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.

Prologue

These Words, These Lies

Grimaldus. They lied to us about the Mannheim Gap. They sent us there to die.

You know of whom I speak. We cannot outrun the echoes of Khattar. We pay the price now for our virtue in the past.

We are sons of Dorn and we know nothing of surrender, even when victory is out of reach. What concerns us is injustice. Ignominy. If we could be said to fear anything, it is the shame of our legacy being fouled by lies.

And if the Imperium remembers us at all, it will be as one of mankind’s most grievous failures. But we have not failed mankind; mankind has failed itself. The bitter hearts and closed minds of weak men and women will see us dead before dawn.

So be it.

Our enemies do not move in the light, where they run the risk of facing our blades. Nor are they truly in the shadows, but they occupy positions of power so far above us in the hierarchy of man that exact identities become meaningless. They have the power and influence to deceive us, and deceive us they did.

The Celestial Lions will never leave this world. A handful of us remain, but we know the truth. We died at the Mannheim Gap. We died the day the sun rose over the scrap-iron bodies of alien gods.

I

Season of Fire

We were warned, as if we needed warning, not to go out into the storm. The air was already severe enough to scald unprotected flesh, and while our armour offered a shield against the elements, it wouldn’t protect us for long. All trace of our sacred colours was already flayed away by the gritty wind, leaving us clad in gunmetal grey, stripped of paint and heraldry. I wondered, just briefly, if there was a metaphor in that moment. If so, it remained for one of keener humour to uncover.

The downed gunship was a beached, smashed memory of a thing, all lethality stolen by the savagery of its crash landing. In contrast, the Valkyrie we had acquired from the 101st Steel Legion sat hunched on the sands, a bored crow with its curved wings spread wide. I’d had cause to use this vehicle many times in the past month, and I could not dissuade myself of the notion that its machine-spirit despised me. If gunships could scowl, that one most certainly did. I looked back at it, its turbine engines still howling impatiently, its grey-green hull being abraded to dull silver by the desert wind. I could hear just how little the engines enjoyed eating this dust.

The pilot was a uniformed blur behind the scratched windshield. He had volunteered for this mission, despite its risks. I admired him for it.

The weeks since my convalescence had passed slowly. I was coming to believe I would never be wholly comfortable with the humans’ regard. The people of Helsreach looked upon me as some kind of icon, purely for the virtue of doing my duty. Why did it make me uncomfortable? There are a hundred difficult answers to that. We of the Adeptus Astartes are a breed apart from the humans we might have been. Let that be enough of an explanation.

I turned back to the downed Storm Eagle. Whatever colours it had borne into battle were long gone, stolen by the storm. Its symbols of allegiance were similarly eroded by the ash and dirt in the turbulent air.

Cyneric ducked under the slanted wing, one side of his armour still black in patches where it hadn’t yet faced the storm. In his left hand, an auspex scanner sputtered and clicked, murdered by the storm’s interference. He said nothing, which was answer enough.

I climbed the rolled hull, braced against the wind by the magnetic locks on the bottom of my boots. The last oath-scroll on my armour was ripped away. I let the wind steal it, to take my inscribed Litanies of Hate into the storm. It felt curiously apt.

The bulkhead was sealed from within. I drew my crozius maul, and heard its energy field buzzing against the grit in the air. It took a single blow, with the sound of a muted belltower, and the bulkhead was gone. I hauled the mangled door free with one hand, and cast it down to the ground. Cyneric still said nothing. It was a habit I liked to encourage.

The interior of the crashed Storm Eagle was set at a stark angle, with equipment crates and loose weapons scattered across the confined crew bay. The cockpit was no better, but what the reinforced visor screen hid from the outside was revealed at once: a lone Space Marine, clad in burnished gold, lying in ungainly repose where the deck met the weapon-racked walls. I knew those colours. I knew the Chapter’s heraldry.

What I didn’t know was what this gunship was doing all the way out here, so far from Hive Volcanus.

Cyneric dropped down behind me, the chains binding his weapons to his armour rattling in sympathy to his movements. I heard his breathing over the squad’s vox link, then came the curse, as he saw what I saw.

‘It is the Lions,’ he said.

It was just one Lion. The pilot. And from the faint signs of darkening decay in evidence once I removed his azure helm, he was several days dead. None of this made sense.

Before I rose, I pressed my rosarius amulet to the dead warrior’s forehead. Cyneric questioned this. Why offer the Lion these last rites? Was he not of another Chapter?

It was not disrespectful to question my actions. It was his duty. He must learn what I do and why I did it.

As I stood again, I asked Cyneric why he objected to this salute of a fallen warrior’s soul.

‘Because he is not a knight,’ he told me. ‘The Lion was not one of us.’

I had used the very same reasons myself, often enough. Even with the noble Salamanders, not so long ago. Yet there were exceptions.

‘He does not wear the cross of our calling,’ I admitted, ‘but he was Dorn’s son, as surely as we are. Bloodlines reach beyond Chapter heraldry, Cyneric.’

‘Forgive me, master.’

‘Forgiveness is irrelevant. There is nothing to forgive.’

Cyneric had only served at my side for three weeks, and still felt the weight of tradition and expectation that comes with the chance of bearing a skull helm. It would be my choice whether to admit him into the sacred mysteries of the Chapter cult; he would be a Chaplain at my command, or he would return to the rank and file.

Cyneric was my Lord Helbrecht’s idea. Conversely, going out to the gunship was my decision. I could never abide mysteries.

Mag-locked to the dead warrior’s belt was a hololithic imagifier the size of a human fist. Once freed and activated, it gave rise to a flickering blue image – the ghost of another warrior in another city – wearing the heraldry of the Celestial Lions and carrying a skull-faced helm beneath one arm. Despite the wraithly image, I could see that the warrior’s face was black, the black of birth on a distant jungle world. By contrast, my flesh was as white as veined marble. I had no clear memory of childhood. All I recalled of my pre-initiation infancy was howling white wind and the bite of frost on the fingers.

‘Julkhara,’ I greeted the hololithic ghost.

‘Grimaldus,’ it said, and its voice wavered the same way as the image itself. ‘They lied to us about the Mannheim Gap. They sent us there to die.’

As the recording finished in a spurt of flawed electrics, I heard the storm waiting for us outside. It was getting harder, heavier, surely more abrasive. The Imperial Guard gunship we had acquired would never make it back to the city if the weather worsened any further. This venture had already been delayed by several days, until an adequate break in the storm front.

‘Master,’ Cyneric said.

