It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

Skalathrax [origin: Nagrakali]

1. Place of judgement/ending [See. Time of Ending, ref. MCXVII]
2. Destruction (partic. burning)

Prologue

The pain engine embedded in his brain grew silent. Slowly, his awareness returned.

A counter blinked in the upper right of his vision.

Two hours, thirty-seven minutes and twenty-three seconds. That’s how much time he had lost to the cortical implants.

For now, the beast was sated. For now, it slumbered, retracting its claws from the meat of his mind.

His body ached from injuries he didn’t remember receiving. His arms were leaden from kills that he didn’t remember making.

He reached up and removed his helmet. The stink of blood filled his nostrils.

Two hours, thirty-seven minutes and twenty-three seconds ago this had been a living, breathing world. Now it was a wasteland of death.

He stood in the middle of a sea of corpses, a vast ocean that spread out as far as the eye could see. In the distance were the ruins of a once-great city. Smoke rose from its sundered walls.

Other World Eaters picked their way through the sea of the dead, stripping weapons and armour from fallen brothers, claiming skulls and cutting the threads of those that still lived. All of them were liberally coated with gore.

Overhead, the warships of the Legion hung in low orbit, like carrion-eaters awaiting their turn to feed.

For a few moments he was able to think clearly, without the Butcher’s Nails screaming in his head, stabbing into his brain, urging him to do their bidding.

‘We cannot continue like this,’ he said.

‘Like what?’ growled a voice from behind.

Dreagher glanced around. A legionary garbed in rad-scarred black armour was down on one knee nearby, cutting at dead flesh. Chunks of meat and hair clung to the razor wire wrapped around the Destroyer’s pauldrons and shoulder plates. Ruokh.

Blood of the primarch. Had he been so lost in the Nails that he’d been fighting alongside that berserker?

‘Killing every world we come upon,’ Dreagher said. ‘We’re bleeding the Legion dry.’

Ruokh stood, having finished his grisly task. He held a human head by its hair, blood leaking slowly from the ragged stump of its neck. He regarded Dreagher with the hostile lenses of his Sarum-pattern helmet. The Destroyer said nothing.

‘Angron is gone. Horus is dead,’ said Dreagher. ‘Is this all there is for us now? Endless butchery, our numbers slowly whittling away, until we are all lost to the Nails, or dead? Is that to be our fate?’

‘You think too much,’ said Ruokh. ‘This is what we do. This is what we are.’

‘There has to be something more.’

Ruokh turned away, shaking his head.

‘Khârn,’ said Dreagher. ‘We need Khârn.’

Ruokh laughed. It was an ugly sound. Bitter and harsh.

‘The Legion would follow Khârn,’ he said, ‘But he is lost to us. He is not coming back.’

‘He has to,’ said Dreagher. ‘Or else the Legion is already dead.’

Khârn; even then it was a name that evoked fear, awe and respect, even amongst his own genhanced, hyper-augmented brethren, the fraternity of killers, psychotics and berserkers that made up the XII Legion.

Perhaps fear is the wrong word. ‘They shall know no fear’, as the rhetoric goes. Caution. Unease. Discomfort. Wariness. These words are perhaps more fitting, certainly less likely to incur a killing rage.

His was not a name that evoked hatred, though, at least not among his own Legion. Not yet. Nor was distrust a word that the legionaries of the XII would have associated with him, or at least any more distrust than any of the Legion had for another.

He had, of course, already been called traitor – they all had – but only by those now being dubbed ‘loyalists’. He’d not yet been called that by his own, not then.

No, that would come later.

He was a figure of contradiction, of course, both before and after Terra, as were all the best of them. He was broken, as were they all.

Too long the Nails had been grinding into their minds. They’d been caught in the death-grip of those hateful implants too long. They’d been dragged too far down the crimson spiral. There was no coming back.

What they were before had been largely obliterated, and what remained was but a shadow; fragments and splintered glimpses of who they could have been before they willingly destroyed themselves in emulation of the primarch. They didn’t know it, though. Not back then.

But even if they did, would they have made another choice? Perhaps. Some of them.

The best of them – and Khârn was, at least for a time, counted as the very best – were the most confounding. They were the most torn, the most tragic. The most contradictory. Khârn epitomised that more than any.

Khârn the Equerry, the most rational of the Legion. The cool head to balance Angron’s rage. The diplomat. The wise.

Khârn the Bloody, the most berserk of them all when the Nails took hold, which they did with increased regularity after Angron’s… change. All of the Legion were devolving before then, but after Nuceria their inexorable descent spiralled into a plummeting free fall.

Now, after the fact, it is easy to regard Khârn as the worst of them all, the chief sinner, but it is certainly true, then if not now, that he was also the chief sufferer.

Perhaps he was the wisest, even then, even in the grip of his blackest madness. Perhaps he foresaw what the Legion would become and sought to end it.

But then… perhaps not. It’s possible that I read too much into the actions of a madman. Perhaps I construct a façade of rationality as something to cling to, a buoy in a raging storm, unwilling to accept the alternative – that he truly had no reason for what he did.

Before Skalathrax he was Khârn, captain of the Eighth Assault Company, equerry of the daemon-primarch Angron. Afterwards, he was the Betrayer, most hated of the World Eaters, even among his own.

First onto the walls of the Emperor’s Palace, he was, and last to leave – or at least so it is now being said.

I do not know the truth of that. I was not there to see it.

What I did see was the aftermath.

– Hhal Maven, Seneschal Senioris, 17th Company

Chapter 1

So this, then, is Khârn, enthroned like a warrior king of a bygone age, the gifts and offerings of lesser beings piled before him.

The helms of noted enemies. Weapons pried from the grasp of bested foes. Ornate standards taken from worlds left in ruin by the fury of the Legion. The acid-cleaned skulls of the mightiest enemy champions. Offerings to appease, to honour, and, perhaps, to beg favour.

His massive arms are bare, as ever, criss-crossed with the scars of the past. His wounds – or at least the wounds of his flesh – have healed, though they have left their mark. His chest too is bare. Every scar has a story. Without exception, every being that inflicted those injuries is dead, killed by his own hands.

Those murderous hands, thick-knuckled, deadly and dripping with blood – metaphorically if not literally – are, for now, at rest, palm down upon the throne’s armrests.

The immense war-axe, Gorechild, is before him. It takes pride of place. The Legion’s artificers have restored it, doing their best to replace its missing and blunted mica-dragon teeth. It is as much a touchstone to the Legion as Khârn himself. Many covet it, though none yet dare to claim it while Khârn breathes, despite his condition.

His frame: immense, heavily muscled yet lean. He is a giant to unaugmented mortals. Among his own, he is no taller nor heavier than any other. It was never his physical presence that made him stand out among his brothers. His fire came from within.

His downcast face: narrow, stern, serious. It is, for the moment, mercifully free of the pain, suppressed rage and facial tics that personify the Legion now courtesy of their neural aggressor-implants.

That peace is an anomaly.

Even at rest, the warriors of the Legion were tortured. Pain stabbed into their cortices like vile knives whenever they were not doing the bidding of those cruel devices, driving in deep, grinding and twisting, eroding any joy to be had beyond the act of killing. Only bloodshed relieved the merciless assault, and even then, never for long.

Only in death do the devices relent.

That then, Apothecary Khurgan surmised, was why Khârn’s face was not twisted by pain like his brethren.

He’d died on Terra, after all.

Dreagher stalked back and forth like a beast driven to madness by enforced confinement.

His breath was rapid and shallow, and the servos of his gauntlets whined as he clenched and unclenched his hands. His scarred, short-shaven head was bare, and his mouth was twisted into a scowl. His teeth were grinding. His brow was creased, and the eyes below narrow, their irises contracted to pin-points. The muscles around his left eye twitched, lifting his lip to expose file-sharpened teeth.

The Nails were torturing him today.

Over the years he’d come to regard them as a living entity, a parasite nestled in the back of his skull. It enhanced and fed off his hate, gorging itself on the aggression it encouraged and the thrill of the kills it shared with him. Its segmented arachnid legs pressed deep into his brain, and when angered, it would clench them, punishing him. When sated it would slumber, the pressure in his mind easing, giving him a moment of blessed respite. Right now, it was ravenous.

Still pacing, Dreagher ground his knuckles into his temples, screwing his eyes tightly shut. An animal growl rumbled from deep in his chest. The headache was a corkscrew pain in his cortex, a throbbing agony that made him nauseous and his vision contract.

Kill, the Nails said to him with each painful pulse.

Kill.

Kill.

Kill.

He slammed one of his fists into a wall, buckling the sheet metal plating.

Once, all the ills of the warriors of the XII – the blood-letting, the uncontrollable, psychotic rages, the butchering of innocents and the utter lack of conscience that followed – could perhaps have been blamed on the aggressor engines. No, warriors was the wrong word – its fighters. Once, the Nails could have been blamed for all of it.

But now? No. Now, something far darker and more powerful held the Legion in its death-grip. And that grip was tightening with every turn of the universe.

Focus, he told himself, ceasing his relentless pacing, and attempting to forcibly slow his breathing. It did little good. The beat of his primary heart continued to race, like the pounding of war drums.

‘Enough,’ he snarled, eyes flicking open. They were bloodshot, and his gaze flitted around the round room without taking anything in, seeking… what? An escape? An enemy?

Where was he? How had he come to be here?

The last thing he could recall was sharpening his falax blades in his arming chamber, then… nothing.

Worse than not knowing how he came to be here was the niggling unease; what had he done in the time that he had lost?

He looked at his hands. His gauntlets were free of blood. That was good. That was something.

There was an antiseptic smell in his nostrils.

His vision stabilised and he began to discern his surroundings. Life-support systems and cogitator units wheezed and chimed. Vitae-sacs dripped their life-giving fluids. Data screens scrolled with information. Cells lit with bright fluorescent glow-globes, each hermetically sealed by armourglass.

He was within the apothecarion secundus, one of the medicae-wards on the rear decks of the Defiant. The area was a sealed, secure environment. Gene-code locked. He didn’t remember coming here.

Medicae support servitors shuffled to and fro, checking the blinking machines and scanning the streams of data-tape being spat out at intervals from the mouths of other servitors hard-wired into the cogitators’ processor-banks. They all appeared ignorant, oblivious or uncaring of his presence.

How long had he been here? He had no way of knowing.

Surgical mech-apparatus with articulated, multi-jointed arms replete with hooked blades, digi-lasers, suture-staplers and scalpels were folded in upon themselves on the ceiling.

Set into two of the walls were nutrient-rich restoration tanks with plexglas fronts. An unconscious legionary floated in suspension within one of the tanks. Kholak of the Second Battalion. His veins were pierced with tubes and a respirator was strapped across his face like a grotesque xenos parasite. He twitched and jerked in his induced healing coma. His wounds were recovering well.

A lone servo-skull swung in near Dreagher, probes and needles jutting from below its upper jaw. Its grav-suspensor buzzed loudly, making him twitch. He swatted it away.

While the apothecarion secundus did, when needed, still serve as an overflow for the ship’s primary medicae hall, and it remained the chief recovery ward for the echelon, the room no longer felt like a medicae ward.

No. It felt like a shrine.

Dreagher glared at the comatose figure seated within the central isolation cell, bright fluorescence shining down on him.

‘Wake up,’ he snarled. ‘Come back to us. Your Legion needs you.’

With a final glare, he turned and strode from the room.

The crowd roared at the muffled smack of fists striking flesh and the sharp twig-like crack of breaking ribs.

The faces of the onlookers were twisted and bestial as they watched the pair of combatants circle one another. They stamped their feet and beat their fists against the metal sheeting of the barricade separating them from the combatants, making the underdeck vault, deep within the bowels of the Defiant, shudder and boom.

Alone amongst the savage, braying crowd, Maven was silent, a slight smile playing upon his lean, hard face. He could see in the dance on the sand below that Skoral would win.

He breathed deeply the hot animal stink of human sweat. It was not a pleasant smell, but nor was it overtly repellent. It was the smell of brotherhood, of shared adversity. It was a warrior smell.

He stood with his arms folded. His muscles were raw and beginning to ache, but that was nothing to what he’d feel tomorrow. His knuckles were grazed and bloody, and he could already feel them swelling. He’d taken a beating tonight.

His eyes, granite grey and intense, stared unblinking at the two adversaries bleeding in the pit below.

The first, Skoral; a broad-shouldered woman with tattooed arms as thick as Maven’s thighs and a heart as big as an oroxen’s.

Thick ropes of blood dripped from her lower lip, and ugly welts marred her flesh. Her hair was shaved to the scalp on the left side of her head. One eye was swollen shut, the skin around it bulging and purple. She was still smiling, though. She was loving this. Her teeth were tinged red with her own blood and there were several gaps in her grin where five minutes ago there had been none.

The second, some low-deck munitions loader; a brute of a man, middling in years with the body of an ogryn and a face that few mothers would love. He was breathing hard and blood was running freely down the side of his face from a gash above his left eye. His hands were like rockcrete mitts. His eyes were glassy and his neck muscles wound as taut as springs; he was spiking, Maven realised. Sump-cooked aggressor-stimms most likely. He stalked around the confines of the pit, contemptuously turning his back on Skoral, and lifted his arms into the air, revving up the crowd.

The fool, thought Maven. That’s only going to piss her off.

Both the fighters were big. Not legionary big, of course, but certainly big for mortal humans. They’d both undergone gene-therapy, enhancing their bulk, strength and reflexes beyond what was normal. There was nothing unusual in that.

Skoral went for him as his back was turned, but that had been anticipated. He turned swiftly – he was surprisingly quick – and swung a murderous hook at her head. She ducked under it and hit him with an uppercut to the chin that snapped his head back, hard.

He wasn’t done, though, not by a long shot. There was a flurry of blows, a scuffling grapple as each fighter tried and failed to get a dominant grip. They separated, and as they did, Skoral’s opponent landed a meaty fist square in the side of her head.

Maven winced and the crowd roared with renewed intensity. Skoral staggered, lurching drunkenly, and the big loader went after her. It wouldn’t be long now. He’d seen this routine before.

The massive loader cannoned a blow at Skoral’s face, putting all his strength and weight behind it, looking to end the fight in one blow. Too late he realised he’d been suckered.

Stepping outside the big fighter’s swinging arm, she grabbed him by the wrist, twisting it painfully, and pulled him forward, simultaneously slamming her open hand into his shoulder. The joint popped, dislocating. She drove him down, continuing to use his own momentum against him, and slammed him face-first into the sheet metal pit wall behind her.

There was a collective intake of breath at the force of the impact, which tore the sheet panel loose, wrenching it violently out of shape. The big fighter was on his knees, supporting himself with his good arm. The other hung limp at his side.

Skoral stepped back away from him, her chest rising and falling heavily. Sweat and splatters of blood marred her grey singlet top.

To the loader’s credit, he managed to push himself to his feet, turning unsteadily towards Skoral once more. He was tough, Maven had to give him that. His face was a mess of blood and snot. His nose, already broken from an earlier strike, was now smeared across his face. He spat out a handful of teeth. Skoral shook her head.

‘Should’ve stayed down,’ Maven heard her grunt, still grinning.

‘M’not gettin’ shamed by some medicae whore,’ spat the big man. Skoral’s smile disappeared and Maven shuddered. That was not clever.

The big man went for her then, swinging wildly, but the end was a foregone conclusion. By the time Skoral stepped away from him her knuckles were dripping and the hulking loader was unconscious, lying in a pool of his own blood.

Finished, her demolition of her opponent complete, Skoral walked from the pit.

New combatants were entering even as the still-unconscious fighter was being dragged away. Maven pushed his way through the press of bodies.

He found her in a side-chamber. The burly loader was conscious now, though the blood on the ground showed where he’d been roughly dragged from the pit and unceremoniously dumped on the floor. Skoral had set his dislocated shoulder – which must have been agonising – and was stitching up the cut to his head. She wasn’t being overly gentle either, stabbing in with the hooked needle and yanking the thick thread through.

Her skin was liberally covered in angular, totemic tattoos. Maven’s gaze lingered for a moment on the Gothic numerals inked on the meat of Skoral’s shoulder, in the midst of those tribalistic markings. Ninth Company. He bore a similar brand upon his left pectoral, though his declared him as bonded to the 17th – his master Argus Brond’s company.

Glancing up at him, Skoral inclined her head in greeting before turning back to her work.

‘You hit hard, woman,’ said the loader, grimacing as Skoral drew the thread through his skin. ‘You’d be a good breeder.’

Skoral snorted, and glanced up at Maven, who was leaning back against the wall, a wry smile on his face. She winked at him.

‘Is that a proposition?’ she grunted.

‘Might be,’ said the man. ‘You’re ugly as sin itself but you’re strong. I could do worse.’

‘You really know how to make a woman feel special,’ said Skoral. She yanked hard on the thread, making the man flinch. ‘And while the notion of pumping out your idiot spawn is oh-so-appealing, I’ll have to decline your proposal. But good luck to you. I’m sure you’ll make some sump-swine a fine husband.’

‘I’ll take that as a no, then,’ said the thickset loader.

‘Not if you were the last seed-bearing specimen of manhood in the void,’ said Skoral, with a grin.

Her former adversary grunted and shrugged.

‘Fair enough,’ he said. He saw Maven standing in the doorway and nodded his thick jaw in his direction. ‘You lie with that? Is that it? I could break him over my knee.’

Maven grinned, folding his arms across his chest.

‘Pfff,’ scoffed Skoral. She bit the thread, cutting it, and tied it off. ‘Him? He’s nothing but skin and bone. I can’t see him satisfying me.’

‘With the creds I won on your fight tonight, I might just marry her, though,’ Maven said to the man.

‘You bet on her against me?’ said the loader, sounding a little hurt.

‘You would’ve done so yourself if you had any sense,’ said Maven. ‘You’ll know for next time.’

Skoral punched the loader in his bad shoulder, making him grimace. ‘Go. Get out of here before I beat you senseless for the second time today.’

‘Well, if you change your mind…’ he said as he rose.

‘Go,’ said Skoral, pointing the way out, a hint of a smile on her lips.

The big man rose and shuffled from the room, looking sheepish.

‘A charming individual,’ said Maven.

Skoral winced as she sank onto a bench, nursing her bruised and bloodied hands in a chilled gel-pack.

‘He’s harmless,’ she said. ‘He’s honest at least. There’re worse men on this ship.’

‘That there are,’ said Maven, taking a seat opposite her.

While she was a big woman – easily a head taller than most unaugmented men – she was effortlessly comfortable in her own skin, and had a constant string of admirers. She would never be described as a beauty, not by any means, but there was an earthy appeal about her, a proud vitality that was certainly attractive. She was no demure high-born lady – she was crude, rough and could out-drink any man – but in the hard, short and brutal lives of those on the ship, her manner was deeply life-affirming.

‘Why do I feel you’re here to lecture me?’ said Skoral, giving him a glare.

‘You know what I’m going to say?’

‘You could just congratulate me on the win,’ she said. ‘You could thank me for earning you a fat wad of credits.’

‘Yes, you won,’ said Maven. ‘But you could have done so without letting him hit you like that. You’re better than that.’

‘You can talk,’ said Skoral. ‘What the hell happened to you out there tonight? You bet against yourself, didn’t you?’

Maven’s handsome features split in a crooked grin, though he instantly regretted it, groaning slightly. He was going to have some serious bruises come the morning.

‘You could get yourself killed doing that,’ said Skoral. ‘If anyone found out you bet against yourself and took a dive…’

‘No one will find out,’ said Maven. ‘I had intermediaries place the bets.’

‘How much did you win?’

‘A lot,’ said Maven. ‘There’s a game tonight. Knights and Knaves. I play it right, I could make the same again tenfold.’

‘Or you could be found hanging from a sub-deck rafter, your face purple and your britches filled.’

‘Only if I’m stupid,’ said Maven. ‘And I’m not.’

Skoral grunted in frustration. ‘What is it that you want, nursemaid? You came here for something. Spit it out.’

Maven’s face darkened. ‘We need to talk,’ he said, lowering his voice.

‘We’re not talking now?’

‘We need to talk somewhere quiet. Somewhere… not here.’

Skoral looked at him frankly, trying to read him. It never worked.

‘Don’t tell me you are going to proposition me as well?’ she said, giving him a salacious wink.

Maven looked irritated.

‘No,’ he said, unamused.

‘What is it? Tell me.’

‘Not here. Not now,’ he hissed.

A shape appeared in the doorway, blotting out the light. Maven rose hastily to his feet, stepping back and lowering his head in deference. Skoral turned.

One of the Legion stood there, silhouetted against the light behind him. He was truly massive – even the hulking munitions loader would have looked like a child beside him.

The warrior was forced to turn sideways and duck his head to fit through the door frame as he entered the room. He was built to a different scale from the denizens of the ship’s sub-levels – they were made for menials and servants, not legionaries. His armour’s servos whined with each movement. Each step he took made the floor plates shudder.

His shaved scalp was heavily scarred, and cables and plugs jutted from the back of his head. A thick, dark beard covered his huge, square jaw. His skin was the colour of deep mahogany, and by human standards his features were too broad, too thick, and too heavy, as if affected by a form of gigantism. Nevertheless, his head looked perhaps too small for his oversized body.

It was counterintuitive, but Maven always felt the legionaries seemed even less human when they were not wearing their helmets. At least with their helmets on you could imagine something human within.

The World Eater’s armour was a bastard hybrid of different marks, though he clearly favoured the earlier, heavier designs. His armour plates were a mix of the alabaster white and cerulean blue of the old Legion. Those colours were becoming ever more of a rarity.

His heavy armour was in good order, but showed signs of extensive repair. It was austere; the XII Legion was not known for its flamboyance, though various plates – poleyns, pauldrons, greaves – were emblazoned with kill-markings and campaign honours. The Legion’s heraldry – a stylised gaping red maw engulfing a planet – was emblazoned upon his left shoulder plate. On his right: echelon and rank markings.

If Maven hadn’t recognised him by face, those markings would have made the centurion’s identity plain: Dreagher, captain of the Ninth. Or at least what was left of it after Terra.

He glanced down at Maven. His eyes were like the clouded grey moons of Bodt set against the darkness of the void. Madness and unpredictability lurked there.

‘Go away,’ he said, his voice a deep subdural bass rumble.

Maven needed no encouragement.

‘My lord,’ said Skoral, dropping painfully to one knee and lowering her head once Maven had gone.

‘I saw you fight,’ said Dreagher.

Skoral rose to her feet, suppressing a wince. She glanced up at the huge World Eaters captain, attempting to read his demeanour, before looking aside. It was never wise to let your gaze linger for long on one of the Legion. It tended to make them agitated. Things usually died when a World Eater became agitated.

‘You saw?’ she said. The presence of one of the Legion was unusual at the fights, though not unheard of.

‘You fought well.’

Skoral glanced up at him. He wasn’t looking at her. He was scanning the room, his brow creased, taking in its details, or perhaps seeking any potential threat.

‘Thank you, my lord,’ Skoral said, unsure quite how to respond to the uncharacteristic praise.

‘It is a shame you were born female,’ added Dreagher. ‘You would have made a fine legionary.’

That could have been taken a number of ways. Skoral decided to take it as a compliment.

‘Thank you, my lord,’ she said.

Dreagher began pacing. He was uncomfortable here, Skoral realised. The chamber was too close. Too stifling. Normally when she spoke with him it was in his arming chamber, where he seemed more at ease. She saw the World Eater’s breath hasten – a clear danger sign.

Unwilling to risk inciting Dreagher’s anger by speaking, she stood stock-still, waiting for the captain of the Ninth to make his intention known. Why had he come here?

He stopped directly in front of her. Her head was on a level with the middle of his chest. Up close she could see all the repaired scrapes, cuts and nicks in the armour, like battle scars. The throaty purr of his armour made her skin tingle.

Standing close to one of the Legion was to stand in the shadow of death. Her life was a slender thread that he could cut at a whim. There would be no questions. There would be no inquiry. No one would mourn her, except perhaps–

‘That was Brond’s man,’ Dreagher said. This close, the deep bass of his voice seemed to pass through her, making her bones shudder.

‘Yes, lord,’ she said.

‘Do not get sentimentally attached,’ Dreagher said. ‘The 17th are only stationed aboard the Defiant temporarily.’

‘I understand, lord,’ said Skoral.

‘Good,’ he said.

He stood there unmoving. The silence became uncomfortable. Slowly, biting her lip, Skoral lifted her gaze, looking up at the captain of the Ninth.

He appeared lost in thought, looking off into the mid-distance.

‘My lord?’ she ventured, finally.

His gaze settled on her and his brow furrowed.

‘Tend to your wounds. Meet me in my arming chamber once you have done so. I want a condition report on our patient,’ he said.

‘My lord? Has his condition changed since this morning?’

Dreagher looked at her, his expression inscrutable.

‘Why?’ he said.

‘I have already given you today’s condition report, my lord.’

‘I see,’ said Dreagher. ‘Of course.’

Skoral tongued the new gap in her teeth, troubled.

There was no denying it. He was getting worse.

‘I can recheck the patient to see if his condition has changed?’ she said.

Dreagher did not answer. Skoral heard the distinctive click of vox-comm traffic. The World Eater turned away, speaking in a low voice.

She stood and opened the locker where she’d stashed her belongings before her fight. She retrieved her heavy combat jacket, and pulled it on over her sweat and bloodstained singlet. There was a red handprint on the front of the jacket, over her heart – a mark of considerable honour among the Legion’s servants, one that Dreagher himself had allowed her to wear. It had been her proudest moment.

She slipped a heavy bracelet onto her wrist. One of its links pulsed with pale light almost immediately, lighting up from within. She clicked it off, and looked up at Dreagher, her brow furrowed.

‘My lord?’ she said. ‘What is it?’

‘Blood,’ he said.

Chapter 2

Skoral could feel her master’s anger; it radiated from him like heat from simmering embers. It wouldn’t take much provocation for those embers to roar into flame. She’d seen his violent rages before.

He was far from the worst of them in the Legion – but even so she had served him long enough to know when to tread warily.

She stood at his side, dwarfed by his massive, war-plate encased frame. Her every instinct right now screamed to back away, to put distance between herself and her unpredictable master, but that was not possible within the tight confines of the service lift.

Dreagher was far more controlled than many within the XII, but all it needed would be one stab of the Nails and she would be dead. She knew that he valued her service highly – a fact she bore with much pride – but he was as much a slave to those hateful, buzzing implants as any of them.

She watched the buttons of the lift light up in turn as they ascended through the core of the battleship, willing them to go faster. She tried not to notice Dreagher’s hands clenching and unclenching, servos whining. She kept her gaze fixed ahead of her, and shifted the weight of the heavy narthecium cradled in her arms.

A sophisticated medicae tool, it resembled something from a sadist’s cruel imaginings, tipped with diamantine drills, retracted needle-points, monomolecular bone-saws and laser scalpels. Despite its grisly appearance, it served multiple life-giving functions, from patient diagnosis and contagion detection, to administering pain-suppressants, conducting vitae transfusions and undertaking field amputations. Concealed in its protective ceramite casing was a wide range of antitoxins, serums and liniments.

A Legion Apothecary would wear the specialist tools on one arm, as a gauntlet, his servo-assisted strength hefting it with little effort. For Skoral, it was an unwieldy, heavy piece of hardware that required two hands and all of her not-inconsiderable strength to manage.

Skoral was highly aware that she understood only a fraction of the narthecium’s potential. She’d received only cursory training in its use. The rest she’d had to figure out on her own.

Still, she was practised in one of its primary functions. Too practised.

Gears ground as the lift slowed and came to a clunking halt.

‘Sub-deck delta-five,’ croaked the emaciated, limbless servitor hard-wired into the control panel, and the doors slid open amid a burst of steam. Skoral let out a breath that she didn’t realise she’d been holding as Dreagher stepped from the lift. Glad to be out of its confines, she followed in his wake.

Argus Brond, captain of the 17th was waiting for them. He wore a battle-scarred Crusader-era helm, painted blood red, its aspect belligerent and brutal. From the darkness of the helm’s deep visor slits, his lenses gleamed.

The slender figure of Maven stood in the captain’s shadow. Skoral caught the seneschal’s gaze and arched one of her eyebrows, questioningly. Maven, almost imperceptibly, shook his head in response.

Brond removed his helm with a hiss of equalising pressure, revealing his brutish, ugly brick of a head. His face was war-flattened and heavy scars carved jagged arcs across his cheeks, lips, brow and scalp, contorting his features. The cables of his neural aggression implants jutted from his short-shaved scalp.

Maven stepped forward and took his captain’s helm. It looked almost comically over-large in his arms.

‘Brond,’ growled Skoral’s master, inclining his chin in greeting.

‘Dreagher.’

Skoral remembered a time when the warriors of the Legion greeted each other in the old manner – wrist-to-wrist – but that custom was all but dead now. It was not just the mortal servants of the Legion who trod softly around their masters; the World Eaters themselves eyed each other warily whenever another came near.

The bonds of brotherhood were still intact, for now, but they were frayed. No World Eater was comfortable being in close proximity to his kin. Brond and Dreagher were about as close to friends as Skoral had seen within the Legion, but they were cautious around each other nonetheless.

Brond was garbed for war, as ever. Over his worn, blood-red battleplate hung a cloak of chainmail, and a massive executioner’s axe was strapped across his back. At his hips were a pair of scabbarded power swords. Their blades were short and wide, tipped with wicked, forward-jutting spikes.

‘Apprise me,’ growled Dreagher.

‘Two of yours,’ said Brond, indicating behind him with a movement of his head, though he did not take his gaze off Dreagher. ‘An hour dead.’

‘Who are they?’ he said.

‘One of them is Saal. The other… I can’t tell,’ said Brond.

Dreagher spat a curse. ‘There are few enough of us left as it is,’ Dreagher snarled. ‘The Legion is weakened with every death.’

Brond shrugged. ‘Without an enemy to kill, we kill each other,’ he said.

Dreagher shook his head. ‘It cannot continue.’

‘I see you’ve brought your pet Apothecary,’ said Brond, his gaze switching to Skoral.

She bristled at the derision in his voice, but lowered her gaze submissively and tried not to let her anger show. Not that it would matter; most of the Legion were unable to read the body language of lesser beings.

While masterful in so many ways, reading human emotions was one area where their skills were noticeably lacking. Her hypothesis was that it was probably something never considered in their creation. They were made to be the perfect warriors, not diplomats or politicians; what need had they to be able to connect on an emotional level with base humans?

‘We must continue to harvest the dead,’ said Dreagher. ‘Without the gene-banks, the Legion has no future.’

‘I do not see us replenishing our ranks any time soon,’ said Brond, bitterness tingeing his words.

‘A time will come when we are able to rebuild, brother,’ said Dreagher. ‘We are wounded, sorely wounded, but we will rise again.’

‘I hope you are right, Dreagher,’ said Brond, ‘but there are those who believe that is just a dream. That the Legion is already in its death throes.’

‘They are wrong,’ said Dreagher. ‘It will only die if we allow it. Where are the bodies?’

‘Back here,’ said Brond, stepping aside and gesturing up one of the darkened service corridors.

The two captains fell in beside each other, leaving Skoral and Maven to follow close behind. They exchanged a glance.

A circle of World Eaters stood around the corpses. The onlookers were legionaries of Brond’s 17th Company, all garbed in red like their master, in stark contrast to Dreagher’s blue and white of the old Legion.

None of them appeared particularly moved by the loss of their warrior brothers, lying sprawled upon the deck floor, covered in dried blood. Skoral was not surprised. The Nails robbed the World Eaters of what little humanity was left in them.

Skoral slipped between the towering giants, and knelt before the bodies. The stink was appalling, but she was used to that. Legion blood smelt different from human blood – it was richer and had a harsher metallic tang to it. They were a breed apart, after all.

She recognised Saal. His face was grey and spattered with dried, flaking blood, but his lipless features were unmistakable, still curled in their perpetual snarl. He was one that Skoral had always been wary of; she was not upset to see him dead.

His throat was a mass of torn tissue and blood, the wound so savage and deep that the vertebrae were visible. It wasn’t his only wound; there were three punctures in his breastplate over his twin hearts. Those were the wounds that killed him.

She turned her attention to the other body.

Its face was a sunken, bloody crater, making facial identification impossible. The front of the skull was completely caved in; the force necessary to do this to a legionary skull was immense.

Added to that, the Space Marine’s abdomen had been viciously ripped open. That wound was jagged and messy, the meat shredded and hanging in mutilated chunks, like mincemeat. Skoral knew that kind of wound well. Chainblade.

It looked like the work of a rabid beast. That was nothing unusual; indeed, it was expected – the XII was a Legion of rabid beasts.

Her gaze settled on a trio of brass and bone totemic fetishes that hung from a length of leather wrapped around the dead warrior’s left wrist. They were highly stylised skulls; the symbol of the Blood Father. She looked up at Dreagher.

‘This is Khrast,’ she said.

Dreagher’s face darkened, flushing with anger and frustration as he saw that she was correct. He barked a curse in Nagrakali, the sound harsh and clipped.

‘He was a good warrior,’ said Brond. ‘A good lieutenant.’

‘He survived Arrigata, Isstvan, Terra… only to die here to one of his own brothers,’ said Dreagher. He laughed then. The sound was ugly, harsh and utterly devoid of humour.

‘He died in battle,’ said Brond, gesturing at the pair of corpses. ‘They both did. It’s a good death. It’s as much as any of us could hope for.’

‘They did not kill each other,’ said Dreagher. ‘Saal could never have taken Khrast.’

‘Perhaps he got lucky,’ said Brond. Even to Skoral’s ear, it didn’t sound as if he believed it.

‘You saw him in the pits,’ said Dreagher. ‘You’ve seen him in battle. No, these two didn’t kill each other. They were squad brothers. They died together. They were fighting someone else.’

Skoral was inspecting the wounds at Saal’s neck, probing the dead flesh.

‘The injuries sustained support that,’ she said. ‘I don’t think these two did kill each other.’

Dreagher and Brond stared at each other for a long moment, until Brond conceded, nodding his head.

‘Ruokh,’ said Brond, his voice low. ‘That’s what you are thinking.’

‘Tell me you believe otherwise. Who else could take Khrast? Let alone Khrast and Saal together?’

Brond shrugged.

Dreagher opened up a comms channel, speaking into the pick-up on the inside of his gorget.

‘Ruokh, this is Dreagher,’ he said, his voice tinged with anger. ‘Give me your current location.’

Silence was the only response.

‘Ruokh, brother, answer me. Your current location – what is it?’

Nothing. Dreagher swore again.

‘The Blood Priest felt this was Ruokh’s doing as well,’ said Brond.

Skoral looked up in alarm.

‘What?’ said Dreagher, his head snapping around to lock on to Brond. ‘Baruda knows of this?’

Brond nodded. ‘He was here. What is the issue?’

‘Baruda and Khrast were as brothers,’ snarled Dreagher. ‘They ran together on Bodt, and came through the Bloodtrials together. He will be seeking recompense – he will be looking for blood. We need to find Ruokh before he does.’

Brond nodded. ‘The 17th will join the hunt.’

Dreagher glanced down at Skoral.

‘Deal with the bodies,’ he said. She nodded, and Dreagher turned away, barking orders.

The other World Eaters drifted away, moving to secure the area and joining the search for Ruokh. She was left alone with the corpses.

‘By the gods, you stink,’ she said to the corpse of Saal.

With a sigh, she lay the narthecium on its side and removed her combat jacket. She folded it and placed it far enough away that it wouldn’t get bloody. Then she knelt and set to work.

Nurtured within the flesh of every Space Marine were two progenoid glands, the repositories of the genetic building blocks needed to create more of their kind. The first of these glands, nestled in the throat, grew to maturation in half a decade. Skoral turned the mutilated legionary’s head to one side, pressing her fingers against his skin. It was still warm.

As she’d expected, the gland there had already been removed. The dead warrior was no neophyte. The Legion had no neophytes, not any more. They were all veterans now – those of them left alive after Terra and the slow bleeding of the Legion since.

The chest-gland, however, was only removed after death.

The narthecium’s reductor was designed to cut through Space Marine armour and hardened Legiones Astartes bone to retrieve the precious gene-seed. In this case, the arduous task was made easier by the sickening wound in the dead World Eater’s gut.

Skoral opened the wound further, cutting a neat slice upwards until the narthecium’s saw began chewing at the corpse’s sternum. Hefting the heavy Apothecary’s tool to her shoulder, she took a breath and wiped a splatter of blood from her face, before gripping it tightly with both hands once more and bracing herself.

Grimacing, Skoral drove the narthecium into the gaping stomach cavity, burying it in the steaming flesh. She grunted as she pressed it upwards under the ribcage. She revved the saw blade, grinding through muscle tissue, pressing deeper.

