans were.

‘It could perhaps be arranged. Come with me.’

Elantra crouched over the boy. Feeding him was hard. There was no milk.

Katsuhiro had mixed up food powders, when he had had them, with the brackish water rations. When that hadn’t been possible, all he could do was chew the child’s food into a slurry for him. Katsuhiro had not thought that ideal, but it was often the only way. Elantra was doing that just then, softening pellets of hard tack and pushing it into his mouth in such a tender manner, Katsuhiro felt something other than sadness. She was totally focused on the child and did not see him approach, so he watched for a few minutes, how the child’s arms and legs jerked with pleasure as she tickled him and fed him. He could have watched for hours, he thought, but one does not keep a Space Marine waiting.

‘Hello,’ he said.

Her expression betrayed a complex set of emotions. Part of her, he thought, hadn’t wanted him to come back. He understood that. She had purpose again, with the boy.

‘I didn’t think you were going to return,’ she said.

‘I almost didn’t,’ he said. He crouched down next to them. The child rolled his head around to see his visitor, and shrieked with delight when he saw who it was.

‘That’s the biggest smile anyone has smiled in the Palace since forever,’

she cooed at the boy, but she was sad, Katsuhiro could tell.

‘We’re leaving. The child and I,’ he said. ‘I’ve managed to get passage home to the east.’

‘How?’ she said. She rested her hand on the child’s stomach, a protective gesture, the same as Katsuhiro had used himself so many times.

‘I don’t know. Coincidences. Luck.’ He glanced over his shoulder towards the Inner Palace, and its sombre airs. Maybe… He could not countenance that. ‘You have to give him back. I’m taking him home.’

She hesitated, then nodded. She let her hand linger, then removed it.

Katsuhiro bent low and scooped up his charge. He drew in his soft, infant’s scent, and kissed his head.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the boy. ‘I’m sorry I had to go.’

He had a thought.

‘You can come with me, Elantra. It’ll be safe, getting there at least. I have an angel as an escort.’

Her eyes widened.

‘A Space Marine?’

‘It’s a long story,’ he said. ‘He’s the one who gave me the child. Come on, come with me. Help me raise him. I don’t mean as a wife or anything like that, it’s an honest offer. No conditions attached. I see how good you are with him.’

Her gaze drifted down to the child with tenderness, then back up to Katsuhiro’s face.

‘Why me?’

‘Why not?’ said Katsuhiro. ‘Do you have anywhere better to be?’

‘No.’

‘Then come.’

She looked like she might cry. ‘So He does protect after all,’ she said. ‘I heard that, on the line.’

Katsuhiro had once been sure He did. Images of Keeler, the light, the faithful. Simple words of faith throwing back the monsters of the enemy, the great burning wash of grace and terror that had erupted in the Hollow Mountain. There was something there, or someone. Then, all this… The child surviving was a miracle, the chain of events that had led him here almost beyond the scope of coincidence to provide. Surely, some of that had to mean something.

‘Perhaps He does,’ he said, and almost meant it, but when he looked again towards the north, he felt a shiver run down his spine.

Shiban Khan sat in the pilot’s seat of a sleek combat skimmer hovering a few metres in the air. A Javelin, Katsuhiro thought it was called. Its engines growled, making it seem angry and alive. The space beneath danced with dust caught in complex anti-gravitic currents.

Shiban’s helmed head looked down at them.

‘You said only two. You and the child.’

‘Well, now there are three,’ Katsuhiro shouted over the noise of the machine. ‘We’ll fit. I’m sure if that machine of yours can carry two fully

armoured members of the Legiones Astartes, it can accommodate two half-starved mortals and a baby.’

The khan grunted in amusement. ‘There is a lot of spirit in that small frame, Katsuhiro. You’ve no fear.’

‘I’ve had enough of fear,’ said Katsuhiro. ‘Now, are you going to bring that thing down so we can get in, or are you going to sit up there all day?’

The khan shook his head.

‘You are a most peculiar man, Katsuhiro.’ He depressed a button and the vehicle sank down to the ground.

‘I’m surprised you came yourself,’ said Katsuhiro, as the Javelin came level with him.

‘I said it was a matter of honour,’ said Shiban, ‘and you are not the only one who wishes to get out of the Palace.’

By now a crowd was gathering. The people kept their distance, and Katsuhiro ignored them. He clambered into the immense seat well of the gunner’s station. There was easily enough room for him and Elantra. He took the child off her, and helped her up with his free hand. They sat side by side, legs touching with a companionable warmth. The child reached out a pudgy fist to the angel, and smiled.

‘I have your papers. I do not have the woman’s,’ Shiban said.

‘I don’t think it matters,’ said Katsuhiro.

‘I see you named the child,’ Shiban said, as he handed over a satchel.

Inside were the plastek flimsies confirming Katsuhiro and the child’s identity, a little food, and a canteen full of water.

‘I didn’t name him. The Administratum did,’ Katsuhiro said, somewhat sourly.

‘It is good that they did. Cole said he needed a name. He was right, and it is a good name they chose for him,’ said the White Scar.

Katsuhiro read the flimsy. Oriens Katsuhiro, it said.

‘Consider keeping it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because in High Gothic, Oriens means “the dawn”. I cannot think of a better name for one such as he.’ Shiban bent over the machine’s controls.

‘Be still. We have a long flight ahead of us.’

The Javelin’s engines lifted them into the air. The crowd of upturned faces dwindled into a sea of dots on grey. The air thinned. Katsuhiro worried he

would suffocate, but the Space Marine stopped before he rose too high.

A bar of orange light fell over them. Katsuhiro looked west, where a break in the choking dust let the evening sun creep under the pall, so that it hit the broken city, casting shadows across the land. These lengths of blackness crept up and over the debris, like arms, fingers jealously reaching for the warmth of living bodies.

The shadows would not catch Katsuhiro. Shiban was bringing the Javelin around, facing towards the indifferent grey skies of the east. Somewhere, thousands of kilometres away, were the Dragon Nations.

‘Oriens,’ he said. ‘Oriens.’ It seemed like the right name.

The child, Oriens, smiled.

Jets choking on the dusty air, the Javelin accelerated and was away over the walls of the Palace, out into the mountains the Emperor had chosen for His eternal seat, then beyond, heading home, heading towards the dawn.

Katsuhiro and Shiban Khan reunited.

HOMEBOUND

CHRIS WRAIGHT

Maybe she should have felt guilty. She’d felt guilty before, often, but now she couldn’t summon anything. The sense of impropriety, that she was alive

– again! – when others had been butchered in the trenches, just couldn’t be sustained forever. All she retained now was a vague numbness, a cold nothing that rose up from her fingertips and made her heart and lungs ache.

But it wasn’t guilt. All those things were for the past now. A chapter in the story had ended violently, closure had finally come. How long had it been, then, in all? The best part of eight years devoted to this grinding horror show. Getting over the finishing line, bruised and bleeding, felt nothing like a victory, because it wasn’t, but it was a change. It consigned a great deal to the past, all to be locked away now, shoved out of view. Even more would be buried soon. Layers of earth would be heaped over the bodies, the still-hot gun barrels, the cursed metals and the cursed flesh. The soil would be pushed down by trembling hands, each of them numb like hers, and then those who had witnessed these things would die, the earth would subside and harden, and even the memories would be buried.

When the news came in, the confirmation that the Arch-Traitor was dead, she was standing at her workstation, her thin grey hair loose around her face, hands limp by her sides. Ilya Ravallion, decorated general of the Imperial Army, honoured sage of the V Legion, took in one weak breath, then another. People were moving around her, shakily, feeling their way across the wreckage in the chamber. She paid them no mind. They were lost in their own worlds of shock, unwilling to believe it was over no matter how many urgent comms came in telling them the news. Every pict-lens swam with empty static, useless now. The lumens were down, save for a couple of low-power emergency strips, so it was dark, just as all moments of creation were.

She had wanted him dead. She had wanted his ship to be destroyed before it got to Terra, or blown apart in the opening barrages from the surface.

Then she had wanted him to come down to the planet himself so he could be torn apart in front of his own hateful armies. She’d wanted to watch that happen. He’d never come. He’d never set foot on the world he’d sworn to take. His end had come, as it had had to, in the heavens, the realm of gods, not mortals. That made it all seem unreal, like a myth, despite the reality of the blood and the bodies.

So, what now? What was left? What had they saved?

Rumours were still swirling. That the Emperor had died. That He was merely wounded. That Guilliman was here. That the Lion was here, together with the Wolf, poised to reconstruct and to restore.

All those things might have been true; they might not have been. Months would pass before any true certainty arrived. Until then, Terra would be fogbound, a realm of doubt and whispers, a planet frozen by its own psychic agony.

She looked down. She lifted her hands, saw how her fingers trembled.

Each of her nails was bloody, worn down to the quick by nervous biting.

The flesh was puckered and dry over the bone. All of a sudden, from nowhere, she had a memory of doing the same thing as a little girl, decades ago now. She had lifted her hands and studied them, caught by random awe at the sight of ten pudgy fingers, all of them hers, stained with the dark earth of her home where she had been grubbing in the topsoil.

Home. A modest house. A yard. Flowers in pots, a cold blue sky above her.

She had always meant to return. Always.

Withdraw, she reflected, ruefully. Then, only then, return.

A shadow fell over her. A familiar aroma filled her nostrils: the engine-stink of power armour, undercut with dried blood and burnt soil.

She looked up. It was Halji. No, Halji was dead. It was Sojuk. Attentive, diligent Sojuk. So he was alive. Good. Good.

‘ Szu,’ he said, using the Legion honorific. His voice was cracked, hoarse, as if he’d been shouting for so long his throat lining had ruptured. ‘You are preserved.’

She issued a wry smile. ‘Not really. I thought you’d gone out there to die.’

‘I expected to.’ Sojuk was unhelmed, his forehead a mass of bruises and scabs. ‘But there have been surprises.’

‘Really?’ She looked around her bleakly. ‘I don’t see any.’

‘He is alive, szu.’

Her gaze snapped up. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I came to get you. To take you to him.’

‘Did he ask for me?’

‘Can you come? Now?’

Her body ached. Her temples throbbed. She was malnourished, badly dehydrated, sleep-deprived. The final barrages still rang in her ears, hours after they’d stopped. Her pulse felt weak in her veins, because her old heart

– and she only had one – was finally on the verge of giving up. If she lay down here, in the tangled detritus of the Rotunda’s interior, she could finally close her eyes. She could set her head on the rubble and start to forget about it all. They couldn’t ask for more. They’d already asked for more than was humanly possible, and, somehow, she’d given it.

‘Take me,’ she said, reaching out for his hand. ‘Take me there.’

Sojuk knew the way. He had the perfect recall of the Astartes, that innate ability to commit tactical landscapes to memory, and even the ever-disintegrating Palace ruins – now a three-dimensional labyrinth of collapsed foundations, open shafts and crumbling walkways – gave him no trouble.

He limped, though. Limped badly. Ilya wondered if he’d taken a wound that even his physiology wouldn’t cope with.

After they’d clambered down from the Rotunda’s outworks, picking their way through cliffs of rubble and rusting rebar, they started the long slog down into the catacombs. Ilya got a brief view of the Delphic Battlement,

just before the arched roofs closed overhead again. Those proud ramparts were high slopes of gravel now, scooped and swept into curves by the wind.

It all smelled strongly of carrion. A diamond-shaped patch of sky shone with ongoing chemical fires. After so long being a deafening cacophony, the narrow vista was almost silent now, except for the crackle of the flames and the distant, booming hum of electric storms.

Then they were back into the dark, both of them limping now, ducking under lintels and squeezing along narrow corridors cut into heavily cracked and pitted rockcrete. Sojuk activated his armour’s lumens to guide them both, and the hard white pools of light slipped and slithered across bare masonry.

She remembered marching down similar walkways before she’d left Terra for Ullanor, data-slate in hand, heels snapping smartly on polished floors.

She remembered staggering through the very same corridors not so long ago, fighting physical and mental agonies after the assault on the Lion’s Gate port. They had all been filled with the clamour of military preparation then, bodies moving swiftly past one another, orders shouted. Now the bodies lay still amid the ankle-deep ash. One corpse had a stiff hand outstretched, fingers curled, as if reaching for a hand up, but its hidden face was buried in dust, expression unreadable.

Pride forced her to keep walking, to give away nothing to Sojuk, who could go on forever. She’d have to stop at some point, humiliatingly, sink down into the filth at her feet and take some deep, sour breaths. She gritted her teeth, balled her fists, forced herself to recite the mantras Qin Xa had taught her on the Swordstorm.

‘We are here, szu,’ Sojuk said, startling her out of her reverie.

She squinted in the gloom. This was not the place the two of them had visited before, just after their nerve-flaying journey by Thunderhawk at the height of the final assault. It might have been even further down, sunk far into the thick-layered crusts of civilisational sediment that ran under the Palace’s ancient foundations. The stone arches above them, barely clearing Sojuk’s head, were worn smooth by winds that had not blown for millennia.

‘This is his place,’ Ilya breathed, referring to the Sigillite. ‘Is he here?’

‘No. His people do not answer questions about him.’

She guessed the reason why. One of Malcador’s Chosen shuffled up to them out of the darkness, still wearing her battle armour.

‘Who is this?’ she asked, looking doubtfully at Ilya.

‘You will let her pass,’ Sojuk said, flatly.

‘She is of the Legion?’

‘Very much so,’ Sojuk said.

The woman hesitated, then backed down. ‘If you say so, lord,’ she said, in a tone of voice that seemed to add as if it matters any more.

More Chosen emerged, some robed and cowled, some in battle dress, all carrying an air of faint dissolution. Ilya and Sojuk were ushered along more interminable rock-cut tunnels, ones that throbbed with geothermal warmth in the deep shadow. Eventually they reached a sealed doorway, and the attendants melted away as silently as they had come.

Ilya looked up at Sojuk. ‘You’ve been inside here?’

‘No. You will be the first.’

That was said so casually, as they often did, and yet the gift, the privilege of that… She was a mortal, a mere human, whereas the primarch was a part of them, a continuum of genetics and fealty and brotherhood that defied easy description.

The honours they heaped on her could become oppressive at times, hard to deal with, not that they would ever have known it.

She reached out for the door. The heavy panel swung inwards, revealing a large chamber beyond, bare stone, faint strip lumens, batteries of gently ticking medicae equipment. Cables coiled across a vapour-covered floor like torpid serpents. The place smelled of counterseptic and sorcery.

A single slab dominated the room’s centre, an oblong of black stone five metres across and three deep, smooth and dully reflective like smoked glass. A translucent canopy hung over the slab, glowing acid-yellow from some diffuse inner light source. Tubes cobwebbed the canopy like veins, making the fragile covering shiver.

Ilya edged closer. An opening had been cut at one end. The interior of the canopy was filled with a dense fog of the vapour, continually refreshed by outtakes so that it spilled down the sides of the slab in slow-moving cataracts and spread out across the chamber floor.

She instantly recognised the profile of his face silhouetted against the ambient glow. The high forehead, hooked nose, and lean, bony features. He was lying on his back, his eyes open and unfocused. She could hear him breathing, a movement accompanied by the wheeze and tick of mechanical

helpers. He had not responded to her approach, but remained totally still, as if locked down in time, a graven image lost amid all the other statues down here, just one more of the Sigillite’s discarded relics.

She crouched lower, bringing her head level with his. Sojuk hovered close by, saying nothing. For a long time she stared at the inputs, the cables, anywhere but the shrouded face she had known so well.

‘Sage,’ he said eventually. His voice was a hoarse hiss, barely audible over the clank of the devices keeping him alive.

‘Khagan,’ she replied, softly.

She couldn’t make out much detail amid the backlit smoke. She caught glimpses of charred-dark flesh, of exposed sinew and flecks of visible bone.

He still looked more corpse than man, though he could clearly speak. She saw an eye blink, the halting rise and fall of a cavernous chest.

His bloodshot eye swivelled in her direction. ‘He’s dead,’ the Khan said.

‘My brother.’

‘He is,’ said Ilya. ‘Damn him to the hells.’

‘I felt it. The loss. Immense. Immense. ’

His voice cracked as he spoke. Grief. He was grieving. Ilya didn’t know what to say to that. How could he possibly feel that way? She wanted to reach out, try to brush away the clouds of condensation that pooled and trickled down his ravaged cheeks, check that it was really him.

‘His essence is gone,’ he said. ‘Destroyed. My father enacted vengeance, in the end. He found the strength for it. I never knew if He really would.’

The Khan was rambling, falling over his words as he struggled to get them out. Perhaps he was still under the influence of sedatives.

‘Victory is ours, though,’ Ilya said, weakly.