I sensed the questions coming and warded them away with a shake of my head. None of this made sense. I needed time to think.

Without a word, we emerged back into the fiercening wind, moving to the Valkyrie. Its troop bay was an orderly mess of untouched crew seats, too small for either Cyneric or myself in our armour.

‘Orders, Reclusiarch?’ came the pilot’s voice from the cockpit. The gunship jolted beneath our boots, already rising into the sky. The wind was merciless, it would be a turbulent ride home.

‘Back to the city.’

The city. My city. Helsreach, the hive that claimed me as its champion; the city that changed how I see my own oath of service. We are Templars, and we attack, we advance, as the last proud knights of the Great Crusade. But we were crusading for the right of mankind to exist. Our wrath must be pure, else it is worthless and futile. We are judged in life for more than the evil we destroy. We are judged for what virtues we represent, for the ideals that lie behind our blades.

I had thought I would die on this world. I was certain of it, until the very moment death came for me. The enemy entombed me beneath the fallen Temple of the Emperor Ascendant, doing me the honour of a cairn while I still drew breath. Weeks after my recovery, I thought of it in the quiet hours of each day: the privilege of such a sacred tombstone. It was almost a shame to survive.

But Armageddon didn’t kill me. We would leave the world soon – in three days I would sail with the High Marshal aboard the Eternal Crusader, back to war. The wounded hive I was sworn to defend had granted me its relics, and I would take them with me as we waged war across the stars.

Caution brought us in low over Helsreach. Several of the city’s districts were still in the hands of the mongrel invaders, and although the Season of Fire had forced an unwelcome cessation of hostilities, there were nonetheless forces from both sides willing to risk the breaks between dust monsoons in the hopes of bleeding their entrenched foes. Anti-air rockets were a cursed hope in the wind, but they still spat skywards at our gunships and supply landers with irritating frequency.

I heard the city-wide sirens even before we were over the fallen outer walls – another storm warning, wailing of worse to come.

Helsreach itself no longer existed as anything more than a battlefield. We had killed the city while fighting to save it. Its skyline was an amputated thing of cleaved towers and – in the rare hours the wind died down – pillars of black smoke. The central spire – modest by the standards of many hives – still stood despite extensive shelling from both sides, now home to huddled masses of stinking alien invaders taking shelter from the storms.

The true city that spread around the spire’s foundations was a flattened ruin. Of the millions that had lived there a year before, perhaps a quarter yet drew breath. Most were holed up in underground bunkers, or in what precious few intact districts were still warded by the steel ring of Guard armour battalions. The city had been reinforced by huge numbers of fresh Guard soldiers, just in time to linger in a seasonal deadlock. Tens of thousands of rifles going unfired.

The pilot took us through the stumps of shattered buildings, veering between fallen habitation blocks to minimise the risk of enemy sky-fire. It also shielded us from the worst of the wind, calming the Valkyrie’s judders.

Soon enough, we cut over the corpse of Stormherald, reduced to a collapsed castle of scrap and slag, spread across two city blocks. The wind had scored away all sign of Imperial loyalty upon its armour plating, and the wrecked spires of its shoulder battlements were too ruined to speak of any gothic majesty. Salvaged metal alien effigies resisted the storm – iron war banners erected by whatever foul clan flooded aboard the downed Titan at the end of its proud life.

We passed overhead, over this monument to defiance in the face of failure, and I thought of Zarha, the Crone of Invigilata, whose mangled remains lay there still. She would be rotting in the cold fluid of her life support cradle, unburied and unblessed. That injustice grieved me. Would that I could have done something to change it, but Stormherald’s corpse lay deep in enemy-held territory.

Cyneric stood with me in the troop bay, watching the city roll below from the open bay door.

‘By forcing the gunship out into these storms, do we abuse its machine-spirit?’

The philosophy of biomechanical life was not beyond me, but I needed Cyneric’s mind on more relevant matters.

‘Focus,’ I told him, and his reply was a curt nod. He was learning.

We touched down on the Kruja-17-SEC landing platform – a barricaded and bunkered landing pad built over the broken straits of Hel’s Highway’s westernmost run. Baneblades and multiple patterns of Leman Russ front-line tanks sat in the storm, scratched bare by the wind. As the ramp slammed down, Cyneric walked away first, out into the wind and towards the closest entrance to the flakboarded forward command bunker.

The sky was black with ash and the promise of a vicious night at the mercy of the coming storm. I hesitated, looking back to the pilot, but he was already unbuckled and throwing on his environment suit for the short run to the bunker. Three months before, instinct wouldn’t have told me to look back. If nothing else, I thank this world for the lessons I have learned while walking its surface.

Organised chaos reigned in the command bunker. Against the walls, cogitators, auspex relays and vox-engines clicked, ticked and pulsed. Humans scattered before us in the screen-lit darkness. Several saluted, not yet shaken from the habit; their signs of formality and respect were meaningless to me.

‘I require a clean vox link to the Eternal Crusader.’

Officers and technicians scurried to obey. Contact with the ships in orbit was sporadic at best, and contact with the other cities was relayed through the fleet in the rare hours it functioned at all. The planetary satellite network, and the convenience of communication it brought, was naught but a memory.

One of the tech officers saluted as she came before me. ‘We have a link, Reclusiarch. It should hold until the storm breaks.’

‘My thanks.’ A moment’s attention activated my helm’s own vox-reader, scanning for uncorrupted local channels. Icons flashed and chimed on the left edge of my retinal display. Three of them flickered red, then settled green.

‘Reclusiarch,’ came a voice half-killed by vox crackle – one of the countless Chapter serf bridge crew aboard the flagship. ‘I live to serve.’

‘I require four tasks completed within the hour. First, you are to make contact with every vessel of the Celestial Lions Chapter still in orbit – I need a full accounting of their war fleet. Second, contact whatever command structure remains in place at Hive Volcanus and acquire a detailed report of every Adeptus Astartes casualty in that region since the war’s commencement. Third, Cyneric and I need a gunship to return us to the Eternal Crusader. If the storm hits before you are able to arrange it, we will risk teleportation.’

‘Your will be done, Reclusiarch. And the fourth order?’

I had to be careful.

‘Make contact with the ranking officer of the Celestial Lions, garrisoned at Hive Volcanus. The transmission will be monitored, no matter what encryption processes we run. Record the following message, deliver it, and say nothing more.’

‘As you command. The message, Reclusiarch?’

‘Only six words. “No pity. No remorse. No fear”.’

II

High Marshal

Ten thousand years ago.