She used the green-glowing data screen to guide her, navigating past organs that no human was born with. After a few failed attempts, each of which required her to pull the narthecium’s questing probes back before pressing deeper into the Space Marine’s body cavity, she found what she was looking for. On the data screen it looked like a bulbous tumour.

Once in position, she squeezed a trigger mechanism. The narthecium jolted and there was a tearing sound as the globular organ was extracted. A wet splatch followed as the reductor deposited the progenoid within one of the medicae canisters in the back of the narthecium’s armoured housing.

It didn’t look like much, little more than a veined, bloody lump hung with stringy sinew and muscle. Nevertheless, it held the key to the Legion’s future – if it had one.

On that point, Skoral was becoming increasingly doubtful.

Egil Galerius moved like a dancer, each step in perfect balance, each movement flowing into the next without pause. Each strike was executed to deliver a perfect killing blow.

Galerius was of the III Legion, the exalted Emperor’s Children. Seventh Millennial, Third Tactical. His skin was the white of flawless marble. His hair, cropped short, was similarly devoid of colour. His eyes, however, were a startling shade of violet. They had an intensity of colour to them that was as brilliant and sharp as finely cut amethyst.

Perfection. Killing perfection. That was what he strove for. That was what consumed him. It was the ideal that he trained his body and mind incessantly to achieve.

His features were angular and refined, invested with a haughty pride often read by those outside the III Legion as arrogance. His face was unmarked by scar or blemish, except around his mouth and chin.

A pair of thin pink scars stretched straight out from the corners of his mouth to a point just below his ears, at the base of his jawline. Another two extended down from a point where they met at the very centre of his bottom lip, cutting down over his chin at an acute angle, finishing on his neck to either side of his throat.

These were not scars earned in battle. These cuts were purposeful. Galerius had willingly allowed them to be made. Fabius Bile had performed the operation himself, honouring Galerius with the masterful touch of his scalpel. The Apothecary was a true artist. His flesh-work was sublime.

Galerius was garbed in a long, flowing tabard, the material coarse and undyed. It was not something that a member of the Brotherhood of Palatine Blades would normally deign to wear, but these were unusual times. He was alone, cut off from his beloved Legion, a refugee in a hive of savagery and barbarism. This was the best that he had.

He moved slowly, ensuring every strike, parry, thrust and step was precise, his body in absolute balance, completely in control of his every muscle movement. His breathing was similarly controlled. He used his breath to enhance the focus of his strikes and the ease of his movement.

His bare, alabaster arms were covered in small, criss-crossing cuts. Some were recent, the wounds bright and fresh, the blood newly congealed. Others were older. Pale scars underneath spoke of this not being a new vice. They were artful, these slices, following the contours of his muscles. To a certain taste they were aesthetic, these delicate blade-marks, as was the pain of their creation. Among the ranks of the Emperor’s Children, such a thing was the very least of the practices that others might call deviance.

Galerius turned, rotating smoothly on the balls of his bare feet, and brought his sword, the exemplar blade Argentus, around in a slow, two-handed killing strike.

The sword was an exquisite work of art, forged to Galerius’s exact specifications on Chemos by one of the III Legion’s finest sword smiths. The slender blade was like liquid silver, with the slightest blue tinge to its sheen, and its golden hilt was fashioned in the likeness of a resplendent phoenix. Gently tapering to a narrow point, even without its power core activated its blade was able to cut through the finest steel. Activated, it could carve through adamantium and ceramite like a knife through water.

Lowering his weight, he continued the flow of his strike, slowly arching backwards as he twisted his body the way it had turned, rolling his shoulders to bring Argentus around in a new, flashing arc. His neck followed the serpentine unfurling of his spine, extending his head back so that he was looking at the floor, mimicking the movement of flowing under an enemy strike.

Smoothly, his body and mind in perfect symmetry, he rolled his shoulder back around in a new strike. His spine straightened once more, as if carving the legs from a new enemy, then spinning lightly, turning, lowering one hand to the ground, striking behind him with a reverse, one-handed thrust that would have impaled an enemy rushing him from his blind side.

Argentus sliced the air in a gleaming arc as Galerius rose, turning and bringing the blade down in a powerful two-handed slash that would have cut an enemy in two, from collarbone to hip.

It was a sinuous, deadly dance that he weaved. His style of swordplay was so far removed from the killing ways of the World Eaters as to be almost laughable.

Where he was precise, focused and disciplined, they were wild, uncontrollable, a rabble. If he were a hunting falcon – elegant and controlled, striking hard and with absolute precision – then the World Eaters were blood-maddened, rabid dogs let loose off the leash, biting and ripping at anything that moved, and snapping at each other when they had no identifiable enemy.

Of course, he would never let his hosts register his contempt. That would be tantamount to suicide. And in truth it was hard to argue with their way of war. They were unsubtle, unrefined savages, but they were brutally, brutally effective. When the World Eaters went to war, nothing was left alive.

He was no officer, but they had given him his own quarters, crude and spartan as they were. He was thankful to have his own space to rest and train in. A place to escape to.

He completed his training regimen and knelt, sheathing the falchion Argentus in its decorative, golden scabbard. He placed the weapon reverently upon a shelf and turned, shrugging off his tabard. Every inch of his snow-white skin was covered in cuts or the ghosts of cuts. The plugs and sockets embedded in his flesh where his power armour bonded to him stood out starkly, the black metal further enhancing the pallid nature of his flesh.

His armour hung upon his arming rack. He crossed his cell and stood before it. The heavy, rich purple plate, polished to a mirror sheen, was edged in gold and covered in intricate filigree. His left shoulder plate, couter, vambrace and gauntlet were plated in platinum, an honour unique to the Palatine Blades. He reached out to the Legion heraldry emblazoned on his left shoulder plate, and traced the outline of the golden eagle. It felt cold.

He transferred his gaze to his helm, with its golden Phoenician-pattern faceplate. It stared back at him, lifeless and inert. He could see his distorted reflection mirrored in its visor lenses. Their curve made him look grotesque. His reflected appearance was made more distorted still as his lips peeled back along the lines of the pink scars on his face, the flesh of his lower face folding back like the petals of a flower.

He heard heavy footfalls in the corridor outside his cell, and the flesh of his face slapped back into place.

Galerius was tolerated by the legionaries of the XII, but there was little warmth or camaraderie between them. There was a simmering undercurrent of aggression and barely suppressed rage in the XII Legion that frequently roared to the surface. His presence seemed to aggravate them, and so he avoided them as best he could. Many were openly hostile.

Only the captain, Dreagher, had shown him anything more than the barest of civility. It had been Dreagher that had dragged him from beneath the shadow of the palatial walls on Terra, his armour a sundered ruin from the guns of the Imperial Fists. He had a certain barbaric honour about him, the captain.

Dreagher came to him on occasion, and they spoke of simple matters; battle tactics and fighting techniques, mostly. The captain’s accented Gothic was thick and guttural. Amongst themselves, the XII Legion largely spoke their mongrel tongue Nagrakali. It was an ugly, simplistic language.

Much to Galerius’s surprise, he’d come to look forward to those moments when Dreagher came to him. A certain mutual respect had grown between the two of them.

More heavy footfalls in the corridor outside. Intriguing.

Galerius reached for his armour.

It had not always been like this, thought Dreagher, as he scoured the endless corridors of the Defiant. Once, there had been hope.

Once, a bright and promising future had beckoned, and it had seemed that anything was possible. Humanity was at the epoch of something incredible, a new golden age, and the Legions were there at the forefront of it, carving it out with bolter and chainsword. They’d had a purpose then. There had been a reason for what they did.

He glanced over at Argus Brond. He too seemed lost in his own private reflections, his brow furrowed.

The universe had been a simpler place in the early years of the Great Crusade. The darkness of Old Night had been dispelled, and the insular shackles that had constrained humanity for so long were thrown off. For the first time in millennia, humanity began to look out beyond the borders of its own fears, staring out into the universe with bold aims and the purity of a singular purpose. And at the vanguard of the crusade that rippled out from Terra had been the newly formed Legiones Astartes. Among them, feared and respected even then for their ferocity and brutality – and their unshakeable discipline, something that was now lost to them – was the XII Legion. The War Hounds.

When the pain engine in his head was not tightening the screws, blinding him to everything but their insistent urge, Dreagher recalled the optimism of those halcyon days. He knew the Nails had deadened him inside, painting his memories in colourless tones, draining them of intensity, yet still what remained made him mourn for what the Legion had lost.

All that optimism had long been trampled to dust and whisked away on the winds of fate. Hope had turned to despair. What had been golden had been revealed as fool’s gold – a shining veneer that concealed a rotting, poisonous core.

It could so easily have been different. He looked around at his Legion, disintegrating around him, bleeding itself dry, tearing itself apart, and he despaired, thinking of what might have been.

It would have been easy to pinpoint the start of that decay as the moment when Angron had been reunited with them. Other Legions had already been fighting alongside their own primarchs for some years by that point. How many countless hours had Dreagher and his comrades spent in awed speculation about the traits and martial skills of their own gene-sire?

Whatever they had expected, it had not been the broken, damaged thing that was delivered to them. And yet it would be too easy to blame him for the Legion’s degradations.

Yes, it had been in emulation of and at the insistence of Angron that the Legion was subjected to the self-same psycho-surgery that had so damaged the psyche and state of mind of the primarch. That this was the prime cause of the Legion’s devolution was unarguable. Nevertheless, Dreagher believed it was all too easy to lay the blame at Angron’s door. So also was it too simple to regard the Nucerians, those long-butchered fools who had so damaged Angron in the first place, as the instigators of the World Eaters’ decline.

No, Dreagher pointed the finger of blame for the Legion’s fate at one individual, and it was not his primarch: it was the being that he had once called Emperor.

In denying Angron his death, denying him his honour, the Emperor had damned the XII Legion to a slow death.

It would have been a bitter blow for the Legion never to have known or fought alongside its primarch – but Dreagher couldn’t help but think it would have been preferable to what had come after.

Dreagher was torn from his reverie by a click in his gorget. Incoming vox from the bridge. Stirzaker.

‘Initial augur sweeps read negative, Dreagher,’ said the cracked, thin voice of the ship’s flag-captain. ‘I cannot see either of them. It would seem that neither of them wishes to be found.’

‘Keep trying,’ snarled Dreagher, killing the connection. ‘Where the hell are they?’

‘Ruokh could have accessed the tertiary lift shafts,’ said Argus Brond. The captain was tap-clicking the screen of the auspex built into his left vambrace. He looked up. The green light emitted by the screen gave his brutish face an unhealthy, eerie sheen. ‘If he’s loose in the sub-decks, he could be anywhere. He knows we are hunting him.’

‘We have to find him before Baruda does. Do we know if he has made any more kills?’ said Dreagher.

‘There have been no reports of further casualties,’ said Brond.

‘That’s something at least,’ said Dreagher.

‘For now,’ said Brond, returning his attention to his screen. Dreagher heard accusation in his fellow captain’s voice. Brond had spoken against Ruokh on more than one occasion.

An incoming vox-alert sounded.

‘What is it?’ growled Dreagher.

‘Baruda,’ said Brond.

Chapter 3

Skoral Wroth was voidborn. She had come into the universe screaming and fighting, born in the lower hab-decks of the Defiant. She’d been fighting each of her thirty-two Terran standard years of life since.

Her mother had died in labour; Skoral had been huge, even then, and her mother little more than a child, slender and ethereal. The beatings Skoral had received from her father, a mean-spirited sub-level graft-welder with narc addiction, had ended only after Skoral had caved in his head with a wrench. She’d been seven years old.

A few years of running riot with a kill-gang through the underdeck had ended with her own gang turning against her, its barely teenaged leader judging her a threat. She had knocked out two of them as they had come for her in the night, broken the jaw of another and killed one, sticking him with the blade he’d brought to cut her thread, but they’d overcome her. They had left her to die, hanging from a chain-noose in the ship’s lower starboard sump depths. That was where Dreagher had found her.

He’d carried the unconscious girl up to the main decks and dumped her before Khurgan. The Apothecary had worn an expression that suggested his captain had just deposited vermin in his apothecarion. In a sense, he had.

‘What is that?’ he had said.

‘You said you wanted a medicae aid,’ said Dreagher. ‘Teach him.’

‘You want this tending your legionaries?’ said Khurgan, flatly.

‘He’s strong and has a warrior’s spirit. He will do. If he doesn’t show any aptitude, dispose of him. There are plenty more where he came from.’

‘I’m not a boy,’ Skoral had snarled up at Dreagher. ‘And I’m not afraid of you.’

An ugly sound croaked from Khurgan’s throat at that. Only later had Skoral learned that he had been laughing.

‘You are a bad liar, girl,’ Dreagher had said. ‘I can taste your fear.’

Then he had clipped her lightly on the side of her head with the back of one immense hand. The blow had sent her crashing over a trolley of medicae implements, sending them flying. She hit the ground hard.

‘I like her,’ she remembered hearing Khurgan say, just before the darkness had surged up to claim her. ‘She does have a warrior’s spirit.’

The Legion blood on her hands and arms had dried to a brown crust. The iron-stink of it was making her feel sick. She was hurrying now, thinking of the chem-showers. All she wanted to do was get herself clean.

Her bracelet chimed, vibrating slightly. Maven. She ignored it. She could speak to him later. Right now, her main priority was finishing off her duty here and cleaning herself up.

She keyed in her access code and let the emergent needle prick her thumb. A perfect droplet of blood rose from the tiny wound. She smeared it on the plexglass assessor plate. The plate retracted and a light began to flicker, accompanied by a faint clicking sound. Both stopped a moment later.

A servitor embedded in the door frame, almost completely concealed amongst the pipes and cabling, turned its emaciated head, its movement robotic and stilted. It had no eyes. In their place were wires and capacitors.

‘Greetings Skoral Wroth, Medicae Assist Third Class,’ it said, its monotone voice crackling from the vox-speaker embedded in its throat. Why its jaws clicked open and shut while it spoke was anyone’s guess. Its own larynx had long been removed.

‘It’s Skoral, not “Score-al”, idiot thing,’ she said. The servitor did not respond – to do so was not in its programming – and it retreated back into the fold of pipes and ribbed cables.

The articulated planes of the iris door slid soundlessly open, revealing an armourglass-sided chamber beyond. She stepped through, followed closely by a pair of lobotomised medicae servitors. They pushed two humming grav-pallets before them, a World Eaters corpse on each.

The doors hummed shut behind them, sealing them within.

‘Commencing cleansing protocols,’ said a mechanised voice.

With a sharp hiss, the contained space was suddenly filled with a cold, blinding white cloud, bursting from tiny nozzles set in the floor and ceiling. The cloud dissipated almost as quickly, and the inner iris doors to the apothecarion secundus glided open.

Skoral walked into the room beyond.

‘Put them in the cold chamber,’ she ordered the servitors.

She set her bloodied narthecium on a counter top, and moved straight to the armourglass-fronted cells against the back wall to look in on her charge. He sat motionless, as always. She picked up a data-slate, and slid her fingers across its surface, checking for any alteration in his condition. Nothing.

Skoral moved back to her bloodstained narthecium, and detached the heavy vial holding the gene-seed she’d just extracted. It came away with a hiss. The glass canister was cold to the touch.

She entered the gene-vault, shivering at the sudden temperature drop as the door hissed shut behind her. Every surface was covered in a sheen of frost. It looked as though diamond-dust had been liberally sprayed within the room. She fogged the air with every breath.

It did not look like much, but this cramped, icy vault represented the future of the echelon. Held here was the genetic material of two hundred and seventy-six legionaries – soon to be two hundred and seventy-eight. It wasn’t much – merely a tiny fraction of the losses that the echelon had suffered – but it was something. Without these genetic building blocks, creating more legionaries to replace the heavy losses the XII Legion had suffered was impossible.

She walked quickly down one of the vault’s aisles and slotted the vial holding the precious gene-seed into a vacant slot. She tapped a sequence of keys in response to a series of prompts, skipping the information she did not know. She could come back to that later.

<Name: Khrast>

<Company: 9th>

<Squad: [Unknown]>

<Gene-code: [Unknown]>

<Extraction: [Wroth, Skoral, 234.234.523.5]>

After the final prompt, a frosted glass panel slid down in front of the vial of gene-seed, sealing it inside. A green light clicked on below it, and a small screen lit up: Khrast.

She tapped a key, and the gene-bank column tracked upwards, until another vacant slot presented itself before her. She secured Saal’s gene-seed within, and entered his details. The name ‘Saal’ appeared upon the small screen as she completed her work.

In truth it was satisfying to have been in a position to put names to the gene-seed. Too many of the screens blinked ‘Unknown’.

Skoral turned and made her way out of the gene-vault. She was bone cold, the sub-freezing temperature having chilled the sweat upon her skin. She rubbed her hands together and blew on them, trying to warm them.

She was tired and sore, and ravenously hungry. Before going to the galley, however, she needed to wash. The chem-showers were calling to her.

She exited the gene-vault, which sealed behind her. She was halfway across the apothecarion’s floor when she jolted with shock, suddenly realising she was not alone.

A legionary stood nearby, staring into the armourglass cell that held her charge. He stood as motionless as a statue – nothing truly human could be that still.

She froze.

The legionary was armoured in heavily worn black war-plate, its surfaces pitted and scarred. Rad-damage. Those plates were bound in razor wire.

The World Eater’s pallid head was utterly hairless, exposing a mess of contorted scars criss-crossing across his scalp – she’d stitched more than a few of those herself – along with his ugly, jutting cranial implants.

Inwardly, Skoral swore. She recognised him instantly, of course.

Ruokh.

The Blood Priest. That was what they called Baruda now. Once, he had been a Chaplain, given that honour after the Edict of Nikea, but that was a different, earlier time. Now it was plain to see where his allegiance lay.

Baruda stared at Dreagher, unblinking. The oily stink of aggressor-stimms and kill-pheromones were coming off him in waves.

They were standing within an arming deck. Nine World Eaters surrounded Baruda, weapons held loosely in their hands. Argus Brond was a few steps back, arms folded across his chest.

Neither Dreagher nor Baruda held weapons, but that could change in a second.

‘The Destroyer has murdered his own brothers, and yet it is I that am being held here like a prisoner, while he is still loose,’ said Baruda. ‘Why?’

His face was narrow for one of the Legion, sharp and hawkish. The sides of his head were shaved short, exposing the moribund death tattoos and blood-cult emblems engraved into his scalp. The rest of his hair was clumped together in thick, blood-matted dreadlocks. Tied together with strips of leather, it resembled a barbarous version of an officer’s helmet crest.

Bones strung on strings of sinew hung around his neck and were wrapped around his wrists, jingling dully as he moved. The cult emblem representing the Blood Father was painted upon his forehead in dried, flaking blood.

One of Dreagher’s eyes twitched to see such blatant reverence.

‘You know why,’ said Dreagher. ‘I will not have more blood spilled this day. The ship is being scoured, from top to bottom. Ruokh will be found.’

‘Every drop of blood spilled is an offering to Kharanath,’ said Baruda. ‘Who are you to deny Him?’

‘I care only for the Legion,’ snarled Dreagher, ‘not for your so-called god.’

‘The Lord of Skulls is your god as much as mine,’ said Baruda. ‘It matters not that you deny it; your soul is already pledged to Him. Let me take Ruokh’s head. Let me take it in honour of the Brazen Lord.’

‘The Brazen Lord,’ hissed Dreagher. ‘The Blood Father. Kharanath, the Lord of Skulls. Listen to yourself! The Legion has never needed gods to pray to. That is for the weak.’

‘The gods never answered before,’ said Baruda. ‘There is no point fighting it. We all walk the Eightfold Path, now. We are but thralls of the Blood God.’

‘Those are the words of a zealot,’ said Dreagher. ‘You sound like one of preachers of the Seventeenth Legion.’

‘There is much we could have learned from our brothers of the Word Bearers. They saw the truth before any of us, though they wilfully obfuscate simple truths with dogma and pompous, needless ritual,’ said Baruda.

‘Enough,’ snapped Dreagher. ‘You will not convert me to your insane, nonsense faith. Not now, not ever. And this is not the time for such a discussion.’

‘No, it is not,’ said Baruda, matching Dreagher’s venom. ‘Now is the time when Ruokh should be bled. Give him to me.’

‘I will deal with him,’ said Dreagher. ‘It is not your place.’

‘That is where you are wrong,’ said Baruda, his hand closing around the haft of his chainaxe.

Above Skoral, one of the lumen strips buzzed loudly.

For a second she considered backing from the room, but she knew that he could scent the sudden spike of adrenaline coursing through her, even if he had not heard her come in. To flee from him would be akin to running from a wild beast – even if not hungry, the sight of prey fleeing would impel the predator to chase.

Moving slowly, she reached down and pressed a button on the side of her bracelet. A tiny light on it began to blink.

He turned. Jagged red tattoos crossed his pockmarked, heavily scarred cheeks and chin – an imitation of the primarch’s Desh’ean gladiatorial tattoos. The whites of his eyes were a sickly, irradiated yellow, and his head was hairless; another effect of the rad-weapons the Destroyers bore to war. It was strange how it was his complete lack of eyebrows and lashes that Skoral found his most unnerving feature, given the rest of his appearance.

‘He will not wake,’ he said. She could see his black metal teeth when he spoke. His own had long ago fallen out – another symptom of rad-sickness. ‘He is as lost to the Legion as Angron.’

‘Your captain believes otherwise, lord,’ said Skoral, moving cautiously forward, keeping several benches and tables between them.

Ruokh shrugged. ‘Dreagher needs something to believe in,’ he said. ‘He needs his life to have meaning. It is the only way he can continue.’

‘We all need something to believe in, my lord,’ said Skoral.

Ruokh shrugged again. ‘My cells are utterly irradiated. You know as well as I that it is only a matter of time until the cancers consume me. This body,’ he said, gesturing at himself, ‘should be virtually immortal, and yet I’m dying. Perhaps that is why I see things as they are. Ungh.’

The Destroyer clenched his eyes shut, and pressed a fist against them. Skoral froze.

‘There is no meaning to our lives,’ said Ruokh. ‘None of this matters. Accepting that is… comforting.’

‘Dreagher is looking for you, lord,’ Skoral said quietly. ‘You should turn your vox on. Tell them where you are.’

Ruokh glanced over at the bodies of Saal and Khrast. The servitors were in the process of transferring them from the grav-pallet to one of the apothecarion’s cryo-chambers.

‘I killed them, didn’t I,’ Ruokh said.

‘Yes,’ said Skoral.

‘There will be repercussions for that,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

Ruokh grunted in pain again, once more pressing a fist into his eye. Skoral glanced down at her bracelet. The light there continued to blink.

‘Come here, human,’ said Ruokh. ‘Serve your purpose.’

Skoral made her way cautiously towards the Destroyer.

Ruokh reversed into a metal, legionary-sized chair, and sat. He slammed his right arm onto the bench in front of him. It was bloody, with flesh gaping open from palm to elbow, exposing muscle, sinew and tendons. The blood flow had ceased, courtesy of the hyper-coagulants in his engineered bloodstream. A regular human would have bled out had such a wound been left untended, as this one clearly had. His hand was grey and bloodless. It was also missing two fingers.

Skoral placed her hands into a box-like unit. They were blasted with a chill antibacterial gas and sprayed with a quick-drying synth-film. She retracted them, now encased in a thin blue synthetic skin, and began gathering what she needed. There wasn’t much to choose from. The Legion was critically low on supplies.

‘What happened?’ she said, turning the arm slightly, getting a better look. She was familiar with the jagged wounds – too familiar. Chainaxe. It had torn the arm to pieces.

‘Does it matter?’ said Ruokh. ‘My hand does not work. Fix it. Here,’ he added, slamming down his good hand on the table. When he lifted it, two severed fingers were revealed. They were smoking slightly and skinless. Skoral picked one of them up. It looked as though they had been doused in acid.

‘I cut them from Khrast’s stomach,’ said Ruokh, by way of explanation. He nodded to the ruin of his arm. ‘He resisted.’

‘These are not salvageable,’ said Skoral, putting the finger down. ‘They are too damaged.’

‘Fine,’ said Ruokh. He swept them aside with the back of his hand. They fell to the deck floor. ‘Get on with it.’

‘This is not an insignificant injury,’ said Skoral. She gestured. ‘Look. All these tendons are shredded. I’ll need to graft new ones. These muscles here and here are useless and will need to be re-cultured. These ligaments need reattaching. Your arteries are severed here, here, here and here – I’ll need to attach replacements before your hand regains circulation.’

‘So get started.’

Skoral sighed and stood up, moving to a glass-fronted refrigeration unit. She opened it, letting a waft of icy vapours fall to the floor, scanning for what she needed. Finding it, she pulled two vials from a rack. Both contained liquids; one clear, one amber. She let the door to the refrigeration unit close, and came back to Ruokh, shaking both vials vigorously.

‘You can make the hand work again, yes?’ said the Destroyer.

‘I can,’ said Skoral, unscrewing the two vials and carefully adding the amber liquid to the clear. She disposed of the empty vial, dropping it into a recyc-drawer, and shook the combined liquids together until she was satisfied they were adequately mixed. ‘But it will take time.’

‘How long?’

Skoral shrugged. ‘For the initial operation, an hour. Maybe two.’ She pulled open a drawer, and retrieved a large, pistol-gripped syringe. With practised efficiency, she fitted it with a new needle, and slotted in the vial of mixed liquids.

‘And the recovery?’

‘You should regain full strength in your hand in less than a month.’

That answer did not seem to please Ruokh. His expression darkened. ‘Better to hack it off then,’ he snarled. ‘Fit me with an augmetic.’

‘We don’t have a Techmarine aboard the ship,’ said Skoral. ‘Once we enter real space Dreagher can request that Master Jareg come aboard to perform the operation, but I cannot do it alone.’

‘Khurgan could,’ growled Ruokh.

‘He could,’ said Skoral. ‘I can’t.’

Ruokh grunted. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have killed him.’

Skoral glared at Ruokh for a moment, but made no response. She set the loaded syringe on the steel-topped counter within easy reach and sat, pulling her stool in close to work on the legionary’s arm.

‘The coagulation has stopped the bleeding, but I need to get your blood flowing again to clean this wound out properly. I need to clear away these clots, then I’m going to inject you with an anticoagulant, before I clip these arteries and get to work.’

She picked up a scalpel and clippers.

‘Hold still,’ she said, leaning in close. On her wrist, exposed, her bracelet blinked. Inwardly, she cursed. The scalpel blade caught the light, glinting.

The change came over him faster than she could have imagined. One moment he was sitting there, compliant. The next he was lurching up, overthrowing the table and sending her tools scattering.

He had a hold of her arm. Then she was on the far side of the room. Tables and chairs had been knocked over. She was on the ground, lying in something warm.

She was gaping at him – how was he so far away? He had something in his hand. He tossed it aside and came at her, roaring, smashing aside tables and chairs.

She tried to scramble back away. Something wasn’t right. Her arm wouldn’t respond. No… her arm wasn’t there.

She was lying in a growing pool of her own blood. It was an arm that Ruokh had been holding, that he’d tossed aside disdainfully. Her arm. It lay on the floor. She could see her bracelet. It was still blinking.

Ruokh leapt at her. His face twisted with the fury of the neural implants in his brain.

There was a flash of purple and gold, and a newly arrived figure hit him, tackling him in midair. Instead of landing on her, Ruokh was slammed sidewards, crashing into one of the apothecarion’s walls.

Skoral rolled onto her back. She lay there in the pool of her own blood, gulping air. She could hear the roar and crash of the two combatants nearby, but it was fading away, becoming strangely distant, as if she were being rapidly transported away to a quieter, more serene place.

She could hear her own gasping breath. She stared at the lumen globe directly above her. It was buzzing loudly.

The buzzing got louder, until it blotted out everything.

‘Is this the way it is going to be, brother?’ said Baruda, his hand on the hilt of his chainaxe. ‘You’ll let us spill blood on account of Ruokh?’ He practically spat the name, his voice filled with contempt.

‘I have already lost two warriors today,’ said Dreagher. ‘One of them was my lieutenant, your friend. We are few enough as it is. These loses are not sustainable, and they cannot continue. We are bleeding ourselves dry. I will deal with Ruokh. Go against my order, and the consequences are on you.’

‘Honour demands it, Dreagher. It is our way.’

‘Honour,’ spat Dreagher. ‘Don’t use that word as justification for slaking your anger, Baruda.’

‘Reopen the pits,’ hissed Baruda. ‘Let me face him on the red sand. That is all that I ask.’

‘No,’ said Dreagher. ‘A line must be drawn. This is that line. I will see no more blood spilt on Ruokh’s account.’

‘Blood demands blood. If not Ruokh’s… then someone else’s.’

Baruda unhooked his chainaxe and dropped his other hand to the bolt pistol at his hip.

Bolters and plasma guns were suddenly cocked and readied, aiming at Baruda. Chainaxes growled. Servos whined as the World Eaters readied to kill one of their own.

Dreagher’s expression tightened, his jaw clenching and the veins at his temples bulging. The Nails were pounding. He gritted his teeth, but refused to reach for a weapon of his own.

‘Dreagher,’ said Argus Brond, from behind the standoff.

‘What?’ snapped Dreagher, not taking his eyes from Baruda.

‘Ruokh,’ said Brond. ‘He has been found. He’s… there’s been another casualty.’

Dreagher stabbed a finger at Baruda. ‘Keep him here,’ he barked, and turned to leave.

Baruda snarled and took a step forward. Fingers tightened on triggers.

‘Let me take him!’ Baruda growled. ‘Let me claim his skull!’

Dreagher glanced at his old comrade over his shoulder, angered and resentful of the changes that he had seen wrought in him over the past decade. But then, had he himself not changed, as well?

With a snarl, he swung away.

‘Not today,’ he said.

Chapter 4

Dreagher’s face was thunderous, and the Legion’s servants stood hurriedly aside, lowering their eyes, as he stormed past them. The pulse of the Nails was a grinding throb in the back of his head.

‘You’re a stubborn bastard, Dreagher,’ said Brond, marching alongside him. ‘Tensions are high. A challenge might have done some good. Why not just give him to Baruda and be done with it?’

‘He wouldn’t last a minute against Ruokh,’ said Dreagher. ‘It would not solve anything. It would simply weaken the Legion further. Baruda is too important, especially now that Khrast is gone. I have no other officers I can rely upon. All are either dead, or lost to the Nails,’ said Dreagher, ignoring the mortals scrambling to get out of his way.

They turned a corner, and passed a trio of legionaries walking the other way. He saw the tell-tale twitches of the Nails in them, the barely suppressed anger simmering behind their eyes. Dreagher inclined his head to them as he passed, acknowledging them.

‘And it would not have stopped at one death,’ said Dreagher. ‘When Baruda fell – and he would – another would step forward, one pledged to their Brazen God, then another. They’d have killed Ruokh in the end, but how many would he take with him? Five? Ten? No. I will not permit it.’

‘You could reopen the pits,’ said Brond. ‘The other echelons still allow it. Let your men fight once again.’

Dreagher himself had had a formidable record in the pits, before he’d chained the combat arenas shut, leaving them as a haunted, empty expanse.

‘No,’ said Dreagher. ‘We cannot control ourselves any more.’

‘The pressure on this ship is palpable. The pits are a release valve for that. Yes, there would be some deaths. There always were. That is our way.’

‘Our ranks have been decimated, Brond,’ said Dreagher. ‘We don’t have any neophytes coming in. We can’t afford self-inflicted casualties during warp transit. The other echelons can do as they wish – but on this vessel, the pits stay closed.’

‘There will be more deaths before long, then. I’m surprised there haven’t been more already. If we cannot release our fury in the pits, then the violence in our souls will be enacted elsewhere. It cannot be contained. Not for long,’ said Brond. It was an old argument.

They marched the rest of the way in silence. As they walked, Dreagher’s anger began to build. It was an amorphous, unfocused rage.

A pair of hulking, vat-grown monsters stood guard before the blast doors. They were immense, slab-muscled abhumans, bigger even than Dreagher and Brond, with oversized arms and immense iron-knuckled fists. Ribbed cables jutted from their thick, leathery skin, like parasitic, mechanical worms.

Each of them bore a lance-like shock-prod, the jag-bladed tips crackling with energy. Those weapons were wired into generators embedded in the flesh of the creatures’ shoulders. Dim-witted brutes who felt little in the way of pain, they were gene-bred for obedience and aggression. As well as helping the World Eaters repel any fool insane enough to board the Defiant, they served as the ship’s gaolers.

They lowered their heads in subservience, shuffling out of the way of the two World Eaters. One of them keyed a code sequence into a wall panel and the heavy reinforced cell block doors ground open, allowing Dreagher and Brond to continue through without pause.

‘Come,’ said Dreagher, and the two abhumans fell in behind him.

They passed through another two armoured blast portals that ground open before them, and through the firing arc of ceiling-mounted sentry guns. They were dormant, but even so, Dreagher tensed as he walked beneath them. The Nails twisted, readying him for combat.

A cacophony of sound rolled over them as the final blast door lifted before them and they stepped through into the cell block. Muffled screams and inhuman roars accompanied repetitive booms and echoes, the rattle and pull of chains, and reverberations that made the deck shudder.

There were three levels of cells in the block, linked by raised gantries, leaving the central corridor shaft empty. Immense abhuman gaolers walked the perimeter, and more sentry guns tracked overhead.

Two company veterans stood halfway along the bottom tier of the cell block, one to either side of a sealed door. These were the World Eaters that had brought Ruokh in. Dreagher marched towards them. They straightened at his approach, crashing their fists against their chests in the old Legion manner. The door between them reverberated with repetitive booms, making the deck shudder. It matched the pounding of the Nails in Dreagher’s head, souring his already foul mood.

Egil Galerius of the III Legion stood nearby, leaning casually up against a girder, partially concealed in the shadow of the gantry above. His immense, single-bladed falchion was strapped across his shoulders.

Dreagher nodded curtly to the swordsman, who returned the motion with a flourish, a half-smile on his lips. The scars on his face bothered Dreagher. He pushed the Palatine Blade from his thoughts, however, and turned his attention to the cell.

‘Open the door,’ he snarled. ‘If he goes for me, shoot him.’

Dreagher stood unarmed, hands clenched into fists. The two veterans stepped back away from the door, pressing their bolters to their shoulders. The two abhuman gaolers stepped protectively in front of Dreagher, sending power into their shock-prods.

The Emperor’s Children swordsman remained leaning against the base of the girder, a sardonic smile on his snow-white face. At a nod from Dreagher, one of the abhuman gaolers lumbered forward and hit the cell door release.

It retracted sharply into the ceiling. Ruokh was revealed, hunched over in the sudden opening, his tattooed, hairless face twisted and bestial. One of his hands was flexed like a talon. The other was limp at his side, his arm a mangled ruin of bared flesh and tendon. He took a threatening step forward, then checked himself as he registered the weapons levelled at him. The abhumans growled in warning, energy crackling upon the tips of their shock-prods.

Dreagher’s lips curled and he felt an overwhelming urge to rip those gaolers limb from limb. It was an affront to even think of these sub-humans applying shock-prods to once proud legionaries, but then someone had to act as the Legion’s gaolers, and that was not a task that any warrior of the XII should have to do.

Ruokh looked past the hunched brutes, his gaze settling on Galerius, at the back of the group. The Destroyer’s lips drew back in a savage smile, exposing banks of sharp, black, metal teeth.

‘You took me unawares, Son of Fulgrim,’ he said. ‘Next time will be different.’

Galerius smiled broadly, with genuine amusement.

‘I’ll gut you like I gutted–’ Ruokh began, but he was cut off as Dreagher stepped forward and slammed a boot square into his midsection, hurling him back into the cell. Before he could recover, Dreagher was on him. He moved fast for a being so big. He drove Ruokh back against the far wall, his armoured forearm pressed hard against his throat, restricting his air flow.

‘Enough,’ he snarled, his face only centimetres from Ruokh’s.

Fury sparked in Ruokh’s eyes, but he held it in check; he did not resist, or attempt to break away from his captain’s grip. Brond and the others had followed him into the cell, weapons aimed at his head. He swallowed, forcing back the bile and anger that was surging within him.

‘You’ve become a liability,’ hissed Dreagher. ‘Baruda wanted to call you out for the death of Khrast, but I refused him.’

Ruokh’s yellow gaze stared back at Dreagher. ‘I’d relish the chance to kill the sanctimonious dog. He’s always hated me. I would rip his still-beating hearts from him and eat them before the life faded from his eyes. If he is so enamoured with his beloved Brazen Lord, then let him go and join him in hell.’

Dreagher slammed Ruokh back into the wall again, arresting his attention.