‘No, no,’ croaked the Khan. ‘No victory now. He is destroyed. His soul annihilated. I never knew if He would actually do it.’

Ilya glanced over at Sojuk, who returned a look of quiet alarm.

‘So then, are you… recovering?’ she asked.

The Khan didn’t reply immediately. ‘I walked strange paths,’ he said, his voice now little more than a whisper. ‘I saw the hidden realm. For a time, I was a part of it. I was in it. I searched for him. My brother. And when I couldn’t find him, I knew the end had come. So I had to come back.’

It was all about Horus.

‘Yes. Your people need you now,’ Ilya ventured. ‘When you are restored, back to health, they will need you with them again.’

He looked briefly confused, as if he couldn’t remember anything about what he had done.

‘I am not… what I was,’ he mumbled.

What did that mean? That he was weaker? That his role had changed, as everyone’s had? Or something more profound, more worrisome?

‘You will be,’ said Ilya firmly. ‘You must be.’

The lone bloodshot eye fixed her again. ‘Nothing can be the same now, sage. Nothing. All the more so for those who have crossed the boundary.’

The boundary. Life and death, the fixed border that had been ruptured by the forces unleashed on this world. Once a breach had been established, it would be hard to close again. She found herself wanting to ask much more: what he’d seen, where he’d travelled to, what that meant for the future of them all.

But then his expression changed, a sudden rearrangement of those bloodied, tormented features. He smiled crookedly, and for a moment it was almost back as it had been, as if the two of them were on the Swordstorm again.

‘I remember when you met us for the first time,’ the Khan said. ‘You remember it too? On the ship, over Ullanor. I thought you’d pass out when he walked in.’

Despite everything, she smiled at the memory. It felt an age away, part of another reality now, but the shock of meeting a primarch – two primarchs –

for the first time left its imprint.

‘Both of you had that effect,’ she admitted. ‘Yesugei did try to warn me.’

‘Who?’

But that cut her, sudden, like shrapnel to her heart. The Khan, noticing her expression, immediately lost his smile. Then he looked anguished.

‘Targutai,’ he whispered. ‘Of course. It is all so… hard to remember.’ His voice trailed away, miserably.

Ilya shuffled closer. She badly wanted to reach out, just touch him, reassure him, even if such intimacy was surely forbidden. ‘You will remember. It will return. You will recover.’

He looked at her, and said nothing, but the expression was one she had never witnessed on him before. Fear. Terrible, deep-seated fear. That

something fundamental had gone, never to return. That he still bore the same name, still possessed his title and his privileges, but that the Deathlord had taken something away that could never be returned.

The price had been high, for what he had done. It could never have been otherwise, not in this galaxy, where every gift given had to be paid for in full, but the full toll was still excruciating.

‘You saved your people,’ she told him, hoping the words counted for something. ‘You brought them deliverance, on Terra, just as you did on Chogoris. You will remember it all, and be yourself again, and lead them again. Believe that.’

He did not reply. His breathing became shallower, his bruised eyelids closed.

Exhaustion had returned. He slipped back into unconsciousness, and across his sarcophagus warning lumens blinked on.

‘We must go, szu,’ Sojuk urged.

But it was hard to pull away. She knew already this would be the last time she would ever see him. They would never converse again over an evening game of go, never discuss strategy and tactics by the light of candles, never exchange wry asides over the insanities of the Imperial bureaucracy. This was it. The final parting, and yet he was so damaged that she barely knew who she was saying farewell to.

Perhaps, if he had been himself, the parting might have been impossible.

The pressure to stay, to rebuild, might have been too much to bear. So maybe this was the way it had to be. A formal renunciation of her commission, a withdrawal, and then keeping the memories intact. What she had before her now was not the Khan. It had been, and maybe in the future it would be again, but for now it was a dream remnant, a half-shadow, spun out of the warp’s sudden retreat and still struggling to breathe the real world’s air.

‘You showed me another world, lord,’ she said, her voice cracking a little.

‘When you can, return to this one.’

After leaving the medicae chamber, they met another warrior of the Legion coming the other way. Ilya recognised him immediately. Despite all the work done to improve and conceal his augmetics, Shiban Khan’s profile had been forever altered by the war. He looked in the very worst shape

she’d ever seen, with his white armour now blackened and encrusted in layers of stinking grime. He was helmless, and his heavily scarred face with its tufts of scratchy beard made him look like a wild man stumbling into a village from out of the wastes.

All she had known during her time at the Rotunda was that Shiban had been fighting on, isolated and far from any possible help. No details had made it through after her return to the core. To see him alive, walking, breathing… A grin of pure relief broke out across her face.

‘Tachseer,’ she burst out, limping towards him.

He took her hands up in his gauntlets, clasped them tight. ‘Szu,’ he said.

‘No one could tell me anything. But this… Hai. It gladdens my heart!’

Ilya laughed suddenly, a release of pent-up sorrow and tension. She wanted to hug him, to draw him into her embrace, but even if she could somehow have managed to get her arms across his huge frame he’d never have allowed it.

‘How many others?’ she asked, meaning the defenders of the port.

Shiban drew in a breath. ‘We were tested. Not many.’ But then a sly smile.

‘We held out long enough. Did what we came for.’

‘You did,’ she said, with feeling. ‘You did, Shiban. They’re already telling stories of it. There’ll be songs before long. Ever imagine that? Terrans!

Terrans, singing about a bunch of savages from the grass!’

Shiban’s face darkened. ‘But… him? You’ve been inside?’

‘I have. He’ll want to see you. You, most of all. But I would wait a while… You should be warned – he’s not recovered. He’s not himself.’

‘In what way?’

‘I… don’t know. Not yet. Something’s changed. How could it not have done?’ She shook her head, forced out another smile. ‘It will pass. He was dead. Of that I’m certain. So it will be difficult. Give it time, though, I urge you. Make no hasty judgements.’

Shiban winced. ‘You sound like a Stormseer.’

‘I doubt that.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘It is a new dawn for the Legion. We are the witnesses of it. For those who remain, it may be brighter than we expect.’

‘So we will need you. More than ever. Naranbaatar is gone, half the command staff are gone. We are just bones and gristle now.’

Only then did she disentangle her fingers from his. ‘No. No, do not make me doubt. I can’t.’ She looked up at him. ‘I wish I could. I wish I had another twenty years, the strength to get back on a ship again, to finish what we started.’ She sighed. ‘But look at me. Look at this body. I’m done.

There’s nothing left. Nothing at all.’

He resisted. Was he surprised? Did he really think he could persuade her?

Or was that a kind of politeness? Maybe neither. Maybe just an unwillingness to accept the hard truths.

‘The challenge ahead of us will be greater than we have ever known,’ he said. ‘Everything lies in ruins. We must rearm, rebuild, and swiftly. No one could guide us better than you. We need you.’ A look – almost – of yearning. ‘ I need you.’

That might even have been true, and so, listening to the flattery, that nagging, treacherous doubt returned. Maybe she could do it. Hold it together, train up a replacement. Just a few months. Put things in order for them before nature finally exacted its delayed price for her continual postponement of the inevitable. She owed them that, and it would prevent all her old work from going to waste, forgotten in the whirl of fresh fighting that would come again soon.

Ilya closed her eyes briefly, allowed herself to smile again.

They are perilous, these people. Their courtesies, their hidden weapons.

‘No. I steeled myself against this. The decision has been made, and cannot be changed.’ She opened her eyes to look at him squarely. ‘Yesugei thought so highly of you, Shiban. They all did, the masters of your Legion. Now you are their inheritor. This is your task.’

They never queried it, when she made her judgements. This time was no different, for all that it clearly pained him. Shiban drew in a long breath. He crossed his arms, stood back, regarded her.

‘Then what will you do?’ he asked. ‘Where will you go?’

‘To the place I came from. My home. Terra is my world, and I will see it cleansed of the Traitor’s touch.’

‘Not alone.’

‘I will not take strength away from where it’s needed.’

Shiban looked over at Sojuk, who was standing close by. ‘You will accompany her,’ he ordered. ‘Her life in your hands, her blood warded by your blade.’

Sojuk bowed. Ilya almost protested, but a quick glance at Shiban’s face told her it would be futile. The indulgence they extended towards her had always been just that: a grant of generosity. At bottom, they were still lords of battle, capable of almost anything, as far above her in capability as the gods were to humanity.

And yet, just then, Shiban bowed to her deeply, took her hand again, and dropped to one knee in the manner of a warrior giving fealty to his warlord.

‘It will be remembered. All of it. Know that you have been venerated. You have been loved.’

She’d almost avoided the spike of tears – she’d been determined to – but that was too much. This, the second great parting, was harder.

‘And I, too,’ she said. ‘More than I’d ever expected.’

‘Then you must go in joy,’ Shiban said. ‘We have mourned enough. We have grieved enough. We will learn to laugh again now, just as we used to.’

‘May that be so,’ she said, gripping his hand hard. ‘May that truly be so.’

Only then did she leave the Palace.

In normal times, they would have taken a flyer, but there were no flyers left. It proved hard enough to find a ground transport, for most had been destroyed and those few capable of combat operations were still badly needed. In the end, Sojuk managed to unearth a wrecked civilian transport upended in a blast crater. After nearly an hour of work, he was able to coax the machine spirit back to wakefulness, haul it out of the mire, and get the soot-belching engines shaking into noisy life.

Ilya clambered up into the cab. She was wearing an environment suit, full rebreather. The back of the transport was filled with all the supplies they’d been able to find at short notice. They hadn’t hunted too hard for those.

Starvation would soon raise its head over the ruins, even if the incoming loyalist supply fleets got here soon, so they’d taken the minimum they judged necessary.

She already felt nauseous as she settled in, her stomach empty and her head light. Her emotions fizzed, making her fragile and morose. She shuffled back against the hard seat, took a pill from her rapidly diminishing stash, let Sojuk take responsibility for driving. Through the smeary forward viewers she watched what was going on around them: the few survivors emerging from their bunkers and standing around in twos and threes, gazing

in stupefaction at the extent of the devastation. Ilya had been told that serious work was already going on in the heart of the Sanctum Imperialis, and that the advance units of the incoming reinforcements had gone there first to shore it up. The entire structure was in danger of collapse, she understood, and tens of thousands of people were still working inside its essential control chambers. On the surface, though, the whole place looked abandoned, an ancient set of crumbling monuments amid a static ocean of blasted stone. Above them, the storm clouds still boiled, no longer ruptured with orbital las-fire but messy and lurid from the backwash of fires. Her chrono told her it was mid-morning, though it looked like dusk in winter, and probably would do so forever now.

‘Ready?’ Sojuk asked, preparing to test out the transport’s doubtful powers.

She was. This was the correct path now, for all the pain of it. She thought back to the Khan, for so long her master, buried under kilometres of earth, clawing his way back to a new life. She thought of Shiban, with the weight of reconstruction ahead of him. She thought of the survivors at the port, of Jangsai Khan in particular, whom she dearly hoped had lived to see another age. They all had wars still to fight, and would have to summon the strength for them soon. Hers, though, at last, was over.

‘Ready,’ she replied, biting back the tremor in her voice.

Sojuk started the engines. The ignition spluttered, kicked, then thrummed into life. Then they were moving, slowly, skidding over the treacherous terrain, heading north.

It took them a long time to reach the Palace’s nominal boundaries. Ilya gazed out of the viewers for a while, but soon became dispirited. The old gaudy complexity of the vast city-world had been reduced down to grinding tedium: kilometre after kilometre of undifferentiated wreckage, gently smouldering like slowly cooling lava. Under every levelled block festered hundreds of thousands of bodies, a hot stew of decomposition that would soon bring plague in its wake. The greater majority would be humans just like her, defenders and attackers alike, subject to two different species of delusion, now destined to rot away into the undercrofts of their origin world together.

Some sights were striking. She saw a Stormbird gunship suspended between the teetering flanks of two skeletal hab-towers, its earthward plummet arrested as it wedged between them, nose down. It was still on fire somehow, a crackling torch held a hundred metres from the ground, placed there like a warning. She saw headless Titans in the distance, a whole phalanx of them, static and shrouded in roiling clots of mist. She saw the immense carcass of a void-going ship that had crashed over an industrial area, and marvelled at the inferno that landing must have kindled. The entire district was a colossal cat’s cradle of black spars and gaping thruster housings, as silent and wind worn as everything else.

The going was slow. All transitways were blocked, or pitted with craters, or lost under the deep tides of rubble. Sojuk drove hard where he could, at times scaling steep slopes of scree before sliding and skidding down the far side. It was an oddly natural landscape, like a stone desert that had existed undisturbed for millennia. No sign of any living thing – no warriors, no civilians, no animals. For a theatre of war that had been teeming just weeks ago, filled from horizon to horizon with the largest armies ever assembled in human history, the emptiness of it now was astounding.

‘Where did they all go?’ she murmured to herself as the transport laboured.

‘Were they really here at all?’

‘Oh, they were here,’ grunted Sojuk darkly.

All the same, the landscape became increasingly dreamlike. Smoke rolled across the ruination endlessly, thick and tox-heavy, snagging on the edges of eyeless buildings before wafting back into the heights. Burned-out military vehicles littered the terrain like the discarded shells of enormous crustaceans. At times Ilya thought she caught strange noises on the wind, like screams, or maybe laughter.

Night fell before they reached the city’s edge. Sojuk drove on through while Ilya drowsed fitfully, her head jerking up whenever the transport’s wheels snagged on an obstacle. The light slid out of the turbulent sky, turning an ash-grey horizon a deep unbroken black. In the extreme west, lightning forks flickered, white-silver flashes that briefly exposed the jagged ruin-profile, but otherwise it felt like tunnelling back into the world’s core.

Ilya awoke just before dawn. Sojuk stopped the transport and she stiffly dismounted. He was on edge the whole time, unwilling for her to leave his

eyeline, but she had human requirements – and a need for privacy – that he didn’t. He was happier when she was back at the transport again, chewing weakly at a carb bar and sipping from one of the canisters. Travelling was tough; she felt worse than she had for weeks. The adrenaline that had kept her on her feet, just about, during the siege itself was dissipating fast.

‘Close to the edge yet?’ she asked.

‘The scanners are malfunctioning,’ Sojuk said, doubtfully. ‘But yes. One more day, then out onto the plains. You will have to guide me after that.’

That might be hard. It had been years since she’d been anywhere close to the old lands, the oblasts of her youth. Every trip she’d ever taken down to the Himalazian heartlands after that had been by flyer, and summoning up cartographs was impossible now. Still, it was possible some of the big multi-lane transit corridors were intact, as well as the cities that had spread steadily across the high plains. It should be possible to orientate via those, even if they were ruins too. Her memory was still good, at least her long-term memory. That was almost the last thing she felt she could rely on now.

They set off again. Ilya let Sojuk drive – he could do so for hours at a stretch without tiring. She attempted to stay awake herself, but struggled as the hours passed. At times it felt as though she was drifting through a semiconscious fever, punctuated by brief interludes where a jolt would force her to open her eyes, stare out at the world beyond, before lapsing back into an uneasy reverie.

Eventually, the transport crawled its way to the remains of the Palace’s great northern wall systems. Sections of the structure were still intact, rearing up into the haze like geological features, their outer flanks shorn cleanly to expose honeycomb innards. Quagmires of broken masonry and metal still glowed hot from the munitions employed to break the outer perimeter, and the air crackled with electrostatic. Bodies were plentiful here at least, or pieces of them, lying out in the open pressed up against one another, piled high, loyalist and traitor alike, dotted with the larger wrecks of attack walkers and troop carriers. Every surface was coated in a thin film of sooty black.

‘Bastion Ledge,’ Ilya said, grimly, squinting up at the profile of the high parapets. ‘I didn’t even know they’d broken through here.’

Sojuk regarded it dispassionately. He stopped the engines, got out, stalked over to some troop carriers. He came back with armfuls of power packs,

some ammunition magazines, a couple of water canisters. ‘I detected movement,’ he said, starting the ignition and slamming the cab door. ‘Not everything is dead.’

They pushed on, grinding over the heaps of corpses, shoving their way through old barricades. Even once free of the wall-line, the crowded landscape of limbs and torsos still stretched off into the distance, punctuated by derelict Titans and artillery pieces. The transport travelled for fifty kilometres, Ilya reckoned, without the wheels touching dirt, just churning up the desiccated remains of the infantry hordes. The survivors, when they got here, would have to burn these corpse fields. Was there enough promethium left in the reserves for that? The entire plateau would be like this now. The soil of the future, all of it rad-scarred and phage-rich.