So many of our stories begin with those words. Ten thousand years ago, when the Chapters were Legions. Ten thousand years ago, when the Emperor’s sons walked the stars. Ten thousand years ago when the galaxy caught fire, as though it hadn’t been burning ever since.

The Adeptus Astartes are the keepers of the oldest lore, and even among our archives so much has been lost. Truth twists and warps over time, as the stories change to reflect the reader’s vision. Whole swathes of the galaxy know nothing of the Heresy and the Crusade before it. Thousands of worlds pray to the Emperor not as a man, but as a god or a spirit; a warrior-avatar; a benevolent entity beyond the grave; a seasonal avatar that brings annual floods and commands the sun to rise each dawn.

Each time I return to the flagship, I find myself dwelling on the nature of truth. Our archives are among the purest in the Imperium, but even they are little more than fragments of what happened. Our reverence isn’t reserved for scripture and story. When the words ten thousand years ago stir the blood of any Templar, it is not because of the scrolls and holorecords we have preserved through the generations. It is because of vessels like the Eternal Crusader.

She sailed the stars ten thousand years ago, fighting in the wars that forged our species. We walk in the footsteps of those ancient knights of the Great Crusade. We command the same vessel, train in the same chambers and bring the same wrath. When so many words have been lost, this is a truth we can cling to.

I thought all of this again that day, as Cyneric followed me from the landing bay. I could sense his uneasiness at the respect we were both shown, as well. When I had been a Chaplain, Chapter serfs would salute me. As Reclusiarch, they showed much greater reverence. We allowed our serfs to carry ceremonial weapons of their own – usually unpowered blades and daggers. They drew their swords and knelt, head down against the reversed hilt. When we passed other Templars in the dim corridors, they did not make the sign of the aquila. They crossed forearms, banging their fists to their breastplates, forming the crusader’s cross.

Cyneric was still silent when we walked alone. He wasn’t used to his equals showing him such elevated respect.

‘The discomfort passes,’ I told him. This was both true and untrue. My liege Helbrecht had told me it passed, and he was a warrior who would die before speaking a lie. The discomfort had not yet passed for me, but I trusted my lord’s assurance.

The Eternal Crusader is a fortress in the void; it would take months to traverse if one walked every hallway and chamber. I led Cyneric through the corridors, taking the grinding elevators between decks, heedless of whether we moved through populated areas or not. My targeting reticule leapt from door to door, figure to figure, scrolling with biometric data and basic scanning lore. As we stood on one of the ascension platforms, rising up through the decks, I turned to regard Cyneric’s plain, scarred features and a thought occurred to me. To my shame, it was one that should have occurred to me much earlier.

‘Put your helmet back on.’

He hesitated before obeying, from surprise rather than disobedience. As it clicked into place at his collar seals, he looked back at me through the red eye-lenses of a stylised, riveted Mark VI Corvus helm. The question was within the gaze. I offered him the answer.

‘You may remove it with the Chapter’s lord-commanders, but never with your other brethren. You are no longer you, Cyneric. A Chaplain is the Chapter’s history and its future, manifest in one man. Your features must be the deathmask of the Emperor.’ I tapped the gaunt cheekbones of my helm’s silver skull faceplate. ‘Your brothers must forget your face, as they have forgotten mine.’

Cyneric nodded, though I sensed he was not convinced. He knew he must use these months to prove he deserved a skull helm, but the logic of my order escaped him. After all, his helm’s faceplate was not the visage of immortal death I wear. Not yet, at least.

I could have replied to his doubt by reciting a cold truth: that he still wore the helm of an Adeptus Astartes warrior, one of the Emperor’s genetic descendants, and the galaxy was conquered by millions of those emotionless, impersonal masks in the era we sought to embody. If he lacked a skull helm, his warrior’s visage was almost as appropriate.

But there was a time to preach, and a time to teach.

‘Cyneric,’ I replied. ‘Behave as if you already carry the responsibilities you seek to earn.’

Another nod, less hesitant and more satisfied.

As we walked down a thoroughfare hallway, doing our mutual best to ignore the obeisance we were both shown by the human thralls, I added another warning over a shared vox channel.

‘When we stand before the High Marshal, do not meet his eyes.’

More confusion. ‘Master?’ Cyneric voxed back.

‘Just trust me.’

He waited for us in the Chamber of the First Proclamation, more often known as Sigismund’s Hall. Legend tells us it was there that the first High Marshal of the Black Templars stood with the brothers who would become the first Chapter lords, looking out over the battlefield known as the Iron Cage, and swore that the Great Crusade would go on, no matter what wounds the Imperium still bore. The other Legions were free to protect mankind’s domain, bearing no shame for their decision. But Sigismund’s Imperial Fists would darken their armour for the battles to come, and continue their charge to carry the Emperor’s message out into the void. They would not defend. They would attack. And so were born the Black Templars, the only warriors for whom the Great Crusade never ended.

Alien worlds and long-dead warriors were portrayed in paintings – each one a masterpiece rendered by a different hand – lining the dark iron walls. The statue of Sigismund himself stood as eternal guardian, flanked by sculptures of our Chapter’s original marshals and castellans. Each of these bronze warriors was stained green with the patina of time, but lifted a defiant blade to the age-greyed banners hanging from the arched, gothic ceiling.

Their armour was archaic: rough, overlapping plates in a style rarely seen even among the true successors to the Legion: those noble Chapters of the Second Founding. Outdated helmet crests marked these legendary warriors apart from those of us who had taken their place ten millennia later. One could not help but feel judged, and to wonder if we bore their legacy with the same honour they displayed in life.

The entire hall smelled of dust and the stately, stale parchment scent of old memory. At the far end awaited Helbrecht.

My liege is a man of great resolve, but equally great sorrows. His humours have ever tended towards the melancholic – not from introspection or emotion, but from ambition and devotion. His duty is never done. He cares nothing for personal glory, displays no overt offering of emotion, and spends every second of his life upon the Eternal Crusade. I have never once seen him display any emotion beyond the faintest smile, during the decades of calculated planning; the acid anger of the battlefield; and the cold rage that always follows a fight. He does not feel emotion as other sentient beings. He has mastered it.

His face is a cartographic map of wars won and scars suffered in the name of humanity’s dead messiah-king. His voice is unspeakably controlled, impossibly soulful. He has seen more blood, fire, iron and hatred in life than almost any man or woman still drawing breath.

That day, he greeted me by name; one of the few among the Chapter with the rank to do so. Cyneric, he called ‘Brother-Initiate’, and offered a nod in the younger warrior’s direction. Both of us knelt before our lord, as tradition states when first entering his presence. I prayed Cyneric had heeded my words and avoided our liege lord’s eyes.