‘I refused him, but that was before I learned what you did in the apothecarion,’ snarled Dreagher. Keeping the Destroyer pinned to the wall, he reached back and drew one of the blades at his side – a jag-toothed monomolecular knife that had cut more threads than he had bothered to remember. He pressed the blade against the warrior’s throat.

‘You’d kill me for the life of one human?’ snarled Ruokh. ‘How many innocents have you killed, Dreagher? Your hands are as stained as any of ours.’

‘I do not claim otherwise, brother,’ spat Dreagher. ‘She is different.’

‘More important than one of your own blood?’ said Ruokh.

‘More important than yours.’

Ruokh grunted. He licked his lips.

‘Does she live?’ said Ruokh, his voice raw, but calmer.

‘If she didn’t, you’d already be dead,’ said Dreagher. ‘But she may yet die. We do not have an Apothecary any more. You killed him. Remember?’

Ruokh’s eye twitched. ‘That was a fair fight,’ he growled.

‘It was to first blood,’ said Dreagher.

‘I only hit him once,’ said Ruokh.

‘You decapitated him.’

‘There was a lot of first blood,’ admitted Ruokh. His expression turned into a grimace as Dreagher exerted more pressure on his knife, drawing a neat line of red. ‘The Apothecary was weak,’ croaked Ruokh. ‘Such weakness could have been exploited on the field. He should have blocked my strike. He didn’t.’

‘No, he didn’t,’ agreed Dreagher, ‘and the Ninth was left without an Apothecary. You weakened us, Ruokh. Skoral is all we have now. She was Khurgan’s assistant and the only one on this ship with anything more than field medicae training. And you ripped her arm off.’

‘The blood rage was upon me–’ began Ruokh, but he was interrupted by his captain holding up his hand.

‘Enough,’ said Dreagher. ‘You don’t think things through, Ruokh. You never did, even before the Nails.’

‘Do it then,’ snarled Ruokh. He leaned forward onto the blade, making it press in deeper. His blood began to flow more freely. ‘I’m already a dead man. It’s only a matter of years at best before rad-sickness finally claims me. Finish me off now if you’ve already condemned me.’

With a look of disgust, Dreagher eased the pressure off his knife. ‘No,’ he said. He sheathed his blade. ‘That would be too easy.’

‘Then let me face Baruda,’ said Ruokh.

‘No,’ said Dreagher again. He stepped back, away from the Destroyer.

Two warriors entered the cell, heavy spiked chains in their hands.

‘What is this?’ snarled Ruokh.

‘We are all degenerating, Ruokh, but you are falling faster than most. You can no longer be trusted,’ said Dreagher, turning his gaze on the Destroyer, his face grim. ‘Your place is with the Caedere now.’

There were cells, deeper within the ship, where the most uncontrollable World Eaters, those completely lost to the Nails, were confined.

Though too dangerous and unpredictable to be allowed free-roam of the ship, in battle they were terrifying shock troops. Set loose against an enemy, the berserkers were nigh unstoppable. These were the Caedere. The Red Butchers.

‘Baruda will not accept this,’ said Ruokh. ‘I can hear him now. “Blood for blood”, that’s what he’ll say. He’ll demand it. Let me face him.’

‘I will not see more Legion blood spilled on your account,’ snarled Dreagher, reiterating his stance.

‘I’ll face him,’ said a voice.

Egil Galerius eased through the press of World Eaters.

‘What?’ said Dreagher. The Nails were pounding in his head. He didn’t immediately comprehend what the swordsman was saying.

‘You don’t want him to spill more Twelfth Legion blood,’ said the swordsman, ‘but your Chaplain desires there to be a reckoning. Let me fight as his champion, and let honour be met.’

Ruokh had become still. Dreagher’s face was dark. Brond appraised the Emperor’s Children legionary, taking in every detail of his immaculate appearance.

‘You were one of Fulgrim’s Palatine Blades, were you not?’ said Brond.

‘I still am,’ said Galerius.

‘Are you good?’

Galerius’s amethyst eyes gleamed. ‘Yes.’

Ruokh’s face twisted into a savage, toothy grin. ‘Let me kill him. Baruda’s Brazen Lord cares not whose blood is spilled. Make him agree to it.’

Brond glanced over at Dreagher and shrugged. ‘It’s an option. Would Baruda agree?’

Dreagher’s face was grim. The Nails were punishing him. He could not think.

‘No,’ he said, finally. It was an effort simply to form words. ‘Baruda is too proud. Even if he did accept, I would not. I will not give him the satisfaction,’ he said, nodding towards Ruokh.

Galerius’s smile slipped off his face, leaving it stony and cold. Without a word he spun and walked away.

‘You should have let me kill the preening peacock,’ said Ruokh, once he was gone. ‘I’ve always wanted to kill one of the Third Legion.’

‘You’re a savage, Ruokh,’ said Dreagher.

Ruokh’s sneer left his face.

‘We are all slipping towards the precipice, you as much as any of us,’ he said. ‘I simply do not fight it.’

‘And that is why you can no longer be trusted.’

‘You struggle and agonise and torture yourself trying to remain in control, Dreagher, but you must know you will fail in the end. What’s the point? Why choose to put yourself through that? The Nails take us to a purer place. Angron knew this. He would never have chosen to have his implants removed, even if that had been an option. The Nails gave him focus. They give us focus.’

‘In combat they give us an edge, but they rob us of strategy, of tactics, or coordination, of control–’

‘Control,’ sneered Ruokh. ‘Your need for control will be your undoing, brother. Mark my words.’

‘They rob us of our humanity.’

‘We are not human,’ said Ruokh, slowly. ‘We have no humanity to lose.’

‘If I released all those who have fallen too far to the Nails, what would happen?’ said Dreagher. ‘It would be a massacre. You are not as far gone as most of them, not yet – but you will be soon.’

‘As will you,’ said Ruokh. ‘As will every one of us. Will you lock up every legionary on board this vessel? In time, you will need to.’

‘If that is what it takes,’ said Dreagher.

‘And what about you? You cannot control the Nails. You could snap, as easily as any of us. What then?’

‘Then I’ll be locked up,’ snarled Dreagher.

Ruokh laughed at that. ‘Ah, the proud and mighty Ninth Company, with every legionary locked in a cell, imprisoned by sub-human by-blows. You’d turn this into a prison ship,’ he said. ‘You know what your problem is, Dreagher?’

‘Somehow I feel you are about to tell me.’

Ruokh leant forward, straining against the arms holding him. ‘You hate the Nails,’ he hissed, ‘but the Nails are the Legion. You are fighting the wrong war, brother.’

Dreagher stared at him for a moment. Then he turned away. ‘Chain him,’ he said, and he marched from the cell.

Dreagher stalked the corridors and halls of the Defiant, lost in his thoughts. Invariably, his path brought him back where it always did.

He rounded the corner and paused momentarily before continuing on more slowly.

Egil Galerius of the III Legion bowed his head at the approach of the World Eaters captain. Dreagher’s eye twitched. Somehow it felt as though Galerius was mocking him, even in that moment of respect. His eyes were involuntarily drawn to the four scars radiating out from the Palatine Blade’s lips. He stared for a moment, then nodded curtly back and moved to stand beside the warrior.

Together, they looked through the glass at the enthroned figure of Khârn, who remained, as ever, utterly motionless. The floor before the window was strewn with the skulls, weapons, armour fragments and helmets of fallen comrades and noted enemies.

‘His exploits were well known among the Third Legion,’ said Galerius. ‘I would like to have faced him in the training cages.’

‘No,’ said Dreagher. ‘You wouldn’t.’

Galerius stared at him, his amethyst eyes glinting, his cold, white face set in arrogant disdain.

‘I duelled with Sevatar, First Captain of the Night Lords, and Lucius of my own Legion. I crossed blades with Sigismund of the Imperial Fists and lived to speak of it. With respect, I do not believe that I would have anything to fear by crossing blades with your Khârn.’

‘Then you are a fool,’ said Dreagher.

Galerius sniffed and turned away, returning his gaze to Khârn. ‘We’ll never know,’ he said. ‘I understand that it is unlikely he will ever wake.’

‘He will,’ said Dreagher.

One of Galerius’s slender eyebrows arched upwards, like a feline languidly stretching its back.

‘Blind faith is not a trait that I would ever have associated with the Twelfth Legion,’ he said, ‘and yet is seems that it is to be found everywhere amongst your ranks these days.’

‘It is not faith,’ said Dreagher. ‘He’s alive. I don’t know how – he was dead when we found him, half-buried in a pile of Imperial Fists – but he is alive.’

‘It is not much of a life,’ said Galerius. ‘But then he is with his Legion. That is something. As far as I know, I am the last of mine.’

Galerius dropped to one knee and picked up a skull that had been left there as an offering. It had been blackened in a fire, though its forehead had been cleaned of ash and soot. A design had been traced in blood there, brown and flaking – a stylised skull motif.

It was crude and almost childishly simplistic, little more than a triangle with a line across its top and lines off the bottom for teeth. This was the mark of one of the Ruinous Powers; the same mark that Baruda wore upon his forehead, painted in his own blood each day.

Galerius turned the skull, presenting the symbol to Dreagher.

‘Are you sure it is not faith that you cling to?’ he said.

‘I have to believe that Khârn will come back to us,’ said Dreagher. ‘I have to. He was dead. I saw his body. He had no life signals. None. There has to be a reason why he came back.’

Galerius shrugged, and placed the skull back where it had been. He ran his fingertips across the shoulder plate of an Imperial Fist, its surface cratered with bolt damage.

‘Not everything has a reason,’ he said. ‘Some things just are.’

‘I cannot believe that,’ said Dreagher. ‘There is a reason why his heart started beating again.’

‘You don’t believe in faith, but you believe there must be a reason for seemingly random events. That sounds like a contradiction to me.’

‘I don’t see it that way.’

Galerius shrugged, as if the conversation was beginning to bore him.

‘Perhaps the warp wants him alive,’ he said. ‘What is it Lorgar’s zealots call it? The Primordial Truth? Perhaps the gods of the aether intervened to keep him alive. Perhaps he has a destiny to fulfil.’

‘That is not a comforting thought,’ said Dreagher.

‘We both know that those powers are real, though. We have both seen evidence of it. I daresay we have both worshipped them, in our own way.’

Dreagher stared at him, a look of distaste on his face.

‘I pray to no gods,’ he said. ‘What you speak of are daemons. They can be powerful, but they are not gods.’

Galerius did not seem concerned by Dreagher’s glare. He shrugged.

‘Semantics,’ he said. ‘And whether you pray to them or not, you worship them with your actions, regardless. You feed them with your anger, your hatred, your rage, just as the Third Legion feeds them with excess.’

‘Most within the Twelfth would say that yours has become a Legion of sadists and hedonists.’

‘And most within the Third would say that yours has become a Legion of mindless berserkers.’

‘There is truth in both those statements.’

Galerius smiled. ‘There is. But fine. Put aside any talk of gods and daemons. Perhaps the most obvious truth is that Khârn is not really alive at all.’

Dreagher stared back at him, his expression hard.

‘Oh, technically he is alive, of course,’ said Galerius. ‘His lungs expand and contract, delivering oxygen into his bloodstream which is continuing to be pumped through his veins by his primary heart. The mechanics of life are being maintained. But what is life if there is no mind? No soul? Khârn may technically be alive, but his consciousness is clearly not here. There is no brain activity barring that needed to maintain the body’s most basic functions. He does not dream. There is nothing there.’

Galerius licked his lips, warming to his topic – or perhaps enjoying the fact that he was clearly goading Dreagher. ‘He’s just a shell. An empty shell of meat.’

Dreagher clenched his fists.

‘Careful,’ he growled.

‘I mean no disrespect, obviously,’ said Galerius, though his mocking eyes said otherwise. ‘It would be my assumption that the one you knew as Khârn is long dead. I would not waste your time hoping that he will rise up and become the saviour of your Legion.’

Dreagher had turned back towards the motionless figure of Khârn. His face was set. Hard. Uncompromising. And angry – it was rare to see one of the XII that did not look angry.

Galerius sighed, and stood up.

‘I am not trying to antagonise you, World Eater. I’m merely thinking aloud,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you are right and there is a reason why he did not stay dead. Why not? Far stranger things than that have happened in the last decades.’

Dreagher did not respond. Galerius shrugged again, and turned to leave the World Eaters captain to his thoughts.

‘I am not a fool, Galerius,’ Dreagher said in a low voice.

Galerius looked back at him. ‘I have never thought you were.’

‘I know that you are probably right. All that’s left of him is a vacant shell.’

Galerius waited for him to continue.

‘If he doesn’t wake, the Legion is lost,’ said Dreagher. ‘Already we are splintering. Already there are those who are looking to carve their own path, go in their own direction. Argus Brond, for one. We’ll all go our separate ways, becoming scattered warbands, condemned to die a slow death. Without the primarch there is a power vacuum that cannot be filled. Oh, there are those who would fill it – they are already making their play for power – but there is no one, no one, who can unite the Legion.’

‘Except Khârn.’

‘Except Khârn,’ said Dreagher, nodding. ‘The Legion would rally behind him. Without question.’

‘You don’t actually believe this will happen,’ said Galerius, realisation dawning on him. It was a statement, not a question.

Dreagher glanced over at Galerius. He sighed.

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘But I cling to the hope that I am wrong, because if not, then my Legion is already dead.’

In truth, Dreagher had tried everything to rouse Khârn. Electro-shock therapy. Adrenaline injections administered directly into his primary heart. Neural pulses fired into his cortical implants. He’d even tried more esoteric methods. Speaking to him. Pleading with him. Curling Khârn’s pliant fingers around the haft of Gorechild. He’d even spilt his own blood and dripped it onto Khârn’s lips, praying to the Blood Father for some reaction. Nothing.

‘Perhaps I am a fool,’ said Dreagher.

‘No,’ said Galerius. ‘I have a similar hope that I will be reunited with my Legion. Without that hope,’ he said, ‘there is no reason to go on.’

‘I did not thank you for intervening and saving Skoral,’ said Dreagher.

‘You’re very protective of this mortal,’ said Galerius.

‘She is the closest to an Apothecary that we have,’ said Dreagher. ‘Tell me, why did you offer to fight for Baruda?’

‘Truly?’ said Galerius. ‘I’m bored. A duel would be a worthy distraction.’

Dreagher looked at the III Legion swordsman. A harsh laugh barked from his throat.

Galerius grinned and shrugged his shoulders. Even that simple movement was artful and languid.

‘It’s the truth.’

They were interrupted by a chime from Dreagher’s gorget vox. Dreagher turned away.

‘Flag-captain,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

‘You need to be up here, Dreagher,’ came the reply. ‘You need to be up here now.’

Chapter 5

Flag-Captain Aorek Stirzaker was old even by Legion reckoning. For one not of the Legiones Astartes, he was positively ancient.

His face was long and narrow, and the outline of his skull was clearly visible beneath age-mottled, paper-thin skin. His flesh hung off his bones like crumpled cloth draped over a frame of sticks, and his birth-eyes, which had long ago failed him, filled with cataracts and cancers, had been replaced with emotionless deep-set silver synth-orbs.

He looked like nothing more than a cadaver that had been restored to a mockery of life. Nevertheless, his mind was a razor, his devotion to the Ninth Company fierce, and his nature as bellicose and proud as the machine-spirit of his battleship, the Defiant.

No longer able to walk – an Ultramarines blade had severed his spine during the void battle above the war-world of Armatura – he was now permanently rigged into his command throne.

Hard-wired into the ship’s systems, he felt what the Defiant felt – savage joy as broadsides were unleashed, pain as enemy lance strikes punched through armour plating. He felt the living warp probing at his Geller field, seeking any weak spots, the sensation a strange prickling upon his skin. He felt the Legion serfs and the World Eaters themselves moving through his corridors, like blood pumping through his veins.

The bridge of the Defiant was deeply shadowed. He preferred it that way. He found the dimness calming, and knew from experience that the stark white light of lumen strips put the World Eaters on edge. Nor was there any starlight to be seen beyond the bridge’s oculus viewscreens – the blast shutters were down and secured, lest the sight of the living aether drive his crew to madness.

In the gloom, the strategium’s officers, distaff and servitors went about their work with quiet efficiency, faces lit by glowing screens.

Stirzaker slowly turned his head at the approach of the two World Eaters captains. Raised upon his command throne, he looked down upon them. Some of their kind did not like that – a mortal looking down on them.

The World Eaters nodded to him. That was about as much respect as any World Eater paid to any being. He inclined his head in return, the movement slow, hampered by the calcification of his joints. He was of comparable age to these two, though it would not be known by looking at them. Of Argus Brond he knew little, but Dreagher he knew well. The Defiant had borne the Ninth into battle since its completion in Andromache’s shipyards.

‘Aorek,’ said Dreagher. ‘What is it that you see?’

As ever, he was straight to the point. Stirzaker liked that. He was too old for wasted words.

‘See for yourself,’ he said. He rotated his command throne with a mind impulse, and gestured with one gnarled claw of a hand. A three-dimensional projection crackled into life in the air between him and the World Eaters. It was rendered in grainy blue-grey light, and flickered with heavy distortion and interference.

Faces could be seen in the crackling white static surges. They appeared only for a fraction of a second at a time, but they left an indelible imprint on the mind. They were distorted, twisted and screaming. They were not of human origin.

Stirzaker paid them no mind. He was long used to the snarling denizens of the aether. He felt them scratching upon his Geller field even now, straining to get in.

In between the scratching fuzz of static bursts, the image showed a binary star system. Two suns of comparable mass revolved in an elliptical orbit around each other. Five planets of various size and aspect orbited the twin giants, and an array of asteroid belts, moons and other nebulae completed the system. The twin suns were unusual but not overly rare. In every other regard, the system was utterly unremarkable, little different to millions of others that made up the galaxy.

‘How is that possible?’ said Brond. ‘We are in the warp.’

‘We are within the Eye,’ said Stirzaker. ‘Reality and unreality blend together.’

With a mental impulse and the widening of his talon-like fingers, Stirzaker zoomed the three-dimensional image out. Now it showed the system as it was in relation to its surroundings – a perfect sphere amid the writhing madness of the aether.

‘Something holds the warp at bay, here,’ said Stirzaker. ‘It would appear to be a safe harbour in a furious ocean.’

‘Are there habitable worlds here?’ said Dreagher.

‘It would seem so, yes. One of the worlds, at least,’ said Stirzaker.

‘Is it stable?’ said Brond.

‘As far as can be told,’ said Stirzaker. ‘It is intriguing.’

‘A safe harbour,’ mused Dreagher. ‘This could be where we rebuild the Legion.’

‘Incoming transmission, sir,’ called out the ship’s first mate. ‘It’s an open vox-hail, transmitted to the whole fleet.’

‘Bring it up,’ said Stirzaker.

The image of a figure stepped forward from nowhere, moving into the area occupied by the three-dimensional system chart, which fractured and dissipated in response. This new image showed a massive Cataphractii-armoured World Eater, his slab-like plates hung with skulls and adorned with spikes. His helm was brutish, jutting forward aggressively from between his shoulders. Long curved tusks extended from either side of his grilled vox-grille.

‘Goghur,’ said Argus Brond, his lip curling in distaste.

Once the immense warrior had been one of the primarch’s elite bodyguard, the Devourers. By the end, they had acted as little more than his gaolers. It was an ignoble task for what should have been the Legion’s most vaunted warriors.

The Devourer removed his helmet with a burst of crackling static-steam. He shook his head, releasing his dreadlocked power couplings from their confinement. His face bore angular tattoos. His mouth was drawn in a deep scowl.

His image flickered and shorted. For a blink of an eye a sinuous beast stood in his place, its elongated head framed by curving horns. It looked onto the Defiant’s strategium, and bared its fangs. Fire flickered in its eyes and a tongue of flame licked out from between its teeth. An immense fiery blade appeared in its hands, and it took an aggressive step forward. Then the image shorted again, and Goghur stood there once more.

‘Brothers,’ he said. His voice was a distorted crackle, underscored with distant roars. ‘No doubt you all see this system. It is ripe for the slaughter. We attack. Blood for the Blood God.’

With that, the image of the Devourer crackled and disappeared, leaving the strategium shrouded in shadow.

‘He thinks to command the Legion now?’ said Argus Brond. ‘He is not even a captain.’

‘None stepped forward to challenge him,’ said Dreagher, shrugging.

‘Shall I plot a course into the system?’ said Stirzaker. His crew of officers was looking to him, awaiting his orders. ‘The fleet is turning towards it.’

‘Do it,’ said Dreagher.

He turned to leave the strategium, but Argus Brond caught his arm, arresting his movement. He looked down at the gauntleted hand holding him. The Nails tick-tocked in the back of his head.

‘We do not have to do this,’ hissed Argus Brond.

‘Remove your hand,’ said Dreagher, his voice hard.

‘Listen to me!’ Brond said. ‘Goghur seeks to fill the power vacuum in the Legion. Already he has considerable support.’

‘Not enough,’ said Dreagher.

‘Not yet,’ said Brond.

‘And when Khârn wakes, he will assume command. None will refuse him, Goghur included.’

‘He’s not waking up, Dreagher. You need to face facts.’

‘You do not know that.’

‘Dreagher,’ said Stirzaker. ‘Am I plotting a course?’

‘A moment!’ snarled Brond, rounding on the flag-captain. Stirzaker was not cowed. He stared back at the captain, his silver eyes unreadable.

‘I was not addressing you, captain,’ he said.

Brond took a slow, calming breath.

‘Goghur is a killer of worlds, but he is no leader. He will drive the Legion to destruction. He’s leading us in a downward spiral from which we will never be able to return. Let us go our own way before he damns us all.’

‘Abandon the Legion? This is your proposal?’

‘No,’ said Brond. ‘We save the Legion. We forge our path, you and I, and we do as you envision. We rebuild the War Hounds.’

‘I want to unite the Legion, not be the one to sunder it,’ said Dreagher.

Neither captain blinked. Brond’s frustration was plain.

‘Flag-captain,’ said Dreagher, not taking his gaze off Brond. ‘Plot your course. We stay with the Legion.’

‘It will be done,’ said Stirzaker. He rotated his command throne, ascending it as he turned, and began to speak his orders, even as his controls descended from the ceiling, ensconcing him within a curved bank of screens, each one flooded with data-streams.

‘This is a mistake,’ said Brond. He shouldered past Dreagher, and strode from the bridge.

In his enclosed cell, Ruokh paced back and forth, muttering under his breath. Drool dripped from his lips in thick ropes. His yellow eyes were glazed and distant.

He stopped abruptly, feeling a change in the ship’s engines.

A savage smile cracked his tattooed face. Even in his madness, he knew what this change heralded.

Soon it would be time to kill.

In the apothecarion, Skoral remained in an induced coma. The medicae servitors tending her paid no mind to the shudder of the Defiant, the groaning of its hull as it came out of warp transit. It meant nothing to them. They continued their work, blissfully ignorant of the violence that would soon erupt.

Maven was sleeping with his feet up on the work bench of his master’s arming chamber, but he woke with a start when the door hissed open and the lumen strips in the ceiling flickered on. He jumped to his feet, almost knocking his chair over.

‘My lord,’ he said, blinking against the bright light.

‘He is a deluded fool,’ said Argus Brond, storming into the room and slamming his helmet onto the desk, making the scattering of tools, scraps of armour plates, servos and an ash tray of lho stubs jump.

‘Who, my lord?’ said Maven.

‘Dreagher! He pins his hopes on a fool’s dream.’

‘You were not able to convince him, then?’

‘He will not be swayed. He’ll see us all dead before he stops believing,’ he said. He looked at Maven with a steady, angry gaze. ‘He’s given me no option. Open up the external comms channel.’

Maven stood slowly, his reluctance clearly apparent. Still, he did as he was ordered, moving to the archaic, heavily modified comms-unit in the corner of the arming chamber.

He sank into the padded chair before it and pulled on the headset, the heavy brass earpieces, hooked to the machine with a tightly spiralling cable, closing completely around each side of his head.

‘Are you sure, master?’ he said.

‘I gave him the opportunity to steer us away from this course of action,’ said Brond. ‘His blindness has forced my hand.’

Sighing, Maven slid the vox-mic – a grilled sphere clasped on a bronze claw – towards Brond, and continued to turn the dials, listening for the telegraph signal-trap to register.

Not long after the 17th Company had taken up temporary lodging aboard the Defiant – their own Acheron-class cruiser having been obliterated during the assault on Terra – Maven had managed to tap a line into the Defiant’s communications channel, allowing him to intercept inbound ship communications, as well as project them. He’d fed a number of fail-safes and shroud-codes into the system, and had placed a number of decoy transmitters across the ship, but was under no illusions. Stirzaker would know that someone was broadcasting as soon as they opened the channel. He’d have to keep the communication short.

The crackle in his earpiece sharpened to a steady pitch.

‘I have it,’ he said.

‘Do it,’ said Brond. ‘Open a secure channel.’

Maven took a deep breath and did as he was bid. The channel code he had been seeking was there, waiting, as he flicked the switch to project. A grating voice scratched through the vox almost immediately.

‘You took your time,’ it said. The voice was running through a vox-scrambler, keeping the speaker’s identity concealed. Argus Brond’s voice would be similarly distorted.

‘Are the Bloodborn ready?’ said Brond.

‘Yes.’

‘The way will be open,’ said Brond. He nodded, and Maven cut the connection. The seneschal sat there in silence, his eyes downcast.

‘It’s the only way,’ said Brond.

Maven wasn’t sure who his master was trying to convince.

‘If he truly is the chosen of the Blood God,’ said Brond, ‘then let him intervene.’

Chapter 6

The Defiant slipped seamlessly from the tumultuous hell of the warp into the system-sized bubble of real space. The roiling ether clung to the crenulated flanks of the battleship, as if unwilling to relinquish its hold. Tentacles of un-matter scrabbled at its armoured flanks, like the writhing limbs of some vast, shapeless cephalopod.

As the Defiant powered into the emptiness of real space, it pulled away from those clinging ungulae. They were sucked back into the un-mass of the warp, subsumed into its shapeless whole, sending vast ripples quivering out across the insubstantial border between the two realms.

The bridge of the Defiant was a scene of ordered chaos, hectic with movement and vox traffic as Flag-Captain Stirzaker brought the battleship online. Officers and servitors rushed to enact orders, while scores of others seated at control panels in concentric half-circles around the bridge worked busily, either hard-wired into their machines, or connected to them via headsets, spinal-plugs and mechadendrites and cortical-wires.

Binaric code ran down vid-screens in a constant stream, flooding in from across the ship and the fleet as a whole. Suspended panels showed real-time feeds of engine levels, shield power and such, while others showed officers from other parts of the ship, communicating in quick, clipped tones as they received and enacted orders.

In the sunken central dais, the disposition of the World Eaters fleet was displayed in a shimmering three-dimensional projection. The officers stationed within the innermost semicircle interacted with this projection, their fingertips hung with wires and cables. With confident, well-drilled movements, they zoomed and rotated the display, focusing in on the different ships and bringing up swatches of data with subtle hand movements.

The air swam with noospheric data, invisible to those not fitted with the requisite Mechanicum-crafted upgrades. This digital information flitted back and forth, transferring at a far quicker rate than binaric or machine-based methods.

At the heart of the bustling action of the bridge was Stirzaker, conducting the affairs of the battleship with calm efficiency. His mind was working at levels far beyond the ken of unaugmented humans, and indeed, even beyond that of the Legiones Astartes. He was the absolute centre of the bridge’s focus – he was its mind. Everything passed through him.

While physically he barely moved, his command throne was in constant motion, turning and shifting upon its suspensor arms as he addressed individual officers, issuing clipped orders before moving on. His augmetic steel-tipped talons tapped a constant dance upon his armrests, making slight course adjustments and subtly shifting the balance of the ship’s power output. At the same time, he manipulated the flow of noospheric data flowing back and forth across the bridge with the skill of a Magos of the Mechanicum.

The only figure on the bridge who was not working at a frenetic pace was Dreagher. Standing alone, he stared out into the void as the armoured blast shutters slid back, allowing an unobstructed view beyond the bridge’s oculus portals. Those portals were curved, allowing a one hundred and eighty degree view out into the void.

Dreagher looked out across the battleship’s port flank, back towards the bizarrely stark border between the warp and the system-sized pocket of real space the ship had entered. The only things that gave the vision any sense of scale were the last World Eaters ships pushing through from the ether alongside the Defiant.

For a disorienting moment, it felt as though he were looking across an insane, roiling red ocean, and the Defiant and the other ships of the fleet were rising vertically from its surface. Of course, there was no notion of up or down in the void – that he thought in such terms was merely a weakness of his human-born spatial comprehension. With a mental shift, he was no longer looking down at the other ships rising towards him, but rather seeing them emerging horizontally from the wall that held the warp at bay.

The warp stared back at him from those fathomless depths. Vast, incorporeal leviathans coiled out there beyond the veil, things immeasurably large and ancient. They stared in jealously, enraged that they were unable to claim this mortal pocket of existence, held at bay by… what? Some incomprehensible power was clearly at work within this system.

He let his gaze shift forwards, looking out over the armoured prow of the mighty battleship. No stars were visible out there. In place of the cold blackness of the void there were just the bruised reds, purples and blues of the living warp, writhing and shifting like an aurora, like coloured oils swirling within water.

The World Eaters fleet drifted, slowly awaking from slumber as power was routed to weapon systems and shields. Each ship moved on its own heading, powering forward on its own trajectory. This was no synergistic battle deployment. The Legion had long ago lost such coordination.

Escorts, shuttles and attack craft swarmed around the World Eaters battleships and cruisers as they discharged from scores of launch bays. It was standard procedure for a fleet emerging from the warp, providing a screen of defence while the warp-capable battleships cast off their Geller fields and powered up their shields. To Dreagher’s eyes, they resembled flies hovering around bloated corpses, or vultures hovering around apex predators, waiting for the inevitable butchery.

The waking predators were hungry. As their systems came slowly to life, they scanned their surrondings, searching for any threat, straining to sniff out any hint of blood in the water. As soon as they were able, the World Eaters began scanning for anything they could kill.

Dreagher leaned forward, peering out into the void, as if he were able to overcome the colossal distance and spy whatever threat lay here. A pair of distant, dying suns burned at the heart of the unnamed system.

‘Do you see anything, flag-captain?’ he said over one shoulder.

‘Not yet,’ came the reply. ‘I am rerouting power for long-distance scans. I will… hmm.’

Dreagher turned.

‘What is it?’

‘There is something…’ the old flag-captain muttered, more to himself than to Dreagher. He swung away, the articulated arm holding his throne aloft extending with a series of mechanised whines. ‘Auspex!’ he ordered. ‘What is that? Focus and intensify the scan.’

‘Ships, captain, towards the core of the system,’ said the ranking officer amongst the score of mortals and servitors manning the ship’s auspex. ‘We cannot confirm numbers, but… they are gathered in strength. It’s an armada. They have us outnumbered.’

‘When have we ever cared about the odds?’ said Stirzaker.

‘Are they Imperial? Xenos?’ said Dreagher.

‘Impossible to tell from this distance,’ said Stirzaker. ‘Though that looks like a Legion fleet’s dispersal pattern to me. Wait…’

A blaring klaxon sounded, and the bridge darkened, red attack lights replacing the few lumen strips that Stirzaker tolerated.

‘We have close contact, flag-captain!’ shouted the bridge’s second officer. ‘An unknown vessel has just moved into range.’

‘I see it,’ said Stirzaker. The flag-captain had a host of image projections hovering before him – logistical displays and binaric code that meant nothing to Dreagher. With a glance, Stirzaker shunted that work to a subordinate and retracted his command throne back to its central location before the oculus, the articulated arm, hung with wires and ribbed cables, whining softly.

‘Route power to shields and bring our weapons online. Bring us around three points to starboard, offset thirty degrees.’

‘Aye, sir,’ came a flurry of responses.

In a sunken hololith pit, a target locus appeared, haloing the new vessel that was emerging from behind a nearby moon. Its shape was vague, but sharpening. Dreagher narrowed his eyes as he stared at it.

‘Bring it up on screen,’ said Stirzaker.

A section of the oculus zoomed in on the moon, which appeared as little more than a sphere of darkness rimmed in red light. It was still many hundreds of thousands of kilometres away, yet in comparative terms, it was exceedingly close to the fleet, only just out of weapons range. A vessel was emerging from behind this moon, hidden in shadow. Nevertheless, its profile was immediately recognisable.

‘That’s an Imperial cruiser,’ said Dreagher.

Amongst the flurry of activity as the World Eaters reacted to the presence of the Imperial cruiser, one small shuttle went unnoticed.

Veering off its defensive vector sweep, it banked several kilometres off the bow of the Defiant, angling past immense arched weapon bays, cannon turrets and missile tubes. Its embarkation ramps gaped open and seven figures leapt into the vacuum of space. They were unseen by scanners not yet fully operational, and too small and insignificant to be registered by fighters and assault boats.

They drifted through the expanse of nothingness in absolute silence. Against the immense backdrop of the World Eaters fleet they were tiny. Insignificant specks closing the distance to the Defiant.

They were the last of their echelons, these seven. Their battle brothers had all died, either on Terra or in the killing frenzy that came after. All had seen the death of hope.

They were Bloodborn – warriors oath-sworn to a death-mission. Nothing could turn them from their path, not now.

They came for different reasons: resentment; jealousy; a long harboured grudge; fatalism. Only their blood-pledge united them.

He had been clever in choosing them for this task. They would not point back at him. They would succeed and die, or they would fail and die. None would be mourned. All those who would have done so were already ground to dust.

The Bloodborn landed on the exterior of the Defiant, unnoticed. Boots maglocked to the immense armoured hull. Kilometres long, the length of the ship stretched out before them. As one they began their slow progress, striding across the exterior of the Defiant, closing in on the access hatch designated as their entry location.

No vox-chatter passed between them. Each knew their task.

They came to kill.

‘Shields?’ said Stirzaker, his voice even.

‘Up in five, four, three, two, one,’ said the officer of the deck. ‘Shields active.’

‘Weapons?’

‘All online, sir.’

Already, Dreagher could see the World Eaters fleet turning towards this lone cruiser, like sharks sensing blood in the water.

‘Who are they?’ he said. ‘Surely none of Dorn’s get would have pursued us this far. Russ’s Wolves? The Scars?’

‘Incoming vox-hail, captain! It’s being projected on all channels, fleet-wide.’

‘Bring it up,’ Stirzaker ordered.

A face appeared on the oculus, though the image quality was poor. Pict-scrubbers worked to eliminate the pixilation plaguing the image, and it was brought sharply into focus.

A human woman of middling years glared haughtily onto the bridge. Her face was high-cheeked and stern, and her hair was pulled back in an artful hive skewered with long, silver needles. A teardrop tattoo was emblazoned upon the bone-white skin below her left eye.

Dreagher instinctively loathed her. She may have had captain’s pins on her lapel, but her appearance was one of decadence and arrogance. His instantaneous appraisal was proved correct as soon as she opened her mouth to speak.

‘World Eaters,’ she said, derision virtually dripping from her accented, high-born lips.

‘It’s a one-way transmission,’ said Stirzaker. ‘She’s rejecting vox transmission from our fleet.’

‘This system is claimed by the Third Legion, the peerless Emperor’s Children,’ said the cruiser’s captain. ‘Halt your advance immediately. To not do so will be regarded as a provocative move of unwarranted aggression.’

The screen went blank as the III Legion ship abruptly cut off its broadcast.

Dreagher snorted, taken aback by the brashness of this mortal woman. He could imagine the reactions her statements were having across the rest of the fleet. Was she looking to start a war?

Stirzaker did not even look to Dreagher for guidance before ordering the Defiant to recall its fighters and interceptors and increase its momentum.

‘And ready torpedo bays one through sixteen,’ he added.

It was no surprise to see the Emperor’s Children vessel lurch into a hard bank as it swung abruptly away from the World Eaters fleet turning towards it. Such a manoeuvre would put the ship under considerable stress, and Dreagher could imagine the warning klaxons and alarms blaring though its corridors.

The III Legion cruiser’s plasma core burned hot as it pulled away, extricating itself from immediate danger. Turning one’s back and running from World Eaters was only ever going to elicit one response, however. Even the most restrained and controlled of the remaining XII Legion captains were unable to resist the tantalising urge.

As one, the fleet accelerated up to combat speed, giving chase. The hunt was on.

The hatch was unlocked, as expected. With a final twist of its central locking wheel, it swung silently open, and the Bloodborn drifted in, using handholds to propel themselves into the decompression chamber beyond.

Strobing red warning lights filled the interior. Faded hazard stripes edged the hard surfaces of the chamber. Arrows painted in cracked paint indicated the orientation of the ship, and the Bloodborn arranged themselves accordingly, rotating in the zero-gravity environment and maglocking themselves to the deck floor.