Night fell again before they cleared the traitor rearguard zones. As the last sunlight died, Ilya caught sight of some big troop landers, the vast ships that had made planetfall out of the range of the Palace wall guns to unload their cargo. The ridged spines of the storeyed crew compartments towered a hundred metres into the dusk half-light, immense and empty, like tombs built for impossible giants, before slipping behind them again and dissolving into the gathering dark.

Sojuk kept going. He was steady, implacable, pushing them onwards without pause or mistake. Ilya fell asleep again, this time deeply. Getting out of the Palace seemed to trigger something within her, some kind of release valve, and after losing consciousness she didn’t even dream.

When she next awoke, it was still dark.

‘How long was I out?’ she murmured, blearily.

‘All night, all day,’ replied Sojuk, smiling. ‘We have made progress.’

She rubbed her face, stretched out, gingerly pushed her aching body higher up in the seat. Looking out of the viewports, she saw that the city was long behind them. The landscape was empty and featureless in all directions, a true desert now, stony, pale under the night sky, free of vegetation. The cloud cover was less complete here, exposing a couple of diamond-like stars between the drifting shrouds. Portions of an old transitway – a fifty-metre-wide ribbon of asphalt – still lingered in broken patches, and Sojuk threaded a path along the extant passages. A cluster of immense fuel pipes

ran parallel alongside them, breached at regular intervals, and Ilya could smell the acrid tang of spilled promethium.

‘Signs of life?’ she asked, peering out into the night.

‘Not much.’ Sojuk adjusted the controls, keeping the speed steady. ‘The outer cities are dark. Maybe bombarded, maybe evacuated.’

Ilya nodded. She remembered some of the early transmissions, back before the orbital barrage had made comms beyond the Palace almost impossible to pick up. The tributary cities of the high plains had been planning to hold out for as long as they could, even to open second fronts once the traitors had made planetfall. Some regiments of the Army had been stationed for that very purpose, though if any counter-attacks had been launched they had certainly failed. Most likely those urban zones had been overrun in the first few days, reduced to playgrounds for the millions of murder-hungry troops waiting for their summons to the main prize. It wouldn’t have been good, to have ended up stuck there. Not good at all.

‘Can we stop, just for a moment?’ she asked.

Sojuk’s eyes narrowed. ‘This is exposed. Not a good place.’

‘Do you expect to find a good place soon?’

He thought about that, then pulled the transport to the ragged edge of the old transitway. ‘Quickly, please.’

Ilya pushed open the door and stiffly clambered down. The air was cool here and smelled less foul than in the Palace. She limped towards the transport’s rear end, trying to get some blood moving through her system.

Her joints protested, her hands started to shake. She reached for the canteen at her belt, and unscrewed the cap with trembling fingers.

The wind was howling down from the line of dark mountains to the south, and her loose hair flapped around her face. Nothing much to stop the gales here, not for hundreds of kilometres, just like the country she’d been raised in. She drank, and the cold water quelled the worst of her shakes. She closed her eyes, listening to the howl again for a moment. It felt like it was all around her. Closer than it should have been. She opened her eyes again, and saw a dozen pairs staring back at her from the dark.

‘Sojuk!’ she shouted, scrabbling back towards the cab.

The eyes moved, leaping out of the murk, bounding towards her, turning into heavy silhouettes of animals.

Ilya ran, almost reaching the cab, the scatter of paws on scree in her ears, the hot panting of canid breath on her back, imagining the inevitable leap, jaws agape. She wouldn’t make it. She twisted around, back to the transport’s edge, fumbling for her blade.

They had once been dogs – strays, or even pets. Now they were changed, engorged, their skin split open, their eyes wide and rolling. Spines had erupted along their backs, claws from their pads. Their hides were skin-pale and glistening, their flayed muscles obscenely bulked out.

The first one leapt at her; she flailed clumsily with her knife. The creature yowled, jerking away and crashing into the side of the transport, before dropping low and growling, coming again more carefully.

Except that Ilya hadn’t touched it, she hadn’t got close. Sojuk was there, silent out of the dark, pulling her back and shielding her with his body. His own blade dripped with blood. The pack closed in on them both, limping and lurching, a misshapen gaggle of hideous, famished mutants driven into the empty lands to starve.

Another one leapt and Sojuk lashed out, severing its bulbous head and sending the heavy body crashing to the ground. He pushed Ilya up the cab steps, then lunged back into the gathering pack, laying into them and killing two more. Ilya, breathing heavily, palms sweaty, reached over to the engine controls and got them going. The howling got worse. More were coming.

She grabbed the control column and the transport began to move. Sojuk scrambled up through the open door and slammed it shut behind him. As he did so, one of the canids pounced, hitting the armaglass and raking it with its claws. Ilya had a brief, freeze-frame vision of manically snapping jaws against the pane, bloody eyes, vivid pink flayed flesh.

Then it fell away. The transport picked up speed. For a while the howls kept pace, but after a few minutes of pursuit the creatures lost ground. Ilya had her foot on the accelerator the whole time, bouncing and jarring across the pitted terrain. Her fists clenched the controls hard, painfully hard, and she found it difficult to breathe.

Sojuk reached across to her, gently, placing his gauntlet on her shoulder.

‘They are gone,’ he said. ‘Please, a little less speed. You will crack an axle.’

He was right. The transport was already battered, and she was smashing it around badly. She couldn’t stop. She couldn’t relax, her limbs were rigid, her jawline tight.

Slowly, slowly, she got herself under control. The transport’s crashing progress slowed, and the engine whine fell back into the normal range. She forced her shoulders back, her muscles to unclench.

‘They were horrible,’ she muttered.

‘Left behind,’ Sojuk said. ‘I do not think they will last long.’

Ilya snorted. ‘Maybe they will. Maybe they’re the only thing that will.’

Her panic was turning to anger. ‘These places had been tamed. It’s all gone.

It’s all ruined. It’s all–’

Again, the gentle pressure of a hand on her shoulder. ‘They were remnants.

They will not endure.’

Ilya tried to listen. For some reason, she didn’t want to hear it. She found herself wanting to wallow in the grief for a moment, to give in to it, to believe that it had all been for nothing, that everything had been a waste and an exercise in folly. ‘Where are the people?’ she demanded. ‘Where are the people?’

‘The people will return.’ Sojuk never raised his voice. He was just like they always were, damn them – reasonable, measured. ‘The cities will be remade.’

She couldn’t maintain her fury for long; fatigue returned too quickly. Once the cortisol drained from her system, the old ailments and the nausea reasserted themselves, dragging her back into the state of resigned weakness she loathed.

Someone, in time, would have to plan out the purging and resettlement of these places. Someone would have to coordinate the demolition teams and the construction crews, manage the logistics of supply and migration, liaise with the incoming repopulation fleets. Whoever it was, they wouldn’t do it as well as she would have done. They wouldn’t have the attention to detail that she did. Things would be lost. Mistakes would be made.

She found herself wishing she’d never lived to see the prospect. To glimpse the problem, and be too decrepit to address it. That was worse than ignorance.

She sighed, concentrated on what she was doing, on the broken road twisting off into the night, a patchwork of asphalt blocks picked out by the transport’s weak lumens.

‘Why am I even going back?’ she murmured, half to herself. ‘It’s just a city. Just a house. I don’t even know who lives in it any more, I lost touch

years ago. Why do it?’

‘Because it is the right thing to do,’ said Sojuk. ‘Because it is honourable, after all you have achieved. And because you wished it, and deserve to have that wish fulfilled.’

She blurted out a laugh, suddenly amused by that. ‘Or maybe just stupid,’

she said.

‘Maybe,’ said Sojuk. ‘If so, though, you have earned the right to be.’

She glanced over at him. ‘Do you feel the grief of it, Sojuk?’ she asked.

‘All that we’ve lost?’

He paused for a while. She knew just what he was thinking of – the last days, out beyond the Delphic Range, the fighting he never spoke about –

and regretted the question.

‘I do, szu. Very often.’

‘You don’t show it.’

‘When I have a blade. Then it shows.’

She nodded. ‘We should be glad the time for that is over, then.’

He said nothing in response to that. For all that, Ilya knew what he was thinking.

It is not over. It will never be over now.

She kept driving.

Days passed, one after the other in numbing succession, and the landscape barely changed. These regions had always been empty, even during the great population boom of Terra’s recent history. They were wide, flat, featureless places, traversed at speed by travellers, traders or armies looking for somewhere more amenable to linger. Even after Unification, when so much of the planet’s long-tormented terrain had been cleansed and placed back into productive life, these vast highlands had never become crowded.

Their few cities were clustered around natural resources, and resembled enormous manufactories rather than natural settlements. You could still see their decaying hulks on the eastern horizon from time to time, slowly rusting away as the storm clouds raced above them.

The road took them very close to one such place. Sojuk hadn’t found a way to bypass it, so they drove through the outskirts, keeping their speed up, watchful for threats. Ilya looked up and around as they travelled under the enormous labyrinths of pipework and scaffolding. The place had the

look of an ore-processing module, something the Mechanicum would have laid out to standard templates – core workforce of a few hundred thousand, a support population maybe three times that. The once-booming forges were silent, the furnaces empty and the conveyer belts static. Catastrophic damage was evident all around – an absolute hurricane of artillery must have been unleashed to wreck it so completely. The desert gravels had started to filter in from the outside, running up against the corroded walls in shifting piles. Partly mummified corpses littered every unsheltered area, their exposed skin wax stiff. One zone must have been hit with some kind of arcane chem-weaponry, freezing an entire mob of terrified civilians in place even as they ran. The transport passed close by them, and Ilya couldn’t resist looking at their expressions, still intact after months: fear, panic, horror, even anger. Men, women, children clutching toys, thousands of them, locked in position until the city fell apart around them and the sand reclaimed it all at last.

‘Did the Legions come this far out?’ she asked Sojuk. ‘The traitors, I mean.’

He looked uncertain. ‘I do not know. I saw reports of the Third leaving the walls. They must have gone somewhere.’

Ilya shuddered. Of all the Legions to be let loose on civilians, they might have been the very worst. ‘Maybe Traitor Mechanicum.’

‘Possible. They would have relished destroying these places.’

Likely no one would ever know. A small atrocity, in the scheme of things, one that would be erased by the elements long before reclamation squads made it here. Still, the faces were all individual. The families clutching one another’s hands, the fathers reaching out for sons, the mothers cradling daughters. They had a monument to their suffering at least, as grotesque as it was.

The transport passed back out onto the open road, and Sojuk carried on tracing out the long north-west road, keeping the mountains to the south, heading further and further away from the Palace.

As the long hours passed, Ilya found her grip on reality start to slip. She flitted in and out of wakefulness again. On one occasion she was sure that it was Shiban sitting next to her, as if they were back on the bridge of the Swordstorm. On another, she thought she was back on Ullanor in the

transport she’d taken to find Yesugei. She knew all those things had happened, but could no longer be sure in exactly what order.

‘I find it harder and harder to tell the difference,’ she muttered.

Sojuk glanced at her. ‘Between what?’

‘The real and the unreal,’ she said. ‘The ghosts and the living.’

‘I am real,’ he said. He thumped the dashboard. ‘This is real. As are you.’

Ilya smiled sadly, feeling an exhausted sleep coming for her again. ‘For a little while, Sojuk. A little while.’

When the towers crested the forward horizon, she recognised them at once.

They were grim hab-blocks, rectangular slabs of cheap rockcrete, but they had been home, and they gave her a sudden pang of familiarity. She shuffled upright, peering through the viewport.

‘There it is,’ she said.

Sojuk kept driving, watchful as ever. He had been doing so for days with only the scantest breaks for rest. His endurance was phenomenal –

uncomplaining, solid, remorseless.

The outskirts drew closer. Ilya recognised it all: the moisture traps on the outer limits, crumbling and paint-flaked; the big water towers; the hydroponic gardens with their fraying plastek films. Orchards had lined the roads in the old days, and the trees still lingered amid the rubble and rubbish, overgrown and untended, but alive. Like everywhere else they had passed, signs of combat were plentiful: bullet-pocked walls, belongings strewn across roads, empty vehicles overturned on the edges of cratered roads. Here, though, it didn’t look quite as bad as other places. This was a long way from anywhere, so far from strategic targets that an enemy would have had to be particularly determined, or badly lost, to have gone for it.

The transport crossed the boundary, rumbled down deserted streets. Empty windows looked out at them from the tenements on either side. One of the public announcement boards had got stuck in a loop, flashing its warning message over and over in faded phosphor dots: The Traitor Has Landed. All Civilians To Designated Evacuation Points. The Traitor Has Landed. All Civilians…

‘They didn’t fight?’ she mused, resting her chin on her hand.

Sojuk shrugged. The administration of the isolated stretches hadn’t been a priority. ‘They could not hold everywhere.’ His voice gave away a certain

disappointment, though.

Ilya pursed her lips unhappily. It wasn’t as if she’d have known anyone here any more – it had been decades since she’d been home, and she had no family to come back to. Still, some evidence of resistance would have been nice.

In the event, they found that soon enough. The centre of the city was dominated by its administrative core, a monolithic dome of rockcrete with a black-green patina creeping up the exterior. Decomposed bodies lay in clumps all around its blasted walls, clustered around barricades and piles of sandbags. A few fixed artillery pieces still looked functional, but otherwise the destruction was ruinous. The dome itself had been ruptured by missile fire, and its cracked curve gaped like an enormous black-toothed mouth.

Sojuk ran a scan. ‘This was months ago,’ he said, sweeping the auspex around him. ‘No active signals remain. The attackers have moved on.’

Ilya nodded. So at least some of them had tried to hold what they had. It had never been much, but the fact of it made her feel a little better. She wondered who had come for them – dregs from the traitor rearguard, most likely. Deserters, rampaging across a world largely stripped of its defences in favour of the Palace. Maybe the marauders had kept on going, burning a path towards softer and softer targets, or maybe they’d been stopped somewhere. She hoped so.

She looked up at the heavily damaged buildings around them, tried to get her bearings. ‘We need to push on,’ she said. ‘Past the dome, into the hab-zones beyond. I can find it from there.’

Sojuk pushed the controls and the transport rumbled over the wreckage.

They soon moved back into a suburban sprawl of low-rise buildings, though this time the hab-clusters looked a little better built, a little cleaner. These places had had gardens, some of which were already bursting at the seams from overgrowth, sending foliage spilling up and over the cracking hardstanding. Save for the plentiful, wind-dried corpses, the smell and the occasional ruin, it might have been anywhere in post-Unity Terra – modest, decent.

When they finally reached the street she’d been born in, and she caught sight of the old house, Ilya’s hand flew to her mouth. She hadn’t expected it to hit her so hard. For a vivid moment she had the same vision she’d had at the Rotunda. She was a young girl again, playing in the dusty road with the

rest of them, her cheeks dirty but flushed, her eyes squinting against an old sun, long before careers and wars and travels into the void.

The place was still standing, at least, though many of the lots around it were fire-damaged. It was a single-storey unit, an old-style prefab dwelling set in a square yard and surrounded by a low wall. The neatness she remembered had largely gone – it was now overgrown, the render cracked and falling off in slabs. Metal gates hung from their hinges, exposing the uneven path up to the open doors. It had clearly been deserted for a long time. The family who had lived here after Ilya had left for the Palace would have cleared out with the rest of the evacuees, assuming they’d survived the fighting. She didn’t know their names or anything about them; they were just transient episodes in a long story, hopefully carrying on somewhere else.

Sojuk halted the transport. Gingerly, with a buzzing in her ears both from fatigue and the constant drone of the transport’s engines, Ilya got down from the cab, limped up to the gate. Sojuk came with her, saying nothing.

The two of them passed inside, up some steps to a veranda, then through double doors and into a low-ceilinged living chamber. The place had been ransacked – the furniture pulled apart and clothes strewn over the wooden floor. An old vid-projector lay smashed in the corner, and more doors leading further inside hung from their hinges. A standard-issue image of the Emperor and His eighteen sons in a cheap plastek frame had hung on the facing wall – it had done so for as long as Ilya could remember – but it was on the floor now, the glass cracked. Someone had scrawled over the old mount unintelligibly. It might have read Damn them all, or maybe Help us all. It was hard to tell.

She reached for one of the chairs, pulled it upright and sat in it. Sojuk watched her.

‘This is the place?’ he asked, carefully.

She looked up at him. A whole stew of emotions boiled within her. She felt at once young again, and older than ever. It smelled the same. Despite all the wreckage, the general fug of decay that hung over the city, the long occupancy of people she didn’t know, she could still smell the old aromas: fabrics, polish on the floor, engine oil from the generators in the rear yard.

She had begun to doubt on the journey. Whether it was worth all the effort.