I remember thinking, so clearly, He is warfare given human form. No other words could describe him so completely. Armour of black and gold marked him out from the rank and file, not for exaltation but so he drew the enemy’s eyes and ire. When Helbrecht pulled steel, he wanted to be seen. My lord was always the first in the fight, at the centre of the front line.

His red cloak was a brown rag, scarcely clinging to his battered, cracked war-plate. Blood had dried across his armour in rainspray flecks, doubtless in patterns of mystical relevance to the alien soothsayers and shamans among the tribes we were butchering on the surface. His bionic arm was bared, the mechanical servos and clicking pistons doing their visible work through damaged portions of his armour. No desire had ever driven him to sheathe the limb in synthetic skin. Such meaningless cosmetic detail would never enter his mind.

‘Sire,’ I greeted him. Reaching up, I disengaged my helmet’s seals, pulling it free to fully taste the antique air of the chamber. The Sword of the High Marshals descended to aim at my throat. My lips brushed the proffered blade in knightly obeisance, the traditional kiss to confirm one’s loyalty to the Chapter and its lord-commander.

Next to me, a moment later, Cyneric did the same.

‘Rise,’ Helbrecht told us. He sheathed the blade at his hip – the blade that, if legend is true, was reforged from shards of our primarch’s own sword. We rose as bid.

‘Speak, Merek,’ said my lord.

Cyneric tensed at the use of my first name.

Instead of speaking, I produced a handheld holorecorder. It projected a life-size avatar of light, an Adeptus Astartes warrior addressing all three of us.

‘Grimaldus,’ it said. ‘They lied to us about the Mannheim Gap. They sent us there to die.’

Helbrecht was silent after the message ran its course. He looked into the space where Julkhara’s image had stood moments before and spoken of the basest treachery.

‘Could this recording have been manipulated or falsified?’ He didn’t mean doctored by the enemy. The greenskin xenos were far too crude for such subtle measures.

I shook my head. ‘The traitors Julkhara spoke of would profit nothing by such a message. I believe it to be true.’

‘As do I.’ Helbrecht turned back to me. ‘What is it you wish, Grimaldus?’

‘I am still seeking to establish contact with the Celestial Lions and take stock of their losses.’

‘And you intend to destroy those who have betrayed them.’

‘I doubt that will be possible, sire. No matter how much it appeals to me.’

Helbrecht looked to the statue of Sigismund, resting his hand on the pommel of his sheathed sword. The bronze replica of the First High Marshal carried the same sword, rendered there in the same bronze as the statue itself. Sigismund stood with the blade drawn, aiming it at the wide windows, at the world that turned and burned below.

‘You risk dragging the Chapter into direct conflict with the Inquisition.’

There was no denying it. ‘Yes, sire.’

‘I do not fear that conflict, Grimaldus. Injustice must be opposed. Impurity must be purged. But the Eternal Crusader sets sail in three days, my brother. The warlord has fled from Armageddon and our first duty must be to hunt him down.’

I had expected that. ‘Then leave me behind.’

For the first time I could recall, surprise crossed my liege lord’s scarred features. ‘You, who were so reluctant to fight on this world, now plead to stay?’

The irony was not lost on me. ‘I can leave on another ship, sire. The Virtue of Kings will remain with the remnants of Amalrich’s fighting company. If I survive, I will travel with them.’

‘I lose my Reclusiarch, either way.’

‘Then promote another. The Eternal Crusade will continue without me, Helbrecht.’

It was strange to see him like that, caught between the purity of a war against external enemies, and a just war against an internal foe. He would fight both, if he could. The alien king’s death, however, took priority over all else.

‘You have been up here,’ I said, as he still looked above at the towering statue, ‘fighting the xenos in orbit. You have seen the void war with your own eyes. Tell me the reports of Celestial Lions fleet losses are wrong, sire.’

Helbrecht turned, regarding me with eyes far too old for even his war-weathered, time-cracked face.

‘The reports are true.’

It was my turn to look through the great window, at the world slowly rolling below, as Helbrecht continued. ‘They have been with us, side by side, in almost every engagement. As we speak, they have but three vessels remaining.’

‘That cannot be.’

My voice was cold, but my blood ran hot enough to boil. We were speaking of the death of an entire Chapter. ‘How can they have sustained such losses?’

My liege has never been a man prone to even flashes of humour. He took a breath that could not quite be called a sigh. This war had enraged and wearied him in equal measure, and now the final blow was ready to fall; I brought him the threat of another delay.

‘Their devastation is the principal reason I believe your concerns are valid,’ he said. ‘You know the ebb and flow of void war: the endless relay of orders; the voices in the murk; the shouting above cannonfire and the thundering flames of structural damage. Hundreds and hundreds of ships moving in every imaginable angle – firing, ramming, crashing, dying. Facts and fiction twine together.’

But Helbrecht was a void commander without parallel. That was why he had been chosen to oversee the Imperium’s forces in orbit. I knew his words were not an excuse for a personal failing. Unfortunately, neither were they an apology for him consigning me to Helsreach with the wider war taking place up here. I was no longer bitter about it, merely regretful at the moments of brotherhood I missed.

‘I know,’ I nodded.

‘The Lions have fought well,’ he allowed. ‘I would never cast aspersions on their fighting character. Their straits have arisen from apparent ill fortune: orders given but never received, or too slowly answered. We have had many reports of vox breakage and orders never reaching their warship’s captains. Much of it reeks of enemy guile.’

I had to hear this. ‘Tell me.’

‘The battle-barge Serenkai was boarded and overwhelmed when it pulled free of our spearhead, failing to heed orders to maintain formation. The cruiser Lavi took four hours to die from structural haemorrhage when it collided with the wounded Flesh Tearers flagship Victus. The Nubica destroyed itself when it was boarded, choosing sacrifice over capture.’

He listed another dozen ships, another dozen deaths. My teeth clenched harder with each name.

‘It is difficult,’ he finished, ‘to know what events were born of sabotage or treachery, rather than honest battle. It has been eventful in Armageddon’s skies, brother. And those who might have borne closer witness are in their graves. If the Inquisition moves against the Lions, it is doing so with a tenacity and subtlety I have rarely seen from its agents.’

‘Nevertheless, we are left with a Chapter devoid of its fleet, with its remnants annihilated on the surface.’