One of their number sealed the hatch, swinging it shut and securing its locking mechanism. The red lights ceased their incessant flashing, and were replaced by a single, slowly pulsing amber lumen. A warning chime sounded, three times. Recycled oxygen was shunted into the chamber, and the pressure between equalised.

The brazen armour of the Bloodborn was liberally hung with spiked chains, severed heads and other moribund death-tokens. They floated at odd angles but as gravity slammed in, they dropped, pulled towards the ship’s deck.

The amber lumen turned to green, but the way forward into the battleship’s interior remained sealed. A narrow window, the glass thick and tri-layered, was set into the chamber’s lone portal into the battleship proper. A shadowed figure stood beyond it, features obscured by low light and the moisture trapped between the glass layers. He looked within, unmoving.

One of the Bloodborn pushed to the front of the group. He placed his spike-armoured gauntlets palm first on either side of the narrow window and leaned forwards, staring out at the figure beyond. The snarling faceplate of his helm was mere centimetres from the glass. His eye lenses were slanted and glowed with hellish light, lending him an aggressive demeanour. He did not speak. He did not move. He simply stared.

Seemingly satisfied, the shadowed figure within the ship stepped away from the window. A moment later, with a hiss, the portal slid upwards. A second was revealed, a bonded alloy blast door of adamantium, plasteel and ceramite capable of withstanding anything barring concentrated melta blasts. It too ground open.

The Bloodborn strode through, chains clinking, glowing eye lenses scanning for threats. Several of them glanced down at the figure that had opened their way as they filed past. The smell of blood was heavy upon them. Their armour plates bore black handprints upon their helms and breastplates, marking them for death; none of them expected to survive this mission.

None of them spoke. There was no need to. They knew what they had come to do. They had memorised the labyrinthine path they intended to walk. The way forward lay open before them.

Without acknowledging the one who had allowed them access, they ghosted into the gloom of the Defiant’s interior. They moved with surprising stealth for such large, heavily armoured beings. Within seconds they were gone.

Maven sealed the blast portals. He removed a heavy magnetic override from the metal chest of the door servitor embedded in a wall panel beside the portal, and slipped out a long, needle-tipped cable from the servitor’s forehead plug. The servitor twitched. A rope of drool hung from its grey, lumpen lips.

The override allowed Maven access and ensured his actions were shrouded, an inbuilt feedback scrub making the ship believe that the portals had never been opened. It was a device of his own creation. He shook off the cranial slime from the needle-plug, grimacing, and folded the cable around the device’s circular casing. He slipped it into a deep pocket and glanced around him. The corridors were empty.

He pulled his hood up over his head, and walked away, taking a different route from the Bloodborn. Within moments, he too was swallowed up in the labyrinthine interior of the battleship.

Chapter 7

Galerius’s expression was cold, matching the alabaster perfection of his skin. His violet eyes had no warmth.

‘Why have I been confined to my cell?’ he said, his tone icy. ‘Why are there guards posted at my door? Am I a prisoner now?’

‘You are no prisoner,’ said Dreagher. ‘But neither are you free to wander as you please. That you were able to do so previously was a privilege.’

‘That wandering saved the life of your precious human pet,’ said Galerius.

‘For which I am grateful,’ said Dreagher. ‘External events have forced my hand.’

‘What’s happened?’ said Galerius, narrowing his eyes to slits.

The Palatine Blade had felt the shudder and groan of the battleship as it advanced to combat speed. He’d half expected to feel the impact of an enemy barrage, but none had come. That had been when he’d discovered that his cell door was maglocked, and that his vox had been disabled. After a period of hours that had felt like weeks, the ship’s advance had slowed. Now the engines were still, thrumming rhythmically through the braces of the ship.

‘Come with me,’ said Dreagher. ‘See with your own eyes.’

‘My blade,’ said Galerius. ‘May I bring it?’

‘Do as you will,’ said Dreagher. ‘As I said, you are not a prisoner.’

That the World Eaters were on a war footing was obvious. Legion serfs and servitors hurried by, hauling boxes of ammunition and ordnance. Squads of XII legionaries loped past them as they strode through the corridors of the Defiant accompanied, much to Galerius’s chagrin, by four World Eaters guards. The legionaries snarled at him in open hostility as they passed by, revving the engines of their chain weapons. Others spat at his feet, the powerful acid in their saliva making the deck sizzle and bubble.

A sneer turned Galerius’s handsome face cruel. They were a wild rabble, these World Eaters, with no sense of order or discipline about them.

‘Is this necessary?’ he snapped. ‘There is nowhere I could go, even if I wanted to.’

‘They are your protectors, not your captors,’ said Dreagher. ‘Without them, you’d already be dead.’

Another squad of World Eaters jogged past. They were fully armed and armoured for war, and heading for the embarkation decks. Some unwilling victim was soon to feel their wrath.

Whatever wretched backwater world the XII had come upon this time was going to die, its civilisation left in ruin and dust as so many others that had been obliterated since he’d been aboard the ship. It was tiresome.

They stared at him, growls crackling from the grilles of their helms. One of them, a brute clad in blood-drenched plate – many of the XII refused to wash the gore from their armour post battle – slowed as he noticed Galerius. He drew a heavy serrated blade from a sheath strapped to his vambrace and took a threatening step towards him.

Galerius stared at him, a look of distaste of his face. He did not reach for Argentus. Not yet.

One of his so-called bodyguards interposed himself, placing one hand on the warrior’s chest, halting his advance. In his other he held his bolter one-handed, the barrel levelled at the World Eater’s head.

‘Back off,’ snarled the guard, using the mongrel Nagrakali tongue. Galerius knew enough of the barbaric language to understand those words, a fact that he had no intention of sharing with his hosts.

One of the legionary’s squad pulled the aggressor back, dragging him away from the confrontation. He allowed himself to be withdrawn, though he lowered his blade at Galerius as he did.

‘Your skull is pledged for the Skull Throne,’ he said in stilted Gothic before he moved on.

‘I will miss this place so, if I ever get off this ship,’ said Galerius.

‘I’m sure,’ said Dreagher.

‘Where are we going?’ said Galerius.

‘To a view deck,’ said Dreagher. ‘There is something I believe you will wish to see.’

Maven walked swiftly through the halls of the Defiant. That he was Argus Brond’s man was well known. He was not questioned or stopped. To outward appearances he was hurrying upon some errand of his master. Only those close to him would have been able to read his tension.

He was armed; a wide-bladed sword hung on his belt, while on his other hip a large-bore hand cannon was holstered.

As he walked, he lifted the small vox-bead attached to his lapel close to his mouth.

Still there was no answer. The other end of the vox was silent. He swore in frustration.

‘Come on,’ he breathed. ‘Answer!’

Galerius stood with his hands on the armourglass of the view deck’s curved portal, staring out into the void. There were blood-tinged tears in his eyes, forming red rivulets down his ivory face. Dreagher stared at the Palatine Blade, partially amused, partially repulsed.

Beyond the thick reinforced layers of the portal, past the armoured spine and bristling arrays upon the prow of the Defiant, a fleet was spread out across the void before a blue-grey planet, swirling with cyclonic, continent-sized storms.

The fleet hung in perfect, resplendent formation at the very edge of enhanced visual range. Such distances were vast by any mortal standards, though dangerously close in the scale of void wars. Being able to see a ship with your own eyes always meant that it was within weapon range.

The ships were bedecked in regal purple and gleaming gold, their magnificence a stark contrast to the battle-worn, fire-blackened battleships of the World Eaters fleet.

It was the Emperor’s Children – perhaps the entirety of the Legion.

Their dispersal was ordered, arranged in a logical, coordinated defensive screen. Dreagher would expect nothing less of the III Legion. The World Eaters ships, in contrast, were scattered and isolated, each operating as an individual, with scant regard for formation, overlapping fire-arcs or mutual support. The XII fleet was as divided as the Legion itself.

‘I have to make contact,’ said Galerius, still staring out at the distant fleet, unblinking, red tears tracking down his face. ‘I have to make contact with Lord Commander Cyrius. I am his Palatine. My place is by his side. Gods below – the Phoenician! Does the Pride of the Emperor still sail the aether? Is my lord primarch out there?’

‘I do not have any answers for you,’ said Dreagher. ‘None of the Third Legion have yet deigned to speak to us.’

‘We are allies! So let me speak with them.’

‘Our Legions were allied to Horus,’ said Dreagher. ‘Not to each other.’

‘Even if the ties of brotherhood no longer bind our Legions, we have common cause. Fighting each other is pointless.’

‘Some would say our common cause is dead,’ said Dreagher, his ceramite-encased fingers drumming a rhythm upon his vambraces. ‘And I am not sure that I disagree.’

He unfolded his arms, and rubbed a hand across his dark mahogany face, as if trying to wipe away the problems plaguing his mind.

‘There are those among the Twelfth who would gladly wet their blades in Emperor’s Children blood,’ he said.

‘Give me a shuttle,’ said Galerius, his gaze drawn like a lodestone back to the Emperor’s Children fleet. ‘Let me return to my Legion. I can end this deadlock. Let me speak on your behalf. We can end this without hostilities.’

‘That is not going to happen,’ said Dreagher. ‘Not until this situation is resolved.’

‘So, I am to be… what? A hostage?’

‘Should things deteriorate, you have knowledge that could be used against us,’ said Dreagher. ‘That cannot be allowed to happen.’

‘Let me speak of what it is that I know: that your Legion is a shadow of its former self, riven by factionalism and division. I know that you’ll be destroyed utterly if you walk this foolish path,’ said Galerius. ‘I know that you don’t have the numbers to defeat the Third Legion. If those ships out there are at quarter-strength, then we outnumber you what, three-to-two? Two-to-one?’

Dreagher’s expression hardened. ‘Nothing can survive a war with the World Eaters. You may defeat us, but you know as well as I that we’ll take your Legion with us to hell.’

‘United, maybe,’ said Galerius. ‘But your Legion is divided.’

Dreagher sighed. ‘I’m not sure this is a path we can turn away from. Not any more.’

‘Then you have a choice to make, Dreagher,’ said Galerius.

The Bloodborn moved steadily through the Defiant. Their path was circuitous, wending its way through the tight corridors of the underdeck. Legionaries were seldom seen down in those lower levels. This was the realm of the ship’s menials, serfs and slave-workers, where the mortals that kept the ship running slept, ate and socialised, bred, fought and traded.

To the mortal inhabitants of the Defiant, this was their world. Most had never stepped foot off the battleship. Few had ever lived a moment of their lives without the incessant thrum of the ship’s engines reverberating underfoot, without the low ceilings and close walls pressing in upon them. The universe and its machinations beyond the ship’s hull were nothing they had ever seen or experienced – a concept that they understood simply as theoretical, like the existence of paradise to the devout, or hell to those who knew better.

The Bloodborn could see the mortals peering at them from the shadows as they marched through this underworld realm. The arrival of a group of legionaries down here was a rare thing, seen perhaps once or twice in a mortal’s lifetime, and their curiosity was strong. None were foolish enough to get in their way, naturally – more often than not, the appearance of one of the armoured demigods of the XII Legion was a herald of death. They scattered before them, slinking in the darkness like vermin, peering back from side-corridors and from behind grilled ventilation hatches at the armoured transhumans.

The route the mortal had uploaded to them had been accurate, thus far. The way before them was open. Portals unlocked, allowing them unimpeded progress into the heart of the creaking battleship.

They walked kilometres through the bowels of the ship, traversing its squalid underworld. Only as they drew near their target did they begin to rise into the main corridors and chambers of the battleship.

They traversed a vertical access shaft, hand over hand, hauling themselves up the tightly bound steel cable running down its centre. They ghosted down corridors unimpeded. Every door along their route was open. All vid-cameras blinked off as they approached, or turned aside as they loped by, moving as a pack.

They encountered three mortals and one legionary in the upper levels. The Bloodborn dispatched the serfs without breaking stride, snapping their spines with a vicious crack or caving in their heads with the butt of their weapons.

The legionary emerged from a side-chamber halfway along the line of the Bloodborn. Three of them were on him instantly. He smashed the faceplate of one before he was taken down; arms pinned him, and a power blade was rammed up under his chin and into his brainpan.

The time for subtlety had passed. They left him where he fell and picked up the pace, loping ever onward.

It was time. It was time to kill a legend.

Chapter 8

In her dreams, Skoral was powerless. She was in the pits, bleeding from a dozen wounds. Her feet were bare on the red sands. The heavens above were filled with roaring fire. Thousands of faceless onlookers jeered and screamed in the stands.

She should have had a weapon, but she was unarmed. She fought a huge, vat-grown brute wearing a snarling Legion helm. One of its arms was mechanised, its fingers clicking with pistons. In its other hand it swung a length of heavy chain.

Dreagher stood nearby, expression stern. Beside him was Maven, a wry smile upon his handsome, lean face.

She was slow. Her feet were heavy and dragged in the sands. She tripped, struggled to her feet and tripped again. Sweat was running from her body in rivulets.

She had no weapon. She needed a weapon.

There was a machete on the sand, near Maven and Dreagher. She tried to call out to them to throw it to her, but the red dust caught in her throat. The only sound that came out was a choking rasp. Dreagher stood unmoving. Maven laughed.

Her enemy came at her. Her legs were leaden. She could not move. The monster’s chain snapped out and caught around her arm, wrapping tight. He yanked it, hard. Her arm came off, ripped from the socket.

Things squirmed forth from within her, exiting her body amidst the gushing spray of blood. They writhed and squealed, using her body and her blood as a gateway between the warp and reality. The pain was incredible. Snapping tentacles ripping through her body, bursting out through the gaping stump of her shoulder, and she screamed.

Skoral woke to pain, drenched in sweat, adrenaline racing through her system. She suffered a moment of panic as she realised she was missing her left arm, before she remembered.

A nightmare. It had seemed so real, but it had been nothing but a nightmare.

It took her a second to realise where she was – enclosed in a recovery pod within the apothecarion secundus. She lay there for a few breaths, calming herself. The stump of her shoulder itched.

She heard a chime nearby, but ignored it. It could wait. She scratched her bound shoulder and felt a staple dislodge.

‘Idiot,’ she said. She began to unbind her bandages. They smelt rank, as if the wound were festering.

Something moved beneath her bandages, making them ripple, and her breath caught in her throat.

‘No,’ she whimpered.

Yes, hissed a voice in her head.

Snapping, thorn-tipped tentacles burst from her wound, punching out through the bandages, splattering the inside of her recovery pod with blood. She screamed.

She woke again, this time for real.

Her breathing was fast and shallow, and the bed sheet beneath her was drenched with feverish sweat. Blood had leaked from her bound shoulder stump, soaking her bandages.

She hit the release of her pod, which opened slowly. She swung her legs over the side and pushed herself upright, grimacing. She rubbed her hand across her face and took in a long breath, attempting to slow her racing heartbeat.

It was often this way while traversing through the aether. Dreams and nightmares were magnified far beyond anything she’d ever experienced in real space. Even ensconced within the protective Geller field that kept the predations of the Sea of Souls at bay, its presence was always felt.

Sometimes it manifested as terrifying and disturbed dreams, at other times as uncharacteristic melancholia, blind rages that came from nowhere, crippling anxiety that ate away at a person from within, vivid hallucinations or psychotic episodes.

On rare occasions, physical manifestations from the warp took form within the ship. Sometimes the World Eaters would seek them out, burning them to ash that dissipated into the ether with bursts of promethium. At other times, they’d ignore them. It was generally only the mortals aboard the ship that were taken by these apparitions, anyway.

On one horrific three-month warp transit, Skoral had been haunted by the presence of a whispering, eyeless crone. She’d been there in the shadows, creeping forwards in the corner of her vision whenever she turned. She’d been there, stroking Skoral’s hair when she fell at last into a fitful, exhausted slumber after days without rest. She’d jolted awake instantly in shock, and the whispering crone recoiled. Her fingers were like a spider’s legs. Skoral’s flesh was icy and numb where she’d been touched. That particular manifestation had haunted her for months, before disappearing. Still, she’d been lucky.

Three times she’d seen crew members possessed from within by hateful beings from beyond the veil. Each of those times there had been deaths involved. She still bore the soul-scars of the last such encounter she’d witnessed.

Some could not take it. Many chose suicide rather than face yet another night-cycle aboard the ship while in warp transit. She’d known of a score of others who simply vanished. Most were never seen again. A few were found, horribly mutilated, their skin ripped off, hanging from chains in the low decks – but then, it could well have been one of the Legion who had performed that grisly ritual, not something of the warp.

For a time, she had not thought she would ever recover – but she had. She was resilient beyond the measure of most other mortals, she’d come to realise. She was a fighter. She could survive any pain, any discomfort, any trauma. She would endure. She was strong.

Gingerly, she unwrapped the bloody bandages from her shoulder stump. She could still not rationalise that this was her flesh, her body. It did not seem real.

The bandages were stuck to the wound, and she gritted her teeth as she peeled them away. A synthflesh graft had been sutured over the wound, its edge puckered and pink. Blood was leaking between the staples where the wound had reopened in her sleep. The whole area was an ugly shade of purple, but she was satisfied with how it was healing, despite this latest minor tear.

She’d done the majority of the surgery herself, pumped with powerful analgesics. It was not an experience that she had any wish to repeat. The effort to reroute her severed arteries, which had been clamped off by her medicae servitors while the Emperor’s Children legionary fought Ruokh, had been almost too much for her. She’d passed out twice during the surgery, each time brought back to consciousness by jolting adrenaline shots administered by her servitors.

Skoral grimaced. Phantom pain throbbed down her nonexistent limb. She scrabbled at the steel tray beside her pod, snatching up a syringe-gun. With two clicks of the trigger, she injected painkillers into her flesh, emptying two vials’ worth. The area was instantly numbed, and she sighed in relief.

She saw that her vox-bracelet, placed on a steel-topped side-bench nearby, was blinking and vibrating subtly. Incoming call. Leaving it where it was on the side-table, she spoke aloud her command.

‘Answer vox,’ she said, probing at her shoulder-wound with her fingers.

‘Where are you?’ said a voice. Maven.

‘Well, hello to you too,’ she said.

‘Where are you?’ he said, his tone urgent, serious.

‘Apothecarion secundus. Where do you think?’

‘Get out,’ said Maven. ‘Get out now.’

‘What are you–’ she said, turning as she heard the main portal hiss open.

‘Manual override accepted,’ said the muffled voice of the servitor at the door outside. Its voice was cut off with a wet, ripping sound. Skoral frowned.

The sound of a bolter discharging hit her like a slap to the forehead. The sound was shockingly loud, and the head of one of her medicae servitors simply disappeared in a red mist. It remained upright for a moment, then slumped to the floor, like a puppet with its strings cut.

Galerius shook his head.

‘This is insanity,’ he said. ‘The real enemy is out there, hunting us. Already it has hounded us here, to the never-edge of madness. Do you think Dorn, Guilliman, Russ and the rest will simply give up their pursuit? They will hunt us down until all who fought under the Eye of Horus are dead. If we are to have any chance of survival, any chance at all, we cannot wage war against each other and let the weakened survivors be picked apart by the lapdogs of the Imperium. We will never be able to hit back at them, to besiege Terra and actually win, if we are divided.’

‘I don’t care about taking Terra. That’s a fool’s dream, now,’ said Dreagher. ‘All I care about is the Legion, nothing else.’

‘Well, it will be destroyed if you let this situation escalate,’ said Galerius, gesturing to the standoff between the two Legion armadas. ‘Yes, we of the Third Legion are arrogant. Yes, we look down upon you as savages, but there is a warrior’s respect there too. We are brothers. Convince them to help your fleet resupply, refuel, rearm, whatever it is you need, then leave this place and go where you will. Go and find that insane daemon that was once your liege lord. Go and throw your lives away in a pointless, suicidal attack against Ultramar or Terra, if you must. But don’t be stupid enough to let this escalate into conflict.’

Skoral reacted to the gunfire instantly, rolling from her recovery pod and falling heavily to the floor. She lay low. The deck was icy cold against her skin. She was still connected to her pod by a pair of intravenous drip-lines, she realised. She tore off the tape holding them to her skin and ripped the needles from her arm, letting them drip onto the deck floor.

‘Skoral? Are you there?’ came Maven’s strained voice from her bracelet.

‘End vox,’ she said, and it went silent.

Heavy booted footsteps entered the room, followed closely by two more deafening booms. Each shot made her whole body jolt. The wall behind Skoral splattered with blood; milky, artificial synth-blood. It ran down the wall in thick rivulets. Skull fragments were embedded in the wall panels.

Skoral crept backwards on her knees and her one arm, being as silent as possible, feeling unbalanced and awkward. She kept the recuperation pod between her and the newcomers. Between the low legs of the pod she could see red-armoured boots and bronze-edged greaves. At least half a dozen legionaries. She could see two of her servitors down, ripped apart by the horrendously powerful bolt fire.

She didn’t know who it was that had come into her apothecarion or why they had come, but she was under no illusions. If they found her, they would kill her.

They were not moving. Scanning for movement, for anything still living, she realised. She froze. The silence was oppressive. She stopped breathing, for fear that the sound would alert them to her presence. She heard a series of dull clicks. She’d been around the Legion long enough to know what that was; closed vox traffic. The legionaries were talking to each other.

They split up and began to move through the apothecarion. They were being methodical, looking for survivors. These were not the actions of legionaries lost to the Nails. This was a planned operation. That thought was not a comforting one.

One of the legionaries was coming towards her location, either drawn to her gaping recuperation pod or – oh gods – her gently swinging intravenous drip-feeds. She could hear the sound of his armour as he came closer, droning angrily, like a swarm of insects. She could hear the grind and whirr of his servos. His steps were heavy, making the deck reverberate. Three steps, and he’d see her.

She scrambled back, moving as quietly as possible, and cowered behind the solid block of the apothecarion’s wet station. She heard the Space Marine step around her recuperation pod and pause, scanning where she had been just seconds before. He would see the swaying drip-feeds. There was no way that he could not. Again she heard the click of his closed vox.

Four bolt shots in quick succession came from the other side of the room. With the last shot she heard plex-glass shatter, and a gush of water exploded outwards onto the deck floor. The rejuvenat-vats. One of the Legion was suspended in that regenerative liquid. Kholak. He wasn’t properly conscious. Skoral herself had administered the serum that had kicked in his sus-an membrane, bringing on an induced form of suspended animation. A fifth shot, followed almost instantly by a wet detonation, which likely ended his life.

What in the hells was going on? These were not legionaries of Dreagher’s echelon, and she felt certain they did not answer to Argus Brond either. Where had they come from? What was their goal? And how had they come here without being stopped?

A thought hit her. Dreagher did not know they were here.

She knew that there were a multitude of sub-factions within the Legion vying for dominance. This was likely a squad of one of her master’s enemies that had infiltrated the Defiant. But for what purpose?

She needed to let Dreagher know.

Her responder bracelet. She cursed herself for a fool. Why had she not grabbed it when she had the chance? The painkillers still in her system were clouding her judgement.

The World Eater was so close she could feel the electric tingle of his armour, powered by the miniature reactor plant embedded in his armoured backpack. He began to move again.

Scarce daring to breathe, she backed along the length of the wet station. Her route took her through a pool of warm liquid. Blood textured with brain matter and shards of skull. It soaked into her gown at her knees, and covered her feet and hand.

Moving as quickly as she could while still remaining silent, Skoral continued to back up, sliding round the corner of the bench. She pressed her back up against it just as the World Eater stepped around the wet station.

Her heart was beating thunderously in her chest. She prayed that he would not hear it. She heard him pause.

Taking a chance, she half-crawled, half-dragged herself around the end of the bench, moving back to her recuperation pod. She cast a quick glance about her. It did not appear as though any of the legionaries were looking in her direction. Reaching up, she felt along the edge of the bench, groping blindly for her transponder bracelet. After a moment of searching, she found what she sought.

She slipped the wristband over her hand, and lifted the tiny hole that was its transponder to her mouth, cupping it in her palm.

‘Dreagher,’ she said, as quietly as possible.

Dreagher paused his pacing to and fro within the enclosed view-station as the incoming vox chimed. He clicked it off, silencing it.

The light within the room was dim. The bruised glare of the warp tinged everything red.

‘If you are not going to send me back to my Legion, or use me in any negotiations, then why show me this?’ said Galerius. ‘It seems a pointless cruelty. It pleases me beyond measure to know that my Legion has survived, but not to allow me to be with my brothers… I would perhaps rather not have known they were so close. They seem further from me now than ever.’

Dreagher’s vox chimed again. With a snarl of frustration, he clicked it off.

‘A war-meet has been called, to determine the course of action the Twelfth takes,’ said Dreagher. ‘It is set to gather even as we speak. You said that the Legion has become factionalised. You are right. There are those who wish to fight, those who wish to walk away, and those who do not care either way.’

‘And you?’

‘I want to see a united Twelfth Legion,’ said Dreagher. ‘And I want to see us rebuild. This could be the place where we do it.’

‘You’re torn,’ said Galerius. ‘You do not know where to lay your support.’

‘So convince me,’ said Dreagher.

Skoral mouthed a silent curse. Dreagher was not answering. She pressed a hidden rune upon her bracelet’s inner surface, and a tiny pinprick of light upon the bracelet began to blink.

It was only then she registered the bloody prints she’d tracked round from the other side of the wet station.

Again she cursed herself for a fool. Frantically, she tried to wipe the worst of it off her feet using her medicae gown, but it was a useless effort. There was nothing that could be done.

She had to get out of here. Now.

Moving in a low crouch, she ducked around the side of her recuperation pod, angling for the exit.

No. Two legionaries stood to either side of the portal. That way was blocked.

She glimpsed them briefly, armoured in baroque, spike-edged red plate, bedecked with skulls and kill-markings. There was a brilliant flare of light and a hissing roar, accompanied by a hot chemical stink that stung her nostrils. They were sealing the door. They were sealing her in.

She froze for what seemed an eternity, but could only have been a heartbeat. Her mind was a blank. There was no way out.

That moment of inaction almost killed her. A legionary stepped by her, so close that she could have reached out and touched his heavily battle-scarred plate. He did not see her cowering on the floor – his attention was elsewhere.

Shocked out of her moment of inaction, she turned and scrambled away from the exit, keeping low. She ducked between cabinets filled with medical supplies, empty gurneys and thrumming, almost silent life-support machinery. She glanced left, glimpsing legionaries moving as one for the far corner of the room, towards the isolation cell that held Khârn, then looked right – straight into the hateful, snarling faceplate of the legionary who had been searching for her.

He was down on one knee, a gauntleted hand touching one of the bloody smears she’d left on the deck. Carved teeth had been affixed into his vox-grille, giving him a vicious, bestial appearance. A black handprint was emblazoned upon the left half of his faceplate.

The legionary saw her at the same moment, but he reacted much quicker. He moved impossibly fast, a blur of movement, rising like a sprinter. A trolley was upended, hurled out of his path as he barrelled towards her, an unstoppable juggernaut intent on her demise.

Skoral didn’t have time to think. She lurched to her feet, shoved a gurney laden with boxes of supplies into his path and ran for an open cell door. He smashed it aside with the back of his hand, swatting it away as dismissively as a mortal would a fly. The gurney hurtled away from him, flipping end over end through the air, sending boxes and supplies scattering.

He covered the distance astonishingly fast. She’d gone only two steps, making perhaps two metres by the time he closed on her, covering easily three times that distance. Nevertheless, she made it into the isolation cell, a square room of armourglass with only a single recovery pod in its centre. There was no way out. She’d backed herself into a corner.

He was close. She slammed her palm against the door’s locking rune. The portal hissed shut instantly. For a horrible moment she thought she’d locked herself in there with him, but no, he was outside. She could see him through the thick armourglass. Up close he seemed impossibly huge. She saw him reach for the door release.

Moving fast, her hand shaking so much that she almost missed it, she thumbed a red key button beside the door. Emergency contamination control. A warning siren began to sound and red lights began to flash. Immediately, a locking mechanism kicked in with a series of grinding turns, sealing the door fast. It could only be opened with the requisite code.

She backed away from the door, staring at the immense Space Marine standing beyond it, glowering in at her. He stepped back two steps and levelled a bolt pistol at her. Without pause he fired. Three shots in quick succession. Skoral flinched.

The armourglass was scarred by the gunfire, but held. The World Eater lowered his pistol, ribbons of smoke rising from its barrel and the holes of its muzzle brake. He stared at her, holding her gaze, then simply turned away, as if judging the difficulty in breaking into the cell more than her life was worth.

Skoral staggered around the single recovery pod centred in the cell and pressed herself against the armourglass wall opposite the door, looking frantically out into the corridor beyond. The ship’s corridor was empty. She began to bang on it, shouting.

‘Anyone!’ she roared. ‘Anyone!’

Her bracelet transponder vibrated against her skin. Dreagher. Finally.

‘What is going on down there?’ he growled.

Movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention.

Two cells down, she could see Khârn sitting unmoving in his throne, as always. Outside his cell, the World Eaters kill-team was clustered.

Contamination protocols. When the emergency contamination lockdown was triggered, all of the cells in the apothecarion secundus were locked down.

She saw the flare of a weld-torch.

‘Legionaries,’ breathed Skoral. ‘Cutting into Khârn’s cell. They’re going to kill him.’

Chapter 9

Dreagher sprinted through the corridors of the Defiant, barking orders. The Emperor’s Children swordsman, Galerius, was a step behind him, his massive curved blade strapped across his back. An honour guard of World Eaters pounded behind in their wake, bolters and chainswords clasped in their hands.

Too long, thought Dreagher. It was taking them too long to get there. There were no legionaries any closer, none that would get there any faster. He picked up the pace, taking five, six, seven metres with each stride. The corridors reverberated with the pounding of footfalls.

He heard the screaming contamination klaxon. It was getting louder. They were almost there. He could see the strobing blood-tinged light up ahead.

He rounded a corner too fast, boots skidding on the metal decking. He hit the wall opposite, his armoured shoulder skidding off its surface. Galerius took the corner more gracefully, using his momentum to step up onto the wall itself. He took two light steps before pushing off the wall and thudding back to ground, maintaining his speed. He pulled out in front of Dreagher and the other World Eaters, arms pumping like pistons.

They raced past the armourglass walls of the apothecarion. He could see legionaries within. At a glance he knew that they were neither his nor Argus Brond’s.

These were outsiders. Infiltrators onto his ship. He felt the rage build within him. The Nails tick-tocked in his mind, lending fuel to his burning muscles, granting him strength and speed.

He saw Skoral in one of the isolation cells. She was standing up against the glass, pounding on it and shouting, though nothing of that could be heard from the corridor itself. His gaze met hers, briefly. Then he was past her. The final corner. Beyond it, the entrance to the apothecarion.

A deafening torrent of heavy fire met him as he rounded the corner. High-calibre rounds caught Dreagher high on the left shoulder. They ripped great chunks from his ceramite and spun him half around, making him stumble. Galerius threw himself into a roll to avoid the incoming fire, but he too was hit, the streaming heavy weapons fire scoring a series of gouges across his pristine purple chest plate.

A legionary stood before the entrance to the apothecarion, legs braced in a wide stance. He wielded a bucking, belt-fed autocannon, the huge twin-barrelled weapon fighting him with every pounding shot.

One of Dreagher’s World Eaters dropped instantly, his helmet exploding in a shower of red. Two others fell as the booming autocannon rounds churned across them, gouging massive craters in their armour. They were sent reeling back, stumbling into the path of those behind them.

Another World Eater died, cut in two at the waist by the sheer force of the autocannon’s barrage before Dreagher took the legionary down. Two shots, fired in quick succession. The detonation virtually tore the legionary’s head off. The murderous weapon fell silent, the dead warrior’s thumb finally releasing the pressure of the trigger.

Dreagher was up and moving even before the warrior fell. He and Galerius were the first to the entrance. The head of the servitor built into the door frame had been ripped clean off. Dreagher pushed into the confines of the antechamber beyond, his bolter raised, the bayonet chainaxe slung beneath the barrel churning the air. Galerius was a step behind, holding his blade Argentus in both hands.

Dreagher slammed his fist onto the door release. Nothing happened.

‘They’ve sealed it,’ said Galerius, nodding his chin towards the scorch marks at the door’s join.

‘The autocannon,’ ordered Dreagher, stabbing a finger at one of his legionaries. ‘Quickly!’

The World Eater tore the heavy weapon from the grasp of the dead legionary, and brought it up to bear on the sealed door. Dreagher and Galerius stepped aside, turning their heads away, and the legionary depressed the thumb trigger.

A hail of fire impacted with the burn-sealed door, crazing the glass portal, but not breaking it. The legionary emptied the autocannon’s ammunition bank in seconds, firing on full auto. The barrels were glowing red-hot by the time he was done. The door was a mangled ruin, but still it held.

Dreagher stepped forward and slammed the flat of his boot into the door’s glass centre. It shattered inwards and he moved in, firing, bolter pressed to his shoulder.

A pair of grenades bounced towards him, and he threw himself aside, taking cover behind an overturned bench. The explosions, coming so close together as to almost be a single detonation, sent shards of burning frag bursting out in every direction. The antechamber had taken the full brunt of the explosions. He had no time to check on his legionaries.

He rose, and took in the room at a glance. The enemy legionaries were clustered at the far starboard end, standing outside Khârn’s armourglass cell. One of them held a bulky combi-bolter in two hands, and he sprayed fire at Dreagher as he rose from cover.

He stayed low and stepped sidewards, returning fire.

They were still cutting their way into Khârn’s cell, he saw, but they were almost done. Even as he ducked from a heavy barrage of incoming fire, they finished the job. A pair of them grabbed the door, hauling it open. Two World Eaters remained in the apothecarion, weapons raised, to slow Dreagher and his legionaries. The others moved into the armoured cell to deal with Khârn.

From his kneeling position, Dreagher sighted one of the legionaries advancing, and fired off two bolts. He took the World Eater in the left knee, ripping the leg clean off, and he rose to finish him. He leapt a fallen gurney and kicked the legionary’s weapon away before ramming his chainblade bayonet into the warrior’s throat. The bladed links tore through the flexible, rubberised armour and into the flesh beyond, ripping it to shreds in a hot spray.

Two of the World Eaters within Khârn’s cell were dragging the door shut, and Dreagher shouted out, launching himself forward, desperate to stop them.

Galerius was closer.

The Palatine Blade spun as he closed on the last World Eater standing in their path, who was chasing the purple-armoured legionary with the fire of his combi-bolter. Too slow, he brought it around to bear.

Galerius made two cuts, each flowing smoothly into the next, wielding his two-handed blade with blinding speed. The first disembowelled the World Eater, slicing him open to the spine. The second neatly decapitated him, sending his helmeted head toppling backwards. It rolled and bounced back into Khârn’s isolation cell before coming to rest on the floor, staring vacantly upwards.

The headless body of the legionary dropped to its knees, blood fountaining from the stump of its neck. Then it too toppled backwards. Blood pumped back into the isolation cell, liberally spraying the legionaries within and splashing across Khârn’s face before the doors slammed shut.

Fusion strips were affixed across the door’s join from within, and Dreagher roared in anger and desperation as the cell was effectively sealed off.

‘Melta charges!’ he roared. ‘Bring them!’

He smashed his fist ineffectually against the armourglass, knowing that it would take far, far too long to bring forth a weapon or charge capable of breaching the barrier before the infiltrators finished what they had come to do. Dreagher roared, smashing his fist against the armourglass once more.

Two cells along, Skoral watched in helpless anguish, feeling the desperation of her master. Within the cell she could see the five remaining members of the kill-team encircle Khârn. Each of them held arms at the ready: bolters, chainswords, power axes, mauls.

The legionary directly behind the comatose equerry was a hulking giant, chains hung with skulls pulled taut across the curved plates of his shoulders. The faceplate of his helm was bronze and fashioned in the likeness of a daemon. Ribbed, curving horns rose from his temples.

This warrior holstered his sidearm, and drew a short gladius from a scabbard at his hip. This task would be done with cold steel. It was an old, well-worn weapon, simple and unadorned, with nothing ornate about it. It was purely functional, and its blade had spilled the blood of countless hundreds.

He drew the gladius back for a fatal strike aimed at the back of Khârn’s neck. He reached out with his free hand, as if to grab hold of the equerry’s shoulder to help his aim. He thought better of it at the last second, and pulled his hand back. He shifted his stance and his grip on his gladius, placing the palm of his free hand on its pommel instead.

The tip of the gladius was centimetres from Khârn’s neck, ready for the killing thrust. The World Eater closed his fingers around the pommel.

The others stood with weapons in hand, witnesses to Khârn’s death.

Skoral sucked in her breath.

Dreagher roared, smashing at the armourglass.