Whether it meant anything. Whether the gesture, such as it was, was

entirely pointless, just a piece of indulgence that she’d regret. Now, though… Now, the old place seemed to shrink comfortably around her, just as her own body was shrinking. Unlike the vast sarcophagus of the Palace, gigantic even in its ruin, this was more her size. And it was still here, just as she was, clinging on, battered, the outer shell ravaged but the heart still beating.

‘It is the place,’ she said, leaning her head against the chair’s frame.

‘Throne, at last. It is the place.’

Sojuk moved the transport some distance away, hiding it from prying eyes and taking all the supplies from its hold. Between them, they cleared the worst of the rubbish from the hab’s living chambers. Ilya got tired very quickly, frequently having to sit, panting weakly, as Sojuk did all the work.

It was faintly ludicrous to watch him, with his heavy battle armour still on, picking up scraps of clothing or broken furniture and neatly stacking it all up for her to go through. She wondered what he really thought of it. Only days ago, he’d been fighting a battle of vengeance in the heart of a living hell, the war to end all wars where the fates of new-cast gods and devils were being determined. Now he was looking after an old woman on the edge of the world, stooping under her low lintels, bumping his outsized shins against the room’s flimsy paraphernalia.

He only hesitated once, when taking out the dagger Qin Xa had given her years ago. That was one of the very few relics of the war she’d had the time and inclination to bring with her from the desolation. Perhaps he thought it inappropriate for her to be carting something so precious around. She didn’t really see why. It had never been drawn, and was virtually the only physical link she now had to her life in the Legion.

‘Put it on the case, over there,’ she told him, pointing across the room. ‘It will remind me of better times.’

Later, as evening fell, the two of them sat together on the veranda. As the light reduced, the rows of tenements started to blend into the grey-blue of the desert beyond. Sojuk had arranged a couple of portable lumens, strung from the veranda’s ceiling and swinging against the ever-present whine of the wind.

‘We are running low on supplies,’ he told her, standing at her side. ‘I will need to go into the city at first light.’

He attempted to hide it, but he was very weary. Weeks of non-stop fighting against the worst enemies imaginable, followed by days of unbroken wakefulness carrying deep wounds, had taken its toll even on him.

‘I’m grateful, Sojuk,’ Ilya said, pulling a blanket around her shoulders. It would get cold soon, and they would both need to sleep. ‘I’d never have made it.’

Sojuk bowed. ‘You say that. I think you would have found a way.’

She smiled wryly. Always with the compliments. ‘So, what now for you?

Your duty is done here.’

‘I will stay.’

‘Shiban will want you back.’

‘He ordered me to ward you.’ He left the rest unspoken: until the end.

Ilya took a sip of water from the canister she’d carried with her. ‘And after that? Things will change.’

Sojuk looked equivocal. ‘The Khagan will rule.’

She shivered slightly – the shock of seeing his alteration hadn’t faded.

Maybe his gene-progeny would be blind to it, once the Khan recovered.

Perhaps it wouldn’t matter. Or perhaps it would alter everything. It felt very strange, knowing that it would all take place without her.

‘We used to speculate,’ she said. ‘In the Departmento. About what would come for the Legions as the crusade ended. I doubted anything would happen because the primarchs were so powerful. Even then, it was hard to imagine imposing anything on the expeditionary fleets. But now… I really don’t know.’

‘We may go back to Chogoris,’ Sojuk said. ‘The oath was fulfilled.’

‘You might, and it was. But would you be allowed that luxury?’ She shook her head, doubtful. ‘They were lenient with you before. They could afford to be. Now it’s about survival. They will not want to lose control of one of the few Legions they still have here.’

‘The Khagan will not be compelled.’

‘No, maybe not. But there is more than one primarch on Terra, and they’re only nominal equals. Watch for Guilliman, would be my advice. The Wolf has no desire to control anything, and the Lion was always too busy with his own world’s intrigues. Guilliman, though, he’s a man after my own heart. An organiser. A builder of systems. If the Emperor fails to speak again, watch that one.’

‘I shall pass on the advice.’

‘Do. Look, you were a shambles when I first came among you. Don’t slip back now.’ Her expression became more serious. ‘It could all fall apart. It’s a dangerous time, just after the guns fall silent. You have few natural allies on the Throneworld, despite all your heroics. I wouldn’t like to see you swallowed up by them, your identity lost. That will be the instinct – to impose control, to erase the past. Fight it. Maybe the new masters of the Imperium will be wiser than those who commanded us, but I fear the best are gone now.’

Sojuk folded his arms. ‘Or it may be better. Renewal may come. Things were not perfect before.’

Ilya sighed. ‘They were not. Anything is possible. Still.’ She trailed away.

Every part of her ached. Her forehead felt hot, and she guessed she had another fever coming. ‘I’ll do my best to write down my thoughts on how the bureaucracy works. You can take them back with you. You’ll have to work with the politicians, the power brokers. You’ll need the tools. Your tulwars won’t frighten them.’

Sojuk looked at her tolerantly. ‘Szu, we have just arrived. You need to rest.

These things can wait until some strength returns.’ He looked up, over to the west, where the sun was sliding below the horizon and embossing the churning clouds with grey-pink. In the evening haze the worst of the damage to the urban structure was obscured, and the distant peaks were traced with slivers of intense gold. ‘I like this place. It has a good sky.’

Ilya let her head fall back, giving in, her dry lips twitching with a smile.

‘You’re right. It does.’

The next few days passed in a strange kind of companionability. Ilya, when her strength allowed, did what she could to put the house in order. For all that it had been inhabited by strangers for so long, very little of substance had changed. She would surprise herself to enter a room and have a memory of long ago immediately pulled into her mind: a gesture, a word, a laugh, an injury. At times she almost expected to hear her mother shuffle out of the hallway to nag her about getting married and giving her grandchildren, or her father grumble about the draft for the Army stripping the young from the city or ask for help with the maintenance of the cold-frames. She remembered the day she’d buried both of them, just weeks

apart, in the municipal cemetery on the city’s edge. She remembered how that had hollowed her out, made her feel more alone than she’d ever felt, and how after that the house had seemed both too big and too small. Too big for a single soul, too small for the ideas that had already clustered in her active mind.

So she had left. Studied for the Army exams, travelled five hundred kilometres away to the regional proving centre. She was older than the average, but progressed quickly. All those memory tests her father had instilled into her, all those mathematical treatises he’d forced her to plough through, proved their worth then. Progression up through the ranks felt as easy as anything. It had been rapid, painless, and she’d loved the work. The old house was swiftly forgotten, lost in a welter of troop planning and ledger creation. The stars had to be conquered. The race into the void had to be won. In time, she’d left Terra entirely, never once regretting it, marvelling at the beauty and the splendour of her new life, the shimmer of the galactic swirl against the deep dark, the fires in the abyss, the glittering fleets and the alien worlds.

And now she was back, and it all felt like a sham. A huge wrong turning, one that she should have seen coming. Who would have thought that the void-ships she’d travelled on – so colossal and unbreakable – were all destroyed now, whereas this little house was intact? It had been here the whole time, cradling the smells and sights of her earliest days, keeping them ready for her return.

She might have relished it more had the pain been less. She tried to hide the worst of it from Sojuk, who would only fuss, but she slept more than she waked now, and even hobbling out into the yard to feel some weak sun on her face took up most of her energy. Her lungs were tight, a result of all the toxic air she’d breathed in during her time in the Palace bunkers. Maybe the filth from the Lion’s Gate space port had pushed her a little further down the slide. The corruption there had been worse than anything she’d ever experienced during the worst of the fighting to get back to Terra.

So she sat more than she’d have liked and walked even less. She ate less too, and drank less. Some cleaning up was done, but most was left to Sojuk.

She found some old bulbs in her father’s ramshackle shed, and spent a long and exhausting afternoon clearing the dust-covered earth and planting them in a row. Sojuk had wanted to help her, but she’d shooed him away.

‘I can do this one thing,’ she’d snapped, angrier at herself and her decay than at him.

For his part, Sojuk did his own recovering. He found medicae supplies from somewhere, some tinned rations, a source of purified water. Astartes were astonishing things. Given just a little time and a few calorific inputs, his wounds seemed to fade away into nothing. She often wondered if he was keeping in touch with the Palace somehow, even though the range was great and all the comms networks were down. He would have to go back soon. It was still amazing to her that Shiban had even countenanced his absence for so long, but then the Scars had always been generous to a fault.

She did not venture much into the city itself. Sojuk told her a little about it

– that the emptiness appeared to be complete, that all the fighting had taken place a long time ago and no one appeared to have come back. On the few occasions she limped out of the front door and walked along the street, the echoing silence unnerved her. The stench of death was harder to ignore somehow, and the rapid erosion of the environment made her despondent. It had been a tidy place, once. Nothing glamorous, far from the bright centres, but the streets had been clean and the dwellings well kept.

The nights were worse. Strange noises were carried by the wind, just as had happened all the way along the journey. She had dreams about the feral canids, and feared they would follow the scent. She had dreams about the siege, especially the terrible last few days in the Rotunda, and woke often covered in freezing sweat. When she dreamed of the Khan, though, the images were all from the earlier days, before the war had really started, when he had been vital and imposing and alive. Those had been the best days, the ones that had been so busy that she’d barely slept, filled with an almost febrile level of discovery and enchantment. For a scant few moments, sunk within those dreams, the old reality was back, the one she had felt, at the time, would last forever.

As the days went on, Sojuk began to become increasingly concerned for her welfare. She felt the rapid weakening herself, but it no longer bothered her. What could she do? She sat in the yard as much as she could, blankets heaped over her even in the faint grey sunlight, and watched for germination from the bulbs. Sojuk told her he’d seen contrails from aircraft a few times, far to the south, but at least it was evidence of activity. He’d picked up signals from land vehicles too, but too far for him to investigate.

A convoy, he had thought, but they hadn’t been interested in the city, and he couldn’t tell where they were headed.

Little else punctuated her fading existence, just the ancient rhythms of light and dark, wakefulness and forgetting. She began to feel primordial.

Nothing to do, nowhere to go, just a state of being, herself alone, everything else stripped away.

‘Turning to stone,’ she murmured. ‘Just like everything else.’

Days later, some warmth returned. The cloud cover was sporadic, and patches of wan light speckled the ruins. The vegetation continued to grow, pushing up the asphalt into liquid-like ripples, prising apart cinderblock foundations. It was all already beginning to look parched, but maybe rain would come soon. Who knew what the weather systems were doing now, or how they would develop. Life would find a path, in one way or another.

Ilya woke from one of her shallow naps. She blinked, waiting for the room around her to come into focus. It took her a while to remember what was going on. Sojuk had gone out again some time ago, to collect more water, she thought. She had the place to herself. Again.

She tried to lift herself, felt shooting pain in her arms and chest. Stiffly, she pulled upright, shuffled to the lip of the chair’s seat. The room around her was dark, the blinds lowered, though thin strips of sunlight peeped in around the edges.

An odd smell wafted in from somewhere. Sojuk had cleared the corpses from the nearest hab-blocks, but the city still reeked when the wind dropped. Ilya sniffed. This one was foul, far worse than usual. Maybe something had got into the old cistern.

She got up awkwardly, rooted around for her stick, hobbled towards the rear doorway. As she did so, she heard a low machine grind: a whisper-soft purr of ancient servos, damaged and erratic. She turned her head, and saw the light strips under the blind interrupted. Something heavy was moving in front of the windows, coming for the front door.

‘Sojuk?’ she asked, tensing. She knew the sound of power armour, the way it moved, but the smell was getting worse.

Then the door opened, and a monster came in.

Even in her diminished state, despite all the corrosion and mutation of the battle plate, she instantly recognised the sigils. III Legion. Fulgrim’s sense-

addled degenerates. The monster was huge, as they all were, barely squeezing under the door frame. Its armour was incomplete, some plates missing, some fused with fat-pale flesh that rippled unnervingly around the edges. Scraps of other unfortunates’ skin hung from rivets and spikes, flecked with dark bloodstains. The monster was helmless, and its ruined face peered, birdlike, into the gloom. It had no eyes. Its ears had been sewn shut. Its mouth was only loosely human, crammed full of curved needle-thin teeth and with a lacertine black tongue. A few scraps of thin hair clung to an otherwise naked scalp. It carried no weapon, but its gauntlets had been refashioned into cutting tools. It stank of perfume, chems and rotting flesh.

It turned its eyeless head towards her, sniffed, smiled.

‘I came this way before,’ it said. Its voice was like tangled steel pulled across glass. ‘No one was left. I ate this city. I ate it all. Then how are you here?’

Ilya could hardly breathe. The creature filled up the entire space, dominating the tiny chamber, looking almost as if it might keep swelling until it squeezed her up against the walls.

It took a step towards her. Just a single step, on a leg of exposed muscle, pinned skin pulled back from the sinews, old ceramite of lurid finery now cracked and faded.

‘I slept for a long time,’ it said. ‘Gorged on the gristle of your kind. Now I awake again, and nothing is left. The Warmaster is gone. My people are gone. Has the world ended? Has it all ended?’

Ilya remembered the dome at the city’s heart, the one like a broken jaw.

Had this thing been slumbering in there? Wouldn’t Sojuk have detected it?

It felt like a fist had rammed itself down her throat, choking out the words from her mouth. Not like this! she wanted to scream. Not like this!

The monster’s knife-fingers snickered against one another. ‘I shall starve, if I do not eat. I shall starve. Shall I eat you? How long will your flesh keep me alive?’

The monster was insane. It seemed barely sensate, as if its sensory inputs had all been burned out. It panted, it drooled.

Then, suddenly, she was angry. She remembered what the III Legion had done to the Scars at Kalium. She remembered what these bastards had done to a thousand worlds, how much they had ruined, how much pain they had caused, and for nothing, because they themselves had been destroyed too,

they had dragged the whole species down with them, and for all their power and their strength they were to blame, the Astartes were to blame, and it had been her kind, the baseline humans, who had kept things together for their masters while they swaggered in their blood orgy across the stars.

‘Get out of here,’ she croaked, balling her veined fists. ‘Get out of this place.’

It sniffed again, grinned, its tongue curling around skinless lips. ‘I can already smell death on you,’ it said. ‘It hangs over your shoulder, close, close. Lucky you. I can give you a remarkable death. An extraordinary one.

I made a scream last for a whole day, once. Shall I best that record with you?’

No fear remained. She was furious. She was beyond fury. Her cheeks flushed, her nostrils flared. ‘They will drive you out,’ she spat. ‘They will drive you from this world and hunt you into the void. You have failed here.

Nothing awaits you now but oblivion. They will never let you back.’

That halted it. For a second, it hesitated, as if stung by the words. It cocked its avian head, considering.

Then it grinned again. It raised its bladed hand, extended the fingers. Bars of shadow fell across her face.

‘You might be right,’ it said, advancing. ‘But, just for now, your shrieks will light up the empyrean.’

Neither of them saw Sojuk coming. Just as before, with the canids, he was suddenly there, piling through the door, tackling the monster and barrelling it past her, the two of them carried together by his momentum and slamming into the far wall, denting the masonry and making the ceiling above it sag.

Ilya fell to her haunches, fighting against hyperventilation, instantly reduced to a spectator as the armoured leviathans went at it. Sojuk had his blade drawn, slashing wildly and tearing loose flesh from the beast. The traitor lunged back at him, punching its knives at the White Scar’s throat and torso. The monster wailed horribly as it fought, an eldritch squeal, while Sojuk fought with silent determination.

The monster would win. She could already see it. It was faster, stronger, still benefitting from the gifts it had been given despite its debasement.

Sojuk hammered at it, gauntlets flying, but the thing seemed to absorb

every punishment. The margins were tight, just as all combat between Astartes was tight, but this could only have one outcome.

She would not allow it. This was her house. Trembling, she got up, staggered over to the pile of old cases, grabbed Qin Xa’s dagger and unsheathed it for the very first time. A white metal blade glinted in the pale sun, and it felt light in her hands. She clutched it two-handed over her head, took a deep breath, and threw herself at the monster.

Sojuk reacted immediately, seeing the opportunity, slamming his adversary around in an all-in move that rocked it into her path while sacrificing his defence. Ilya thrust the dagger point down, putting every last morsel of her strength into the blow. It penetrated the nape of the monster’s neck, jarring on bone before sliding deep into the spinal cord.

The monster screamed, thrashing wildly and throwing Ilya free. Her hands slipped from the dagger’s grip and she thudded to the floor, skidding along before smacking into her chair. The blade had bitten deep, and Sojuk now had the opening he needed. He punched three deep quick thrusts in succession, tearing up the creature’s chest and sending its armour panels clanging to the ground. It tried to respond, its throat filled with blood now, its limbs half hanging, but missed its aim. Sojuk spun viciously, whipping his tulwar laterally across the traitor’s neck. The blade lodged deep, dislodging Ilya’s dagger. The traitor’s huge, raddled corpse teetered, swayed, then crashed down, cracking the floor and making the walls around them shiver.