Helbrecht closed his eyes, musing in solemn silence for several beats of my heart. When they opened again, all doubt was banished. This was how he always acted, and I admired him greatly for it. A man of action, not reaction. He attacked, always attacked.

‘Justice calls to us,’ he said.

A Chaplain should not smile, for we are avatars of morbid rituals and righteous death in battle. I could not help it. My blood caught fire with his words, the way it does in those holiest of moments: when he declares a Crusade.

‘At the very least, we must learn the truth of this matter,’ he said, and both Cyneric and I were already making the crusader’s cross over our breastplates.

‘As you say, sire.’

‘Go to Hive Volcanus,’ he told us. ‘The bulk of the Chapter must sail in three days, Grimaldus. The Old Man requires it, and the arch-warlord responsible for Armageddon cannot be allowed to flee from our grasp, for retribution calls as loud as justice. We cannot commit the Templars to the field again and endure another week or more of recovery, rearming and resupply. But make planetfall and learn the truth of what happened down there. If the Lions are destined to die, I would hear the truth of their tale before it is too late.’

‘It will be done.’

‘I have no doubt.’

He did not ask me if three days would be enough. There was no choice: it had to be enough. ‘Do you require more knights?’

I glanced to Cyneric. ‘No, my liege. Not yet.’

‘Good, for we have few to spare. Three days,’ he said again. ‘Go. Cut to the truth and cry it to the sky.’

Cyneric was silent as we left. His quiet was actually a disquiet: a silence born of words unspoken, rather than a need to say nothing at all. Few human serfs walked those austere decks, but both of our helmets clicked back into place. My vision was washed with red-tinted target locks and streaming bio-data.

‘You looked into his eyes.’ It was not a question.

Cyneric nodded. ‘I did.’

‘I warned you not to.’

He nodded again. ‘You did.’

I knew what he was feeling. He felt as I always did before the statues of our Chapter’s legendary forefathers. He had passed beneath Judgement Incarnate. How best to explain this to him?

‘Our liege has seen everything the galaxy can offer, on both sides of reality’s veil. He has killed every enemy imaginable and has stood in the ranks of countless Crusades. And he is not a subtle man. He wears his victories and defeats as plainly displayed as any scar. You feel as if your worth was being weighed, and that is only right. He was measuring you, as he measures everything and everyone that falls beneath his gaze. Helbrecht has old, keen eyes that see right into a warrior’s heart. I do not know him well, for no one outside his Sword Brethren can claim to know our lord well, but trust me when I say he did not find you wanting, Cyneric.’

Cyneric mused on this as we walked through the dark halls. ‘Never have I felt more judged than when my eyes met his.’

‘He is the heir of Sigismund and the avatar of the Eternal Crusade. It is right to doubt you will ever live up to his life’s legacy, just as it is right to be inspired by him in the same breath. High Marshal Helbrecht finds you worthy. You are with me now on our lord’s wishes. He asked that I judge you for initiation into the Chaplain Brotherhood.’

I heard the servos purr in Cyneric’s neck as he turned to regard me. ‘You did not request me yourself?’

The very idea.

‘No, Cyneric. I did not.’

‘It was spoken among the brethren that you were seeking to rebuild your command squad.’

Artarion. Priamus. Cador. Nerovar. Bastilan.

‘Then it was spoken wrong,’ I replied. ‘Let that be the end of it, Cyneric.’

III

The Last Officer

The Codex Astartes – at least, the Eternal Crusader’s incomplete copy of that ancient text – detailed several thousand logistical concerns in the preparation, establishment and fortification of an Adeptus Astartes firebase. Humanity did not invest so much into us in order that we should grind frontline to frontline in protracted theatres of war – that is the purview of the Imperial Guard. The Adeptus Astartes are the falling hammer, the spear to the vitals, striking and withdrawing with the force of a killing thrust to the heart.

But no plan survives contact with the enemy. Fortification and digging in during extensive worldwide Crusades are a necessity of the wars we fight. While the Templars may not cling to the Codex Astartes with a tenacity bordering on worship of holy scripture, it is still the most comprehensive treatise on Space Marine warfare ever written, penned by the hand of the Emperor’s own son, Lord Guilliman of Macragge. Its value is immeasurable to any commander, no matter what divergences are found in a Chapter’s culture.

It is said that no complete copies still exist in the Dark Millennium. Even the original document’s origins are shrouded in more myth than truth. No records even exist as to whether Lord Guilliman wrote the Codex by hand across several dozen tomes, dictated it to nuncio-processors and servitor scribes, or compiled it himself into a hololithic library.

There it is again, of course. Ten thousand years ago, when we were not forced to rely on flawed records and fractured accounts.

The Season of Fire raged hottest and hardest on Armageddon Secundus, the easternmost landmass, where Hive Helsreach and its sister cities drowned in the storms of dust. On the west coast of the continent Armageddon Prime, Hive Volcanus was still besieged by the enemy and the winds were more often free of the burning sand and ash that so blighted the other side of the world.

The Celestial Lions firebase was atop a natural rise in the landscape, supremely defensible, with great battlements and sacred statuary of fallen heroes staring down at any who would dare bring the fight to those dark walls. Turret-defended bunkers within the compound sat beneath barricaded landing pads, which in turn stood above repair foundries, vehicle garages and arming barracks.

The whole site was already in ruin. We heard Volcanus on the wind, as the wind brought the faint sounds of battle from kilometres away.

Walking through the ruined structures, I almost expected to see corpses. The attackers were long gone, and those that died here had been given over to funeral pyres outside the walls weeks ago. Three Thunderhawks, sandblasted but still golden, rested on the northern landing platforms. Along the edge of my retinal display, an open vox link cycled through channels, seeking a connection.

‘Reclusiarch Grimaldus,’ spoke a voice over the vox. ‘You honour us with your presence.’

We walked on, drawing near to the stilted platforms, ascending to the launch deck on crew ladders. Using elevators and servitors piloting lifter-Sentinels, twenty Celestial Lions were plundering their own firebase’s supplies, loading up their Thunderhawks with brutal efficiency. The warriors themselves hauled crates of ammunition between them, every one of them keeping at least one hand free to reach for a bolter at a second’s notice. It was a clean, impressive resupply, even if it bore a few furtive resemblances to a less-noble looting.

One of the Space Marines came forward, bearing the black helm of a Pride Leader. He knelt, though he had no true reason to do so, and removed the dark helmet. The face beneath was the warm, rich brown of humans born to equatorial climes, with cultures dependent on the teeming jungle and expansive savannah. I had never been to the Lions home world of Elysium IX, but I had met many of its dark-skinned sons. A culture of hunters: proud people from birth to death.