This was not how it was meant to end, he told himself. This was not how it was meant to end.

There was hot blood splattered upon Khârn’s face, droplets on his cheek, brow, eyelids and mouth. His lips parted ever so slightly, the movement imperceptible. A scarlet droplet touched his tongue. Lifeblood spilled in battle. Lifeblood spilled in anger.

Behind him, the World Eater drew the point of his gladius back, ready to deliver the killing blow.

Khârn opened his eyes, and blood began to flow.

Chapter 10

It should have been a fatal stroke. There was no way that the veteran legionary could miss his target at such range. But then, this was Khârn.

It all happened in a matter of heartbeats. It was stunning in its brutality and its speed, leaving the onlookers wide-eyed, frozen in surprise and shock.

Khârn leaned to the side, moving just enough so that the blade of the gladius sliced by his bare neck.

His hands came up from the arms of his throne, grabbing the surprised warrior by the wrists.

He twisted, savagely. Snap.

The World Eater released his hold on his weapon, snarling.

Still seated, Khârn grabbed the gladius by the hilt as it dropped from his enemy’s armoured grip.

His arm whipped out, and he flung the gladius away from him. It embedded itself in the throat of one of the other Bloodborn, sinking deep. The warrior clutched at it, blood gurgling.

The Bloodborn were battle-hardened veterans, however. They were surprised by Khârn’s sudden revival, of course, but their instincts had been honed by endless warfare. Their reactions – already far beyond those of mere mortals – had been sharpened to a razor’s edge by constant battle and exacerbated by the Nails thundering in the back of their skulls.

Already their systems were being pumped with stimms, synapses flaring as adrenal spikes surged through them, flooding them with strength and speed.

They were not frozen into inaction as Khârn awoke. Far from it. They responded instantly and without hesitation. Blades were levelled at their singular foe. Barrels were raised.

They were five legionaries against one – four now, as the one with the blade embedded in his neck was already dying. Still, they were armed and fully armoured, they were in an enclosed space, with no way out, and they surrounded a lone, unarmoured, unarmed opponent. There could only be one possible outcome to this fight.

And yet, the outcome of the fight was anything but certain. Even alone and unarmed, Khârn was never an opponent to be taken lightly. He’d already killed one of their number in the blink of an eye.

He rose from his throne, moving with ungodly speed, even for one of the Legiones Astartes. He still had a hold of the broken wrist of the warrior who had tried to execute him. He twisted it sharply as he came up, turning him. In one smooth movement, Khârn was behind him, even as a bolt pistol raised by one of the other Bloodborn fired.

The sound was deafening in the enclosed space of the isolation cell. The shot struck the Bloodborn Khârn was using as a living shield square in the chest. It detonated with a concussive thunderclap. Khârn kicked the World Eater away, planting a bare foot square in the small of the warrior’s back, sending him stumbling directly into the shooter, even as Khârn claimed a plasma pistol from the veteran’s holster.

He drew and fired smoothly, straight into the back of the helmet of the warrior he’d just kicked away. An oscillating scream accompanied the stream of blinding white-blue plasma as the weapon discharged, blasting through the horned helmet and liquefying his head. Hissing coolant vapours vented from the plasma pistol’s reactor chamber.

Two down.

A movement to his left. Khârn dropped to one knee, and a hurled throwing axe, spinning end over end, sliced over his head. It embedded itself in the headrest of his recuperation throne. Khârn’s pistol came around as he dropped, swinging towards his next target.

A spiked power maul smashed the pistol from his hand, then came back around to crush Khârn into the wall. He rose to meet the blow, darting forward with blinding speed to put himself inside his attacker’s effective range. He caught the warrior under one elbow and turned him, taking the Bloodborn off balance. Using the warrior’s momentum against him, Khârn rammed him back into the armourglass wall. The sheer transparent panel shuddered under the impact.

Khârn punched upwards with his fingers outstretched, driving up into the warrior’s throat like a blade, crushing his windpipe.

Feeling a movement behind him, he swayed to the side, narrowly avoiding being impaled upon the roaring tip of a chainsword. He grabbed the legionary’s arms as he followed up on his failed strike, pulling him off balance and driving the blurred chain-links into the belly of the warrior he’d just slammed against the wall. Ceramite and plasteel were churned away in a screech of protesting metal, and blood sprayed.

Spinning, Khârn elbowed the chainsword-wielding Bloodborn square in the face, cracking one of his visor lenses. As he reeled back, Khârn spun, grabbing the throwing axe embedded in his throne. It was a brutish, barbaric killing implement, with a heavy curved blade and jagged teeth.

The chainsword roared as it swung it at him. Khârn hurled himself into a roll, avoiding the madly spinning blade-links. The legionary with the bolt pistol was rising now, pushing off the dead weight of the World Eater whose head Khârn had blasted off.

As Khârn came up, he threw the axe. It whipped across the isolation cell, spinning end over end, and took that legionary in the head, embedding deep in his helmet, square between the eyes. It did not penetrate, but the force of the impact snapped his neck back, the back of his helm smacking hard against the armourglass wall behind him.

The chainsword came in at him again. Turning and stepping in close, Khârn chopped the legionary’s weapon arm at the wrist, forestalling the blow, and drove his fist into the warrior’s helmet, bloodying his knuckles but driving his foe back.

The warrior at his back was not dead, though his windpipe was crushed and his abdomen was a mess of ruined armour and blood. He came at Khârn, growling like an animal, swinging his spiked power maul. Khârn turned and dropped to one knee, arching his spine and throwing his head back. The crackling power maul frizzled through the air, centimetres over him, passing so close that the weapon’s power field scorched his throat and chin.

Khârn grabbed hold of the exposed cables of the legionary’s Mark III chest plate with one hand, the other between his enemy’s legs, and surged to his feet, lifting the warrior clear off the deck. He roared, muscles straining, and hurled the legionary head-first across the cell.

He hit the deck hard and slammed into the corner of the cell, crunching against the armourglass walls. Khârn was instantly moving, whipping around with preternatural speed.

A bolt screamed by his head, centimetres away, and detonated against the wall behind. A second shot boomed, making the gun smoke swirl in a horizontal vortex behind it, but it too failed to find its mark, though it did score a bloody line across Khârn’s chest before it detonated against the cell wall.

Khârn feinted to the right and broke left, avoiding another shot. He took one step, up onto the seat of his throne, and leapt at the shooter, who still had the throwing axe embedded in his helm between the eyes.

The legionary’s bolt pistol barked twice more. The first shot screamed through the gap between Khârn’s left ear and his outstretched arm. The second caught him just above the collarbone.

He was lucky. Had it hit the collarbone the bolt’s velocity would have slowed enough that it would have detonated within his flesh. That would have likely torn his arm off, and possibly his head. As it was, the bolt-round drove straight through him, exiting out through the thick, corded span of muscle between his shoulder and his neck before exploding, tearing his back to shreds of meat and burned flesh.

Still, it did not stop him.

Khârn hit the armoured legionary with his shoulder, slamming him back into the wall. The warrior slipped on the blood-slick deck and went down on one knee. The two fighters were locked together in a deadly clinch. Khârn’s foe drew a saw-toothed knife from the scabbard strapped around one of his greaves, holding it in a downward, stabbing grip. He drove it deep into Khârn’s side, just under his fused ribcage.

Khârn roared his fury and pain and broke away, snapping the legionary’s wrist with a savage wrench, leaving the dagger embedded to the hilt in his flesh. He followed up with a brutal elbow to the side of the legionary’s helmet that snapped his head sidewards. Before he could recover, Khârn took the warrior’s helm in both hands. He thrust his thumbs through the glowing visor lenses, shattering them and driving them into the eyes beyond.

The blinded legionary roared. Khârn placed one foot on his chest, and using that as leverage, he pulled free the axe still embedded in the forehead of the warrior’s helmet. The legionary tried to bring his bolt pistol to bear on Khârn, but Khârn swatted it aside with the flat of the axe blade, then wrenched his opponent’s helmet to the side, exposing his neck.

He hacked into it, once, twice, three times, each strike fast and brutal, chopping first through flexible ribbed under-armour, tightly wrought fibre-bundles, cables and servos, and then hacking through into the meat of the neck. The axe blade was blunted on the legionary’s iron-hard spine, but not before it had severed arteries that squirted hot, gene-rich blood liberally across the room, splashing the armourglass walls and Khârn himself.

Three down. Two remained.

The savage attack was over in a heartbeat. The brutalised legionary fell to the floor, and Khârn rose swiftly, turning, blood dripping from the axe. In the same movement he tore clear the gladius impaling his first victim to the wall. Blood bubbled from the wound. He wasn’t quite dead, not yet, but Khârn finished him, stomping down hard on his neck, ending his pitiful gurgling.

With axe and gladius in hand, he turned to face the last two living World Eaters locked in the cell with him. He spun the two weapons, loosening his wrists.

They came at him from both sides, rounding the iron throne in the centre of the cell. Khârn looked straight ahead, keeping both of them in the periphery of his vision.

They attacked as one; a chainsword roaring in to cut him from shoulder blade to hip, a power maul sizzling in a downward arc to crush his skull.

Khârn broke left, avoiding the screaming chainblade and blocking the downward swing of the maul with the short-handled axe, simultaneously ramming the gladius up through the already compromised armour covering the legionary’s stomach. The downward force of the power maul drove him to his knees.

Hearing the wailing roar of the chainblade sweeping in behind, Khârn threw himself into a roll to the side, leaving the gladius embedded in the legionary’s gut. The chainsword caught him a glancing blow, ripping up the flesh of his shoulder, churning it instantly to the bone, spattering blood.

The warrior lifted the roaring blade to finish him, but Khârn came up quicker, sweeping up a bolt pistol lying on the deck. He planted the barrel of the gun under the legionary’s chin and fired. The top of his helmet exploded, drenching the ceiling with blood and brain matter.

One left.

Khârn swung around, levelling the bolt pistol on the last remaining member of the Bloodborn kill-team. He squeezed the trigger.

Click.

The chamber was empty, the clip dry.

The warrior swung at him, roaring. Khârn caught the haft of the power maul in both hands, dropping his throwing axe. The two warriors fought for control of the weapon, struggling against each other. Unarmoured, they might have been of equal strength. Bedecked in full war-plate, his already prodigious strength considerably augmented, the Bloodborn warrior vastly out-muscled Khârn.

He turned, driving Khârn up against the cell wall, a grinding roar crackling from his snarling vox-grille as he pressed the haft of his power maul into Khârn’s throat. He lifted the unarmoured warrior off the ground, driving his weight against him. Khârn’s face began to turn purple, the veins in his neck and temples bulging. He tried to lift his legs to thrust away, but the Bloodborn drove in close, not giving any room for leverage.

The warrior’s snarling helmet was only centimetres from Khârn’s head. Drawing his head back, the legionary slammed his armoured forehead into Khârn’s face, smashing his nose into a bloody smear. A second headbutt fractured his skull. Khârn roared his defiance, spittle and blood spraying his opponent’s faceplate.

Khârn reached to his side, tearing free the dagger embedded in his flesh, and drove it up into the gap under his enemy’s armpit. The legionary hissed in pain, the sound emerging from his vox-grille like a burst of static, and his grip loosened, dropping Khârn to the floor.

Khârn broke free, and turned his hips into his opponent. In the blink of an eye, he flipped the World Eater, driving him to the deck. He went down with him, driving his knee hard, pinning him down.

Scant centimetres away, on the other side of the armourglass, Dreagher watched the final moments of the shocking, brutal fight. Khârn’s face was twisted into that of a beast, all traces of humanity gone. His teeth were bared, stained red with blood.

He tore loose the knife embedded in the legionary’s body, and stabbed it down into his opponent’s neck, both hands clutched around its blood-slick hilt. The legionary struggled to grab hold of his arms, but dark, gene-rich blood coated his skin, making purchase difficult.

The knife came down again and again. Finally, the legionary managed to catch a hold of the blade in one of his gauntleted hands, twisting it away from Khârn’s grip, but the damage had been done. Blood was pooling beneath them.

Shifting his weight, Khârn’s scrabbling fingers caught the release catch of the legionary’s helm and, with a roar, he tore it off, hurling it aside. The face within was ruddy and broad-featured, eyes burning with the madness of the Butcher’s Nails.

Pinning the warrior down with his knees, Khârn began to pound at his exposed face, raining blows upon him in a berserk flurry.

Five blows and his skull gave way. Three more and he was unrecognisable. Another four, and his enemy was still, the front of his skull caved in.

Khârn continued to strike, roaring, blood dousing his face as he pounded the legionary’s head into pulp. He knelt over him, lifting both fists high into the air, his chest rising and falling with each fast breath, then brought them both down together, crushing the last of the warrior’s head like a sodden, rotten fruit.

The whole violent episode had taken less than thirty seconds from start to finish.

For a time, Khârn did not move. Finally, he lifted his head. His gaze locked on to Dreagher, staring unblinking through the blood-streaked armourglass.

He looked barely human. His refined, angular face was covered in blood, making the whites of his eyes stand out, like twin moons against the void. Those eyes contained such violence, such fury, that they made Dreagher’s breath catch in his throat. He was lost to the Nails, utterly, completely.

Dreagher felt his blood run cold, yet he could not break Khârn’s unblinking gaze. It was like staring into the eyes of an imprisoned apex predator. He was left in no doubt as to what would have happened to him had there been no barrier separating them.

Dreagher smiled.

Khârn was back.

Chapter 11

There were thirty-seven XII Legion warriors present, all of them standing in a rough circle. This was the Enclave – or at least, what was left of it. Only two of their number were of flesh and blood. The others were flickering blue-grey images, hololiths rendered in three dimensions, other captains and ranking officers spread across what remained of the World Eaters fleet.

Brond glared over at the space where Dreagher should have been. It was currently occupied by the Blood Priest. With the death of Khrast, Baruda was next in command of the Ninth.

‘Where the hell is he?’ Brond had snarled at Baruda before the Enclave had gone live.

‘I don’t know,’ Baruda had replied. ‘He is not responding.’

‘Support me,’ Brond had said, stabbing a finger towards Baruda as the first of the ghostly hololith images began to form. ‘That is your role here. That is what Dreagher would want.’

‘Do not seek to use me as your pawn, Brond,’ replied Baruda. ‘I know that you have tried to urge Dreagher to split the Ninth from the Legion, to go our own way with you and yours. You’ve never been able to accept what we are. I will commit to nothing you suggest.’

‘The way things are headed, that is the only logical way forward,’ said Brond. ‘I have no faith that this Enclave will set us on a path other than one of self-destruction.’

‘The Brazen Lord cares not whence the blood flows, only that it does,’ said Baruda.

Now that the Enclave had begun, he and Baruda stood some way apart from each other. Both he and the stand-in commander of the Ninth had their own entourage arrayed behind them; advisors, lieutenants, chosen warriors, menials, servitors. These all stood back. They would not appear in the hololith circles on the other ships.

The circle was the same diameter it had always been. Each individual stood in his traditional place, representing a different company. There were many gaps. Too many.

One gap was more conspicuous than the others.

Of course, it had always been rare for Angron to bother making an appearance at these war meets – this was more a hangover from the War Hounds than a practice much favoured after the Legion was reunited with its primarch – but the tradition had never officially been discontinued.

Some of the hololiths were almost perfect representations, showing every tiny detail and nuance of expression. Others were crackling and distorted, their feed interrupted by static and interference.

The Devourer Goghur dominated the gathering, both politically and in sheer bulk. Bedecked in his hulking Cataphractii armour, he stood half a head taller than most of the others. The fact that he had no real place at this circle – he was not even a captain – seemed not to bother most of those gathered there.

It was Jareg, the Master Shellsmith, who currently held the floor. He alone was able to match Goghur’s sheer bulk, his own mostly mechanised frame augmented with the various arms and mechadendrites of his servo-harness.

‘The Legion war machines are ready to be fielded,’ he was saying. His voice was a grinding rumble, like ill-fitting gears snarling against each other. His was the sharpest hololith image, of course, so clear that were it not for the blue-grey monochrome of his appearance, Brond could have believed the Martian-trained warrior was standing before him in the flesh – or at least what flesh remained.

‘Our super-heavies and artillery pieces are being loaded into bulk-landers as we speak, in the event that they are needed,’ Jareg continued. ‘My heretek engines are being harnessed even now, tethered for transportation.’

Brond shook his head. This was foolishness of the highest order.

Goghur bowed his head to Jareg, the dreadlock-cables plugged into his scalp rustling. He was already acting as if he was the de-facto commander of the Legion, Brond noted in distaste. He was not alone in his unease with Goghur’s aggressive stance, however.

‘It does no good to antagonise the Third Legion further,’ said Solax, the acting captain of the Third Assault. He’d filed his teeth to points, a practice he’d brought with him from his cannibalistic home world. ‘We have nothing to gain. At the first sign of aggression from you, Devourer, I will lead the Third from this system.’

‘Spineless wretch,’ snarled the crackling hololith of Rokgur, a captain five along from Solax. It wouldn’t be long before the Nails claimed him completely, Brond thought. He bore the tell-tale twitching signs of mental degradation. The Nails were making him dance to their tune, turning what had once been among the more cunning and intelligent of the World Eaters commanders into a savage. ‘You… unh… shame the Legion with your unh…’

‘You are welcome to come aboard the Furious Aggression and meet me in the pits any time, Rokgur,’ responded Solax.

The hololith feed of Rokgur spat and shorted as the enraged World Eaters captain took an aggressive step forward, half-removing him from view. The image began to break up. Two other figures stepped into view, restraining Rokgur, before the image cut out. There were murmurs around the circle. Brond snorted and shook his head.

‘We need to resupply,’ said Kho’ren, war-leader of the 19th ‘Skull Takers’. ‘The Emperor’s Children are a brother Legion. We should send envoys to them and–’

He was interrupted by an outburst from another of Angron’s Devourers, another that the primarch had left behind; Tarugar. He was occupying the place of the captain of the 11th – a company that had been killed to a man on Terra. He had no place in this circle either and Brond regarded him as nothing but a lackey of Goghur, here to give him additional support.

‘You would have us go to them on our knees, a begging bowl in hand? I would rather die than crawl for whatever scraps and bones those deviants throw our way.’

‘Why beg for what we can simply take?’ snarled another of the gathered warriors, Kargos the Bloodspitter. Once, he had been part of Khârn’s Eighth Company; now, he led a company of his own, having killed its former captain in a blood-duel. Sanguis Extremis. There were murmurs of agreement from others at his words.

‘Cowards and lickspittles,’ spat yet another, the butcher Zhârkhan. ‘We have fled like dogs with our tails between our legs, and now we bicker and argue about fighting our former allies? I will listen to no more of this. Where is our pride? We should have stayed and fought to the end. I have pledged to take the skull of the Wolf Lord. The 48th is turning to claim it.’

Zhârkhan stepped off his plinth, and disappeared.

A dozen voices began speaking at once.

‘…should be seeking Angron! The astropaths hear him roaring in the…’

‘…nothing but talk! We attack, and attack now, it is what we know, what we…’

‘…join with them. Together we can return and…’

‘…not even a captain. You do not command…’

‘…should be standing united. If we do not, then the Legion is truly already dead…’

‘This is pointless,’ said Argus Brond, stepping away from his own plinth.

The shimmering hololiths continued to argue and bicker.

‘Make your captain see sense,’ Brond said to Baruda. ‘The Legion is fracturing before our eyes. Why should we linger and be part of its downfall?’

Baruda was about to speak, but his gaze was drawn to the chamber’s entry hall as the door hissed open and World Eaters marched in. His eyes widened.

Thinking it was Dreagher finally come to make his presence known, Brond turned.

‘Blood of the primarch,’ he breathed.

A number of World Eaters vessels were turning, leaving the flotilla and setting their sights on the edge of the system, leaving their brethren to their fate, when the hololith of Argus Brond stepped back into view, taking up his place in the circle.

Dreagher, captain of the Ninth, was next to appear, his three-dimensional image projected out across the gathered fleet.

‘So kind of you to grace us with your presence, Dreagher,’ snarled Goghur.

The image of Dreagher stared back at him, eyes hard, but he did not say anything.

‘Do you have anything to contribute to this–’ Goghur was saying, but his words faded into a sibilant hiss as a newcomer stepped forward, occupying the vacant space of the Eighth Assault Company.

This newcomer was armed for war, his body fully encased in battleplate but for his tautly muscled, bare arms. In one hand he held a massive axe that all within the Legion recognised instantly, its name and its bloody history known by all.

Gorechild.

Slowly, the raised voices and arguments ceased, one by one, until all of the gathered captains stood in frozen silence.

The newcomer was not wearing a helm. Dark monochrome specks that could only have been blood covered his bare face, one that was so familiar to them all.

It was a long face, not arrogant or patrician in aspect like those of the Ultramarines or Emperor’s Children, but noble nonetheless.

‘Khârn,’ breathed Goghur finally, breaking the silence. The Eighth Assault Captain turned his mercurial gaze towards him. He stared at him, unblinking, holding his gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable before speaking.

‘Goghur,’ he said, bowing his head fractionally. His voice was refined and clear, calm and tinged with the accent of his home world.

‘We were not expecting you,’ said Goghur.

‘And yet I am here,’ said Khârn.

Chapter 12

Dreagher and Argus Brond stood outside the sealed door. The retinue that Dreagher had posted to watch over Khârn stood to either side of the portal, chain-halberds held at rest.

‘How long has he been in there?’ said Dreagher.

‘Five hours,’ said Brond. ‘No one has gone in or come out in that time.’

‘Remind you of anyone?’ said Dreagher.

‘A little too much,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Go,’ said Dreagher.

Brond nodded. ‘Good luck,’ he said, with a sardonic smile.

As Brond left, Dreagher hit the door release. Darkness awaited him beyond.

‘Khârn?’ he said, stepping into the gloom. His senses were on high alert, half expecting an attack from the darkness. No, he told himself. He is nothing like Angron.

To one of the Legiones Astartes the darkness was not impenetrable, naturally. It took him only a moment to see Khârn, seated at the far end of the room. His head was lowered, and he had Gorechild across his lap, both hands resting upon its haft. How many had fallen beneath the teeth of that blood-soaked axe? Had any weapon forged by man been the cause of more death?

Khârn did not lift his head. Dreagher did not speak, unwilling to interrupt Khârn’s thoughts. He stood motionless, waiting for Khârn to register his presence.

‘There were those who thought I’d gone too far,’ said Khârn, after a long moment of silence. His voice was low, such that Dreagher was forced to move closer to discern his words clearly. ‘They said I was tempting fate, that I would incur his rage. “He’ll kill you”, they said. They did not understand.’

Dreagher said nothing. In the darkness, his brow was furrowed.

‘He’d thrown it away as if it were nothing,’ continued Khârn. ‘The few teeth that remained were blunted to the point of uselessness. You remember this – you were there, were you not?’

‘Armatura,’ said Dreagher, realising that Khârn was speaking of Gorechild. ‘Yes, I was there.’

‘Anyone could have retrieved it and restored it. He wouldn’t have cared. It was not favouritism that spared me his wrath. It was so obvious. They wouldn’t have understood, but it was obvious. Do you, captain? Do you understand?’

Dreagher could feel Khârn’s gaze upon him now. His eyes gleamed silver in the darkness as he looked up: the eyes of a nocturnal predator.

His head was hurting – the Nails were urging him to draw a weapon – but he forced himself to think.

‘He discarded it because it no longer served its primary function,’ he said finally. ‘It ceased to be useful to him.’

‘It no longer served its primary function,’ Khârn repeated, lingering over the words. He nodded slowly. ‘He was nothing if not pragmatic. He did not view any object – or person – with any particular reverence or sentimentality. Gorechild ceased to fulfil its primary function, and so it served him no longer. He cared nothing for what became of it afterwards.’

He stood, hefting Gorechild. He looked down at it, turning it over in his hands.

‘It is only a killing tool, a thing forged by men, the same as billions of others over the course of human history. It is no different from a simple bronze blade smelted in a clay mould on Terra thirty-five thousand years ago. It is only we lesser men who imbue it with worth more than it deserves.’

‘No,’ said Dreagher. ‘It is more than that. It is a symbol, even if Angron never appreciated it.’

‘A symbol of what?’

‘Of the Legion,’ said Dreagher. ‘Of direction. Of leadership.’

‘I never had ambitions to lead the Legion. I have no desire to lead it now.’

‘There is no one else,’ said Dreagher. ‘The Legion will not rally to anyone else. If you do not lead us, then the Legion is done. It will splinter, scattered across the void as independent warbands. It will be the end.’

‘Perhaps our time is passed,’ said Khârn.

‘You do not believe that,’ said Dreagher.

‘The Third Legion,’ Khârn said, changing tack. ‘You bring word?’

‘They have hailed us,’ said Dreagher. ‘We need you.’

Khârn nodded, and stepped into the light.

‘A war is not what they want,’ said Khârn. ‘No sane Legion would start one like this, not without good reason. They will seek to placate us, and send us on our way. However, they are still Emperor’s Children. They will not let the opportunity to show us their superiority pass.’

Dreagher shook his head.

‘It’s all just a game, one of feints and ripostes, posturing and insults hidden as praise,’ said Khârn.

‘It’s tiresome,’ said Dreagher.

‘Politics and diplomacy have never sat well with the Legion. The Nails do not make subtlety one of our strengths, but this is something to be expected when dealing with the Third Legion.’

‘Would that the Nails had never been inflicted on us,’ said Dreagher. ‘Things could have been different for us.’

Khârn glanced at Dreagher. His expression was unreadable, like a mask made of plascrete. Something in his gaze, though, made him want to reach for a weapon.

‘This is our fate. This is the way things are,’ said Khârn. Dreagher nodded, accepting this.

‘I am not the Legion’s saviour, Dreagher,’ said Khârn.

‘You are Khârn,’ said Dreagher. ‘The Legion will follow you.’

‘Tell me,’ said Khârn. ‘Why do you think Angron left us?’

‘He wasn’t Angron any more,’ said Dreagher. ‘Not in the end.’

Khârn shrugged.

‘Perhaps he came to see us like Gorechild,’ said Khârn. ‘Blunted. Broken. Perhaps he believed we had failed him and he discarded us. No longer able to serve our primary function.’

‘But you recovered Gorechild,’ said Dreagher. ‘Rebuilt it, restored it. You made it whole again, and now it serves its function once more. The same could be done with the Legion.’

Khârn grunted. Then he looked Dreagher in the eyes, his gaze burning in its intensity.

‘What would you be willing to do to see the Legion united?’ said Khârn.

‘Anything,’ said Dreagher right away.

Khârn considered this, nodding as he turned Gorechild over in his hands.

‘Come,’ he said, at last. ‘Let us speak with the Emperor’s Children.’

Skoral bit down hard on the hilt of her wide-bladed dagger, enduring the pain in silence.

Oblivious to her discomfort, the tech-servitors went about their work with diligent mono-focus, digits ending in scalpels, sparking electrodes and soldering irons jabbing at her flesh.

She was straddling a utilitarian composite steel chair, her one remaining arm, heavily muscled and covered in jagged tattoos, wrapped around its backrest. Her whole body was tense, like an over-extended spring. The muscles of her neck resembled tightly bound ropes of steel, and her veins protruded dramatically, like branching twigs beneath her skin.

The sickly sweet stink of burning human flesh filled the air as one of the tech-servitors weld-fixed a cog-shaped plug-socket into the stump of Skoral’s shoulder. She clenched her eyes tightly shut against the pain, sweat beading her skin.

‘Is it wrong that the smell is making me hungry?’ said Maven. He was leaning against a nearby wall, smoking a lho-stick.

Skoral’s eyes snapped open, fixing him with a bloodshot glare.

‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ said Maven.

Skoral’s glare turned into a fresh grimace as another servitor touched its needle-like index fingers to the freshly welded plug-socket, causing a shower of sparks to erupt.

‘Throne,’ said Maven. ‘You’re the only thing even approaching an Apothecary on this ship. Just give yourself a damn shot.’

‘Throne?’ growled Skoral, speaking around the dagger hilt clenched between her teeth. ‘Don’t let the masters hear you say that. Even being Brond’s seneschal won’t help you then.’

‘You don’t have anything to prove,’ said Maven. ‘Take a pain suppressant.’

‘Supplies are short,’ snapped Skoral. She made to say more, but her words were cut off by a fresh burst of sparks. Maven inhaled on his lho-stick and blew out a cloud of blue-grey smoke.

‘So it seems that – at least for the moment – we are not at war with the Emperor’s Children,’ said Maven. ‘Who knows if that will last, though. I am not sure how long even Khârn can hold the likes of Goghur back. The Nails have taken root in his mind. He will not be easily dissuaded from this battle.’

Maven took a last pull on his lho-stick before grinding it into the deck beneath his boot. Pushing himself off the wall, he sauntered over to peer over the shoulders of the cluster of tech-servitors, watching their work.

‘Even if the whole Legion turned away from this conflict, I’d guess Goghur would attack,’ said Maven. ‘I don’t know if he would be physically capable of turning away now. He probably wouldn’t be the only one, either. Mark my words, he’ll drag half the Legion to war with him.’

Maven looked away.

‘Perhaps that’s what the Legion needs, though,’ he said. ‘A cleansing of the ranks. That may be the best we can hope for from this idiotic standoff.’

The servitors stepped back from Skoral, having finally finished their work. She stood, a little shakily, removed the dagger from between her teeth and shoved it back into its sheath.

‘I’d be careful who hears you say that,’ she said.

‘Tell me you don’t feel the same way,’ said Maven.

Skoral shrugged, then winced in pain. The flesh around the new implant socket was a raw, red-purple shade, and blood was leaking from the edge of the metal.

‘I feel like someone’s taken a hammer to me,’ said Skoral, ‘then set me on fire.’

‘When do you get your new arm?’

‘A few hours.’

‘Let’s hope we are not at war by then, eh?’ said Maven.

‘With the Twelfth Legion, you never know,’ said Skoral.

‘Are we concluded?’ said the scowling, five-metre-high projection of the Lord Admiral of the Emperor’s Children. His high-born accent, oozing with condescension, set the Nails grinding in Dreagher’s brain.

‘We are done,’ growled Khârn.

‘Coordinates will be out-loaded to your fleet’s cogitators. A deputation of the exalted Third Legion will greet you there.’

Without further talk, the vid-feed was severed. The oculus darkened as the image of the admiral faded, then brightened as it was replaced with a projection looking out into the void.

The vision was heavily pixelated, but its harsh edges smoothed out in a matter of seconds, until the image was so crisp that a casual observer could easily have been fooled into thinking it was a portal looking forward, not that they were hidden behind more than ten metres of reinforced armoured plating.

The void glowed a luminous red, like a bleeding sunset over a heavily polluted industrial world.

‘This is foolishness,’ hissed Brond. ‘No good will come of it.’

Khârn remained standing in the communications pulpit, staring up at the curved screen for a moment, before he turned and bowed his head to Stirzaker.

‘Thank you, captain,’ he said.

‘My lord,’ said Stirzaker, bowing his head.

‘I am no man’s lord,’ said Khârn. ‘Captain will suffice. Khârn would be better.’

‘As you wish,’ said Stirzaker.

Khârn walked off the central dais, and climbed back up the metal stairs to the viewing balcony.

‘Dreagher, Brond,’ said Khârn, as he got to the top. ‘Walk with me.’

A detachment of legionaries fell into step around the three captains as they left the bridge. They were warriors of Dreagher’s echelon, trusted veterans all.

‘Will they parley with us in good faith?’ said Dreagher.

‘I believe they will,’ said Khârn.

‘Goghur will not stand idly by while we go and make peace with the Emperor’s Children,’ said Brond. ‘He is set on conflict here. He will not be dissuaded.’

‘He does not speak for the Legion,’ said Dreagher. ‘The Twelfth will not be hostage to the actions of one madman.’

Brond laughed. It was an ugly, barking sound, and there was no humour in it.

‘Ever since we became the Eaters of Worlds, we have been hostage to the actions of a madman,’ said Brond, his voice tinged with bitterness.

Those words were an error, and Brond realised it instantly.

A stillness descended on Khârn. He stared at Brond without blinking, and while his expression was unreadable, there was a palpable threat of violence in his eyes. The fire of madness and brutality glinted there for a moment, and in that instant Dreagher half expected him to cut the 17th Captain down where he stood, spilling World Eaters blood within the bridge of the Defiant.

To his credit, Brond matched Khârn’s gaze, unwilling to back down or look away. Wisely, his hands did not stray towards the hilts of his swords, though the temptation to do so must have been strong.

‘We are still investigating how the kill-team came aboard,’ said Dreagher in a low voice, seeking to deflect the tension between the two captains. ‘The Defiant was likely compromised by someone on this vessel, in collusion with outside parties within the fleet. I take full responsibility for the breach in security and the attempt on your life.’

‘Other matters are of greater importance,’ said Khârn, still holding Brond’s gaze.

‘Captain?’ said Dreagher. ‘We have traitors in our midst.’

‘In the eyes of the Imperium, we are all traitors. It’s not the first time that an attempt has been made to kill off high-ranking members of our Legion,’ said Khârn, eyes burning, ‘nor will it be the last. It does not matter – the attempt failed. That is the end of it.’

‘If others were involved, they may try again,’ said Dreagher.

‘Let them,’ said Khârn. ‘They will succeed or they will not. Now…’

The Eighth Assault Captain turned towards Dreagher, finally breaking eye contact with Brond.

‘I have been out of the world since Terra,’ Khârn said. ‘I need to know where we stand. I want a full breakdown of every echelon. Numbers, weapons, ammunition, artillery, armour, support. I want to know who leads each company – an appraisal of the existing chain of command – and how many of our numbers have already joined the Caedere cohorts. I want to know which captains and Chapters have fallen hardest to the Nails. I want to know who we can rely on to have some control when the blood starts pumping.’

‘That is an ever-diminishing list,’ said Dreagher.

‘We work with what we have,’ said Khârn.

Chapter 13

Ruokh was roaring as he returned to lucidity, though he didn’t hear it at first. The blood pumping through his veins blotted out all sound.

His throat was raw and his vision bleeding. His breathing was fast and shallow.

His legs kicked uselessly below him, and as the red veil lifted from his eyes, Ruokh remembered where he was. He had no concept of how long he’d been lost in the oblivion of the Nails.

The red light emanating from within his spiked gorget lit his face from below in its hellish glow.

Chains hung down from the darkness above, maglocked to the ceramite hood of his newly donned, hulking armour. That heavy plate was his prison now. It would never be removed while he still drew breath.

Not that it mattered. With every beat of his hearts, with every intake of breath, he drew closer to death. His body was failing. Every cell and fibre of his being was fatally irradiated. His organs were disintegrating within his body, and his lifeblood was bleeding out through his eyes, his ears, his pores. The weapons he’d used for so many years in the Destroyer ranks were finally coming back to claim him.

He did not fight it. He’d already lived far longer than he had any reason to.

Gradually, his heartbeats began to steady and the roar died in his throat. The thundering in his ears began to abate and he heard the others. He was not alone. There were others – hundreds of them – all condemned to the same fate that awaited him.

They thrashed and struck out impotently as they hung there, like twisted, hate-fuelled marionettes. Most of them were further down the blood-soaked spiral than he. Many were no longer capable of even brief moments of lucidity. All they knew now was madness, fury untold, and the constant, never-ending urge to kill.

Before Isstvan, those legionaries who fell too far, who were deemed incapable of controlling the homicidal rages induced by the Butcher’s Nails, those deemed too dangerous to let live, were simply euthanized. There was none of the hand-wringing and pointless ethical dithering that would have occurred in many of the other Legions. They were World Eaters, after all. They had simply been culled. But not any more.

Why kill them when they could still serve a function? When they could still kill for the Legion?

As his vision continued to clear, Ruokh saw a figure coalesce into being before him. He knew this individual, but it took him a moment for the name to form in his rage-addled brain.

His mind was sluggish, and his eyes heavy. He was having trouble focusing, and not just because of the effects of the Nails.

‘Jareg,’ he drawled, a thick rope of drool dripping from his lips.

The hulking Techmarine turned at his name, looking up at Ruokh suspended five metres above the deck floor.

He was massive. Even bedecked in his immense prison-armour, Jareg would have loomed over him had they been standing on a level, and he was almost as wide as he was tall. Indeed, he was roughly the size of one of the newer-model Dreadnoughts that had begun to supersede the mighty Contemptors towards the end of the Great Crusade.

‘You are lucid, finally,’ said the behemoth of metal and ancient flesh. ‘It took a considerable dose of stimulants and electro-shocks to rouse you from your insanity.’

‘What are you doing aboard the Defiant?’

‘I came at Dreagher’s request,’ said Jareg. ‘A favour called in.’