Ilya could feel herself losing consciousness. She tried to get up, and failed.

Through blurred vision she saw Sojuk hurrying for her. He knelt down, his hand lifting her head up gently.

‘Did it strike you?’ he demanded urgently.

Ilya glanced over at her blade, bloody on the floor beside her, used for the first and last time, her gift from the greatest blademaster the Legion had ever produced.

‘No,’ she whispered hoarsely, passing out but still angry. ‘I struck it.’

She never asked Sojuk what he did with the corpse. She was out for so long that by the time she came around, it was almost as if it had never happened.

The wall was still damaged though; the smell lingered. It had happened.

Once she was fully awake, Sojuk took her out into the yard. She sat in the wicker chair, covered in blankets, shivering under the warm sun.

‘So you are one of us at last,’ he said, a weak smile on his worried face.

‘Blooded into the Legion.’

She tried to laugh. It was too painful. After that, they sat together for a long time without saying anything. She looked out over the little yard, the patches of earth she’d cleared, the tools tidied away and hanging neatly.

‘This will enter the annals,’ Sojuk added, sticking to his theme. ‘Shiban Khan will want it recorded.’

Despite everything, she couldn’t help feeling a glow of pride at that. He was right, after all. She’d ended a Space Marine. It had come late in the day, long past the real fighting, but military reputations had been built on far less. Sojuk had taken some nasty wounds, but they would heal up. She, on the other hand, could feel the internal damage. The last test. A good one to go out on.

‘I want you to remember what I told you,’ she said, her voice a faint hiss now. ‘About the Legions, about Guilliman. Do not return to Chogoris too soon. The Khagan needs to see to that.’

Sojuk nodded, taking it seriously. ‘But do not–’

‘My collected data-slates might still be in the Rotunda. Someone should retrieve them. They have documents from the earliest surveys of the Legion, ones that will be useful for reconstruction.’

‘They will be–’

‘You need alliances with Mars, quickly. Get the ships rebuilt. That’s your great asset. Even the Thirteenth can’t master the void like you can.’

Sojuk smiled to himself, defeated. ‘Anything else?’

She thought about it. For some reason, she suddenly remembered Yesugei’s calm face then, on Ullanor, the very first time she’d met a Chogorian. ‘Be careful,’ he’d said. She’d not heeded that advice. She’d never been careful, and it had – mostly – been wonderful.

‘When the Khagan is returned to himself,’ she said, ‘thank him.’

‘Thank him?’

She looked up. ‘For bringing me home. From there, where I didn’t belong, to here, where I do. Do that for me, Sojuk. Thank him.’

After that, the weather warmed further, a steady heat now, gathering strength day after day. The worst of the storms faded, and even the wind dropped a little. No one came to the city, no more monsters were uncovered.

One morning, Sojuk entered Ilya’s room. It was late, and over the past few days he had been helping her walk to the row of bulbs she’d planted to see if they would germinate. He found her lying on her bed, one arm limp against the floor. He went to her, kneeled down close, checked for breathing, checked for a pulse.

Then he sat back, and rested his chin on his chest for a long time. Then he reached up and made sure her eyes were closed. He rested her hand on her chest, and arranged the covers around her. And then he wept.

If Ilya had been Chogorian, her body would have been left for the sky. But she was Terran, so Sojuk buried her in the yard of the house where she had been raised. He left no marker, just in case an enemy should come again and recognise the name, but placed the dagger beside her in the earth. He wondered if she’d known just what a priceless gift it was, and how few blades of such quality had ever been made. He guessed she had done. She had probably known all about it, and been embarrassed by it and flattered at the same time.

After that he spent a long time in the house. He repaired the damage caused by the fight. He put the last of the old mess in order, just as she would have wanted it. He found things to do. Eventually, he couldn’t think of any more tasks. He would go to the transport, take it back to the Palace, report to Shiban Khan and set in motion the things that needed doing. It was where he belonged, and the work was both necessary and honourable.

Before he left, he went into the yard one last time. The light was weak, greyer than it had ever been. A rumble of thunder sounded from the south, where the clouds were thickening against the distant peaks. Despite his efforts, the place looked shabby, bereft of colour, as if the materials themselves were mournful. The growing heat didn’t feel natural. It didn’t feel like it would ebb again.

He crouched down by her garden, checking the soil. Nothing. Too soon, surely. Maybe if it got warmer, something would push through. Maybe, by the time explorators got here, a new garden would be blooming. Or maybe

the poisons ran too deep, and nothing good would be ever raised on this world again.

She had planted, though. Right at the end. She had performed the labour.

That seemed like the important thing. The rite. The activity. She had always been busy, always diligent.

‘ Untakh, szu-khundet,’ he said, softly. ‘To your rest, honoured sage.’

Then he left the house, closing the door behind him. He shut it before heading back to the Palace, closing it tight on a life, on a war, on an age.

Ilya tends the land.

THE CARRION LORD OF THE

IMPERIUM

AARON DEMBSKI-BOWDEN

I

I was there, the day Prometheus stole fire from the gods.

Haedo would chide me for that phrasing. Ra would smile in that sad way of his. Samonas would sigh and call it melodrama. Were any of them here, that is. Were any of them still alive.

But I was there – as were they – on the day our king did what He should never have done. With great engines of scientific violence, He plunged His metaphysical hand into the realm behind reality’s veil. When He withdrew His questing touch, still burning with the violation of breaking the dimensional barrier, there it was. A divine and malignant light.

We asked it then, as you ask it now, as it will be asked in the darkening millennia to come:

Why?

We weren’t enough, you see.

Every one of us represented years of the fleshcrafter’s toil. Each one of us was something bespoke, something wrought just so. We were His guardians in times of war and His conscience in times of crisis. But He could not build an empire with us alone. We were a mere ten thousand souls. If the galaxy’s song is the screaming fusion of a hundred billion stars, our presence was less than a whisper.

There are already scribblings that tell of an accord being reached, a deal being made, or – and one must pay heed to the phrasing of this one – a pact being sworn. I saw no smirking godlings or capering sprites offering to sell tainted souls at midnight. I saw machines. I saw machinery torn out of a bygone age, when humanity had mastered marvels to put our greatest achievements now to shame. Our king hadn’t invented these, any more than He invented the Golden Throne. His genius was never in creation but recreation. His mastery was in dredging the truths and promises of the past, pulling them up into the dim light of today. His vision for humanity’s golden future was built on the technoarchaeological bones of the past.

The engines I saw began as charcoal on parchment, evolving into hololithic schema written in flickering light through the stagnant air of the Palace’s catacombs. Where these ancient engines called for elements of Abominable Intelligence, from the era when robots could think and reason, our king patchworked biotechnical solutions blending engineering and necromancy.

The function of these machines was unknown to me. Unknown to all of us.

Their purpose, yes, that we knew. Their operation owed as much to magic as it did to manufacturing. And that, too, we knew.

So, there we gathered. Not all of us. Not even most of us. Just some of us, those that happened to be present by luck, destiny, or design. The others –

those of the Ten Thousand whom our king trusted above all others – had voiced their hearts and thoughts before. But this was it. We gathered there, in the stark-lit dark, where it always felt no torch’s light ever did more than stab at the gloom.

And, one by one, we told Him:

No.

– Epistle I:I , The Master of Mankind

by Diocletian Coros

‘Humans,’ says Constantin, who is never the first to speak, and often the last. His face isn’t bleached of emotion tonight. That masquerade has no place here: it’s a performance for other audiences. Nor is his voice the stern and stoic baritone of a being expecting his lessers to hear and obey. There’s passion in his tone. He means what he’s saying.

‘The people,’ he says, and his words have the ring of a promise. ‘The people of the Imperium.’

This is an argument they’ve all heard before. Many of them agree with it.

Amon nods in the wake of Valdor’s words. He is one of the Three Hundred, as are the others gathered here in the rattling and clanking heart of the Imperial Dungeon. When any of the Ten Thousand speak, the Emperor always deigns to hear their words, but the Three Hundred are granted indulgences even beyond that. Rank and battle honours mean nothing; none of them has ever really known what qualities they possess that brought them into the Emperor’s innermost circle. They know only that they are the chosen of the chosen.

‘And we will lead them,’ Amon tells his king. ‘The Ten Thousand shall lead the armies of the Imperium into battle.’ Amon is loved by all present here for a lifetime of forthright speech and fraternal honesty. His voice is as rich as Constantin’s, flooded with that same belief in what he’s saying.

Ra is one of the Dynastes – called the Lords of Terra with a smile that could be kind or unkind, depending on who wears it. He was a child of the Emperor’s gravest enemies, stolen from his parents as punishment for their sins, now grown to primacy among the Emperor’s elite. Like Constantin, like Amon, Ra was one of the very first to wear a Custodian’s pale and cold Imperial gold.

He pulls his gaze away from the machines that spark and crash in their housings. Softly – for though he shouts orders across a battlefield, he’s never been as strident in questioning his king as some of the others – he lends his voice to Constantin’s and Amon’s.

The others speak, too. All of them. Their protests and promises echo throughout the grand chamber, over a syncopated backbeat of machines drilling their way through the dimensional barrier. Diocletian listens to all of them, though his eyes never leave his king.

He feels strange being here with only his kindred in gold, though he doesn’t know why. The truth is, he’s not alone in this sensation. It’s a

hollowness that plagues many of the Custodians, for they’re created as only half of a whole. In years to come, when the Great Crusade is born and the Imperium begins claiming the one million worlds that comprise its core, the Legio Custodes will be joined by others just as alien to baseline humanity as they are themselves. There will be unity, synergies yet unimagined, between the Emperor’s finest genetic creations and his warriors born without souls. Together, they will be the Talons. Decades from this moment, Diocletian will be by Kaeria Casryn’s side; long since used to interpreting her thoughts through flickers in her facial expression, knowing her meaning by the weave of her hands in the air as she forms the wordplay of thoughtmark.

But here, now, those nights are far in the future. Of the Silent Sisterhood, only Jenetia Krole exists, and she has yet to cut out her tongue. She stands some way from the Emperor, sensed by all but seen by none. They know she is here somewhere. They register her presence as a distracting absence, like words on a page that never come into focus. She is a sentence you read three times and still miss its meaning.

When every objection has been made and every alternate path suggested, the Custodians fall as silent as Krole.

The Emperor turns to the only one of the Three Hundred that has not yet spoken.

‘Diocletian,’ He says, in a voice that His false sons will one day say is kind, unkind, angry, and calm, no matter its pitch and tone. To Diocletian, He just sounds tired.

Dio isn’t sure what to say. He lacks Constantin’s soulful composure, or Amon’s gift for abrupt rhetoric, or Ra’s poetic sincerity. He worries, in his quiet moments, if he is worthy of inclusion within the Three Hundred. He wonders if his king made a mistake by appointing him.

Everyone is watching him. Waiting for him to speak. Waiting for him to join the chorus of oaths that their blades will be enough, that the Custodians will lead the armies of the Imperium into battle, and that those armies will be human. Not Legions of transhumans. Not led by godling generals. That all this work, all these machines, are unnecessary.

You don’t need to do this, he could say. You don’t need to steal the warp’s essence. You don’t need to create these things, these… primarchs.

Diocletian tells the truth, as he always does to the Emperor, as they all always do. It’s just that, tonight, his truth is different to theirs.

‘I don’t think it matters what I say.’ Dio leans on his spear and inclines his head to the Emperor. ‘I don’t think it matters what any of us say. With respect, my king, I think you’re going to do it anyway.’

II

Immortality.

There is no greater gift, and I have no time for those that decry eternity as a burden. Humans have always soothed their fears with fantasies of what awaits them at the end of life, and it’s hard to respect them for warming themselves with lies.

I try not to judge. Truly. But I am so sick of their prayers.

I am so tired of hearing the people scream and shriek and mumble and murmur of an afterlife at the Emperor’s side. Their prayers reach our ears even here, creeping, spreading, an infection of faith overcoming the species.

I don’t want to enlighten them. It isn’t malice that motivates me. But in the name of the man they believe is a god, I wish they would cease their wailing.

We know what happens when a soul leaves a body. The fortunate enter swift oblivion. The unfortunate are the playthings of daemons, forever. It is the fundamental truth of reality, and the one thing our king never wanted the species to know.

We don’t die as other beings die. We don’t age as mortals age. For us, death is a misfortune not an inevitability. We can be killed, of course. Many of us have been. Nevertheless, we represent the pinnacle of genetic archaeoscience. One of the Dungeon’s laboratory menials spent her life studying my blood – she grew old and died before there was any change in the blood cells under her monoscope.

For the longest time, we didn’t even know if we aged. The Astartes can grow ancient, and their genetic code was always something mass-produced and imperfect. But we would reach a state of healthy middle-age and then…

stasis. Was there some temporal sorcery used in our creation? Something undetectable, that our king never shared with us?

We suspect not. We aren’t made the way the primarchs were made, with tampered metaphysics and borrowed essence. We aren’t flawed from the very start.

There are those of our number that believe, not without precedent, that we don’t age if we remain in our king’s presence. That it is He – something about His body and soul – that binds us to immortality. No one has ever been gone from the Emperor’s side long enough to test this notion; at least, none that have ever returned.

This raises questions better answered by men like Constantin, or Haedo, or Ra. Is there something inside us, some aspect of our loyalty, founded on selfishness? That immortality is ours – but only if our king lives? These are the secret questions my kind has asked one another since our creation, and the kinds of philosophic quandaries we once brought to our king.

I never asked Him such things. Back then, I wore my simplistic demeanour as a badge of honour. I used to tell Ra that I didn’t care about the answers.

Sometimes, walking the halls of the catacombs as they are today, I ask myself what I never considered in those long-lost days: if He kept the truth of reality from the humans, and the truth of obsolescence from the Astartes, was there some truth – magnificent in its darkness – that He kept from us?

Did I keep silent because I trusted my king, or did I never ask anything of Him because I feared what He might say?

– Epistle V:IV , The Master of Mankind

by Diocletian Coros

It is their first funeral. They don’t know what to do.

The Ten Thousand are no strangers to death, and such is their education that they can summon to memory the graveside rituals of innumerable cultures. But they don’t have their own funeral rites because none of them has ever died. All that knowledge of death was academic until now.

Sagittarus was the first to suffer terminal wounds, his dying form infused with alchemical and technological life-sustainers and interred in the cradle-coffin of a Dreadnought. He slumbers often to ease the weight of his dislocated mind. But he still lives. After a fashion.

And there are others beyond Sagittarus. The Moritoi. The living, wounded unto death but saved from the grave, still able to wage war.

Xerxes is dead, though. Truly dead. How should they mark the loss of one of their own?

They ring his body now, shielding it from view. Curiously, it’s the men and women from the Imperial Army that grant the Custodians the most privacy.

With the battle won, they tend to their own wounded and deal with their own dead. These duties may be sorrowful for them, but they’re hardly unfamiliar. They leave the Custodians in peace, sensing that something momentous has happened here today.

The Legio Cataegis knows no such etiquette. The warriors of the Thunder Legion come sniffing around, some curious, some conciliatory, neither of which the Custodians have any interest in hearing. The proto-Astartes are sent away with polite dismissals and the occasional wordless grunt.

Diocletian stands with Juhaza and Mycorian, two of Ra’s Lords of Terra, the Emperor’s precious Dynastes. Haedo looks down at the body, what’s left of it: Xerxes is a thing of meat and broken gold, and it makes Dio’s skin crawl to even glance downward. Gore holds no unease for him, let alone disgust. It’s just that the corpse’s existence feels at odds with reality.

Ra and Amon converse in low tones a short distance away, their armour burnished amber in the light of the setting sun. Diocletian can hear what they’re saying and has no desire to join in. Should they return the body to the Palace? Should they make a cairn? Should they burn the remains? And if so, do they do it alone, or place the corpse with the fallen humans to be incinerated on the mass pyre?

There are political considerations, too. Several of the others have already noted them. The humans would feel honoured if a Custodian was burned in a pyre with the Imperial Army’s slain. Is that an honour that should be conferred upon them? Is their morale a factor for the Ten Thousand to take into account? Would Xerxes have willed it this way? And whether he would or not, do the wishes of the dead even matter?

Diocletian has no answers for them. He can still scarcely believe that he’s looking at a corpse.

Later – when most of these new emotions have lost ground against the mundane realities of troop transports, drop-ships, resupply runs, and the hundred other tasks of lifting an army from here to there – Diocletian comes

upon Constantin. They’re still on the field of battle, their boots still muddy with the blood-reddened muck of the land they were told they had to take.