This warrior’s face was lined with the faint cracks of age. A Chapter veteran, no doubt. His lack of mutilating scars did him great credit.

‘I do not know you,’ I prompted.

‘Pride Leader Ekene Dubaku.’ He rose to his feet, the unnecessary honour complete. ‘I lead those of us who remain.’

Pride Leader. A squad sergeant. This did not bode well.

‘Grimaldus,’ I replied. ‘Reclusiarch of the Eternal Crusade. Cousin, when you say you lead those who remain…’

Ekene took my prompt again. ‘There are ninety-six Lions still drawing breath upon this world, Reclusiarch. I inherited command from Warleader Vakembei, he of the Spear That Hunts Hearts. He walked into the Emperor’s embrace eighteen days ago.’

‘I knew Captain Vakembei. The Imperium will miss his blade, and his wisdom. What of Brother-Chaplain Julkhara?’

‘Deathspeaker Julkhara is dead to the kine, slain twenty-four days past.’

‘The kine,’ I said, without inflection.

‘The greenskins, Reclusiarch. Cattle. Beasts. Kine.’

Disrespect of the enemy should be punished, but it was not my place to chastise them for their hatreds, nor would it be wise to annihilate morale by passing judgement against them for such petty transgressions.

The Lions kept working, alongside the trundling stomp of Sentinel loaders. At my gesture, Cyneric joined them, assisting with their loading.

‘This looks more like looting than resupply, Dubaku.’

He replaced his helm, speaking through the vox-grille. ‘We have little choice, since it was overrun. Our fallback stronghold is within Volcanus itself, but we risk raids out here every three days. Ammunition is low – production and resupply from our fleet has dropped to almost nothing.’

For a moment, I wondered why they had not requested aid from the other Chapters, but Dorn’s blood runs thick in the veins of his descendants. It was difficult to lay pride aside, even in the face of devastation. Especially then, for when else was a warrior truly tested? What other time could be finer for proving that a man is strong enough to stand alone?

Dubaku continued. ‘We have swallowed our pride long enough to request aid from the Flesh Tearers and the Black Templars, but the former are as depleted as we are, and the latter are preparing to set sail. Your brothers are taking the fight out into the stars, Reclusiarch. We have no right to beg for scraps while being left behind. So we exist by plundering our fallen fortress and looting our own dead.’

So Julkhara’s summons had been a personal one. It had still cost him dearly to send it, I was certain.

We moved aside as another three modified Sentinel walkers clanked past, bearing aquila-marked crates in their industrial claws.

I was struck by one thing above all: the Celestial Lions were dead. While a hundred yet remained, they operated now without a single voice from their Chapter’s high command, and their ranking veteran officer was a squad sergeant. I had hoped to find Julkhara. I had hoped to find hope.

‘Finish your loading,’ I told Dubaku. ‘Once we are aboard the gunship, speak to me of everything that happened since you first made planetfall. Then I will judge how best to answer Julkhara’s last words.’

Dubaku saluted, making the sign of the aquila over the winged Imperialis on his breastplate.

‘The Deathspeaker vowed that you would come.’

I did not reply. I merely gestured for him to get back to work. It remained to be seen just what Julkhara truly expected of me, or what I could actually achieve here. It already felt less like I was summoned to save the Lions, and more like I was called to hold a vigil, watching over them as they died.

Nine hundred and eighty-three warriors. They had brought nine hundred and eighty-three warriors to this world, and ninety-six remained.

We rode in restraint thrones in the gunship’s dimly lit crew bay. The Celestial Lions had removed their helms, though Cyneric and I left ours in place.

Ekene’s tale was a grim one.

Their entire Chapter had landed here, but for the most remote uninitiated training forces, spread across the segmentum.

Before dawn over the Mannheim Gap, they had been on the surface for three months and sixteen days, defending Hive Volcanus on the west coast of Armageddon Prime.

In that span of time, all of which was spent bolter-to-blade in the city’s burning streets, they suffered casualties far, far in advance of any other Chapter. Everywhere they fought, the enemy struck back in overwhelming numbers. Countless times they were deployed to reinforce elements of the Imperial Guard that were already long dead by the time the Lions arrived, leaving the Space Marines deep in enemy territory without easy withdrawal.

On at least fifteen catalogued occasions, they were ordered to advance on specific critical objectives, only to find themselves alone without the planned support forces or the promised reinforcements.

Casualties mounted, operation after operation, day by day. Ambushes were common, even on routine patrols through pacified territory. The Lions were assigned to hold crucial districts and sectors, and accordingly moved in force to cover all necessary ground. Yet they found their patrols being hit harder than any orbital intelligence had predicted possible. The enemy would appear in numbers undreamed, rising from ambushes in sectors that were recorded as being most viciously cleansed beforehand.

They were granted orbital picts and auspex-scrye readouts from Hive Command, only to find their intelligence scarcely matched the embattled realities of their deployment zones. Time and again, the Lions jumped into the fire. What choice was there? They would not allow the city to fall. They could not allow the enemy to live.

It did not take long for them to rely first and foremost on their own scanners and Scouts, but their equipment suffered unexpected deteriorations and frequent jamming; their Scouts often fell silent while out in the city alone. Sometimes, the Lions would find their Scouts’ bodies. Usually, they would not.

Pict-feeds from their vessels in orbit were distorted from the void war playing out above, but those rare, wrecked visual clues were the most reliable intelligence they could muster. The Lions swore by them, thanking the thrall-captains of their warships for any and all devoted efforts. But these also grew more infrequent as their fleet was massacred in the sky. Less than a month into the campaign, rearming runs from orbit began to grow as rare as reliable intelligence. Celestial Lions drop-ships were destroyed high in the atmosphere on two occasions, and on another, Volcanus’s own wall-guns malfunctioned and destroyed an incoming shipment, blowing seven loaded Thunderhawks out of the sky.

Never once did Ekene’s voice crack as he told me of these misfortunes; never once did he sigh, or glance away, or lament at what had come to be. Contained within him was a deep, nourishing well of resolve that did credit to any son of Dorn.

It only made my blood run colder with each revealed betrayal, that such a fate had befallen my cousins.

My hands must have been clenched for some time, for Ekene hesitated in his retelling, gesturing to where I gripped the arms of the restraint throne.

‘Reclusiarch?’

I forced my muscles to unlock. ‘Continue.’

And continue he did.

Mere weeks into the war, half the Chapter lay dead, the names of the slain added each dawn to the rolls of honour. The survivors fought on.