Ruokh had never had time for the Master Shellsmith. Too obsessed with machines, war engines and seeking battle from afar. Too many years away from the Legion learning his arts on Mars. He’d never once heard of Jareg fighting in the cages, either. The Butcher’s Nails worked within his head, just as they did in every other World Eater’s, but he wasn’t the same as the rest of them. One look at him made that obvious.

His ancient body, or whatever was left of it, was encased in baroque, heavily augmented armour he had designed in collaboration with a coterie of rebel hereteks of Mars. He stood upon a trio of heavy-duty, mechanised legs, each tipped with powerful, retracted dew-claws. His body was bulked-out exo-armour, powered by a humming plasma core built into his back. A sextet of mechanical, insectoid arms were poised at his back, as if ready to strike, each of them ending in heavy weapons, pincers, welding spikes and diamond-tipped drills. An array of mechadendrite tendrils wafted around him, like blood-sucking parasites seeking a fresh host to drain.

Thick, ribbed power couplings emerged from his temples and the base of his skull, plugging directly into his power source. A trio of lenses had replaced his left eye. Those lenses rotated and dilated as Jareg focused on Ruokh.

His face was largely organic, however. Wolf-lean and hard, it was nevertheless as unforgiving as his mechanised body. His cheeks were a tortured canvas of burn-scars and pockmarks, and the deep, shadowed crevasses and valleys carved in his skin gave him a permanent scowl.

An armed servo-skull held aloft on humming grav-suspensors darted up towards Ruokh. It hovered before him, tiny digi-lasers and a shrunken volkite flayer protruding from its skeletal jaws. Lenses set deep in hollow sockets clicked and whirred. Judging him no threat, it flew back down to circle around the immense Master Shellsmith, who thumped over to Ruokh.

Jareg’s cracked-leather face settled in a thin-lipped smile.

‘How do you like your new home, Destroyer?’ said Jareg.

‘We go to war?’ said Ruokh.

‘No,’ said Jareg.

‘Then why do you rouse me?’

‘Dreagher,’ said Jareg.

‘There is nothing left to be said between us,’ growled Ruokh. ‘He made that very clear.’

‘Situations change,’ said Jareg. ‘He must have some use for you. Or else he’s agreed to Brond’s request and you are to face his pet swordsman of the Emperor’s Children in the pits.’

Seemingly of its own accord, one of the Techmarine’s sinuous mechadendrite tendrils reached out to a panel set into an iron pillar and stabbed the release switch.

The chains maglocked to Ruokh’s armoured hood released their hold, and he dropped like a leaden weight. He landed in a low crouch, making the deck reverberate thunderously.

He rose to his full height, his armoured mitts forming fists, and glared at Jareg balefully.

‘Does Dreagher not worry that I’ll hurt another of his precious mortals?’ said Ruokh.

‘You are no threat to anyone any more.’

‘Oh?’ said Ruokh, taking a threatening step towards the Master Shellsmith. ‘What is to stop me ripping your spinal column from your body here and now? Your little floating protectors?’

Jareg’s servo-arms and mechadendrites flared, like pincers and stabbing, needle-tipped tails, ready to strike.

The shellsmith’s grin turned savage, and he leaned forward.

‘Try me,’ he said. ‘Please.’

His manner gave the Destroyer pause.

‘Ah,’ said Ruokh, at last, the aggression easing from his stance. He folded his arms, and a knowing smile that made him look even more savage curled at his lips. ‘I am inhibited.’

‘Of course,’ said Jareg. ‘You are Caedere now. You cannot be left uncontrolled.’

Ruokh chuckled and turned away. Then he swung at Jareg, roaring, utilising every last fibre of strength in his genhanced form, augmented with the awesome power of his newly donned Terminator armour. Had it struck, the blow would have smashed Jareg’s skull like an egg beneath a hammer. It didn’t strike, though.

His massive fist hung in the air, scant centimetres from Jareg’s face. As much as he strained, he could not move a muscle. His armour had completely seized up.

Jareg stepped around him, each footfall making the deck shudder. He came in close.

‘It works,’ said Ruokh.

Jareg spat in his face. A thick wad of saliva trailed its way down his cheek, the caustic acids within sizzling as they ate into his flesh.

‘This is more than you deserve, you devolved wretch,’ said Jareg. ‘Were it my decision, you and all your kind would be put down like the dogs you are.’

Ruokh barked at him, and bared his black metal teeth. Jareg laughed.

‘I would not even have you lobotomised into servitude,’ he said. ‘I’d just do away with you. Eject you into the void, and forget you ever breathed.’

‘There’s a rabid dog in all of us,’ said Ruokh. ‘I can see it, even in you, Master Shellsmith, despite the cage of iron you’ve built around it.’

One of Jareg’s servo-arms swung around and struck Ruokh hard in the face with the ugly sound of metal striking bone. He toppled backwards, falling awkwardly, his Cataphractii-encased body still frozen rigid.

He was laughing, even as he hit the ground, laughing through the pain of a smashed cheekbone.

‘You hate me, Jareg,’ he shouted, ‘but you know that you will become me, in time.’

‘Then we are all damned,’ said Jareg.

‘What do you remember?’ said Dreagher.

He stood with his arms wide, while servitors and Legion serfs, studiously avoiding the gaze of their immense, unpredictable masters, drilled his war-plates into his flesh.

Khârn was winding lengths of chain around his wrists – an echo of the primarch’s years of enforced slavery and the Desh’ean pit fighters that had been his brothers. Brond’s seneschal, Maven, hovered dutifully nearby, ready to attend Khârn as needed. Though tall for a mortal, and in the prime of his lifespan, he stood barely to the legionary’s sternum. One twist, and his thread would be cut.

How pitifully frail, short-lived and pointless human life was, Dreagher thought.

He caught himself, and shook his head. We are the unnatural ones, he thought. The aberrations, the things that should not be. What right did he have to pass judgement on their lives?

He and his kin were weapons bred to fight the Emperor’s wars, to expand the borders of the horizon, and then… what? To die out once they had fulfilled their usefulness, like the proto-Astartes had before them.

‘Little,’ said Khârn, bringing Dreagher back from his clouded, dark thoughts. ‘The Nails took me well before the end. How long had they held me in their thrall? Hours? Days? Weeks? I have no recollection. It may as well have been a lifetime. You say I was dead?’

Dreagher nodded. ‘Apothecaries verified it. Your hearts were still when we dragged you from Terra. You were as pale as one of Curze’s ilk. There was barely a drop of blood left in you. Your wounds…’ He shook his head. ‘No one could survive what you’d endured.’

Khârn grunted, pondering this. ‘Apparently they can,’ he said, then shrugged and continued securing the chain around his wrists. His arms he left bare. His flesh was criss-crossed with scars, and he glanced down at them while he readied himself.

‘I don’t remember receiving even one in ten of these,’ said Khârn.

The two captains were in Dreagher’s arming chamber being armoured for the formal meet with the Emperor’s Children. It was as if they were going to war.

‘But I remember scattered moments of Terra,’ said Khârn. ‘Brief flashes, mainly, like a series of disjointed pict-images. I remember the sky darkened with drop pods and gunships. I remember the taste of blood on my lips as we stormed the first breach, clambering over the dead, using them as a rampart to reach the Imperial Fists. The bark of bolters. The blazing sunset after the first day’s bombardment. The vision of Angron landing on the walls. Glimpsing the Angel, fighting the voidborn in the dying light. They are fragile things, though, these images. They dissipate into nothingness as I try to grasp them, like dreams upon waking.’

‘I don’t dream,’ said Dreagher. ‘Not any more.’

‘Sometimes I feel our whole existence is just a dream,’ said Khârn. ‘One long, tortuous, never-ending nightmare from which we cannot wake.’

Dreagher looked at Khârn, unsure how to respond. There was something markedly different about him since he’d risen from his coma, but he couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was. There was a brooding intensity to him now that wasn’t there before, perhaps. A strange light in his eyes that spoke of madness and unfettered rage that was utterly at odds with his calmly spoken words and – except for the violence he’d wreaked upon the kill-team in the isolation chamber – his actions.

‘I cannot believe that,’ said Dreagher. ‘If that were true, then none of this would matter. There would be no point to anything.’

Khârn looked at him. Except for those eyes, which burned, his expression was devoid of emotion. Unreadable. Cold. For a moment, Dreagher felt that Khârn was studying him like he might an enemy, assessing his strengths, his weaknesses. Determining the best way to kill him. The moment passed, and the corner of Khârn’s lip twitched in what might have been humour. He shrugged.

‘Maybe that is the great secret of the universe; that in the end, nothing matters.’

‘No,’ said Dreagher. ‘I can’t believe that.’

‘Then what do you believe in, Ninth Captain?’

‘I believe in the Legion,’ Dreagher said, after a moment considering the question. ‘And I believe that it can only survive if we rebuild, and if we are unified. I believe only you can do that.’

Khârn’s amused expression dropped from his face.

‘We of the Twelfth are not given to philosophy and metaphysics,’ said Khârn. ‘It is not in our nature. Such things are best left to Lorgar’s priests, and the adepts of the Crimson King.’

‘If any of them yet live,’ said Dreagher.

Khârn grunted in reply. ‘They do. Magnus is too clever to let his Legion be destroyed, and the remaining Word Bearers are like underdeck roaches. Squash them and still more scuttle up from the darkness. They’ll be here when all the rest of us are dust. We – you and I and all of the Twelfth – were made to be destroyers. We should not fight against our nature. We walk the Eightfold Path. It doesn’t mean we have to become slaves to it.’

‘How does it feel?’

Skoral flexed her new arm, freshly oiled gears and servos purring smoothly.

‘Awkward,’ she said, looking at the arm as if it was some arcane xenos artefact. It was thinner than her other arm, almost skeletally so with its armoured ceramite plates removed. ‘And I miss my totems.’

She rolled her wrist, flexing her new fingers, making the metal ligaments in her forearm click. Each of those fingers was made from bonded steel and ceramite, protecting the fine mechanisms within. They made her hand look like a Legion gauntlet, though on a smaller scale – and one that she could never remove.

‘It’s uncomfortable,’ she said.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ said Maven. ‘It’s a high-grade piece. Dreagher must have pulled in some serious favours to source it. And having Jareg fit it personally.’ He whistled.

Skoral reached onto the bench and began snap-locking the heavy armoured ceramite plates to her bionic arm. There were three in all, one each for the shoulder, upper arm and forearm. The latter two pieces were hinged to encase the limb completely. All were moulded in a vague representation of human musculature. A vanity.

Maven stood to help Skoral fit the heavy armour plates.

‘I can do it,’ she snapped, more aggressively than she’d intended.

Maven held up his hands in appeasement and backed off.

‘I won’t always have someone around to help me, so I need to learn how to do this myself,’ she said in a less confrontational tone. ‘Sorry.’

Maven shrugged and sat back down, kicking his legs up onto the bench. He drew a lho-stick from a pocket and lit it. He took in a deep breath, drawing smoke into his lungs before exhaling it in smoke rings.

Skoral plucked the lho-stick from his lips and took a long drag. She ashed it onto the floor. A slack-faced servitor moved from a shadowed crevice at once, creaking forward to brush the ash up. She took another pull and handed it back to Maven.

It was an awkward process, getting the plates fitted one-handed, but Skoral was managing it, slowly. Once each plate was in place she began drilling them secure.

‘How do the support stabilisers feel?’ said Maven, after a long moment of silence.

‘Fine, I guess,’ said Skoral. ‘I don’t know. My back’s sore.’

‘They might not be calibrated correctly,’ said Maven. He jammed his lho-stick between his lips and stood up. They were of a similar height, which was rare. Of the non-Legiones Astartes on the ship, there were few who were as tall as her. Even before her new limb, she heavily outweighed him, however. He was a good fighter, but he wouldn’t bet against himself if ever he found himself pitted against her.

‘May I?’ he said.

Skoral shrugged, and Maven indicated for her to turn around, making a spinning motion with one finger. She did as he bid.

A metal exo-spine had been affixed to her back, running from the base of her skull to the base of her spine. It was designed to help offset the additional weight of her bionic arm and support her back, with the additional benefit of allowing her to bear heavier loads – specifically her narthecium.

Maven felt down the ridge of her exo-spine, stopping at a point halfway down. He pinched at it, shifting it left and right. ‘This is the problem,’ said Maven. ‘These are too loose. They’ve settled a little since they were fixed in place.’

‘Can you fix it?’ said Skoral.

‘Shouldn’t be hard. Lie face down,’ he said, slapping the padded surface of an operating trolley. ‘Uh. I’ll need, ah, access to your back.’

Skoral turned, her eyebrows raised.

‘Are you embarrassed, Maven?’ she said.

‘I don’t have to help, you know,’ he said, looking away. He turned his back on her. ‘Tell me when you’re ready.’

‘I never realised you were such a prude,’ Skoral laughed. She slipped off her singlet and undergarment support before lying down on the apothecarion trolley, her arms at her sides.

‘You can turn around now,’ she said. ‘It’s safe.’

Maven set to work, drilling each of the exo-spine’s vertebrae in turn, tightening them.

‘What do you think’s going to happen?’ said Skoral.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Maven, testing each of the metal links as he worked. ‘I don’t think anyone is.’

Skoral sighed. ‘I hate this. Sitting around waiting. Not knowing what is going on down on that moon.’

Khârn and a sizeable entourage of World Eaters, Dreagher and Brond among them, had departed an hour earlier. Khârn had spoken with the Emperor’s Children and negotiated a meeting with them, face to face. The moon above the unnamed orange dust-bowl of a planet had been chosen as the neutral location for this meeting.

‘We’ll know soon enough,’ said Maven.

‘Who do you think was responsible? You know, for the attack on Khârn?’ said Skoral.

Maven paused momentarily, before continuing to tighten the exo-spine’s vertebrae.

‘There are many who might harbour a grudge against him, I guess,’ said Maven. ‘Legionaries he’s humbled in the pits. Those jealous of his position. Those who… wanted to break the hold he has over the Legion, even when he was comatose. Someone wanting to boast that he killed the mighty Khârn, or to prove that he does not have the protection of the “Blood Father”.’

‘You shouldn’t mock the gods,’ said Skoral. ‘They are a vengeful pantheon.’

‘Please tell me you don’t believe that the “Blood God” brought him back?’ said Maven, forming inverted commas in the air with his fingers around the name. Scorn practically dripped from his words. The servos in Skoral’s new hand whined as they closed into a fist.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, shrugging. ‘There’s no rational medical answer for him suddenly waking up as he did.’

Maven grunted, and continued to work in silence.

‘I wonder how long it will be before I can fight,’ Skoral said after a few minutes had passed.

‘As soon as you feel like you have enough control,’ said Maven. ‘I wouldn’t want to fight you, though, not now. Well, not before, either, but you’d take my head off with a swing of this arm now. Truly, it’s exquisite work.’

‘You sound jealous. You wish it had been you that had their arm ripped off?’

‘I wouldn’t have ended up with anything as fine as this if I had,’ said Maven. He finished his work and stood back. ‘Right, you’re all done.’

He turned away as Skoral dressed. Once she had, she rolled her shoulders and took up a fighting stance. She punched the air. Two jabs and a cross. The servos of her arm whined softly.

‘Feels good,’ she said.

Maven bowed extravagantly. ‘I have my moments,’ he said.

‘They’re few and far between, but you do,’ agreed Skoral.

‘I’ll take that,’ said Maven, a crooked smile curling at his lips.

‘Will it be war, do you think?’ Skoral said in a soft voice. ‘With the Emperor’s Children?’

‘No,’ said Maven, without pausing even for a moment. ‘Khârn is there. He was able to forestall the worst of Angron’s rage. He’ll make sure things do not get out of hand.’

Chapter 14

‘We’re sitting targets out here,’ said Argus Brond, speaking through a closed vox-channel to the other captains. ‘One guided attack run, and we’ll be a smoking crater on this hell-forsaken moon.’

Three hundred World Eaters stood together, awaiting the arrival of the Emperor’s Children. Even with their ranks decimated, it was but a fraction of the XII’s strength. This was an honour guard, not a battle force.

‘Let them come,’ growled Ruokh. He stood at Dreagher’s side, immense in his new Cataphractii prison. Even before his helm had been drill-locked into position, his face had been twitching. It wouldn’t take much for him to lose himself to the Nails.

At Dreagher’s other side stood Baruda. He said nothing, but he didn’t need to. He’d made his displeasure plain when he had learned that Dreagher was bringing Ruokh here with them.

Despite the fact that a single trigger word would render Ruokh incapable of moving a muscle, Baruda had spoken vehemently against his inclusion in this gathering. Dreagher had listened to his argument, but not taken his advice.

‘If things turn bad, I want him there,’ he had said.

‘Things will turn bad if he is there,’ Baruda had shot back. ‘Mark my words.’

‘They’ve got nothing to gain by doing something stupid,’ came the crackling response from Zhârkhan, captain of the 48th.

The hulking captain and his company had been readying to make warp transit, determined to sell their lives in battle against the Wolves that had been nipping at their heels since Terra, but they had turned back to rejoin the fleet once they had received word of Khârn’s return.

‘They strike and our entire Legion will be galvanised against them,’ said Zhârkhan. ‘They may outnumber us, but we would take a bloody toll on them, and for what? No. They will not strike unless they are goaded into it.’

‘I do not trust them,’ growled the Skull Taker, Kho’ren.

‘And they don’t trust us,’ said Dreagher. ‘Both of our Legions are right to be wary.’

‘They will come to talk,’ said Khârn. ‘They will not strike us as we wait. It is not their style.’

An accord of sorts had been struck between the two Legions. As he had so often done before, Khârn had acted as the Legion’s diplomat, its voice of reason, soothing the tensions of both sides and easing the escalation before they had turned to outright hostility.

The III Legion had agreed to Khârn’s request that the two Legions meet, face to face; a formal meeting of allies. A neutral location had been chosen; the moon on which the World Eaters now stood. The two fleets were arrayed equidistant from the moon, facing off against each other.

Khârn had spoken with the World Eaters captains that were not here – as well as Goghur and the others – and while Dreagher knew not what they had discussed, whatever he’d said had worked thus far. The fleet was holding position. How long it would last, he couldn’t guess, but for now at least, Goghur’s lust for violence was being held in check.

The honour guard had been chosen from half a dozen echelons. All were veterans, but then there were none within the Legion now who were not. Their captains – or at least, the highest-ranking centurions – stood to the fore.

On Dreagher’s left stood Centurion Drask, the Master of Neophytes. Even as acting captain of the 25th, he still wore his stripped-down reconnaissance armour, painted a dusky grey, and his fraying cameleoline cloak over one shoulder, pinned in place with a War Hounds icon of the old Legion. Old habits died hard.

Drask had trained Dreagher when he’d first been inducted in the Legion. He’d trained many of the Legion – even Khârn himself. A tough old bastard, as mean as he was cunning, there were few within the Legion that Dreagher would rather have next to him in battle. His presence was deeply reassuring.

Khârn had chosen well, Dreagher thought. None of the captains here were berserkers or warmongers like Goghur. The legionaries picked to accompany them were those more in control of the Nails. Ruokh was the exception, but then he could be controlled with the inhibitor switch wired into his armour. Any of those gathered were capable of blind fits of uncontrollable rage when the red haze descended, of course – there was not one in the Legion who was not – but these were the most controlled of a Legion of uncontrollable monsters. They were those who could be most relied upon not to start a costly, pointless war.

The honour guard were arranged in loose – very loose – ranks, standing before the shuttles and gunships that had brought them in: a motley arrangement of battle-worn Stormbirds, Thunderhawks and heavily armoured transporters.

Some of the World Eaters stood with their arms folded, weapons maglocked to their armour. Others cut the air with chainblades, or crouched upon the icy, chalk-like ground. More than a few were pacing, clearly feeling the bite of the Nails as they were made to wait.

They carried no banners. No pennants or icons proclaimed their deeds or the wars that they had won. There were no trumpeters or loudhailers to announce them. There were just the World Eaters themselves, hard, battle-scarred veterans bedecked in the skulls of those they had killed. World Eaters did not do parade formations.

Some Legions relished the pomp and ceremony of such displays: the Ultramarines, the Word Bearers and Dorn’s stubborn, headstrong get were notable in this regard.

None had such a reputation for ceremony and drama as the III Legion. They were late, and it was very obvious that they were making a point by having the World Eaters wait for them.

Over Dreagher’s left shoulder, directly behind Baruda, Galerius stood tall and proud. While the World Eaters armour was uniformly battle-stained and cratered, the Palatine Blade’s armour gleamed, the purple ceramite and gold edging shined to perfection. The battle damage he had sustained fighting the Bloodborn had been meticulously repaired, and he stood sharply to attention, head high. Neither the white plume atop his helm nor his pale tabard so much as flitted in the wind, for there was none on this desolate moonscape.

Most of the gathered legionaries wore their battle helms. The oxygen levels on the moon were a little lower than Terran standard, but that wouldn’t bother any of them. No, they wore their helms on account of the fact that going into a potential warzone without one was simply idiotic. A bolt to the brain would kill a legionary as surely as it would an unaugmented human. Why give the enemy that opportunity?

In front of the increasingly aggravated legionaries, standing alone before the captains, was Khârn. Statue-still, he waited for the arrival of the Emperor’s Children emissary, his snarling, Sarum-patterned helm turned out across the undulating dust-plains. He held Gorechild in a relaxed grip; his gauntleted hand clasped the massive chainaxe at its point of balance, just below the blade-housing.

Alone among the World Eaters, Khârn appeared patient, unbothered by the disrespect being shown them by the Emperor’s Children.

The dark, grey-blue orb of the unnamed planet the III Legion had claimed hung in the void above them. Immense swirling storms rotated slowly upon the world’s surface, like giant, staring eyes.

‘Where are they?’ said Solax. ‘Make your pet tell us, Dreagher.’

Galerius stood alongside Dreagher, staring resolutely straight ahead, but he made no reaction. The World Eaters were speaking Nagrakali, the speech of the XII Legion.

‘He knows no more than us,’ said Dreagher.

‘Perhaps you are not asking him forcefully enough,’ came the snarled reply. ‘You should have killed him before now, anyway. Fed his soul to the Blood Father. What purpose does he serve?’

‘Back off, Solax,’ said Dreagher. ‘We are not all savages.’ Not yet, he thought. ‘He has been separated from his Legion since Terra. What could he possibly know that we do not?’

‘Make him speak,’ urged Solax. ‘Ask him if the Third Legion intend deception.’

‘Why not ask him yourself?’ said Galerius. He spoke in perfectly enunciated Nagrakali, but did not so much as deign to turn his head to look upon Solax. ‘Or do you so fear one lone swordsman that you must let others speak for you?’

Solax spat a Nagrakali curse and reached for the massive spiked maul slung across his back. Before he had the weapon even half-drawn, Galerius’s immense, golden-pinioned sword – the blade Argentus – was at his throat. The acting Third Captain looked down at the blade, hovering scant centimetres from his neck.

‘You’re fast,’ he said, speaking heavily accented, guttural Gothic. ‘Wouldn’t do you any good, though. You’d get one strike, that’s all. Then I’d have you.’

‘One strike is all that I would need,’ said Galerius, his voice a refined contrast to the World Eater’s crude speech.

Solax grunted, perhaps in amusement, and stepped back. Galerius sheathed the blade Argentus in one, smooth movement.

‘As the captain of the Ninth said, I have not seen or spoken with any member of the exalted Third Legion since Terra,’ said Galerius. ‘I have no more knowledge of their intentions here than you.’

‘Where in the hells are they?’ snarled Kho’ren. ‘The Nails are starting to bite.’

Kho’ren was not the only one. Dreagher could feel the rising agitation and spiking aggression in the legionaries around him, and his genhanced physiology was already responding in kind. A threat to one legionary was a threat to them all, and they were conditioned to respond to the biological threat-responses of their brothers. The Nails just made that worse.

The Nails pushed the Legion on a dangerous, exponential curve. When a single warrior began to exhibit combat signals – enhanced heart rate, adrenal spikes, automated combat-stimm pheromones – it began to spread to those around him, like a plague. Their anger came off the legionaries in palpable waves, further driving them towards the precipice from where there was no turning back. Within minutes, an entire battalion could succumb, becoming mindless, uncontrollable killing machines. Dreagher had seen it happen on more than a handful of occasions.

He felt the Nails digging into his mind. They urged, cajoled and threatened to make him lose himself in their enticing madness. They scraped behind his eyes, like fingernails on glass.

Ruokh had been wrong when he said that Dreagher hated the Nails. The opposite was true. The Nails were the only source of peace he had any more – in them, all the pain, all the guilt, and all the disappointment was blotted out. Deep within him he longed to succumb, as he knew he would, eventually. And that fact made him hate himself and what he’d become even more. As much as he yearned for the peace the Nails offered, it was anathema to him to allow himself to succumb without a fight. As painful as it was, and as much as he desired to do otherwise, he would resist them to the bitterest of ends.

They stabbed at him now for his rebellious thoughts. His vision began to redden.

‘Not now,’ Dreagher breathed, gritting his teeth, his hands clenching into tight, painful fists. ‘Not now.’

‘Incoming gunships,’ said Baruda.

Dreagher shook his head, clearing it.

‘I see them,’ he said.

They were coming in fast, utilising the radiation glare of the system’s twin suns to partially mask their approach. Dreagher’s helmet cut out most of that blinding light, allowing him to see them as dark silhouettes against the glare.

‘Storm Eagles,’ said Dreagher. ‘And Fire Raptors.’

The gunships came roaring in, flying in formation, angling directly towards the World Eaters on the ground. They were coming in low, kicking up madly swirling clouds of white chalk and frost in the wake of their powerful draught. Dreagher resisted the urge to break for cover and draw his weapon.

‘Hold,’ he growled through the vox. He would not let the Emperor’s Children have the satisfaction of seeing the World Eaters scatter like leaves before them.

Red targeting icons flashed insistently before his eyes. Range-finders showed the rapidly decreasing distance to the approaching gunships. The metres fell away in a flood. Two thousand metres became fifteen hundred, became one thousand, five hundred, two hundred, one hundred. All it would take would be for one legionary to fire, and they would all be annihilated. He blink-clicked the targeting icons away, resisting the urge.

The purple and gold gunships screamed overhead. They were so low that Dreagher could have leapt up and slapped a melta charge to their undercarriage. The sound of their passing hit a fraction of a second later, along with the hard smack of displaced air, heat and dust.

The gunships split into two formations, each one banking sharply, bringing them around in a wide sweeping loop before they again approached directly towards the World Eaters. The banking turn had robbed them of much of their velocity, and they came in slower now, retros blasting hard, before touching down fifty metres before the gathered XII legionaries.

Dreagher wiped grit from the exterior of his helm’s lenses. While the dust cloud had done little to blemish the already tarnished appearance of the World Eaters, it had taken the brilliant sheen off Galerius’s polished battleplate.

Though his face was obscured by his ornate marble-white and gold helm, Dreagher could imagine the Palatine Blade’s irritated expression as he attempted to wipe the worst of the dust from his battleplate.

‘Your Legion,’ said Dreagher, a barking laugh ripping from his vox-grille.

Galerius said nothing. Dreagher slapped the Palatine Blade hard on the shoulder.

‘It’s just dust,’ he said.

‘They didn’t need to do that,’ said Galerius, running a hand through his ivory plume and shaking his gauntlet free of the worst of the grit and dust. ‘It was… disrespectful.’

‘Your Legion chooses the children of high-riders and the noble born to join its ranks,’ snarled Baruda. ‘You pick the finest specimens from the wealthy, the decadent and kingly. It’s in your blood. We of the Twelfth are killers, cannibals and head-takers all, murderers claimed on bloody nights from the most brutal warrior cultures.’

Baruda pointedly ran his fingers along one of his vambraces, leaving trails in the dust there. ‘You have always seen yourselves as our betters,’ he said, ‘and take every opportunity to remind us of it.’

‘You speak in ignorant generalisations, seeing things only as you wish to see them,’ said Galerius. The vocal modulators of his helm were of more refined quality than those of the World Eaters. His voice emerged from his ivory and gold helm as a deep purr, the bass resonant, like the low rumble of a feline predator, rather than the ugly growl of the World Eaters.

‘I was the thirteenth son of a stimm-dependant, low-hab prostitute,’ said Galerius. ‘I made my first kill at the age of nine. I was not noble born. Many within the Third Legion were not. We are more similar than you’d like to believe.’

Dreagher looked at Galerius, considering his words.

‘They come,’ said Brond.

Dreagher grunted and looked away from the Palatine Blade.

The frontal assault ramps of all but the lead Storm Eagle were lowered in perfect symmetry, each of them thudding down onto the moon’s surface at exactly the same moment.

There was a deafening blast of discordant, screeching noise that made Dreagher’s vision become static, momentarily overriding his helmet’s sensors. When it cleared, he saw that the legionaries of the Emperor’s Children were emerging, marching in serried ranks.

They marched in perfect unison, bolters and exotic, nonstandard weapons held across their chests. Ornate banners were unfurled, displaying the victories and conquests of the III Legion. Swordsmen marched with golden blades unsheathed, and mighty Contemptors stomped forward, their armoured carapaces acting as tapestries for ostentatious art and fine gild-work.

The III Legion was accompanied by a vast entourage of non-Legiones Astartes, a cavalcade of such grotesque and debauched decadence that Dreagher wanted to unload his bolter into them.

Long-limbed, androgynous humans bedecked in skin-tight black bodysuits cavorted and danced lasciviously around the Emperor’s Children. Their faces were mutilated. Hooks and blades were embedded in many of those faces, carefully positioned to hold back flaps of flechetted skin, while others had eyes and mouths stitched shut, or eyelids or lips shorn off. Some wore masks of dead flesh, others garish make-up, and others licked at blood-red lips with forked tongues pierced by blades and jingling bells.

Grotesque cherubs, all pallid dead flesh and tiny wings, fluttered above the ranks on humming grav-suspensors, rippling conquest lists and tapestries grasped in their tiny, pudgy hands.

Most repulsive of all, however, was yet to come.

The Emperor’s Children marched forward, maintaining perfect ranks, forming a corridor leading towards the World Eaters from the lead Storm Eagle, a shuttle of gleaming gold. Once in place, they stood stock-still. The assault ramp of the golden ship began to lower.

A cloud of pink-hued vapour emerged, a pastel fog that rolled out but did not dissipate – it hung low, cloying and creeping, similar in substance to the ‘crawling death’, phosphex.

Glowing eyes appeared in the midst of that fog, and Dreagher’s body was instantly flooded with combat stimms and adrenaline. The grind of the Nails turned into a blinding hammering. This was no natural being that approached.

The first figure to resolve itself in the fog, descending from the Storm Eagle in dramatically slow steps, was an ostentatiously garbed Emperor’s Children warrior. His armour was gleaming gold, and fashioned in the likeness of heroically chiselled musculature. The faceplate of his helm was beautifully sculpted, with a single carved tear falling from the left eye. He was accompanied by a trio of golden-armoured champions bearing immense blades; his honour guard.

Terminators emerged next. Massively armoured, they wore golden helms and sweeping, feathered shoulder-guards, and carried long-bladed halberds. Still, Dreagher and his warriors barely cast a glance in their direction, their attention drawn by the creature that had emerged with the envoy of the Emperor’s Children, sent to parley with them.

Dreagher’s lips curled back in snarl.

‘Daemon-spawn,’ he cursed.

‘The Hedonarch,’ breathed Galerius.

Where Dreagher’s voice was filled with loathing and disgust, the Palatine Blade’s was one of awe.

The creature rose to its full height as it emerged from the darkened interior. It towered over the Emperor’s Children. Shadows that might have been wings – Dreagher could not draw a clear focus on them, even as he cycled through different vision modes – stretched and flexed from its back.

From the waist down, the daemon had the body of a snake, though its skin was fleshy and smooth rather than scaled, riven with throbbing veins. It moved with repulsive, peristaltic muscle contractions. Pink musk puffed from vent-like orifices running down either side of its sexless torso, the source of the cloying fog that had filled the shuttle’s interior. Two pairs of arms sprouted from its sinuous, coiling body, each ending in slender crab-claws. Its face was a thing of mortals’ nightmares.

‘This is the company that your Legion now keeps?’ said Dreagher in a low voice.

Targeting icons flickered, disappeared, and reappeared before his eyes as they struggled to get a solid lock on the creature. It was as if it were not truly here, or that it was not fully corporeal.

Galerius looked at Dreagher. His faceplate was emotionless, but Dreagher could imagine the Palatine Blade lifting one sharp eyebrow.

‘I saw your primarch on Terra, Dreagher,’ said Galerius. ‘I saw what he had become. The hypocrisy of your words is not lost on me.’

Dreagher bit back a retort. He could not disagree.

‘We have fallen far, all of us,’ he said.

Dreagher returned his gaze to the daemon. Its teeth clicked as its too-wide jaw worked. Above its dominating maw, a cluster of eyes stared at the World Eaters, unblinking.

One of those eyes was oversized and bulging. The other eyes were shrunken, gleaming jewels, embers burning in darkness.

The Emperor’s Children envoy and the daemon Galerius called the Hedonarch came towards the World Eaters as equals, side by side. Terminators marched in their wake. As they walked along the corridor formed by their honour guard, the Emperor’s Children closed ranks behind them, synchronised lines interweaving, forming a solid, perfect phalanx.

‘Look upon the face of degradation,’ drooled Ruokh. ‘Deviant filth, spitting on their gene-heritage.’

‘Speaks the voice of degradation itself,’ said Baruda.

‘We should just kill them all,’ continued Ruokh, his voice becoming more animalistic, less coherent. ‘None of them deserves to live. Take their skulls. Drink their blood. Suck the marrow from–’

With a word, Dreagher silenced Ruokh’s comms. His warriors did not need to hear his deranged ravings. He didn’t need to hear them.

‘Why did you bring him?’ growled Baruda, over a closed channel.

‘Enough,’ Dreagher said. ‘You’ve made your opinions known.’

‘I cannot understand why you–’

‘Enough, Baruda,’ snapped Dreagher, a harder edge in his voice.

‘With me,’ said Khârn.

Angron’s equerry stepped forward, striding out to meet the III Legion detachment, and the World Eaters went with him en masse.

Ruokh stamped heavily forward, the curved chainblades set beneath his massive armoured mitts whirring.

‘Steady, Ruokh,’ Khârn said. ‘This is not the time to kill.’

Not yet.

Baruda marched at Dreagher’s side, the bones adorning his armour rattling. Galerius strode with them, his head held high. His movements were stiff; he was clearly ill at ease to be surrounded by the World Eaters and facing his brothers.

It would have taken little for the World Eaters’ advance to turn into a loping run, then into a charge. This was how the Legion went to war. Without Khârn at their forefront, it may yet have turned into a bloodbath, but the Eighth Assault Captain kept his pace steady. The others matched it.

The envoy of the Emperor’s Children was undaunted by the mass of World Eaters approaching him. His Terminators marched at his back, a solid wall of gleaming purple and black adamantium and ceramite. Behind them came the rest of the entourage, marching in perfect, uniform order.

They were ostentatious to the point of garishness, and aberration was ripe within their ranks. While not as austere as their brothers of the Death Guard, the World Eaters were a deeply pragmatic Legion who disdained ornamentation and indulgence in all its forms. The Emperor’s Children were the antithesis of that, and Dreagher viewed the debauched flamboyance of the III Legion with revulsion.

While they marched in perfect parade-ground order, individual ornamentation and prideful decoration was common. Some had gaudily coloured silks or human skins hung over their battleplate, while others sported grotesque, iridescent helm-crests or impractically large topknots, overly ornate golden shoulder plates, or wore extravagant furred cloaks. Others had areas of exposed flesh – faces, abdomens, arms, a leg – covered in unsettling, serpentine tattoos or pierced with innumerable spikes and rings. Dreagher saw one battle sergeant with a strangely asymmetrical horn growing from one temple. It made Dreagher want to retch.

The envoy of the III Legion wore a long, ceremonial golden cloak, which trailed behind him like liquid metal, dragging in the frozen powder of the moon’s surface. An impractically high white crest sprouted from his elongated helm. Dreagher could see the World Eaters reflected in the emissary’s gleaming, golden lenses as they drew close.

‘Be calm,’ Dreagher said through the vox, as much to settle his own racing hearts – his secondary heart had kicked in a moment earlier in anticipation – as to placate the rising tension in his legionaries. Ruokh was not the only one feeling a sudden urge to fight. ‘These are not our enemies.’

Compared to the Emperor’s Children, the World Eaters looked exactly like what they were: a Legion that had been waging war since its inception.

When less than twenty paces separated the two Legions, Khârn lifted a hand, halting the World Eaters advance. Even Ruokh came to a grinding halt, settling into a half-crouch, his chainfists ready to do their work at a moment’s notice. Dreagher was thankful for that.