At first, he doesn’t approach. Constantin stands not far from the edge of a cliff overlooking the ruined cityscape below – a vista of tumbledown grey and pillars of smoke that reach the cloudy sky. Constantin doesn’t move. He watches the aftermath of compliance. The wreckage. The fires. The death of a culture that dared resist the precious homogeneity of Unification.

Regardless of all else, it paints a picture: the captain-general, first of their kind, radiates solitude.

In the quiet, away from everyone and everything, Diocletian hears the low, emotive song on the air. Realising his intrusion, he begins to turn away.

‘Dio.’

Diocletian turns back at the sound of his name. Constantin is watching him now, the captain’s eyes betraying a soulful nature the enemies of the Imperium will never know.

‘I didn’t mean to intrude, Con.’

‘All is well.’ There’s a hesitation, three heartbeats in duration. When he speaks again, Constantin’s voice is edged with something subtle and wry. It makes him seem human. Almost. ‘I take it you heard me.’

Now it’s Diocletian’s turn to hesitate. ‘I didn’t know you could sing. It sounded… sad.’

That isn’t the right word, and he knows it, but no word seems righter in its place. Ra would say something like, It sounded melancholy, like you mourned a future that will never come to pass, but the day is unlikely to dawn when Dio phrases things in those terms. Ra tends to sound measured and thoughtful with his eternal sincerity. Diocletian suspects he’d sound far less insightful if he tried to mimic it.

‘It’s a lament,’ Constantin admits, scratching his unshaven jawline.

Diocletian is one of the Ten Thousand that prefers to be clean-shaven, while Constantin always seems a day or three distant from a razor. ‘There was a Nordafrik tribe, a century ago. The Abar. Do you know of them?’

Diocletian does, though he wasn’t present for the war that annihilated them.

‘I’ve seen their entries in the Palace archives. Nomads of the Zu’har Expanse. Matriarchal. Spiritual. Dedicated to ancestor worship.’

Constantin nods. ‘They’d sing dirges by the pyres of their fallen.’ For a moment, he lifts his dark eyes to the occluded sky. ‘Believing that their words join the wind with their loved ones’ ashes. And so, the dead are sent into the afterlife with the blessings of the living.’

Diocletian has never been a passionate student of history.

‘Such fascinating heathens,’ he says.

Constantin smiles. ‘Sarcasm is a keen blade, Dio. Try to wield it carefully.’

Diocletian grunts, the closest he’s come to laughter in days. He adds nothing to it, and Constantin senses the unspoken question, the reason Dio approached him.

‘Ask,’ Constantin presses.

Diocletian gestures west, towards the great golden drop-ship nestling on the churned earth, its wings spread wide. Before he can ask the question, Constantin smiles again.

‘Ah,’ says the First of the Ten Thousand.

Dio asks it, nevertheless. ‘Why doesn’t He tell us what to do?’ There’s something not a thousand leagues from frustration in his tone, giving flavour to his curiosity. ‘Why doesn’t He tell us how to deal with Xerxes’

body?’

He can see in Constantin’s eyes that Con doesn’t have the answer, either.

What Constantin has, as he so often does, is more questions.

‘When has He ever told us how to manage our inner selves?’

‘Ugh. You sound like Malcador. Stop trying to impart wisdom upon me.

Just talk to me.’

Constantin takes a breath, searching for the right words – or the least-wrong ones.

‘I don’t know,’ he admits, ‘and you know I don’t know. Perhaps He keeps His distance because He comprehends that something seismic has occurred in our ranks. Or perhaps He’s already musing over the logistics of His next conquest and the emotions of His creations are a matter of absolute indifference.’

Diocletian gives him a look. ‘You’re not saying anything I’ve not already considered.’

‘I think I am.’ Constantin is patience incarnate. ‘It doesn’t matter why He leaves us alone tonight, Dio. All that matters is that He does.’

Ra has a word for conversations like this about their king. That word is ineffable, and it makes Diocletian grind his teeth.

‘We’re the ones who will make the choice,’ Constantin says. ‘So let us make it.’

Diocletian joins Constantin on the ridge overlooking the dead city, and the two secular demigods speak of heathenry across history. They search for the right rites to honour the first of their kindred to die, knowing that whatever they decide will shape precedent for the second, and the third, and every life they lose in their king’s long war for the soul of the species.

III

It’s said that almost none of the Ten Thousand are able to dream. The biological and psychological truth of the matter is beyond me, though the oneiroscists of my king’s court have theories on the necessity of dreams and the corresponding stability of a mind. It’s commonly believed by the survivors of the Ten Thousand that we all dream, as do all sentient beings, but something in our physiology prevents the evidence of firing synapses showing in machine analysis, and keeps us from accessing those memories.

But I remember mine. Constantin once ventured that it was an intentional adjustment in the Emperor’s genetic masterwork: that our king manipulated each use of the Custodian gene-process in unique and subtle ways, defining us as individuals. There’s no way to know if that’s true. Con knew our king as well as any living being could, but I can’t conceive of why the Emperor would leave me – or imbue me – with the capacity to dream.

My king once asked me to ensure the details of my somnolent visions were entered into the Tower of Hegemon’s archives. I don’t know if He ever read them when He still walked among us, but since His installation upon the Throne, I’ve considered abandoning the practice. It’s a tedium I could well do without. I did it only because He asked it of me, in an age that is already slipping away from mortal memory into immortal myth.

Yet I allow it to continue. It was one of the few times my king asked something of me personally, without it being a command to the Ten Thousand or a specific order given in the line of duty. He came to me one day and He asked for it. I find that I can’t, in good conscience, refuse Him even now. Even now, when it no longer matters.

For most of my life, scribes have painstakingly preserved every one of my dreams, recording my dictations first as simple research, now increasingly as holy writ. As the years pass, what was once a scientific curiosity is taking on a more religious weight, and I see the scribes – ever more faithful, ever more ignorant – clutching the rolls of parchment with a disconcerting fervour.

The nature of my dreams is detailed in thousands of dictated scrolls already. This includes the way they changed from seemingly random firing of synapses invoking scraps of memory and imagination, into something focused and sour. I won’t relate any of them here. I will only note that when the scribes ask me if I reflect on the way my dreams changed to nightmares, I admit that I don’t.

But I often reflect on the day that changed them.

– Epistle X:III , The Master of Mankind

by Diocletian Coros

Diocletian is in the Dungeon when the Emperor’s dream dies. He knows the moment it happens, not because of some over-tuned transhuman sense, but because the entire Eurasian landmass quakes with sudden torment.

He sprints through the chambers of the Imperial Dungeon, through packs of confused and panicking technicians and scientists, towards the screams, the gunfire, the thunder; the sound of empire strangling on its own ignorance. He runs as he’s never run before, with every iota of his physicality devoted to motion. He is a machine; a weapon being drawn for the fight about to take place.

Though less than a minute has passed, by the time he tears into the central chamber the burning avatar of Magnus the Red is gone, driven back by the onslaught of the Ten Thousand and the revelation of its own catastrophic success. In the wake of Magnus’ banishment, disorder reigns. The webway gate is a wound wrenched wide, vomiting inhumanity into the Throne Room. Things, creatures that use humanity only as a mocking baseline from which to diverge, spill into reality, exalted by Magnus arrogantly tearing open the path before them.

‘To the Emperor!’ Constantin is shouting above the uproar as he spins and cleaves and carves and kills. ‘To the Emperor’s side!’

The Emperor is already ringed by fifteen of His golden elite – Con is one of them – and Diocletian is halfway to his king’s side when the Emperor throws His hand forward, fingers curled into a claw as if He could tear at the webway portal from where He stands. Dio sees the scream in his king’s frantic stare before it leaves the Emperor’s lips.

‘Into the breach!’ the Master of Mankind cries out, and His voice is broken, heart-struck. He wears the face of a man watching his hopes die.

The Custodians obey their king, killing their way forward, advancing through the dissipating muck of daemons. The sheer density of corpses forces them to crush underfoot the bodies of butchered Terran scientists and viziers of the Martian Mechanicum. Diocletian is in the front ranks, at Ra’s side by virtue of instinct or fortune. They share a look as they draw closer to the screaming portal. In temporal terms, the glance lasts barely half a second. More than long enough to convey the weight of what both men fear.

For Magnus the Red to have reached the Throne Room, and for Hell to have followed in his wake, there’s a chance that every single Imperial soul on the other side of the portal is already dead. Magnus, through intent or ignorance, has killed thousands of men and women, Martian and Terran, in the span of seconds.

Ra rams his spear through the throat of something shrieking and horned and ultimately nameless, and he plunges forward into the portal, only a step behind Constantin. Diocletian feels as he always feels when he approaches the webway gate: that it wants him to enter and that he has no right doing so. It’s a breach in existence as sure as the warp – the high arcane art of a long-dead species that considered the laws of the physical universe something beneath them, a malleable joke rather than inviolate reality.

Diocletian turns back, seeing the warriors of the Anathema Psykana forming squad-ranks, the Sisters of Silence gathering into their packs and bracing to follow the Custodians. He sees more of his own kind entering the chamber, surging forward; more of his own kind around him, the power fields of their spears crisping away the daemonic blood trying to cling to their blades. He sees scientist-priests of the Mechanicum unlocking never-used protocols to bring weapons of devastating misery to full power; he

sees these holy souls bear them on their shoulders or pull them from beneath robes with unfamiliar grips.

He sees Kaeria. She is his in a way that veteran soldiers will know without needing words to qualify. He is hers in the same way – a bond defined by its supreme intimacy in absence of sensuality. The same way Constantin has Jenetia Krole, and Jenetia has Con. The same way Celia Harroda has Ra, and Ra has Celia.

It isn’t love. Between many, it isn’t even affection. It just is. The bonds that form on the front lines between the chosen few entrusted with the secrets of the galaxy. Bonds mandated at first by a king that needed His precious elite to know, see, and do things far beyond the scope of any others in His kingdom. These bonds will grow in the coming decade, in the war that has literally just begun in the webway. In the case of Ra and Celia, that bond will also end there.

Dio sees Kaeria gathering, arming, with her cadre. She sees him in the same second, and her hand cuts a single slash of thoughtmark across the distance. Endure, that curved slice of her hand says, the way someone else might say Stay alive or Good luck.

Diocletian sees and processes all of this in the time it takes a human to blink. And there, at the heart of this madness, is the Emperor.

Other recollections of this moment will cite that the Emperor raged at what fate had dealt, or was perfectly calm, or said nothing at all. Diocletian will disregard these alternate tales. He sees now what he will always remember seeing: he sees the Emperor distraught, ordering His finest and most loyal souls into the breach, and that in itself is a new kind of agony. He’s never seen his king weep before. Until now, he hadn’t been sure it was possible, whether there was enough humanity in the man for such a human reaction.

Diocletian turns back to the gate. Its alien light screams against his armour.

He steps forward.

IV

If there is one subject which has had more breath committed to questions than any other, and more ink committed to parchment in its analysis, then it is this:

Why did they betray us?

Haedo once asked a more pertinent question, one that haunted me in its aftermath: Why did it take them so long?

There’s a question behind this question. It was often said, in doggerel screeds and propaganda offered up by remembrancers, that the primarchs each embodied an element of the Emperor. Some say they even carried His soul, portioned away into pieces.

This is a lie. At best, it’s a half-truth. There was no division of soul-stuff, no imbuing of the Emperor’s attributes into the gestating monsters that thought they were His sons. Stories have always simplified the nature of gods and heroes by telling tales of children inheriting this virtue or that flaw from their divine sires and mares.

The most evident and crucial divergence between my king and His creations is thus: the Emperor existed for unification. To unite the lost worlds of humanity. To unite an Imperium in echo of the human race’s lost interstellar empire. To unite the species and protect it from unseen adversaries.

The primarchs, from their first steps out into the galaxy, existed in a state of disunity. They distrusted one another. They resented each other’s glories.

They fought amongst themselves even before the great rebellion. Each one of them knew best. Each one of them believed their way was right; no compromise, none.

Yet Haedo’s question remains.

Was this tendency towards infighting because the Emperor had sliced away sections of His spirit and gifted them to His creations? Were they spiritually, fundamentally, incomplete?

I believe not. I believe the opposite. They were perfectly complete. The Emperor succeeded too well in His undertaking.

Each of them embodied their creator in something close to His entirety.

Each of them possessed the same messianic urge for absolute unity that the Ten Thousand saw in our king. They didn’t fight amongst themselves because the Emperor left them incomplete. They hated one another because each of them was an Emperor.

– Epistle XLI:I , The Master of Mankind

by Diocletian Coros

It is the final days of the primarchs and their Legions. Soon, they will be exiled from Terra as the new leaders of the Imperium close the tome of history on the age of gods and demigods. A new age of stagnation and fear is dawning, built over the bones of truths best left forgotten.

Diocletian is going to kill Roboute Guilliman.

He knows it with the surety that he’s ever known anything, that unless the self-proclaimed Lord Commander of the Imperium doesn’t fall silent at once, Dio and the Custodians at his side – and the remaining, furtive, persecuted Sisters in this grand chamber – will draw their blades, and they will kill the creature that believes itself heir to the empire.

Time and again they have endured Guilliman’s speeches, his declarations of intent, his orders that counter even the wishes of his own brothers to the point there are already whispers of another war. A war, this time, over Guilliman’s vision for the Imperium.

‘Are you listening, Diocletian? I call for unity, at a time when we need it most.’

Diocletian is listening. He doesn’t hear calls for unity. He hears demands of obedience. The time they most needed unity was decades ago, when half of Guilliman’s breed set the galaxy aflame.

‘Are you finished?’ Diocletian asks softly. ‘Are you done?’

This is how Diocletian looks to the world outside his brothers and Sisters.

He is almost entirely without warmth and without humour. His genetic lessers irritate him, and he regards no being as his genetic superior. He is decisive, authoritative, and absent of all patience. This perception doesn’t grieve him. He truly couldn’t care less how he’s perceived by others. The perceptions that mattered belong to men and women that are, mostly, now in their graves.

Metaphorically, that is. Many are decomposing unburied in the webway, their bones gnawed by daemons. Many others were incinerated on the Palace walls, their ashes scattered to the Terran winds. But the sentiment stands.

‘I grow weary of your mistrust,’ says Roboute Guilliman, saviour of Terra, Lord of the Armies of Humanity, Avenging Son of the Emperor. And then he says Diocletian’s title, which was once Ra’s title, in a tone of voice that, to human ears, is perfectly smooth, perfectly calm. ‘Tribune.’

Diocletian stops moving. He stops breathing. He’s an animal in that moment, a thing of urges and desires, frozen in place as he feels his heartbeat quicken. If he isn’t careful, if he doesn’t master his instinct and his rage, then the Imperium will lose another primarch this day.

He isn’t convinced that wouldn’t be for the best. Perhaps it would be. But he doesn’t believe it’s his decision to make.

The others sense it, too. It passes between every Talon in the chamber, as wordless and true as a Sister’s hand signals. He sees Haedo shift position, ever so slightly adjusting his balance. He sees Kaeria tilt her head a fraction of an inch and, by her thigh, she taps her first finger against the tip of her thumb in silent signal. He sees others, Custodians and Sisters in absolute harmony and absolute unity; if he acts now, they will act with him before the courageous and honourable fools in blue can even aim their bolters.

‘My mistrust,’ Diocletian repeats. His tone is that of a man seeking clarity.

He wants to be sure he heard what he thinks he heard. ‘ My mistrust.’

There is so, so much he could say to Roboute Guilliman.

He could state, calmly, clearly, that tens of millions have died on worlds that the Legions deigned not to defend, regardless of orders from Terra. He could remind the Lord Commander of the lives lost in the months it took the Khan to decide what side he was on, and ask just how many war fronts lacked Legion support because the Warhawk couldn’t decide whether to betray the man he insists is his father.

He could ask how many Imperial Army regiments went unsupported, on how many worlds, because the primarchs enacted their own crusades instead of aligning with the Imperium’s defence. He could ask how many lives were lost on the Throneworld, and across the galaxy itself, because the mighty Lord of Ultramar squatted in his petty kingdom and only set sail at the eleventh hour. And they’d have their reasons, of course. They have their familiar excuses.

But he could ask how many lives will be lost in the years to come because these creatures disagree on whether the Legions should be broken apart, with Dorn on one side and Guilliman on the other. How many Imperial souls will die in that war, just so one brother can see his vision come to pass over his rival’s?

As if that would be any different to Horus’ war. As if the primarchs haven’t done enough damage to the human race in their ceaseless martyrs’ quest to

be the protagonists of the species.

And this, all of this, is to say nothing of the others, the traitors, the broken monsters that followed Horus into treachery fuelled by ambition, vanity, madness. Sol would burn out before Diocletian could completely speak the roll of their sins.