Decades ago, in the Last War, Hive Volcanus fell quickly to the greenskin horde. Like carrion crows, the enemy picked over the city’s bones and went to war with the looted spoils of Imperial manufactories. There would be no repeat of such shameful history this time. The city’s lords and leaders made that clear at each command briefing, leaving the Lions to make their demands into defiant reality. All the while, the city burned. It burned but did not fall.

Then came Mannheim.

The Mannheim Gap was a canyon running through the mountains north of Hive Volcanus. A rent in this planet’s priceless earth, torn open by the slow, active dance of the world’s tectonics. Any who dwell here for more than a handful of weeks know that Armageddon is not a world that sleeps easy, whether due to groundquakes, dust storms, or yet another war.

The Lions were told the canyon had to be assaulted, for there lay a nest of mechanical heresy, where the aliens were forgebreeding their scrap iron god-machines. Volcanus’s forces had to strike before the alien Titans became active, or the tide would forever turn against the city’s defenders. The Guard could not be trusted to deal such a surgical strike, nor could the city organise a mass withdrawal and redeployment of its deeply entrenched Guard elements to make it a plausible option. It had to be Space Marines. It had to be the Lions.

Primitive void shielding protected the site from orbital bombardment. The Lions had to strike overland, without drop pods, marching into the ravine alongside their tanks, attacking in battalion regiments like some echo of the Heresy and the millennia of crude warfare before it.

The Lions reconnoitred, of course. They scouted and watched, deeming Imperial intelligence reliable. None of the alien god-walkers were infused with life.

But time was not on their side. Every hour they spent behind their fortress walls was another hour that brought the Gargant machines closer to awakening.

Five hundred Lions attacked. The last half of the Chapter went to war, knowing that the enemy numbers were beyond the capability of the Guard to confront. They chose to bring overwhelming force, to strike fast and hard, countering their crippling inability to strike from the skies.

Five hundred Space Marines. I have taken whole worlds with a quarter of that number. Even though human resistance and greenskin forces are impossible to compare, five hundred Adeptus Astartes warriors is an overwhelming weapon in any imaginable reckoning. The Lions commanders were right to commit their full fury. Any Chapter Master would do the same. There was no possible way the enemy could have known such a force was coming to destroy them, and there is simply no way to prepare for five hundred Space Marine warriors.

Strike with choking ferocity. Destroy the enemy. Fall back before getting entrenched in a full-scale battle. It should have worked.

The Season of Fire was still weeks away when they charged, but dragon’s breath in the air already heralded the storms to come. Gritty, stinking air howled down the canyon as the Lions advanced behind their Warleaders and Deathspeakers. I could picture it so clearly, down to their banners tearing in the wind.

Along the canyon’s walls, huge industrial rigging rose against the rock: great construction yard platforms, as the greenskin beasts built their iron avatars higher and higher. Hundreds of them, never of uniform size, each one a bloated, scrap-fleshed icon to foul gods, crawling with screaming aliens.

Still. Five hundred Space Marines…

‘When did you realise you had been betrayed?’ I asked.

Ekene took a breath before replying. ‘It did not take long.’

‘The Gargants,’ Cyneric interjected. ‘They were active.’

Ekene gave a bitter laugh, sharp as a gunshot. ‘If that was all we had to deal with, we might still have fought our way clear without being slaughtered. We might even have won, despite dying to the last man.’

He was more solemn as he continued, letting the tale reach its inevitable conclusion. The Gargants were not sleeping, they were waiting. Searing heat spread through the canyon from the solid fuel burners deep in the alien Titans’ bellies – beneath the crash of bolters and the cracking rattle of alien rifles, came the clank of gears, with the landslide grind of coal and scrap being fed into the Gargants’ heartfires. Great guns whined downward on protesting joints, while the ground shook with each newborn Gargant’s first steps.

The Lions gold battle tanks raged skywards, streams of lascannon fire bursting thin shields and scoring holes in the hulls of towering enemy war machines. Warleaders shouted orders, in control of their warriors even in the heat of the battle, establishing where to strike, where to push through the orks’ lines, where to move in defence of tank battalions threatened by enemy infantry.

My heart soared at his words. Even when the Gargants awoke, Ekene and his brothers – the last half of a noble Chapter – were still fighting to win. They would purge the canyon at the cost of their own lives. Dorn himself would have stood with them that day.

But the tide truly turned. As Ekene described this latest twist of fate, Cyneric leaned forward in his restraint throne, scarcely believing what he was hearing.

The enemy ambush unfolded further. Greenskins spilled from the earth, pouring in hordes from warrens within the canyon sides and the rocky ground. Thousands of them, roaring beneath fanged war banners and standards made from crucified Lions taken in other battles. This fresh army surged into the ravine, filling it like sand in an hourglass, blocking all hope of withdrawal and eliminating any chance of victory.

‘They knew we were coming,’ said Ekene. ‘What other reason could there be to bury whole war-clans under the rock, waiting for such an assault? They knew we were coming. Their overlord was a beast clad in scrapwork armour – the biggest greenskin we had ever seen. He ate the dead: his own, and ours. Captain Vularakh buried the war-sword Je’hara in the beast’s belly and carved three metres of stinking alien guts free. It did nothing. We fought as we fell back, but we knew we were betrayed.’

I could not argue with that. A traitor, somewhere, had fed word to the enemy, and the orks made the most of their ambush. Five hundred Space Marines could take a star system. At Mannheim, they had barely been able to escape alive. It was difficult to imagine the sea of alien flesh necessary to butcher so many of mankind’s finest, but having seen the ocean of greenskins spilling over the plains towards the walls of Helsreach only months before, I had a fairly clear frame of reference.

‘That is not all.’ Ekene gave a grim smile. ‘Sniper fire, brutally accurate, rained down from the canyon walls. I am not speaking of the solid shell rattle of greenskin projectile throwers. I know how these aliens fight, Reclusiarch. This was viciously precise laser weaponry, knifing through our officers’ helms from above. Warleader Dakembe, shot through the throat. Spiritwalker Azadah, taken before he could unleash his powers, his skull blown open by two crossing las-shots an arm’s length away from me. Deathspeakers, Warleaders, Spiritwalkers… even Pride Leaders, cut down with fire too precise, too clinical, to be the enemy.’

He paused, and I could see in his eyes that he was no longer seeing the gunship bay around us. He was seeing his brothers die at Mannheim – some to crude iron blades rending through ceramite, others to spikes of white-hot las-fire lancing down into the ravine.