The World Eaters crowded into a loose semicircle, with Khârn at its centre – a warband gathered around its leader.

The Emperor’s Children halted as one, and the envoy at their centre cast his gaze across the World Eaters. Even with his expression hidden behind his sculptured faceplate, his arrogance and disdain at having to deal with what he would have seen as savages was obvious.

‘I am Tiberius Angellus Anteus,’ said the officer of the Emperor’s Children. His voice was a gentle purr, amplified to be heard by every warrior gathered upon the plain. ‘I am the Lord Emissary of the Third Legion. I have been sent to speak terms with you.’

‘I am Khârn.’

Angron’s former equerry strode forward, alone, moving to the centre of the open space between the two Legions. There he halted. After a moment, the III Legion envoy stepped out to meet him.

The three golden-armoured swordsmen at his back moved with him, but he stopped them with a sharp word, and they fell back into line, leaving him to meet Khârn alone. He came to a halt just feet from the World Eaters commander.

The lord emissary was taller than Khârn, and his highly ornate, opulent armour was a stark contrast to the Eighth Assault Captain’s brutish, utilitarian appearance. The appearance was as that of a meeting between a decadent, impossibly wealthy emperor and a savage warrior chieftain.

Even their weapons set them apart. The lord emissary wore a pair of slender duelling blades at his side, their hilts encrusted with gems and precious metal. Their scabbards were minor works of art, carved from ivory and inlaid with gold and onyx. A pair of slender-barrelled pistols of xenos build were holstered alongside the blades, similarly decorated.

In contrast, Khârn had a plain, old-style plasma pistol mag-clamped at his hip, and held his massive chainaxe loosely in one hand. It may have been the weapon of a primarch, but there was nothing decorative about it.

‘The mighty Gorechild, yes?’ said the envoy, gesturing languidly towards the axe. ‘I expected something more. Is it customary among your Legion to meet an ally with weapon in hand?’

Khârn reached up with one hand and thumbed the release catches on his helmet, then pulled it free with a hiss of depressurisation.

‘Better the weapon you can see than the knife hidden behind one’s back,’ said Khârn, his voice now lacking the mechanised growl of his helm.

The envoy sniffed. ‘You’ve brought your rabble with you, I see,’ he said, casting a glance across the World Eaters.

A low, warning growl rumbled in Dreagher’s chest.

‘This rabble has been at the forefront of humanity’s wars since its inception,’ said Khârn. ‘This rabble was bleeding and dying on the walls of the Imperial Palace while your Legion slaked its lusts upon the Terran populace. There are those who feel that your Legion ought to bleed, as we did.’

‘The Twelfth have ever put themselves into the heart of the meat grinder,’ said the III Legion envoy. ‘You cannot do so and then cry “foul” that you suffered heavy casualties. The Third Legion did its part in the siege. We did as the Warmaster ordered us. Horus recognised that we were capable of a task somewhat more subtle than simply charging into the loyalists’ guns. We were not to blame for the decimation of your ranks. Nor for the fact that the war was lost.’

‘Maybe,’ said Khârn. ‘Maybe not.’

‘Let us not dwell on past blemishes,’ said the envoy. ‘That was a different time. The universe is a different place now. We are not the same Legion as we were,’ said Anteus.

Khârn looked pointedly at the undulating daemon standing back with the lord emissary’s bodyguard. ‘So I see.’

Anteus laughed. It was a rich sound, honeyed and oozing contempt. ‘Don’t be judgemental, Khârn. Your Legion has changed as much as mine, and that is not simply due to the mutilations you’ve subjected yourselves to in emulation of your broken lord.’

‘Take off your helmet, emissary,’ said Khârn. ‘I like to see the faces of those who would insult Angron.’

‘I mean no insult,’ said Anteus. ‘But very well.’

He turned and removed his tall helm with an imperious flourish. A slender limbed mortal – Dreagher could not determine whether it was male or female, or some blend of the two – ran lightly forward to take it in its arms. The lord emissary brushed the mortal’s cheek with the back of his hand before turning to face Khârn.

To Dreagher’s eyes, his appearance was repulsive. His flesh was tinged violet, and his eyes were wide and unblinking. His eyelids had been surgically removed, and his pupils, as black as the void, were dilated to such an extent that they filled his orbs. They were the cold, dead eyes of a shark. Periodically, his painted red lips parted, and a too-long, fleshy tongue licked his eyes, moistening them.

‘Better?’ said the III Legion envoy. Clearly he enjoyed the effect his appearance had on those who beheld him.

Had the Nails not been punishing him, Dreagher might have laughed. Once, he’d regarded the Legiones Astartes as a higher form of humanity. Superior. The next step in the evolution of the human species. He’d long since resigned himself to the fact that they were nothing of the sort. They were genetically engineered weapons, to be used and discarded as needed. Still, to see how devolved and corrupted the World Eaters and the Emperor’s Children were now, how far removed they were from their original concept, was darkly amusing.

The Nails were punishing him, however. He did not laugh. His breathing shallowed, and his hands clenched involuntarily into fists. He wanted to cave the lord emissary’s vile, mocking face in.

He wanted to revel in the gush of hot blood spurting from ruptured arteries, to glory in pitting his strength against another worthy being and besting it. He wanted to butcher this grotesque mockery of a Space Marine, to hack his head from his shoulders and hold it aloft for all to see, screaming his defiance to the heavens, pledging his skull to…

No. Stop.

With a concerted effort, Dreagher slowed his hammering heartbeats, taking a deep, long breath. He was twitching, he realised. He stopped that involuntary movement.

Focus. Focus.

He dragged himself back from the brink. He forced his hands to unclench.

‘Tell me,’ said the III Legion envoy. ‘Why does one of the Phoenician’s noble sons stand among you?’

Khârn cast a glance sidewards.

‘Dreagher,’ he said. ‘Bring the Palatine Blade.’

Dreagher saluted, slamming his fist into his chest in the manner of the War Hounds.

‘Come,’ he said to Galerius, and took a step forward.

Instantly, the three golden-armoured warriors that formed the lord emissary’s bodyguard had their swords half-drawn. At the back, the Terminators’ weapons rose as one, locking on to Dreagher. Anteus waved them down.

‘Please,’ he said, admonishing them. ‘These are our kinsmen.’

Weapons were lowered and blades sheathed.

‘Forgive my warriors,’ said Anteus. ‘They are, perhaps, a little overprotective. Now,’ he said, looking at Dreagher and Galerius, ‘this is an unexpected development.’

The daemon slithered forward to join the lord emissary, and this time it was the World Eaters who bristled, tightening their grip on their weapons and shifting their weight uneasily. It started towards Khârn, eyeing him with its baleful gaze, its teeth clicking as its jaw flapped. The pastel musk gusted from its vents, clouding the air, and its claws clacked.

The cloying stink filled Dreagher’s nostrils as he came to Khârn’s side, and his head swam. That should have been impossible – his armour was a void-capable, closed atmosphere – and yet the mist seeped through the closed grille of his helm.

Dreagher growled and laid a hand on his weapon, intending to draw it and cut the vile thing down. Only a touch on his shoulder forestalled him. He looked down at the gauntleted hand, ready to lash out. He didn’t recognise it at first. Only Khârn’s voice halted him.

‘No, brother,’ he said.

The lord emissary chuckled. ‘The Hedonarch’s presence can be… unnerving for those who are not used to it.’

The daemon brushed a hand along the lord emissary’s armour, the touch intimate and casual. It glanced at Dreagher and he felt like retching, acidic bile rising in his throat. Nausea was not a familiar sensation for those of the Legiones Astartes, and it made him angry. A low growl escaped his lips, rumbling from deep within.

In the daemon’s myriad eyes, he saw a flash of multi-hued, kaleidoscopic colour, like a passing reflection. The brilliance of those hues seemed at odds with its nature, as if they belonged to something else altogether.

At his side, Galerius dropped to one knee and lowered his head. The daemon slithered forward and caressed the side of the Palatine Blade’s helm with the back of one claw. The gesture was at once gentle, nurturing and obscene.

The prodigal returns, whispered a voice that was a hundred voices.

Then the daemon whipped around, making its musk whirl and spin in tiny eddies. With a repulsive spasm of movement, it slithered behind the lord emissary, casting Khârn a baleful glance as it circled by him. Khârn paid it no mind.

‘Rise, Palatine Blade,’ said the lord emissary.

‘Take his return to the Third Legion as a gesture of good faith, if you will,’ said Khârn.

‘And have the Twelfth Legion treated you with the respect you are due, my brother?’ said the lord emissary, addressing Galerius.

‘They have, my lord,’ said Galerius, somewhat stiffly. ‘I had feared the Third Legion was no more. I am overjoyed to see that fear allayed.’

The lord emissary spread his arms wide, a beatific smile twisting his grotesque face. ‘From the ashes, the Legion rises,’ he said.

‘Pray tell me the Lord Commander Cyrius still lives,’ said Galerius. ‘I was oath-sworn to protect him.’

The smile dropped from the envoy’s face. ‘We shall speak, you and I, once you are back in the fold.’

The daemon was staring at Khârn.

‘Why do you stare, daemon-spawn?’ said Khârn, returning its gaze. ‘What do you see?’

The Blood Father’s mark is upon you, Betrayer, said the daemon. Dreagher heard the daemon’s words in his mind. It made him want to spit.

Betrayer. It was spoken like a curse. Dreagher’s teeth ground together. The urge to kill was rising. He fought it down.

‘Betrayer,’ said Khârn, speaking the word slowly, as if weighing it up in his mind. ‘That is a title of ill-portent that you choose for me, creature.’

The daemon seemed unable to remain still. It constantly bobbed on the spot, its serpentine body acting like a spring. Its maw gaped and clacked.

The skeins of the future unravel before me, Betrayer, the daemon whispered in its hundred-layered voice.

‘You know the future, you say, creature?’

I see things that may yet come to be. Some threads are strong. Definite. Immutable. Others are slender and fragile, in constant flux. In all the myriad futures, you are there. Worlds will burn at your behest.

‘All threads can be cut,’ said Khârn.

Dreagher saw the daemon pause its incessant movement, eyes narrowing, as if trying to penetrate a thick fog. If the lord emissary noticed the daemon’s reaction, he gave no indication.

‘Why do we listen to this… thing?’ growled Solax, speaking across a closed circuit in Nagrakali. ‘It speaks nothing but poison.’

I speak the truth, son of Karanath, said the daemon in response, its head snapping around and locking on Solax. As I have to a thousand others so I speak the truth to you now.

‘Watch your tongues and guard your thoughts, brothers,’ said Dreagher. ‘It hears us.’

‘Enough,’ said the Emperor’s Children lord emissary, his voice taking on a harder edge. All the warmth in it had gone, leaving only ice. ‘Let us speak plainly. The Third Legion has claimed this system. Here, we shall rebuild. Here, we shall rise again. I want you and your rabble gone.’

Khârn stared at the lord emissary, not saying anything. Silence descended; even the wind quietened, as if holding its breath.

‘Well?’ said the lord emissary. ‘Will you leave on good terms, a friend to the Third Legion? Or will you force our hand?’

Dreagher saw Khârn’s fingers drum a pattern on the hilt of Gorechild.

‘Speak, you savage,’ spat the lord emissary, all semblance of civility slipping from him, like a shroud dropping. ‘Speak your piece now, or begone.’

‘Our Legions were never friends,’ said Khârn. ‘Not during the years of the Great Crusade, not when we had both pledged ourselves to the Warmaster’s cause. We are not friends now. And we will never be friends.’

‘The Third Legion does not wish there to be bloodshed between us,’ said the envoy. ‘Friend or no, we remain allies, or at the very least not foes. Our cause is as one. Let us reserve our hatred for Guilliman’s get, for the rigid sons of Dorn, for the hounds of Russ, and the Khan’s barbarians.’

‘The Fifth Legion always had our respect,’ said Khârn. ‘More than can be said for the Third.’

The Emperor’s Children envoy bristled, but Khârn turned away from him, his gaze seeking Dreagher. His eyes were burning.

‘You wish to see a unified Twelfth Legion, yes?’ he said in a low voice.

‘More than anything,’ Dreagher replied.

His back still to the lord emissary, Khârn loosened the grip on Gorechild. The haft ran through his fingers, its massive mica-dragon toothed blade slipping towards the ground. Before it hit, he tightened his hold, clasping it firmly around its leather-bound grip.

Immediately, the Emperor’s Children had weapons in hand, barrels and blades levelled at Khârn.

The three Palatine Blades that guarded the envoy had stepped smoothly forward, interposing themselves between their lord and Khârn, massive swords held ready. The blade Argentus sung from its scabbard as Galerius drew his own weapon, its tip aimed at Khârn’s neck.

The World Eaters responded automatically. Chainaxes roared throatily as they were urged to life, and bolters, plasma guns and autocannons were brought to bear.

Baruda had his gladius drawn at Galerius’s back, ready to drive it into his spine.

‘This is insanity,’ hissed Argus Brond.

‘You would lead our Legions to war, equerry?’ spat the Emperor’s Children envoy, his face twisted in a scowl. ‘I thought you were meant to be the rational one. Or have those repulsive implants in your head finally turned your brain to pulp, just as they did to your insane gene-father?’

Khârn stared at the envoy, unblinking. He did not answer immediately. He had made no further hostile move, but nor had he relinquished his grasp on Gorechild’s haft.

Dreagher knew how fast Khârn was. He knew that he could go from inaction to killing in a fraction of a heartbeat. Even unarmed he was dangerous; with the primarch’s weapon in hand, he was nigh unstoppable.

Everyone’s focus was on Khârn. Every eye watched him; every sense was honed upon him, waiting for him to make his move.

When finally he spoke, he did not raise his voice.

‘I will not be the one to start the war,’ he said. ‘But I will be the one to finish it.’

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion, as if it were occurring underwater.

Dreagher’s bolt pistol was in his hand. He had it raised, levelled at the III Legion envoy’s head.

Everyone had been so focused on Khârn; they didn’t react quickly enough to the true threat.

Weapons that had been trained on Khârn swung towards Dreagher. The trio of Palatine Blades, in stepping forward to confront Khârn, had inadvertently given Dreagher a clear shot. He couldn’t miss. They turned, registering – too late – the imminent threat to their lord. None of them was going to be fast enough.

Galerius turned, Argentus swinging for Dreagher’s neck – but he also was too slow.

Dreagher squeezed the trigger, twice in quick succession.

Boom. Boom.

The envoy’s head exploded.

‘Nothing unifies like a war,’ he breathed.

Then everyone started shooting.

Chapter 15

The roar of gunfire was deafening. Scores died in those first, opening moments.

Argentus arced in for Dreagher’s throat – he had no possible chance of avoiding it – but it never landed. A massive armoured mitt caught the blade as it sang for his blood.

The curved chainfists slung beneath Ruokh’s immense powered gauntlets roared, but before he could ram them into Galerius’s body, heavy bolter fire struck him in the face. It was not enough to penetrate his angular helm, but he staggered back under the onslaught, relinquishing his grasp on Argentus.

He turned towards the source of the gunfire, and leapt into the fray. No doubt he was screaming and roaring like a beast, but his vox was still silenced.

Galerius swung again, but this time his blade met Dreagher’s wide-bladed gladius. The two were momentarily locked together, pitting their strength against one another. Dreagher was the larger and more powerful of the two, but even so he strained to hold back the crackling blade Argentus.

‘What have you done?’ Galerius said.

‘What… I… must,’ replied Dreagher.

Then both of them were struck, bolts and high-velocity autocannon rounds ripping into them, smashing them apart.

Amidst the thunderous exchange, Khârn stood miraculously untouched, and, for the moment, unmoving. So too did the serpentine daemon… at least for a moment.

Betrayer, it said, its voice heard by every warrior on the field, despite the deafening roar of weapons and blood. Then it disappeared in a wet explosion of ichor and fire, ripped apart by high-calibre weapons fire.

Betrayer.

‘Skulls for the Skull Throne!’ roared the Blood Priest, Baruda, as he ran, closing the distance with the Emperor’s Children.

He had his heavy spiked power maul in his hands, though he didn’t recall drawing it. The killing had already begun; standing idle now was not an option. There was nothing else to be done but to go forward.

His armour was splattered with blood. A World Eater standing beside Baruda had been one of the first to die, mass reactives detonating within his brainpan in the first seconds.

Tracer fire spat back and forth between the two forces, though markedly more came from the III Legion ranks. The weight of fire was like a solid wall. Baruda was struck half a dozen times, making him stumble even while they did not penetrate, though the press of the World Eaters kept his momentum moving forward. A searing beam of white-blue energy – lascannon – lanced through the XII Legion ranks, taking down half a dozen warriors, and missiles chased by smoking contrails screamed across the rapidly diminishing gulf between the two Legions before detonating, sending bodies and limbs flying, fire billowing up into the low-pressure atmosphere.

Sonic weaponry rippled the air, rupturing organs and bursting eardrums. Autocannons tore through tightly packed ranks, churning through power armour and meat. The thud of rapid-firing bolters was a constant staccato, like hail on an armoured rooftop. Gouts of plasma, burning with the heat of a sun’s core, spat into the World Eaters ranks, killing wherever they struck.

Less than twenty metres separated the Legions now, and the World Eaters would close that distance in two bounds. The enemy braced for the impact, some with blades at the ready, others firing on full auto to thin the tide in the moments before their lines met. Scores died in seconds. It was impossible not to hit something at this range. The warrior alongside Baruda fell face-first into the ground as if his legs had been cut from beneath him, a bolt blasting out of the back of his helmet.

A III Legion support squad stepped forward, raising the barrels of their flamers as one. There was no way to avoid what was to come, and so Baruda simply roared, even as the Emperor’s Children sent a wall of burning promethium crashing over the World Eaters ranks.

Searing, liquid flame engulfed him, blistering his armour and sending the temperature within sky-rocketing. His rubberised armour seals turned molten, and warning icons blinked in the corner of his visor as his plate’s integrity was compromised. His flesh began to burn, but he barely felt it; his system was flooding with stimms and pain repressors, and the Nails were starting to do their work.

For a second, Baruda couldn’t see anything, his vision obscured by the licking flames and acrid black smoke, but he didn’t need his eyes to know how close he was to his enemies.

He leapt, breaking free of the crackling fire, his power-sheathed maul raised high. He was still burning, flames licking along his arms and body, as he came down in front of one of the Emperor’s Children. He smashed his weapon down onto an enemy’s shoulder, driving him to the ground. Kicking the broken warrior away, Baruda launched himself forward, pushing deep into the Emperor’s Children ranks, laying about them.

The World Eaters smashed into the purple-armoured ranks like a tidal wave. The sound of plate crashing against plate was deafening. Chainaxes roared and power swords crackled, carving through armour and flesh. Blades met blades with sharp clashes of sparks, and pistols and bolters barked, punching warriors from their feet.

Baruda smashed his weapon into the face of an enemy – for the Emperor’s Children were now their enemies, there was no denying that – sending the legionary reeling. He followed up, ramming the butt of his weapon into the warrior’s throat, crushing his windpipe, then found himself facing one of the immense Terminator-armoured elite of the III Legion.

The point of a golden halberd thrust at his chest, humming with power. He deflected it with a downward chop, and stepped forward – always forward – to strike. His blow hit home, taking the Terminator in the side of his head, but it was like striking stone; the elite warrior didn’t so much as flinch.

The Terminator stepped to the side and brought the base of the halberd around, striking Baruda hard in the side of his helm. The force of the blow sent him smashing into one of his comrades, who was then dispatched, his head cleaved from crown to throat by a downward strike.

The World Eaters’ wild charge faltered as it struck the wall of Emperor’s Children Terminators. They broke up against them, like a tide against a cliff, blades and axes scarce able to penetrate their immense battleplate. Some fell, brought down by sheer weight of numbers and dispatched by blades slid between the plates of their armoured exoskeletons, but these were few. The Emperor’s Children had weathered the initial storm of blows against them and they struck back. Hard.

Dozens of the XII were slain, cut down by gleaming, golden halberds, their plate and bones crushed beneath the Terminators’ boots. They were taking a bloody toll on the World Eaters’ numbers, and had stalled their momentum.

Baruda swayed aside from the halberd’s axe head as it swung in for him, then darted forward, roaring with effort as he swung his maul around in a powerful arc. His strike met the halberd’s haft. There was no give in the Terminator at all, his already prodigious strength augmented by the monstrous servos and fibre-bundles of his armour. He pushed, throwing Baruda back into his kin.

A World Eater ran by him, bellowing as he swung a massive chain glaive at the Terminator. Before the blow could fall, however, he was impaled on the enemy’s weapon, and lifted bodily into the air, still roaring incoherently. Blood gushed from his punctured breastplate, but he was not yet done. He brought his glaive down on his foe, on one of the Terminator’s arms, sundering the armour encasing it and wrenching it out of shape.

The World Eater was dropped unceremoniously to the ground, though he was pinned in place by the halberd still impaling him. Releasing his grip on his glaive, the warrior grabbed hold of the halberd’s haft, holding it fast.

‘Take him,’ the legionary spat. ‘Claim his skull!’

Baruda was already moving, closing in on the Terminator. Another Emperor’s Children legionary swung at him, but he deflected the attack, pushing it high. He darted past the first Terminator, who was still struggling to regain control of its weapon, and dropping to one knee, smashed a heavy blow into the side of the warrior’s knee.

The joint gave way beneath a shower of sparks, and the Terminator crashed to the ground, making the earth shake. Baruda was on him in an instant, drawing his gladius. The tip of the blade found the gap behind the Terminator’s gorget. Without ceremony he used his weight to drive it down into the warrior’s body.

Baruda rose to his feet. He made to voice his thanks, but the legionary impaled on the halberd was dead. Two more Terminators advanced on Baruda, halberds lowered. He tightened his grip on his weapon and advanced to meet them.

A massive, red-armoured form crashed through the wild melee, smashing Baruda aside. The Blood Priest was knocked to one knee, and he snarled in anger.

‘Ruokh,’ he spat. Another World Eater was swept aside by the Caedere’s charge, condemning him; unbalanced, he was cut down by the enemy, first losing an arm to a scything blow, then being hurled backwards as an autocannon unleashed its fury at point-blank range, ripping him apart.

Uncaring of the mayhem left in his wake, Ruokh hurled himself at the enemy. He caught one of the halberds in a massive armoured mitt as it was thrust towards him, and ripped it from his enemy’s grasp, pulling the Terminator off balance. He ignored the second strike completely. The tip of a halberd embedded in his side, but did nothing to slow him; the wielder himself was pushed a metre backwards, his heavy boots carving deep furrows in the salt plains.

Ruokh threw himself on the first Terminator, tackling him to the ground. Kneeling on him, he punched one of the whirring chainblades slung beneath his fists into his enemy’s chest, again and again. The teeth of his madly whirring blades screamed as they carved through his enemy’s breastplate and fused ribcage, rendering his flesh and organs within to bloody pulp.

Ruokh’s anvil-shaped helmet snapped up, covered in dripping gore, and his gaze locked on the other Terminator. That one swung at him, but he was too slow; moving with a speed that belied the bulk of his cataphractii tomb, Ruokh leapt at this new foe, ripping him apart with wild blows of his chainfists.

Fist-sized craters appeared on Ruokh’s hulking shoulders as the enemy turned their guns on him. In an instant, the Caedere butcher was up, launching himself off his latest kill and into the press of the enemy, who were desperately back pedalling, trying to put as much distance between them and the crazed killer as possible.

Hating the insane berserker but acknowledging the effectiveness of his primal fury and power, Baruda and the World Eaters around him surged into the breach in the enemy’s line that Ruokh had created.

‘Cut them down!’ he roared. ‘Blood for the Blood God!’

Galerius was alone in the midst of the World Eaters. He stood over the fallen Lord Anteus, envoy and lord emissary. He would not let the enemy defile him.

He’d crossed blades with Dreagher, but had lost him in the press. He was still reeling from the shock of Dreagher’s betrayal.

They surrounded him, attacking in one wild, uncontrolled mass, chainblades and axes roaring. It forced everything else aside.

He would dwell on this betrayal and its consequences later. For now, there was only the dance of blades.

His armour was cratered and smoking in a dozen places. Two rounds had punched through him, collapsing one lung, but it mattered not. He was among them now; they’d crashed over him in a wave as they surged towards the ranks of his brethren. This was where he was meant to be.

He had no need to consider who was friend and foe around him – everyone surrounding him was an enemy to be killed. His golden-hilted falchion sang as it cut the air.

A chainblade came in for him, teeth a jagged, screaming blur. Galerius swayed to the side and took the World Eater’s arm, shearing it off at the elbow. Blood spurted.

Galerius was spinning before the severed arm fell, turning aside from the thrust of a jagged blade. Still turning, he slashed through another World Eater’s head, cutting straight through helmet and skull.

A chainaxe roared for his neck. He batted it aside and another of the XII Legion died with a reverse thrust through the chest. Turning fast, Galerius slashed through a bolt pistol that chased his rapid movements, took off a World Eater’s head with the return blow, then planted the blade of his spitting sword through the vox-grille of another. The tip punched through the back of the legionary’s skull.

Displaying preternatural speed and spatial awareness, he neatly sidestepped a sword thrust from behind, then reversed his strike, smashing the pommel of his golden blade into his assailant’s head.

A bolt screamed past him, missing his head by centimetres. A lucky miss. He cursed himself for his lack of awareness. He could have been ended there.

He turned, whipping his immense golden sword around in a blurred arc, spinning it in his hands. He cut the legs from beneath one roaring assailant, then took another under the chin. The ceramite of the legionary’s helm gave little resistance. The vengeful blade sliced upwards, cutting through the World Eater’s jaw, skull and brain before exiting with a hum of energy.

A boot slammed into his chest, sending him reeling. He stumbled, dropping to one knee. A heavy, spiked cudgel slammed down at him. Only a desperate sway to the side stopped him from being brained. Even then, he could not avoid the blow fully. It crunched down on his shoulder, embedding itself in his ceramite plating.

He rose to his feet, backing off to give himself more space. The World Eater – a captain, he saw – came after him. His weapon came down on him with titanic force, and he met it with Argentus. Energy crackled spitefully as the two power fields came into contact. The tip of Galerius’s blade was forced to the ground. The World Eater stepped forward, stamping one boot down upon the blade, ripping it from Galerius’s hand.

The World Eater roared in victory, his vox-amplifiers making him sound more machine than man.

A firing synapse providing the trigger, Galerius forced his helm to open. The faceplate snapped back in a series of unlocking sections, leaving his snow-white face exposed. Blood flecked his lips.

His mouth opened, far wider than was natural, and he sucked in a deep breath. The subtle pink scar-lines radiating from his mouth parted, exposing the glistening, red flesh beneath. His mouth continued to widen, the lower half of his face peeling back like the petals of a blossoming flower.

With a wet crack of bone, his lower jaw split down the middle. The two sections hinged outwards, distending his throat and mouth so that he looked like nothing of human origin at all, more closely resembling some deep-sea monster as it lunged to engulf its prey, or some horrific Neverborn denizen of the warp.

The jarring transformation happened in milliseconds. The XII Legion centurion stepped forward to execute him, ready to bring his spiked, power-wreathed cudgel down upon his skull, but he was too slow.

With a sharp exhalation, Galerius let loose his anger and frustration in a devastating ultrasonic scream that made the air ripple and shimmer like a mirage. It struck the World Eater like a hammer-blow, and the effect was devastating.

The World Eater’s internal organs ruptured. His eyes exploded in their sockets, and his bones vibrated at such a frequency as to cause myriad hairline cracks to permeate their super-dense structure. The World Eater’s twin hearts faltered.

His armour cracked, splintering like ice beneath a hammer, and he was thrown back into his comrades. He was not dead when he hit them – his death would be a painful, lingering one – but he was a fighter unable to fight, utterly crippled by the devastating aural assault. A dozen other World Eaters nearby would never hear again, their eardrums shattered, the cry having overcome even the dampeners that normally protected them from deafening ordnance.

Then it was over, and Galerius’s over-extended mouth snapped shut, bone and flesh reknitting, and his helm clicked back into place.

His scream had cleared the space around Galerius, and in the time before the World Eaters crashed in to fill that void, he retrieved Argentus from the ground.

Through the press, he sought the familiar figure of Dreagher – but he was nowhere to be seen.

‘This is not the end, Dreagher,’ he swore. ‘We shall meet again.’

He still stood over the fallen lord emissary. The broken bodies of Anteus’s three Palatine Blades – warriors Galerius knew by name – lay before him. The enemy were piled around them; they’d sold their lives dearly.

‘Come then, you dogs,’ he said, his voice clear and loud. ‘Come forward and die.’

Klaxons blared across the Defiant’s bridge, and warning icons and floods of logistical data cascaded down the view-screen.

‘The Third Legion’s fleet!’ came a warning cry from the navigation array. ‘Their weapon arrays are coming online!’

‘We have been targeted, sir!’ called another voice.

‘They are advancing into attack range!’ said another.

Flag-Captain Stirzaker didn’t need the verbal updates; he already knew it microseconds before the information reached the comms-screens and cogitators on the bridge.

His skeletal digits tapped orders upon the slates set into the arms of his command throne, while he simultaneously spat noospheric order-packages across the bridge and sent mind-impulse directives into the ship’s datacore, getting the ship ready to fight.

‘Bring the guns up. Split power between frontal shields and engines,’ he ordered, his voice calm and authoritative.

‘Guns, aye sir!’

‘Shields at full!’

‘Engine power rising, sir!’

‘Come about to heading eight-eight-nine-three,’ he said. ‘Bring forward thrust to seventy-two thousand.’

‘Seventy-two thousand, aye!’

A cascade of information scrolled down the inside of his gleaming silver eyes, giving him a constant rundown of the entire ship’s systems. He saw the flurry of binaric code redouble in speed and complexity as his orders were enacted. There was a remarkable beauty to it, that flow of data, though most in the universe were blind to it. Those of the Legion in particular would never understand such a sentiment.

Satisfied for the moment that what needed to be done was in motion, Stirzaker steepled his skeletal fingers before him.

‘And so it begins,’ he said.

Deep in the sub-decks of the Defiant, Skoral struck her opponent in the face with two swift jabs. His nose was already broken from a previous blow; these strikes spread it further across his face, squirting blood. She followed up with a brutal hook that caught him on the side of his jaw, and there was an audible snap of bone. He hit the sand hard.

The onlookers roared, some in approval, others – those who had evidently chosen to back the losing side – in anger and disappointment.

Breathing hard, Skoral pulled off the leather, fingerless glove worn over her mechanised hand, inspecting the extremity for damage. There was none. Satisfied, she gestured to the edge of the circle, ushering an orderly forward. He ran up to her, passing over her field injuries kit. She moved to her downed opponent, who was bellowing in pain, and spitting blood onto the sand.

Kneeling at his side, she took his face in her hand, turning it as she inspected the damage. The man’s jaw was dislocated and broken in at least two places. It would need to be wired together until the bones were able to reknit.

He tried to say something, but it came out as a garbled dribble of blood.

‘Don’t speak,’ she said.

‘You probably didn’t need to hit him quite so hard,’ said Maven, who had appeared at her shoulder. She glared up at him.

‘Didn’t mean to,’ she muttered, throwing an arm around her opponent and helping him to his feet.

The floor underfoot shuddered, and silence descended. Groans and echoes reverberated through the armoured frame and bulkheads of the Defiant, and everyone on the sub-deck listened closely, eyes wide.

‘We’re turning,’ said Skoral, head cocked to the side. ‘The plasma core is firing up. Are we leaving?’

It didn’t sound believable, even to herself.

‘No,’ said Maven, shaking his head. ‘This is something else.’

Warning klaxons could be heard echoing in the distance, moments before those within the sub-deck began blaring.

‘That’s it then,’ sad Maven.

‘We are at war,’ said Skoral.

Argus Brond rammed one of his blades through the spine of an Emperor’s Children legionary who was struggling to rise, for all that he was missing both legs.

He sheathed the gladius, not bothering to wipe the blood off first. It would have been pointless. He was covered in it.

He dropped to one knee, taking cover behind a stand of rocks. He had picked up a bolter some time earlier, but had discarded it when its ammunition had run dry. His bolt pistol was holstered at his side, but he had exhausted its clips early in the fight. He pried a plasma carbine from the dead grasp of the III Legion warrior he had just killed. Its core was half depleted, and it was venting cooling vapours in a hot cloud, but it was serviceable.

He passed his gaze across the moon’s surface. It was a charnel ground.

Corpses in the colours of the XII and the III Legions were strewn across the icy surface. Across the killing ground, the surviving elements of the Emperor’s Children were in the process of pulling back. The III Legion’s fighting retreat was ruthlessly effective, while the World Eaters chased them mindlessly, lost in the throes of the Butcher’s Nails.

Argus Brond shook his head.

When the pursuing World Eaters set upon the legionaries of the III Legion, they tore them apart – quite literally – but they were being led by their nose by the Phoenician’s get, who were falling back in staggered squads.

It was clear that the World Eaters had had the better of the early exchange – the majority of the corpses in the centre of the field, where the two Legions had met, were garbed in the III Legion’s garish purple and pink hues.

In close, there were no better shock troops than the World Eaters. The legionaries of other Legions may be more disciplined, more focused, more tenacious or more cunning, but when the blood started flowing, and battle was met blade to blade, there was simply no more deadly warrior than a World Eater.

That too was where the Emperor’s Children’s mortal hangers-on had died, cut down as they sought to run. They also had been torn apart. Most were completely unrecognisable as having ever been human.

Brond was not displeased to see them dead. Grotesque deviants, all of them.

Now, however, as the battle lines were stretched and dispersing and the brutal, chaotic melee in the centre of the field broke apart, the World Eaters were being cut down in droves.

It seemed so pointless. Their Legion was already but a fraction of its former strength, with no new legionaries replacing those that were killed. And for what?

Already, most of the Emperor’s Children gunships were airborne. Fire Raptors were hurtling in low, cutting through the World Eaters packs in devastating strafing runs. One of the gunships was struck from below by a spearing missile as it banked for another attack run. Even as it went down, the pilot had the presence of mind to steer it into a mass of blood-crazed World Eaters, ploughing through them as it crashed into the moon and disappeared in a tumbling cloud of wreckage, explosions and dust.

A handful of legionaries stood with Brond, using the stand of rocks as a firebase. Three were his own men. Two were of Dreagher’s cohort. The other, sporting jagged tattoos upon the sides of his shaved scalp, bore squad markings identifying him as one of Solax’s warriors.

With the World Eaters, it was often this way. More disciplined Legions fought and died with their squad brothers, but individual fighters of the XII often found themselves scattered once the blood-haze departed.

Isolated World Eaters were loping through the smoke, angling towards them. Brond and the World Eaters with him provided them covering fire as they approached.

A legionary holding three Emperor’s Children’s heads by their hair saw Brond, and jogged through the smoke towards him. He wore a skull-faced helm; Baruda.

Brond squeezed off a shot with his borrowed plasma carbine, and the head of a purple-armoured legionary crawling towards the drop-ships burst into blue flame, consumed by the liquefied heat of a contained sun.

Baruda crashed in beside Brond, placing his back against the rocks. He too was spattered with blood, and his front was blackened and blistered from promethium burns.

He nodded his thanks, and shook off his power maul, showering the ground with gore.

‘Dreagher,’ said Baruda. ‘Have you seen him?’

‘What in the seven hells was he thinking?’ growled Brond. ‘I could expect that kind of thing from the likes of Goghur, or Ruokh, but Dreagher? Did you know he was going to do that?’

‘No,’ said Baruda. ‘But it makes sense now. This is why he brought the Destroyer with us. Have you seen him?’

‘No,’ said Brond. ‘Not since our lines got blurred. He’s not responding to vox-reports?’

Baruda shook his head. ‘Not for some time.’

‘The Nails?’ said Brond.

‘That, or he’s dead,’ said Baruda.

‘It is no less than he deserves,’ said Brond. ‘We need extraction. What’s done is done.’

‘This is just the beginning,’ said Baruda. He busied himself with the three severed heads he had carried, using their hair to tie them at his waist. ‘The Blood God will be pleased with the harvest.’

‘It is madness,’ said Brond. ‘We need to start the extraction.’

‘Half our number are lost to the Nails,’ said Baruda.

‘So we leave them,’ said Brond. ‘Not everyone needs to die here. The Emperor’s Children fleet is inbound. They’ll be in weapons range in twelve minutes.’

‘What of our own fleet?’

‘Sixteen minutes before they are within weapon range,’ said Brond.

Baruda swore.

‘You see?’ Brond said. ‘If we are still here, this moon will be blasted into the ether before our fleet gets here.’