He could say all of this and more. And he wants to. He burns to. The Ten Thousand know all of it is true, as do the surviving Sisters, even as the Imperium turns its ire upon them as witches, even as the shroud of ignorance begins to fall.

He wants to say it, and he knows what he would say.

I watched the death of my king’s dreams, and then the death of my king. I watched half of your kind rebel against the empire it took us almost three centuries to build, and I watched you turn it to ash. I’ve watched even the most loyal of you scheme against your brothers, whine about who was favoured over whom, and go to war over your arrogances, heedless of consequence, like some moronic pantheon of ancient gods. You, and the malformed coven of tainted genetics you call a family, have no right to set foot upon this world.

You say you lost a father. But you didn’t. You lost the scientist that created you. You lost the visionary that had such high hopes for you. But He was never your father. Your fathers love you dearly, primarch . Even now they dance through the warp, laughing at what good boys you’ve all been.

You say the Emperor would trust you now with the resurrection of the Imperium. If He trusted you, why did He need ten thousand bodyguards?

And why weren’t you one of them? Why weren’t you called upon to defend the webway? Why did He entrust that most vital task to His true chosen?

Why, whenever He related the truth of the galaxy, was it never His ‘sons’

that He told?

Diocletian could say all of this.

And it would be so satisfying. So vindicating.

Or…

He forces a slow breath from his body. It takes all his self-control to do so.

Next, he forces his knuckles to unclench from the haft of his spear.

‘Talons,’ he says. ‘With me.’

Diocletian leaves the chamber, the weight of Guilliman’s eyes on his back, and the incessant sound of praying rising to his ears from outside the walls.

Kaeria, at his side, gestures in an elegant flourish of thoughtmark. Her sentiment is cold, but it warms Diocletian with its sincerity. She can smell the stink of defeat on Guilliman, like an aura around him. She believes he will die soon.

‘They all will,’ Diocletian replies. ‘They weren’t built to last forever.’

V

To my core, I am tired of these prayers. The ones whispered in monasteries that were once laboratories. The ones wailed at the Palace walls. They infest my thoughts in a way the cries of daemons never could.

I dream of them. I dream of the suffering cried into the skies of every world in the Imperium. I dream of an empire’s worth of pain and loss and zealotry and fear, all focused towards one man. Some nights, the few nights I require rest, I wake anyway, sheened with sweat and hearing the voices of men and women and children whose prayers cannot ever be answered.

I don’t think this is real. I’m not cursed with a psyker’s genetic spiral-code.

Nor am I a fool, to believe these are anything more than portions of my slumbering mind coming to life in ways I wish they wouldn’t. They’re dreams. Just dreams.

Tonight, I will wear gold for the first time in what seems like an eternity. I will forgo the black helmet of my shame and the symbolism of my bare skin.

I will instead go to my king armed and armoured, the way things used to be before we failed Him.

I am going to ask Him a question. Something I have always wanted to know the answer to. Something I regret never asking Him before.

– Epistle XCIX:CXXV, The Master of Mankind

by Diocletian Coros

It feels at once strange and perfectly natural to be wearing his armour once again. The strength it pours through him is utterly familiar, a homecoming, though he feels subtle deviations in his movements that aren’t quite what he expected. A purr in the servos of his hip there, a tightening of the knuckle joints there. His armour has been maintained (religiously maintained, to his weary disgust) for all these long years, but little vicissitudes have been

introduced into its function purely by the fact he hasn’t worn it in so long. It was made to be worn, to function in bond with him.

Were he inclined to the Martian way of thinking, he might say the armour’s machine spirit resented him for abandoning it. He believes in machine spirits – it’s a common enough thing for a warrior to believe a weapon has a soul – but not in the absolutist terms proclaimed by Mars.

Clad in Imperial gold, Diocletian Coros makes his way through the Palace.

He passes pilgrims that pray to him, that plead for scraps of his cloak, that beg for blessings. He ignores them. He always ignores them.

He moves through museums to lost ages and cloisters dedicated to a new and powerful faith. He walks on, through libraries that are now convents; across avenues now bedecked in religious icon ography. Down he goes, through halls of statues dedicated to the fallen, through chambers of reliquaries housing meaningless bones and stasis fields cradling weapons that will never work again.

He hesitates only twice in his night-long journey. The first is when a beggar-child bars his path, gazing up at him with amazed eyes. Diocletian remembers a time, long ago by his measurement of things and practically prehistorical to the pilgrims and beggars surrounding him, when he’d been with Zephon, the Bringer of Sorrow, and another child stood before them in a similar way.

So much time has passed since then. So much has changed.

‘Are you the God-Emperor?’ this child asks. Past and present collide.

Diocletian’s throat closes.

He goes down to one knee, still towering above the youth. He can see the gold of his war plate reflecting in the child’s eyes.

‘No,’ Diocletian tells the boy. ‘My name is Dio. But I know the Emperor.’

He unbuckles his scarlet cloak, marked with the Palatine Aquila, the Emperor’s own symbol. He bundles it up and hands it to the filthy child, who takes it in trembling hands. Perhaps it will serve this boy as a blanket for the rest of a long life. Perhaps the child will be killed by jealous relic-hunters. Diocletian knows which is more likely in this new dark age, but he hopes he’s wrong to think it.

The second time he pauses in his journey is at Kaeria’s grave. There’s no grand monument to mark her passing, no ornate tomb worthy of one who

served the Emperor and humankind so ardently, for so long. It’s a plaque in an ossuary. A space in a wall. Her bones aren’t even interred there.

Many of the Sisters’ original tombs were looted by mobs of Imperial faithful as the zealotry of their beliefs grew fiercer with time’s passing. The bodies of the ‘soulless witches’, long gone to nothing but bone, were immersed in holy water and subsequently incinerated on pyres, surrounded by the God-Emperor’s joyous and weeping worshippers. Some of the corpses were put on trial, their bones bound together with sanctified rope, while priests and priestesses of the most holy, most hateful, most loving God-Emperor judged the dead witches guilty of the blackest heresy.

Kaeria’s original tomb was one of those defiled. He’d never recovered her body. Only her blade was buried here, in her new grave. He’d tracked her stolen sword to a black market in Ashripur, on the other side of Terra, before returning it to the Palace and placing it here himself.

Tonight, he runs his fingertips along the plaque marking her life and death, lingering only long enough to say farewell. He hates coming here. There’s no closure to be found, only the rawness of a wound that won’t seal.

He goes deeper into the Palace. Deeper. Deeper. Through doors that no human has seen in generations. Past members of his own kind, those that share his age and experience, and those they’ve created in the time since –

those that never heard the Emperor speak in life; those that only know Him as the God-Emperor in death. Some address him by the rank of tribune.

Some call him Dio.

Down. Deeper.

Through the doors, the secret doors, the ones behind those renowned gateways decorated in trappings of glory. Past the graven image of the Immortal Emperor: a skull-faced warlock on a mighty throne, eternally alive on the edge of death, imposing in His majesty.

Through that final door, which opens only to droplets of a tribune’s blood, and whose impenetrable locks take an hour to unseal.

Inside the innermost sanctum, where the architecture of the walls is uncomfortably organic, strangely spinal. Diocletian approaches the Golden Throne, such as it is, and his kindred – naked but for their cloaks, loincloths, and black helms – move aside in his honour.

He ascends the steps. Slowly. Not without reverence, but without the abject worship expected by the people of the Imperium. They would be

horrified by its absence; but then, everything about this place would horrify them. It’s why they will never be allowed to know of it.

At long last, Diocletian stands before his king.

He looks past the hanging wires that resemble intestines, and the clicking, ticking life-support engines, and the preservative mist sprayed into the air in nine-second intervals. He looks past the blood bags and vitae-packets linked intravenously to the thing on the throne, which is just a chair compared to the great and grand artworks: a throne without the capital T that makes it both a curse and the salvation of the species.

He looks at the revenant husk of something that was somehow once, somehow still is, a man. Something that shouldn’t be alive, and arguably isn’t, by any mortal measure. Something tortured by its own impossible continuation – physically starved and psychically bloated on the feast of souls it’s forced to devour every day of its endless and agonising existence.

Or is it forced? Maybe it craves this. Maybe it hungers.

Diocletian removes his helmet and kneels before his king. At first he says nothing, his head hanging, his eyes closed. Here, of all places, there’s no hatred of the primarchs, no anger at the Legions’ betrayal, no bitterness at humanity’s self-destructive nature. The weight of the centuries lies heavy on Diocletian’s shoulders, here in these quiet seconds between a warrior and his liege. He feels the weight of his failure to protect this man; the knowledge that had the Ten Thousand done what was needed of them, then the Emperor would still be with them. Their king would still be a man, not a skeleton silently screaming into the midnight reaches of the universe just to give humanity a few more millennia.

Diocletian lifts his gaze. He stares into what’s left of his king’s features, and in that moment, they appear as two sides of a coin: created and creator

– an ageless countenance opposite a living carcass. Each breath he takes draws the scent of the Throne into his body: a stinging reek of overworked metal unable to entirely mask the fainter smells of alchemical solutions and biological waste. Beneath it all, and worst of all, is a wisp of decay.

Diocletian rests his spear before the God-Emperor’s feet, and he asks his question.

‘My king. Do you dream?’

ABOUT THE AUTHORS JOHN FRENCH IS

THE AUTHOR OF SEVERAL HORUS HERESY

STORIES INCLUDING THE NOVELS THE

SOLAR WAR, MORTIS, PRAETORIAN OF DORN, TALLARN, SLAVES TO DARKNESS AND

SIGISMUND: THE ETERNAL CRUSADER, THE

NOVELLA THE CRIMSON FIST, AND THE

AUDIO DRAMAS DARK COMPLIANCE,

TEMPLAR AND WARMASTER. FOR

WARHAMMER 40,000 HE HAS WRITTEN

RESURRECTION, INCARNATION AND

DIVINATION FOR THE HORUSIAN WARS AND

THREE TIE-IN AUDIO DRAMAS – THE

SCRIBE AWARD-WINNING AGENT OF THE

THRONE: BLOOD AND LIES, AS WELL AS

AGENT OF THE THRONE: TRUTH AND DREAMS

AND AGENT OF THE THRONE: ASHES AND

OATHS. JOHN HAS ALSO WRITTEN THE

AHRIMAN SERIES, THE AGE OF SIGMAR

NOVELS THE HOLLOW KING AND THE DEAD

KINGDOM AND MANY SHORT STORIES.

Nick Kyme is the author of many Horus Heresy novels, novellas and audio dramas, including Old Earth, Promethean Sun and Nightfane.

His novella Feat of Iron was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection The Primarchs. For Warhammer 40,000, Nick has written Volpone Glory and the Dawn of Fire novel The Iron Kingdom.

He is also well known for his popular Salamanders series and the Cato Sicarius novels Damnos and Knights of Macragge. His work for Age of Sigmar includes the short story ‘Borne by the Storm’, included in the novel War Storm, and the audio drama The Imprecations of Daemons. He has also written the Warhammer Horror novel Sepulturum. He lives and works in Nottingham.

Dan Abnett has written over fifty novels, including the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series and the Ravenor, Eisenhorn and Bequin books.

His work for the Horus Heresy includes the first book in the series, Horus Rising, and the three-volume-long conclusion, The End and the Death. He also wrote several novels in between: Legion, The Unremembered Empire, Know No Fear, Prospero Burns and Saturnine. He scripted Macragge’s Honour, the first Horus Heresy graphic novel, as well as numerous Black Library audio dramas. Many of his short stories have been collected into the volume Lord of the Dark Millennium. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.

Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novels The First Wall, Deliverance Lost, Angels of Caliban and Corax, as well as the novella The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs, and several audio dramas. He has written many novels for Warhammer 40,000, including the Dawn of Fire novel The Wolftime, Indomitus, Ashes of Prospero, Imperator: Wrath of the Omnissiah and the Last Chancers series. He also wrote the Rise of the Ynnari novels, the Path of the Eldar and Legacy of Caliban trilogies, and two volumes in The Beast Arises series. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the End Times novel The Curse of Khaine, the Warhammer Chronicles omnibus The Sundering, and, for Age of Sigmar, The Red Feast. In 2017, Gav won the David Gemmell Legend Award for his novel Warbeast. He lives and works in Nottingham.

Guy Haley is the author of the Siege of Terra novel The Lost and the Damned, as well as the Horus Heresy novels Titandeath, Wolfsbane and Pharos, and the Primarchs novels Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter, Corax: Lord of Shadows and Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia. He has also written many Warhammer 40,000 novels, including the Dawn of Fire books Avenging Son and Throne of Light, as well as Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work, Genefather, the Dark Imperium trilogy, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Darkness in the Blood and Astorath: Angel of Mercy. For Age of Sigmar he has penned the Drekki Flynt novels The Arkanaut’s Oath and The Ghosts of Barak-Minoz as well as many other stories. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Warhawk, Scars and The Path of Heaven, the Primarchs novels Leman Russ: The Great Wolf and Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris, the novellas Brotherhood of the Storm, Wolf King and Valdor: Birth of the Imperium, and the audio drama The Sigillite. For Warhammer 40,000

he has written the Space Wolves books Blood of Asaheim, Stormcaller and The Helwinter Gate, as well as the Vaults of Terra trilogy, The Lords of Silence and the Dawn of Fire novel Sea of Souls. Additionally, he has many Warhammer novels to his name, and the Warhammer Crime novel Bloodlines. Chris lives and works in Bradford-on-Avon, in south-west England.

Aaron Dembski-Bowden is the New York Times bestselling author of the Horus Heresy novels Echoes of Eternity, The Master of Mankind, Betrayer and The First Heretic, as well as the novellas Aurelian and Prince of Crows and the audio drama Butcher’s Nails, for the same series. He has also written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Spear of the Emperor and Ragnar Blackmane, the popular Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Armageddon, the novels The Talon of Horus and Black Legion, the Grey Knights novel The Emperor’s Gift and numerous short stories. He lives and works in Northern Ireland.

An extract from Dark Imperium.

The void is impossible for the human mind to encompass.

Within the galaxy mankind calls home there are three hundred billion stars. Around these revolve hundreds of billions of worlds, and the spaces between are crowded by a diversity of objects that defy enumeration.

Mankind’s galaxy is but one of trillions of galaxies in a universe of unguessable size. The distances between even proximate astronomical bodies are inconceivable to creatures evolved to walk a single, small world.

This is why the void cannot be understood. Not by men, nor by their machines.

And when one considers the warp, that nightmare realm skulking behind that of touch, sound and sight, well… any being who claims comprehension of that is either deluded or insane.

Among the higher races there are those that grasp their limitations better than mankind. They understand that the cosmos is ultimately unknow able; they accept their lack of insight. By comparison, the creatures of Terra are so crude in thought that – in the opinion of these more enlightened civilisations – it is a wonder humanity can understand anything at all.

Humans are beings of short reach. Give them voidships, change their shape by gene-forge and augmetic, provide them with weapons of sufficient power to break a star, and the children of Old Earth are still but apes removed from the savannah. Just as an ape’s mind cannot hold an ocean, and the notion of a whole world is inexplicable to it, so a man’s mind

cannot hold the void, and the layered infinities of the warp are beyond him entirely.

The Imperium claims a million worlds as its own. It is an empire spread gossamer-thin across the run of stars, its worlds so far removed from one another that it requires the bloody effort of countless men and women to sustain. In the grand flow of history, the Imperium is the greatest galactic empire of its day. To the people that populate it, it is the most powerful ever to have existed.

To the uncaring universe, it is nothing – the latest in a line of such realms that stretches back to the days of the first thinking beings, when the stars were young and the warp was calm and horror had yet to uncoil its tendrils into the material realm.

There are philosophers that argue war is man’s natural state, and to the inhabitants of this era of blood it is a proven hypothesis. War is everywhere.

Peace is the dream of a silent Emperor, broken by His treacherous sons.

Those sons continued to fight.

Over the green gas giant of Thessala, two battlefleets engaged. Titanic energies snapped and blinked in the eternal night of space.

The total efforts of star systems went into the construction of these fleets.

Neither was free of the taint of blood: not in their construction, nor in their usage. The resources of planets had been poured entire into the forging of their frames; tens of thousands of lives had been expended in their making, and the secrets of ancient sciences plundered to bring them to life. Both had been responsible for the levelling of civilisations.

The fleets differed in only two regards. First was in their appearance. One was a gaudy assault on the senses, the other a motley collection of sober liveries. The more fundamental difference was in their allegiance. The sober fleet fought for the continuation of humanity’s great stellar empire; the gaudy one was dedicated to its extinction.