‘Where is Khârn?’ said Baruda. ‘We cannot leave without him.’

Ice dust kicked up around them in wild vortices as a Stormbird came in fast, killing its speed and lifting its nose as it lowered to the moon’s surface. Its assault ramps were already falling before its clawed landing gear touched down, and World Eaters who had already been collected leapt out, beginning the process of dragging fallen legionaries’ bodies onto the assault boat, under the shouted directions of Brond.

A handful of warriors moved onto the field, aiming missile launchers skyward, scanning for enemy attack craft seeking to target the vulnerable Stormbird – this was always the easiest time to take one of the powerful craft down.

Baruda slammed a fresh clip into his bolt pistol, took up his power maul once more, and rose to his feet.

‘I will find Dreagher,’ he said.

‘Leave him!’ Brond snapped. ‘We are better off without him. He’s the one that caused this.’

‘He is my captain,’ said the skull-helmed warrior. ‘I must find him.’

Brond shook his head. Without further words, Baruda pushed out from the rocks, pistol bucking in his hand, and was gone.

Chapter 16

Blood.

It was all that he could see, drowning his vision in a sea of red. It was all he could hear, blotting out everything, his twin hearts thundering like war drums.

Thump-thump-thump-thump. Thump-thump-thump-thump.

No… there was something else. A voice. He heard it vaguely, as if it was coming to him from a great distance.

Reality reasserted itself. The roar of engines crashed over him. It struck him like a physical blow.

Behind it, for a moment, he heard the visceral onslaught of battle: the roar of weapons, the cries of the dying, the bellow of those lost to the Nails; the clash of blades, the deep resonant boom of heavy weapon fire. But that quickly faded. It was not real. It was just a remnant, an echo of what had brought him here, what had come before.

But where was here?

The red veil bled away, leaving him in darkness. He was seated, locked in placed with a harness restraint. He was jolted sharply, striking the back of his head. He wasn’t wearing his helmet. He had no notion of how he had lost it.

The voice came in at him again, louder this time. Insistent. It was close.

‘Dreagher.’

A dark, red-hazed figure resolved itself before him, seated opposite.

Khârn.

His head was bare, his long, serious face pale and sepulchral in the gloom. His expression: unnaturally calm, almost disinterested. His eyes: burning with rage.

Dreagher took in his surroundings. He had no recollection of how he came to be here, not yet, but that was nothing unusual. It often took him some time to piece together the time he had lost to the Nails.

He was within the armoured belly of a gunship. The interior was claustrophobic, and it stank of oil, blood, cordite and aggression. Gore-drenched World Eaters packed its tight confines, shoulder to shoulder. Their armour buzzed angrily as they reloaded their weapons and wiped congealed body tissue from their blades.

He was gripping his gladius tightly. Bloodied chunks of flesh clung to the blade. He didn’t know whose blood it was. With a conscious effort, he relaxed his grip. He eased his fingers off the sword’s hilt, breaking the glue of semi-congealed gore.

He touched his face, feeling a dull pain there. A deep cut ran from his temple to his lip. It had cut to the bone. Blade wound. He presumed he’d killed whoever had given it to him, else he would be the one now dead.

Under his left eye, a jagged hunk of shrapnel the size of his palm was still embedded in his cheekbone. He tore it free and dropped it to the deck floor. The hyper-coagulants in his genhanced bloodstream would seal the wound within minutes.

‘You are back with us, captain?’ said Khârn.

Dreagher’s gaze returned to Khârn, seated opposite him.

‘I am back,’ he said, his voice a hoarse growl.

As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he saw Khârn’s armour bore fresh scars and promethium burns, as did his own.

‘Good,’ said Khârn.

The shuttle lurched beneath them. From the sound of the engine, he knew they were in the void.

Dreagher looked around him, taking in the details of the shuttle’s interior.

‘This is not one of ours,’ he said in a low voice.

‘No,’ said Khârn.

‘We are within a Third Legion shuttle?’

‘Yes.’

Dreagher’s memories were starting to come back to him, though trying to regain them too fast was pointless – akin to struggling to remember one’s dreams upon waking. Or at least so it was before Nuceria. Ever since then – ever since the primarch’s change – all he dreamed of was blood.

‘Where are we?’ said Dreagher.

‘About to dock with the Golden Absolute.’

‘The Emperor’s Children battle cruiser?’ said Dreagher.

A hint of what might have been humour gleamed in Khârn’s eyes.

‘The same,’ he said.

‘This is…’ hissed Dreagher.

‘Insanity?’ suggested Khârn. He smiled. There was no warmth in it. ‘Some would say the same of your actions in killing the Third Legion envoy. I am impressed. I did not think you had it in you. You may well have united the Legion. Either that, or you have destroyed it.’

A red hazard light began to strobe, and a voice that Dreagher recognised crackled through on the internal vox.

‘Docking in thirty seconds,’ said the voice. ‘The Third Legion has shown no sign that they are yet aware of our presence.’

‘Baruda?’ said Dreagher.

‘He came looking for you,’ said Khârn. ‘Now, prepare yourself. It is time.’

Dreagher threw off his locking restraint and rose to his feet, maglocks ensuring he did not stumble. One of his warriors handed him a bolt pistol – his own was nowhere to be seen – and he nodded in thanks. He checked its clip; full. The weapon bore the emblem of the Emperor’s Children, but he didn’t care. It was a weapon. Who it had been made for mattered not.

The Storm Eagle’s stabiliser engines roared and its acceleration bled off. A shudder ran through the length of the shuttle’s fuselage. They were passing through the integrity shielding of the Emperor’s Children battle cruiser, Dreagher knew. Gravity and a breathable atmosphere crashed in around them. The gunship groaned and creaked alarmingly, its armoured flanks flexing and expanding as the vacuum of the void was left behind.

The engines roared again, and hydraulics groaned and shuddered as the Storm Eagle’s landing gear was deployed.

The internal vox-grilles crackled with Baruda’s voice once again.

‘Ten seconds,’ he said.

Khârn had his helmet on and he rose from his seat, Gorechild growling in his grasp.

‘We hit them hard, before they know we are here,’ he said. His voice was an angry growl. Indeed, his whole persona seemed changed now that his helmet was in place. Aggression radiated from him like a heat shimmer. ‘We slow and we die.’

‘Five seconds,’ said Baruda. There were some loud bangs on the exterior of the gunship. Impact detonations.

‘They are onto us,’ came Baruda’s crackling vox. ‘Expect heavy resistance. Clearing the landing zone now.’

Baruda unleashed the fury of the Storm Eagle’s nose-mounted heavy bolters, the deep bass-boom of the weapon fire making the whole ship shudder.

The gunship touched down hard, landing gear screeching as it slid upon the embarkation deck plating.

‘Warriors of the Twelfth!’ roared Khârn.

The assault ramps blasted open, slamming down hard. The sound of the Storm Eagle’s bolters became instantly louder, their echo booming across the open deck. Gas propellant filled the air as Baruda unleashed the fury of the Storm Eagle’s vengeance launchers, sending a flurry of rockets stabbing across the open deck. Explosions erupted, sending great orange fireballs and oily black smoke curling up to the hangar’s ceiling.

Khârn led the charge, sprinting out onto the embarkation deck, weapons roaring, even as return fire pinged off the deck around them.

‘Blood for the Legion!’ roared Khârn. ‘Blood for the primarch!’

‘So what happens now?’

Maven was scrolling down ship manifests on his data-slate, scanning the lists as new information was in-loaded.

The deck was filled with launch crews, servitors and indentured serfs. Those whose frontal lobes had not been seared out through Mechanicum-sanctioned lobotomisation waited in tense expectation for the inbound shuttles; the others simply drooled, staring vacantly as they awaited a directive.

‘I don’t see him,’ Maven said without looking up. ‘He’s not here. He’s not here.’

‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

‘What?’ said Maven, looking up.

Skoral stood with her arms folded across her chest, glaring at him. Behind her was her contingent of medicae-assigned servitors, alongside a small flotilla of hovering stretcher-pallets.

‘What happens now?’ Skoral said again.

‘What happens now is that we do our jobs,’ said Maven, returning his attention to the data-slate. ‘Your job is about to get a lot busier. And mine… Well, it would seem that my workload has just been halved. Khârn is not on any of the inbound shuttles.’

‘He’s not dead,’ said Skoral. ‘He can’t be dead.’

‘He is not immortal,’ said Maven. ‘He can be killed as easily as any other member of the Legion. Well, maybe not as easily, and he’s been known to come back from the brink of death before, but… a bolt in the brainpan would end him as it would any other legionary. There is no coming back from that.’

Maven continued scanning.

‘Dreagher is not here either,’ he added in a quieter tone, glancing sideways at Skoral.

‘You could be reading it wrong,’ she said.

He wasn’t, but he didn’t say that. He didn’t need to. It was likely that Dreagher was dead – early estimates suggested that more than seventy per cent of the deputation that had gone down to meet the Emperor’s Children had perished. Nevertheless, there was always the chance the captain still lived. They were not immortal, the World Eaters, but it took a hell of a lot to kill them.

The colour had drained from Skoral’s face, and Maven put a hand on her shoulder, giving it a comforting squeeze. It was a strained and difficult relationship that the mortal servants of the XII Legion had with their masters, yet Maven could understand Skoral’s reaction. Dreagher was as unpredictable and dangerous as any of the Legion, but he was one of the good ones, as was his own master.

As much as Maven pushed the boundaries and mouthed off more than was probably necessary, he was incredibly loyal to Brond. Even that was as nothing next to the pedestal that Skoral placed Dreagher on. She was utterly devoted to him, practically venerating the ground he walked on.

The heavy blast shutters – each as high as a Titan and half a hundred metres wide – groaned as they began to open. The harsh, red-tinged glare of the system’s twin suns began to advance across the deck as the vast thermo-shielding plates rolled aside. It made the whole deck look as if it was on fire. The line of light reached Maven and Skoral and began to climb. They shielded their eyes as it climbed up their bodies and reached their faces. With the blast shutter lowered, all that separated them from the void was the invisible skin of the bay’s integrity field. Beyond, immense, building-sized cannon turrets turned towards the incoming ships.

The first of the Legion Stormbirds pierced the integrity field, sending out great ripples across its surface. It passed through, filling the deck with the roar of its engines and the stink of cordite, promethium and exhaust fumes. Its armour was scorched black, and battle damage tracked across its fuselage. Its massive engines rotated downwards as it came in, guided by flashing beacons and serfs waving lumen wands. It lowered to the deck, engines roaring, and its clawed landing gear locked it down.

Assault ramps dropped, and legionaries covered in blood emerged from within, shouting and gesturing.

‘You’re up,’ said Maven.

Skoral was already moving, directing her medicae teams forward. She looked back at Maven as another Stormbird penetrated the integrity shield.

‘Find Dreagher,’ she said. ‘He has to be there.’

They roared through the enemy like a hot wind, barely slowing as they hacked a bloody path towards the bridge.

Speed was essential. Any World Eaters who succumbed to the Nails and stopped to satiate their blood-lust were left behind. They’d reap a bloody toll before they were brought down.

In the main, those ranged against them were unaugmented naval armsmen, and they had as little chance of halting the World Eaters as they did of trying to hold back an incoming tide with their hands.

They were armoured in baroque cream and gold suits of environmentally sealed carapace plate. Only their eyes could be seen beyond the thick glass of their heavy helmets, peering out through a glowing, purple fog. By their lack of fear and apparent disdain for their own lives, Dreagher judged that mist to be some kind of soporific.

They bore weapons designed to repel boarders while minimising the risk of a hull breach: assault shotguns, electro-prods, heavy-bore slug guns, shock-shields, energised halberds.

Against a regular boarding force, they would have been a significant threat. Against legionaries – especially those of the XII Legion – they were chaff.

Dreagher carved the legs out from beneath one of them, severing them above the knees with one sweep of his roaring chainaxe before spinning and ramming his gladius through the glass faceplate of another, impaling his head. Pale, sickly smelling musk wafted from the helmet breach as Dreagher wrenched his gladius free.

He glimpsed another of the defence crew lower a shotgun in his direction and he turned his shoulder into it, leaning into the blast as the weapon boomed. He was kicked back half a step, but he recovered quickly, hurling himself forward. The shotgun boomed again, and he felt displaced air rush by his face. Then he slammed into the armsman, shoulder first, and rammed him back into the wall. The force of the blow made the wall buckle, but the armsman came off the worse. His ribcage was crushed like a cage of twigs, pulping the organs within. It was a death sentence. Internal injuries would have seen him bleed out within minutes. Nevertheless, Dreagher rammed his blade into the armsman’s gut, once, twice. On the third thrust, the armsman’s spine was severed.

‘Move!’ he shouted, rising. A shotgun blast took him in the side, scarcely making him rock. He glared up at his assailant. An armsman was backing away, shotgun lowered. Before he could fire another shot, the skull-helmed figure of Baruda hit him from the side with a swinging arm to the neck. The human was felled instantly, his throat crushed, and he slammed to the deck with a bone-jarring crash.

Blood covered the deck floor and splashed up the walls. Armsmen lay strewn across the corridor like discarded toys, severed limbs and headless torsos lying in bloodied heaps. The World Eaters were butchering their way onwards, unstoppable, unrelenting, unforgiving.

Khârn was at their fore, a simple hand axe in each fist and a pile of bodies spread around him. Gorechild was slung across his back. He would not sully its teeth with the likes of these weaklings.

More of the enemy appeared further up the corridor, rounding a corner with shock-shields raised. Behind the shield wall, armsmen with shotguns and grenade tubes pushed forward, raising their weapons.

Without waiting to see if anyone was with him, Khârn was up and running, sprinting towards them.

‘With Khârn!’ roared Dreagher, breaking into a run.

Baruda knelt upon the armsman who had fired upon Dreagher, hacking with his cleaver. His ivory skull helm was sprayed with blood with every strike. Dreagher dragged him to his feet as he ran past.

‘Enough!’ he shouted. ‘We need to keep moving!’

Baruda fell in beside his captain, shaking the blood from his cleaver as he ran. Dreagher could imagine the savage grin on his narrow, predatory face.

‘It feels good to fight with Khârn once more,’ he said. ‘Will it be enough?’

‘We shall see,’ said Dreagher.

With a dull thump, the first of the armsmen’s grenade launchers fired. Trailing an arc of vapour, the frag grenade ricocheted once off the deck before detonating amongst them in a ball of flame and shrapnel. Dreagher and Baruda sprinted through the maelstrom, their armour peppered with superheated metal fragments.

Two more grenades were launched, and the shorter-ranged shotguns began to boom. Then Khârn was on them.

They were bracing for his impact, the armsmen leaning into their shock-shields, which crackled with arcs of energy. Not slowing his charge, Khârn stepped up onto the face of one of those shields and pushed off, launching himself over the front ranks. He turned in the air as he came down, one hand axe slamming down into the back of an enemy’s skull, opening the throat of another as he landed, bowling several more off their feet.

He began laying around him with his two axes, hacking, cutting, breaking, and blood sprayed high with every strike.

The spike of a halberd was thrust at Dreagher as he charged into the fray, its tip wreathed in power. He batted it aside with his gladius and slammed his chainaxe down into the top edge of a shock-shield. The madly whirring teeth ripped at the metal, shearing it apart. The shield was locked to the armsman’s left arm. With a sharp yank, Dreagher ripped the shield from him, taking off his arm at the shoulder in the process.

Before the enemy could move in to close the breach in the shield wall, Dreagher stepped through, striking left and right, killing with every strike.

Baruda pushed in beside him, his bolt pistol barking.

Half the armsmen were dead in seconds. The deck was soon slick with their blood.

The head of the World Eater standing next to Dreagher exploded in a red mist. Blood, pieces of brain matter and skull fragments bespattered Dreagher’s faceplate.

‘Third Legion, right flank!’ roared Baruda.

Through the press of bodies, Dreagher could see Emperor’s Children advancing on their position, bolters, plasma guns and graviton rifles pressed to their shoulders.

He saw Khârn embed his two axes in the head of an enemy and unsling Gorechild from his back.

This was an enemy worthy of the primarch’s blade.

They lost five of the Legion before they closed the distance and begin to redress the kill-ratio.

Another two died in close – the III Legion were not averse to close combat, not by any degree. They were skilful warriors, of that there was no doubt; more skilful, truth be told, than the World Eaters, at least once the Nails kicked in.

Obsessed with the pursuit of perfection, and forever emulating the blade-skills of their primarch and their most exalted champions – Lucius, Cyrius and Klydel among them – they trained obsessively, perfecting their kill-strokes, their technique, and their form.

They lacked the pure aggression and unrelenting fury of the World Eaters, however. Form and technique were difficult to maintain against an enemy that came at you again and again, uncaring of the wounds it sustained, uncaring about anything other than getting the kill; an enemy that would willingly push itself onto your blade if that was what was needed to win. One by one they were ripped apart, hacked down by chainaxe, blade and fury.

The Emperor’s Children killed with precision, their fatal blows delivered with studied poise and perfect balance. Their kills were neat. Those delivered by the World Eaters were anything but.

The last of the Emperor’s Children was choking on blood, lying on his back with Gorechild embedded in his chest. The chainaxe’s motors idled – an angry, guttural growl. The warrior – of centurion rank – tried to speak, perhaps attempting to curse his killer or deliver some final insult. He didn’t get a chance to finish his words.

Without ceremony, Khârn revved Gorechild and its mica-dragon teeth turned into a blur, ripping maniacally at flesh and armour. The Emperor’s Children officer juddered and shook as Gorechild tore him apart, the pitch of its fury escalating as it began to bite into the deck floor.

Khârn cut Gorechild’s motor. He looked up at Dreagher, his snarling, Sarum-pattern helm dripping in blood.

Dreagher fought the urge to drop into a defensive posture.

‘Time to move,’ said Khârn. ‘We take the bridge.’

Dreagher nodded, and the World Eaters broke into a loping run once more.

Argus Brond stepped from the Stormbird. He was immediately surrounded by a scrum of menials and fussing Legion serfs. He waved them away. His armour was battle damaged and sparking, and his expression was as hard as granite. A crust of rust-brown blood was streaked across his face.

The deck was alive with activity. Deck menials clustered around the arriving shuttles and gunships, refuelling empty tanks, reloading ammunition hops, and rolling in grav-trolleys bearing fresh missiles. The dead and wounded were being borne from the dozen shuttles lined up on the deck. Battle-worn legionaries stomped across the grilled deck, heading to the arming bays to replenish ammunition and replace damaged armour plates. None of them was uninjured.

He saw Dreagher’s human medicae officer, Skoral Wroth, directing the operations as the dead and wounded were unloaded by tracked servitors and menials. Plenty of fresh gene-seed to be harvested for Dreagher’s gene-banks, Brond thought darkly.

He heard the roars of a madman, and turned to see the Terminator-armoured figure of Ruokh being lifted away from one of the shuttles by the chains of a mechanised crane traversing along an overhead girder. His armour was a shattered ruin, rent apart by heavy weapons fire and ordnance. It hung off him loosely, sparking servos and leaking cables exposed. His hulking chainfists were crimson – pieces of flesh and congealed blood coated his arms to the elbows. His helm had been ripped away, and he was roaring incoherently. His hairless face was splattered in blood. His mouth was coated in gore – clearly he’d been feasting on the bodies of the fallen.

They’d lost many good legionaries today – too many – yet this ravening berserker survived? Brond shook his head.

Brond’s seneschal, Maven, appeared at his side. He handed the mortal his helm.

‘Khârn,’ he said. ‘Has he returned?’

‘No, my lord,’ said Maven. ‘What happened? Did the Emperor’s Children betray us?’

Brond laughed, and turned away.

Khârn levelled his plasma pistol at the admiral’s face.

‘Do it,’ he said.

‘I will not,’ said the admiral, staring defiantly at Khârn, though sweat was running in rivulets down his face. ‘I defy you, Kh–’

The back of his head exploded, spraying superheated brain matter, blood and retina-searing plasma overflow across the bridge. He toppled back into his command throne where he lay slumped, what matter remained in his brainpan spitting and cooking.

‘You,’ said Khârn, turning his weapon towards the next in command upon the bridge, a wide-eyed lieutenant commander. ‘You do it.’

The officer gaped at him, unable or unwilling to form coherent words.

He joined his commanding officer, collapsing to the deck.

‘Who is next?’ said Khârn.

A flicker in the eyes of a junior officer identified the next in the chain of command, and Khârn turned. His plasma pistol was venting steam from its coils. Had his hand not been encased in ceramite, the scalding would have stripped flesh from bone.

A severe-looking woman with a coiling, embryonic tattoo on her cheek stared at him defiantly. She spat at Khârn’s feet.

‘This one at least shows some spirit,’ he said, as he placed the barrel of his pistol against her forehead. To her credit she did not flinch, though this did not save her from the fate of her superiors. She fell back against her command station, dead, and lay sprawled across its consoles.

Khârn stepped in close to the next officer down the chain of command. He cowered before the World Eater, shying away from him.

‘Will you do as I ask, mortal?’ said Khârn, his voice a growling, intense burr. ‘Or is it your turn to die?’

‘No, lord,’ said the man, shrinking beneath the unblinking gaze of Khârn’s lenses and his own self-loathing. ‘I mean… yes, lord, I will do as you ask.’

‘Then take your place… acting shipmaster,’ said Khârn.

All was silence within the bridge as the man moved across the deck, averting his eyes from the ruin of his commanding officers.

He came to a halt before the command throne, looking aghast at his admiral, sprawled upon the plush leather seat, his head a smoking mess.

He looked around the bridge, eyes wide, but no one stepped forward to help him. He glanced back at Khârn, who was watching him closely, and quickly dropped his gaze. Breathing hard, he tugged at his dead admiral, but could not move him. He began to hyperventilate.

‘It is only dead flesh,’ snapped Dreagher. The man gaped up at him, unmoving. To Dreagher’s disgust, he realised that the man had soiled himself.

Snarling, Dreagher stepped forward and grabbed the dead admiral by the front of his jacket and hurled him aside. The corpse smacked against the far wall with a wet snap, and collapsed to the deck floor, its back twisted unnaturally beneath it.

The newly elevated officer took the command throne gingerly, lowering himself into its embrace as if the leather itself were cursed.

‘Come about to a new heading, shipmaster,’ said Khârn.

‘New heading, aye… sir,’ said the man, nodding.

‘Here,’ said Khârn, jabbing a finger at a point on the holo-display.

‘My lord?’ said the officer, not understanding. ‘That will take us into–’

‘Do not make him repeat himself,’ warned Dreagher. ‘It would not be wise.’

The new shipmaster blinked.

‘But I don’t… I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘You do not need to understand,’ said Dreagher. ‘Just to act. Now.’

The man nodded, and cleared his throat, composing himself. Or at least, composing himself as much as a man who was visibly shaking and sitting in his own filth could. He tapped a sequence upon the control slate hovering before him, marking the coordinates.

‘Come about to new heading,’ he began.

‘Louder,’ snarled Dreagher.

‘Come about to a new heading,’ repeated the officer, raising his voice. ‘Coordinates are marked.’

A visible wave of consternation swept the bridge as the orders were relayed.

Khârn moved towards the master of navigation, hard-wired into the fore of the bridge controls, and levelled his plasma pistol at him. The man was of middling years, and he glared up at Khârn, his expression one of defiance – but also fear.

‘Enact the new heading, Master Fleicher. Please,’ said the shipmaster. ‘That is an order. I do not wish to see any more killing upon the bridge.’

The master of navigation scowled, and for a second Dreagher thought Khârn was going to be forced to shoot him. The man spat onto the floor at Khârn’s feet, then turned to his console.

Dreagher was sure Khârn was going to kill the man then – he was not sure he would have been able to restrain himself in Khârn’s position – but to his surprise, Khârn merely chuckled, turned away and came back to the shipmaster’s side.

‘All power to front shields and engines,’ said Khârn, his voice calm and even, yet oozing menace.

‘All power to the front shields and engines,’ said the officer.

‘All power to front shields and engines, aye!’ came the confirmation shout from the command deck.

The bridge returned to a semblance of normality, with the assigned personnel and officers busying themselves at their allotted tasks. Dreagher shook his head. They were like drones, he thought. Too crippled by fear to act against them, they latched onto their orders like drowning men to a raft. It was pathetic.

They felt the massive cruiser alter its course beneath their feet.

‘We are being hailed,’ said the shipmaster. ‘The fleet wishes to know why we have changed our course.’

‘Ignore them. Shut down your comms,’ said Khârn.

‘We can only hold this trajectory for twelve minutes before we will be locked in the planet’s gravity well,’ said the shipmaster. It seemed to Dreagher that he had regained something of his composure. ‘We will need a new course before then to avoid it.’

‘Understood,’ said Khârn. ‘Is our heading locked in the ship’s cogitators?’

The shipmaster looked over at his master of navigation. The older man nodded curtly.

‘Yes, my lord,’ said the shipmaster.

‘Good,’ said Khârn. He turned to Dreagher. ‘Kill them all.’

The Emperor’s Children fleet looked like a swarm of hornets whose hive had been kicked. Fighters and gunships surrounded the larger ships of the line and cruisers, even as the larger ships rearranged themselves into an attack formation.

A number of World Eaters battleships were advancing into range, Goghur’s flagship leading the charge. Other World Eaters ships hung back.

On the edge of the formation, one ship did not join the others. It refused to respond to the flurry of vox-hails directed towards it, and while the other battleships closed ranks, readying their torpedoes and marking enemy targets, it swung away, its golden-tipped prow angled towards the planet the Emperor’s Children had laid claim to.

Though there was no concept of up or down in the void, the Emperor’s Children fleet was arranged in such a way that all of the ships were lined up together along the same bearing, the icy moon where the World Eaters had attacked them located above and before them, the planet below. To those looking out from oculus portals and view-stations across the III Legion fleet, it looked as though the Golden Absolute was sinking, its prow dropping until it pointed towards the planet. Its powerful plasma engines were firing at full capacity, filling the void behind it with a blue-white sheen.

It wasn’t until the battleship’s prow had pierced the upper glowing atmosphere and it had spewed forth a barrage of drop pods from its upper decks that the fleet realised what was happening; the ship had been commandeered by the enemy, and that they were using the ship as a living weapon against the Emperor’s Children-held world below.

Two dozen torpedoes screamed silently across the gulf of space towards the Golden Absolute, a vain attempt to knock it off its current course, but by then it was too late.

They struck home along the battleship’s unshielded flank, tearing great chunks from its side and laying waste to hundreds of deck-levels within, killing untold thousands, but the ship’s course could not now be altered. Its velocity was accelerating, being pulled in by the planet’s gravity. Its death-plummet was not going to be stopped now.

With awed horror the Emperor’s Children watched as the ship was surrounded in a corona of burning wash, its nose turning a fiery orange and beginning to break apart as the overwhelmed forward shielding gave way to the titanic forces arrayed against it.

The ship plunged down through the upper atmosphere of the planet, burning up as it continued to accelerate on its final, fatal downward trajectory.

One could only imagine the destruction that would be wrought on the planet itself once it hit.

‘Impressive,’ said Brond, watching from the bridge of the Defiant.

‘We received a vox-fragment before it began its descent,’ said the ship’s flag-captain, Stirzaker. ‘The signal came through from Baruda.’

‘The Blood Priest? This is his doing?’ said Brond, gesturing at the Golden Absolute as it continued its death-ride into the unnamed planet the Emperor’s Children had claimed as their own. ‘He brought it down?’

‘The message was unclear,’ said Stirzaker. ‘Vox-jamming and interference. But I believe he was saying that Khârn and Dreagher were on that ship.’

‘That I could believe,’ said Brond. ‘But if that is true, then this is over. No one will survive that impact. Without Khârn to hold us together, the Legion is dead. Turn us away, flag-captain. Let us leave this place while we still can.’

Frustration, disappointment and grief warred across the old flag-captain’s features. Still, he was not one for indecision.

‘Come about to a new heading,’ he said, his voice subdued. ‘Coordinates are as marked.’

‘Come about to a new heading, aye!’ came the cry from the steersman.

‘The time of the Legion is past,’ said Argus Brond. ‘We forge our own path now.’

Chapter 17

Scores of drop pods hurtled down through the haze of the upper atmosphere, falling like burning comets, arcs of fire trailing in their wake.

Behind them the immense bulk of the Golden Absolute plummeted down on its death trajectory. Its golden prow glowed with the fury of atmospheric entry, and bristling sensor arrays and comms turrets were ripped free, trailing off behind it like burning cinders. Born in the void, it was never designed to withstand gravitic pressures, and its integrity was failing, even as it plummeted to its doom.

The drop pods, however, were made for this type of insertion. Nevertheless, the intense build-up of heat made their interiors almost unbearably hot, despite the ablative heat shields and the entry cushion that formed beneath the blunt base of each drop pod. No unprotected human could survive those spiking temperatures, and few would have been able to remain conscious through their powered descent. But then they were not designed to transport unaugmented humans. They were designed for the Legiones Astartes.

Thick, black cloud banks shrouded the world, lit by sporadic bursts of purple-hued chain lightning. Like a meteor shower, the drop pods smashed through the clouds. Burning up, the Golden Absolute followed them down, like a colossal void predator pursuing its prey, uncaringly condemning itself to its doom.

Through shooting rain and blinding lightning arcs the drop pods roared, propelled down in a burning, dazzling display, like the fiery wrath of a primordial god. After a time, their fiery tails dissipated, the burning flames extinguishing as their velocity was slowed by the heavier atmosphere, the intense heat-build starting to bleed off.

Among the bone-bleached city below, flak turrets and missile pods atop tanks painted the purple and gold of the III Legion rotated skywards, tracking their descent. None of them fired – these drop pods were their own.

Twenty kilometres.

Fifteen.

Ten.

Lightning struck, engulfing a dozen or more drop pods in wildly dancing arcs of energy.

Two thousand metres.

Fifteen hundred.

A number of the drop pods struck a series of soaring, ethereal towers that appeared out of the rain, rising like spear tips from below. Some were destroyed in the impacts, while others became embedded in stone, or ricocheted wildly, spinning end over end to fall, their descent uncontrolled, to their doom.

Others continued on their downward arcs unimpeded, retro-burners firing to slow their rapid descent. They came down hard, spread across a dispersal zone thirty kilometres across. When they hit, they hit hard, slamming down with bone-jarring force, cracking the coral-like stone beneath them, or smashing through thinner layers of bone-like lattice, and coming to rest, finally, several levels below ground.

The armoured sides of the drop pods, still smoking and charred from re-entry, burst open like the petals of some deadly, death world flora.

Emperor’s Children – those last warriors who remained on the Golden Absolute and had managed to reach the drop pod bays before the ship began its fatal dive – emerged from some.

The vast majority of them, however, were empty, released as decoys.

Dreagher emerged from one. Baruda, Khârn and half a dozen other World Eaters were with him. The blood on their armour began to run, washing away in the heavy rain pouring from the heavens.

The World Eaters clambered atop a pile of pale rubble and looked out across the vista spread before them, the darkness lit by near constant lightning strikes.

A vast, crumbling city rolled out as far as Dreagher’s enhanced vision allowed. Its structures were too tall, too slender, too otherworldly to have ever been conceived by a human mind. No Terran-based technology existed to be able to create such buildings.

Inconceivably narrow, soaring towers speared skyward, each of them connected by a crystalline interlacement of delicate walkways, bridges, flyovers. It seemed impossible that these towers could bear their own weight without buckling, so fragile did they appear, yet there was an undeniable strength to them. Whatever material they were made from was clearly far stronger than any alloy that mankind had ever been able to forge. It appeared more akin to a blend of bone and crystal than to stone or metal, but it was clearly not brittle, else it would have shattered like glass beneath the smoking drop pod they had emerged from.

The rubble underfoot was bleeding. Where it was shattered, Dreagher saw that it leaked a pale, milky fluid. While the exterior of the xenos material was like crystallised bone, its centre was organic, something akin to bone marrow.

As he watched, awed by the spectacle, the immensity of the Golden Absolute emerged from the cloud banks overhead, ploughing straight down in eerie silence. Seeing it against the backdrop of the xenos corpse-city made it seem even more enormous, almost unfathomably so. In the vast emptiness of the void it was hard to comprehend the scale of cruisers and battleships, yet here, seeing it on an earthly scale, its immensity was frankly ludicrous. Nigh on five kilometres from gleaming prow to stern, it had not even fully emerged from the cloud bank, like some titanic leviathan of myth, when it hit the ground.

In silence, absolute silence – the deafening sound of its death would not reach the World Eaters for long seconds – it ploughed down, its own mountainous weight driving it on.

A huge cloud rose from the impact, seemingly in slow motion, before the first rumble began to shake the ground. The stern of the great ship finally emerged from the cloud cover, its vast plasma engines still screaming, trailing white-blue fire as they powered the ship down with colossal force.

The shock wave of the ship’s impact radiated outwards, causing earth-tremors and structural collapse in all directions.

Almost a full kilometre of the Golden Absolute’s prow was embedded in the planet’s surface below the towering xenos city when its downward trajectory was finally halted, and it began to tip, shattering towers and bridges beneath its bulk as if they were crystal.

The World Eaters watched the Emperor’s Children battleship die. Their vision darkened momentarily as the ship’s plasma reactor went critical, detonating with a blinding flash that lit up the darkness, dispelling the gloom and lighting up the alien city in cold white-blue light. Nothing within the radius of the vast detonation would have survived. Even at their distance, the air rippled with heat shimmer around Dreagher and the other World Eaters, and the atmosphere around them was filled with steam as the rain was burned off.

The blinding white light of the dying plasma reactor dimmed fractionally, so that with the protective photolenses of their helms, the World Eaters were able to look towards it once more.

The light bleeding from it banished the darkness, casting everything in an unkind, harsh white light.

In that light, it was possible to see the bustling activity on the ground. It was like an ants’ nest that had been kicked: Emperor’s Children overran the city, swarming forth from the cavernous depths below.

Convoys of armour – tanks, super-heavies and APCs – rolled along narrow streets and boulevards, crossing arched bridge-ways and colonnades. Alongside them marched columns of infantry, thousands strong. Hulking Contemptor Dreadnoughts strode alongside phalanxes of legionaries, and larger mechanical constructs walked; tainted Knights of some fallen household, ten-metre giants armoured in void shields and ceramite, and larger still, Titan war engines that sent up ululating cries from their war-horns at the death of the Golden Absolute.

‘Connect me to the Defiant,’ said Khârn. ‘I want my words to be heard by the whole Legion.’

All across the fleet, the World Eaters stopped to listen to the address of their primarch’s former equerry. His voice echoed through the corridors and chambers of every ship, from the lowest sump depths, where the inbred, indentured labourers dwelt in darkness, to the bridge and cells of every vessel. There was not a World Eater, nor one of their mortal servants, who did not hear his words.

‘Warriors of the Twelfth Legion. This is Khârn.’

In the Caedere cells, Ruokh hung in silence, returned – for now – to a semblance of lucidity. The massive figure of Jareg stood before him, his multi-articulated servo-arms and mechadendrites drilling freshly repaired armour plates to his massive frame. He paused, listening to Khârn’s words.

‘We are the Twelfth Legion. We are the sons of Angron. Our fate is not to dwindle, to be slowly snuffed out in the darkness, alone and divided. Our fate is to live and die as one Legion.’

Skoral halted in her work, looking up from the wounded legionary she was patching up, listening to Khârn’s voice echoing through the cavernous decks of the Defiant.

‘I say we take this world that the Third Legion claims as their own. I say we descend on it and take the skull of every Third Legion whoreson who would stand against us.’

On the bridge of the Defiant, Argus Brond listened intently, hand held up to forestall the order to leave the system. Already, those World Eaters ships that had turned to leave the system were swinging around, angling towards the signal. Those nearest the world were already preparing launch tubes and drop ships, ready to send the Legion down to Khârn, to join him.

‘I claim this world in the name of Twelfth Legion, and I name it… Skalathrax.’

About the Author

Anthony Reynolds is the author of the Horus Heresy novella The Purge, audio drama Khârn: The Eightfold Path and short stories ‘Scions of the Storm’ and ‘Dark Heart’. In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, he has written the novel Khârn: Eater of Worlds, alongside the audio drama Chosen of Khorne, also featuring Khârn. He has also penned the Word Bearers trilogy and many short stories. Hailing from Australia, he is currently settled on the west coast of the United States.

When Horus fell, his Sons fell with him. A broken Legion, beset by rivalries and hunted by their erstwhile allies, the former Luna Wolves have scattered across the tortured realm of the Eye of Terror.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Cover illustration by Nacho Molina.
Internal illustrations by Sam Lamont, John Michelbach and Adrian Smith.

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ISBN: 978-1-78251-847-1

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