The battlefleets pursued each other in a slow dance through Thessala’s rings, hundreds of vessels ploughing gaps in the dust that would take centuries to close. The voiceless lightning of their guns filled the skies of Thessala’s inhabited moons. The lives of millions below depended on the outcome of the battle, but the consequences would ripple much further.

At the centre of this iron storm there was no calm, no eye in which respite might be found. Instead, there was a pair of leviathans: the Ultramarines

battle-barge Gauntlet of Power and the Emperor’s Children battleship Pride of the Emperor. Two vessels, forged in a common cause but now implacable enemies, locked together in mortal combat only thirty miles apart – no distance at all in void war.

Each was the flagship of a primarch, genetically engineered demigods crafted by the Emperor of Mankind. Aboard the Gauntlet of Power stood Roboute Guilliman, the foundling of Ultramar, the Avenging Son. The Pride of the Emperor was home to Fulgrim – the traitor, the fallen exemplar, the blighted phoenix. Once covered in his Emperor’s blessings, Fulgrim had followed the arch-traitor Horus and pledged his allegiance to dark gods.

In fighting for their father, both primarchs were made fathers themselves.

Through the application of arcane science, they were the sires of two of the Space Marine Legions, mankind’s greatest warriors. The Space Marines were lords of the galaxy, designed to reunite the human race and shepherd it to a glorious future. They had failed and turned upon one another, and their war had nearly destroyed the galaxy. They fought still.

Such fury a battlefleet can unleash!

It can cow a world without a shot. It can extinguish the life of a species.

Battlefleets are the tools of tyrants, whomever they fight for. Whether their admirals espouse salvation or damnation matters not to the execution of their purpose. Death follows in their wake.

To those participating, a void war is a terrifying, roiling chaos of violence.

It is the pinnacle of mankind’s destructive ingenuity, a whirl of gigantic explosions where lives are snuffed out by the hundred. In such combat, a single person is nothing; they are but part of the machine of the ship they serve, only as essential as a steel cog or an indicator lumen. They can do nothing but work their appointed task and pray their life will not end, or if it must end, that it does so in painless disintegration. A single crewman’s task dominates everything, even their fear of death. There is no escape from service. War and their part in it are the totality of their existence.

Yet what is a void war to the timeless blackness that envelops the footling motes of inhabited worlds? A void war is twinkles in the distance. It is silence. It is infinitesimals of matter sparking and dying, scintillas of metal and flesh consumed by transient fires. The detonation of a battleship miles long is insignificant to a cosmos where the deaths of suns are mere blinks.

On a galactic scale, the loss of a warship is a nugatory flash, outshone by the billion-year candles of the stars.

The inverse is true to a single person. Their life is all that matters, for one life is all a human being has, and they fear to lose it. Yet they must blindly serve in terror. The universe gives meagre gifts, and it does not care how they are spent.

Over Thessala, mankind fought a civil war already centuries old. The Emperor of Mankind had tried and failed to unite humanity’s scattered worlds so that the species might survive the supernatural threat of Chaos.

His sons, the primarchs, who He had created to complete this task, had themselves been corrupted, and half had turned against Him. The Horus Heresy, that war was called. It had ended the Emperor’s dream.

To the beings of the galaxy, the war was everything; to the blank gaze of time, it was nothing. And yet, for all humanity’s seeming inconsequence, the children of its greatest son held the fates of two realities in their grasp.

Roboute Guilliman remained loyal to Terra. His ship was sternly decorated in gold, so much so that it rivalled Fulgrim’s vessel in ornamentation, but whereas the Gauntlet of Power was ornate, the Pride of the Emperor was vulgar. Its decoration had been applied with abandon – everything that could be adorned had been adorned. Back when the two ships had fought side by side, its extravagance had not been to the taste of the Ultramarines, who were born of more solemn worlds. Now it was an affront to decency, added to and added to again until the tawdry obscured all trace of art.

Neglect went hand in hand with this ostentation, and it made the Pride of the Emperor appear ugly. It was a decayed relic, like a theatre from a decadent age left to rot in the rain.

The Pride of the Emperor’s ability to mete out destruction remained undiminished. At point-blank range, it traded blows with the Gauntlet of Power as the ships passed slowly alongside each other. Huge cannons flared, exchanging projectiles the size of transit containers. The space between was a deadly thicket of lance beams and laser light. Void shields blurred and sparked with the dissipation of mighty energies. Multi-hued lightning silenced communications and burst sub-systems with their feedback for thousands of miles around. Weaponry capable of levelling cities blinked and flashed.

Around these metal behemoths, dozens of other ships struggled in cosmic silence, some approaching the size and power of the flagships in their own right. Without exception, those on Fulgrim’s side were the damned ships of the Emperor’s Children. Though Fulgrim had lost his war and his humanity, his Legion yet held some cohesion. On Guilliman’s side fought half a dozen successor Chapters of the proud XIII Legion, the Ultra marines. Dissolution had been the price of fidelity for the Legion of Ultramar, and though there were strengths in the smaller formations Guilliman had forced upon them, there were weaknesses also.

For all Roboute Guilliman’s strategical genius, the loyalists had been outmanoeuvred and caught. Their pursuit of the fallen primarch had become a fight for survival. Three fleet elements of Emperor’s Children had pinned the loyalists into place above Thessala; Fulgrim had turned his flight from Xolco into a devastating trap.

Once, Roboute Guilliman would not have made such an error. Perhaps the situation over emerald Thessala was simple misfortune. Fulgrim was no ordinary opponent, after all. Should Guilliman fail, history would surely be forgiving, if there were any good men left to write it.

Or perhaps the truth was that rage had clouded the Avenging Son’s judgement. Perhaps, some dared whisper, Roboute Guilliman had allowed his desire for revenge to overtake his reason.

Roboute Guilliman was stretched. Although several other primarchs still stood as champions of humanity, the wounded Imperium looked to Guilliman to save it. Every human has a limit, demigod or peasant, and Guilliman’s burden was the heaviest of all.

The Pride of the Emperor heeled over, bringing its portside weapons batteries into better firing arcs. In response, the Gauntlet of Power intensified its barrage, and the void shield covering the Pride of the Emperor’s ventral towers winked out.

Explosions bloomed suddenly across hull plating encrusted with gold and filth.

An opening had been made.

On board the Gauntlet of Power, one hundred of Ultramar’s finest warriors waited on teleport blocks, surrounded by buzzing machinery. They comprised fifty of the First Company and fifty of the Second, all garbed in

the deep blue of the Ultramarines Chapter. The white helmets of the First Company’s veteran Space Marines, recessed under the cowls of Terminator armour, looked out at hundreds of tech-adepts and mortal crewmen labouring to prepare the Ultramarines’ way through the warp.

The Space Marines of the Second Company were in standard power armour, and were being equipped with tall breaching shields by the arming servitors. Their battleplate lacked the thickness of Terminator armour, and the shields, though bulky, would increase their survivability in the close-quarters fighting of boarding.

Ammunition trains rumbled across the deck. Smartly uniformed Ultramarines Chapter menials handed out munitions to their masters while the enhanced warriors performed last-minute checks on themselves and their brothers. Chaplains strode from platform to platform, hearing oaths and affixing papers to armour with wax seals that hissed as they were impressed with sacred irons. Whether human or transhuman, every member of the Chapter worked with perfect efficiency. Even so, as invested as they were in their preparations, all of them had half an eye on the grand archway leading onto the deck.

The ship shook violently. Alarms blared. Lumens spat sparks and went dark over part of the deck. A section of gantry clanged down from the tangle of struts and pipes that clogged the high ceiling. The crew continued upon their business with unhurried purpose. Orders were given to reroute power. Emergency teams of armoured voidsmen and specialised servitors began clearing the wreckage. All was restored to order.

Such calm made it easy to forget the punishing fire the ship was under. But there was no doubt they were losing.

This was not how the battle was supposed to have gone.

From voxmitters studded into the columns and walls, a clipped voice sounded.

‘Shields down on the Pride of the Emperor. Prepare for assault.’ The words were swallowed by the clatter of preparation and tumult of war beating at the ship, yet they were not repeated, for the superior hearing of the Space Marines caught them all.

A clarion followed shortly, sharp and loud enough to be heard by mortal and transhuman alike. The servants of Ultramar stopped what they were doing and stood to attention.

A towering figure clad in the famous Armour of Reason strode through the archway. On his left hand he wore the Hand of Dominion. Belted at his waist was the Sword of the Emperor Himself. The bearer of these weapons was taller by far than the Invictarus Suzerain guard escorting him. He exuded a power and purpose that halted the breath of mortals in their throats.

‘First Captain Andos! Second Captain Thiel! Are your companies ready?’

the giant called.

The two captains crossed the floor to meet their lord. Second Captain Thiel was helmetless in power armour heavy with honours, while First Captain Andos was completely enclosed in a hulking suit of Terminator battleplate.

They saluted their father the Ultramarian way, one fist across their chests –

the old symbol of Unity.

‘My lord Guilliman! Your veterans await your command,’ said Andos, his voice ringing from the voxmitter set below his helm.

‘We stand prepared, my primarch,’ said Aeonid Thiel. His voice, rich and soft, was unmoderated by machinery. It was not so very long after the Heresy and Thiel was still young for a Space Marine, though his face was lined with cares.

Guilliman looked down upon his captains resolutely. The primarch overtopped even Andos in his massive Terminator armour. He was a demigod, humanity’s might captured and moulded in flesh.

Thiel gazed back, unable to take his eyes from the face of his gene-sire.

Thiel was a good warrior, tested in battle many times, unafraid to voice his mind and modest enough to hide the love he had for his lord, but it shone in his face like a light.

Such devotion they bear me, thought Guilliman, even as I fail them.

There were so few of his original Legion left alive, and their replacements were born of a different, less certain era. Thiel’s regard was tempered by long friendship, though he had never lost his rebellious streak. The younger Space Marines were another matter. Guilliman remembered when his warriors had been less reverent. They had been better times.

‘We depart immediately,’ he said, his voice uncompromising. ‘The traitor will not escape again. The warriors of six Chapters stand ready to aid us.

We shall not fail. To your stations – prepare for mass teleport.’

‘My lord, we are prepared,’ said Andos carefully. ‘But the enemy will outnumber us greatly. I am concerned for our chances of success. What is the practical action should resistance prove overwhelming? It is Second Captain Thiel’s and my opinion that you should remain here. We shall occupy the enemy, while the Gauntlet of Power withdraws. We cannot–’

The Avenging Son cut Andos dead with a look.

‘Too much blood has been shed on my behalf. I will not shy from this fight,’ Guilliman said, and his tone would brook no disagreement. ‘There can be no retreat until the Pride of the Emperor is crippled. I must face my brother and occupy him while these tasks are done. And if I must fight him, I will kill him, or I will die in the attempt. I cannot let him escape unpunished again. My sons,’ he added, his tone softening, ‘it is the only way to escape this trap.’

Andos bowed his head. Thiel paused a moment, uncertain, before doing the same. Sure of their agreement, Guilliman took his helm from a grav-platform pushed by two mortal men. He mounted the teleport platform –

stepping directly onto it with no need of the steps that led from the deck –

and turned to address his sons.

‘Now, my warriors, let us show my brother the consequences of turning upon the Imperium of Terra!’

‘We march for Macragge!’ they bellowed, and their combined voices were enough to drown out the thunder of battle.

Guilliman’s Invictarus Suzerain guard followed him onto the pad. They formed a protective shield wall around him, axes ready for combat teleport.

To his men, Guilliman was an infallible leader, his abilities supernatural.

Even to the rational Ultramarines, who believed the Emperor of Mankind to be a man and not a god, and likewise His primarch sons, a sense of near-religious awe had crept into their attitude towards him. It had only become more pronounced since the last days of the Heresy.

But Roboute Guilliman was not infallible.

He knew this course of action to be fraught with risk. Andos had been right to raise the possibility of defeat. The primarch only wished he could praise his son for his insight rather than dismissing his concerns. His campaign against the Emperor’s Children had, to all purposes, failed. Fulgrim had the initiative. Guilliman’s choices had been made for him. The pieces were set on the board, there was only one real option. They should withdraw.

Currently, withdrawal was impossible. If the Gauntlet of Power broke off from the fight, then the Pride of the Emperor would inflict massive damage upon the battle-barge. Fulgrim would then most likely attempt a boarding assault of his own once their defences were shattered. Guilliman could not allow his brother to do that at a time of his choosing.

The primarch’s powerful mind had examined all possibilities. His own strategic treatises would have him retreat quickly, forming a fighting rearguard so that he might withdraw those of his ships that he could, minimising the damage to his flagship by sacrificing many of his others.

Spending the lives of other men to save his own was not to Guilliman’s liking when he saw a chance for true victory. He could not ignore this opportunity to slay his treacherous sibling. Guilliman had come to the conclusion that by defying his own tactical orthodoxies, he might surprise Fulgrim.

It was a risk. Fulgrim might well have dropped his ship’s shields on purpose, a mocking re-enactment of Horus’ last gambit to lure the Emperor aboard his ship at the end of the Siege of Terra.

But Guilliman had his own plans. Other boarding forces drawn from multiple Chapters would teleport in simultaneously, tasked with mutually supportive objectives at the enginarium, the command deck, the navigatorium, the magazine, the subsidiary command deck and the main gunnery control. If only half of Guilliman’s strike teams were successful, they had a good chance of crippling the Pride of the Emperor from within.

His warriors had orders to retreat immediately once their objectives had been achieved. He would make sure as many survived as possible; he would not let his sons pay the price for his mistakes.

He had to settle the reckoning for his errors.

Guilliman could not deny he had been hooked and played like a fish. All he could do was struggle free and bite the one who had snared him.

‘Make ready! We go to war!’ he called.

At his signal, the machines of the teleport deck hummed into life. Giant reaction columns crackled with power, feeding the focusing arrays that would tear open the veil between real space and the warp. They glowed with painful light. As they shone brighter, wisps of corposant were leached from initiation prongs and fed into containment flasks, where it twisted as if alive.

So many of my brothers are dead, fallen to Chaos or lost, thought Guilliman. We assumed we were immortal. We are not. My time must come, but not today. Not at the hands of Fulgrim.

The arcane machineries of teleportation whooped and hummed, the deck vibrating with their activity, and built to a crescendo.

A booming crack and flash of actinic light whited out the teleport deck.

Suppressant vapours gushed from tubes in anticipation of fires in the overstressed machinery. Human armsmen raised their shotguns in case of warp breach and daemonic incursion.

None came. Signal strobes blinked: red, red, red, then blue.

‘Teleport success, teleport success,’ droned a mechanical voice.

The lumens came back on. Corposant flasks emptied to the sounds of half-formed screams. Atmospheric vents drew smoke away, revealing empty pads. Adepts consulted vid-screens and paper cogitator strips, and relief crossed their faces at the read-outs.

Roboute Guilliman and his warriors were aboard the Pride of the Emperor.

Click here to buy Dark Imperium.

Book 1 – THE SOLAR WAR

John French

Book 2 – THE LOST AND THE DAMNED

Guy Haley

Book 3 – THE FIRST WALL

Gav Thorpe

Book 4 – SATURNINE

Dan Abnett

Book 5 – MORTIS

John French

Book 6 – WARHAWK

Chris Wraight

Book 7 – ECHOES OF ETERNITY

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Book 8 – THE END AND THE DEATH: VOLUME I

Book 8 – THE END AND THE DEATH: VOLUME II

Book 8 – THE END AND THE DEATH: VOLUME III

Dan Abnett

SONS OF THE SELENAR

Graham McNeill

FURY OF MAGNUS

Graham McNeill

GARRO: KNIGHT OF GREY

James Swallow

Book 1 – HORUS RISING

Dan Abnett

Book 2 – FALSE GODS

Graham McNeill

Book 3 – GALAXY IN FLAMES

Ben Counter

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION FIRST PUBLISHED IN

GREAT BRITAIN IN 2024.

THIS EBOOK EDITION PUBLISHED IN 2025 BY BLACK

LIBRARY, GAMES WORKSHOP LTD, WILLOW ROAD,

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Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.

Internal artwork by Mikhail Savier.

Era of Ruin © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2025. Era of Ruin, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.

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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-80407-471-8

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Document Outline

Cover

The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra

Era of Ruin

Introduction

ANGELS OF ANOTHER AGE

Quote One

FULGURITE

FRAGMENTS (ALL WE HAVE LEFT)

EX LIBRIS

Quote Two

SYSTEM PURGE

AFTER THE DAWN, THE DARKNESS

HOMEBOUND

THE CARRION LORD OF THE IMPERIUM

About the Authors

An Extract from ‘Dark Imperium’

Backlist

A Black Library Publication

eBook license