‘It took four hours to fight free. We carved our way back the way we came, abandoning a sea of dead tanks, slain brothers and butchered enemy bodies. The gene-seed of half our Chapter lies rotting at the bottom of that canyon, unharvested by our Apothecaries and defiled by the thousands of foes we left alive. We fled,’ he made the word into a spat curse, ‘from the field, and the most valiant battle the Celestial Lions ever fought was in that retreat. Never had we faced such odds. The last of us cut our way free, pulled our brothers from the storm of blades and fell back to our fortress with the enemy at our heels.’

‘The fortress fell,’ I said quietly.

‘That implies we even had a chance to defend it.’ Ekene shook his head. ‘The xenos flooded it before most of our survivors had even arrived. We had to fight just to escape our own falling fortress. Even then, for every gunship that raced free, another two were shot down in flames.’

‘Throne of the Emperor,’ Cyneric swore softly.

Ekene nodded. ‘Our survivors returned to Volcanus. We had three officers left at dusk of that day, three officers above the rank of Pride Leader. Deathspeaker Julkhara, who called you a brother, Reclusiarch; Warleader Vakembei, the last captain; and Lifebinder Kei-Tukh, our last Apothecary. The Chapter’s future rested on his skills. And can you guess the final insult, Reclusiarch? The last gasp in this drama of shame and treachery?’

I wanted facts, not my own speculation. ‘Say it,’ I said.

Ekene smiled. ‘Our territory inside the city walls was a cold foundry, nearly lightless, with a perimeter of rockcrete patrolled by our remaining warriors. Kei-Tukh did not survive the first night. We found him at dawn, slouched against our last Land Raider, shot through the eye-lens. The gene-seed he had carried was gone, and he would harvest no more. So now you see the depths of our plight, Reclusiarch. We have lost our fleet, our armoury, our officers and almost all hope of rebuilding our Chapter. We cannot even cling to pride, after the shame of retreat. All that remains to us is the truth. We must survive long enough to speak it. The Imperium must know what happened here.’

I wanted to tell him the Imperium would know. I wanted to reassure him that his entire bloodline had not died in vain. I meant to say it, yet the words that left my lips were more instinctive, and somehow more honest.

‘You mean to die on this world.’

Ekene’s dark lips curved into another sickle-smile. ‘Of course. We will die alongside our brothers, as it should be. Deathspeaker Julkhara wished you to know the truth behind our coming last stand, and ensure those that share our primarch’s blood never speak ill of our fall.’

I said nothing. They had asked me to come, but I would decide just what my involvement would be.

Cyneric leaned forward, and his helm’s vox-speakers couldn’t quite steal the passion from his voice. ‘You have to return to Elysium. Endure the shame if you must, as the Crimson Fists endured their shame. You have to rebuild your Chapter – the galaxy must not lose the Lions forever.’

‘Elysium? Brother-knight, the Chapter is savaged beyond resurrection. Men, materiel, knowledge… All of it is gone. We have nothing to hand down to any generation that would follow us. You advocate cowardice to fuel false hope?’

‘I advocate survival.’ Cyneric snarled the words. ‘Survival to preserve precious blood, and to rise again to fight another day. I hope to die in glory, as any son of Rogal Dorn. But even in our legends of the primarch, when he bled his warriors to purify them, he never let them taste annihilation. Sometimes, the more virtuous path is to carry the shame and survive.’

I looked between them both. The truth was that there was no wrong answer here. No right answer, either. A glorious last stand was no more or less respectable than preserving the infinite value of a Space Marine Chapter. One would earn more glory, no doubt. The other would better serve mankind. I appreciated Ekene’s zeal to finish what he began, and die with unbroken loyalty alongside his brothers.

But I also appreciated Cyneric’s surprising wisdom, to preserve the Chapter’s soul at the cost of carrying personal shame. Few Templars would commit to such a burden. It spoke well of him that he had the insight to consider both paths, but I wondered if he would advocate shame if he were the one facing the prospect of so glorious a last stand. Easier to speak of shame than to survive it.

In the minutes of silence that followed, we touched down in Hive Volcanus. Whatever solution arose from all this had to appease the Lions’ hot-blooded need for vengeance at Mannheim, as well as their cold-blooded need to be vindicated by spreading word of their betrayal. Both were essential, and both would see the Celestial Lions wiped clear from the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes.

And yet, the Chapter also had to survive.

As we disembarked, Cyneric opened a vox channel, speaking so the Lions would not hear.

‘One question plagues me, Reclusiarch.’

I could guess. ‘You would ask how this all began – what the Lions did in the past to earn this fate.’

‘Every vendetta has a source, does it not?’

‘True. And the truth here is a bleak one, dating back decades. The Lions are being punished now for trying to tell the truth fifty years ago.’

‘I do not understand.’

We made our way across the landing pad, and how glorious it was to see a city skyline that was still intact. Volcanus had endured a lesser siege than Helsreach, with many more defenders manning its walls. The central spire was an ugly monolith that lived up to the name hive, with anaemic industrial sectors and transit stations spread around its wide foundations. Most of the city’s manufactories were protected in the hive tower’s shell, making life wretched for its citizens who were forced to live shut inside with the fumes of their own forge fires eternally tainting the ventilation. It meant, however, that the city was monumentally harder to take than Helsreach, and with no central highway, the enemy could not simply run free through the city’s core.

‘Every Chapter carries a thousand secrets of past wars, unabsolved shames and slights against its honour. This is not the first time that the Lions have dealt with the Inquisition.’

‘Julkhara’s recording,’ Cyneric replied. ‘He spoke of the “echoes of Khattar”.’

‘Khattar is the world where this pathetic grudge began. It is where the Inquisition first betrayed the Celestial Lions.’ I finally turned from the Volcanus skyline, watching the Lions unloading their gunships. ‘You could argue, as other Chapters have argued upon hearing this rumour, that it was also where the Lions damned themselves by their own naivety.’

That gave Cyneric pause. ‘You admire them, but consider them naive?’

‘Anyone who trusts an agent of the Inquisition has earned the right to be named naive, Cyneric. There is a reason the Adeptus Astartes stand apart from the Imperium – autonomous; loyal to the empire’s ideals, but rarely its function. The Lions’ most grievous error was forgetting that.’

IV

Stories at the Fire

The Inquisition does not exist.

It does not exist in the sense many Imperial citizens believe – as a cohesive, interlinked cobweb of organised power. Individual men and women are granted immunity from all persecution and autonomy from all law. They are granted that most nebulous of virtues: authority. Everything else comes down to what they achieve, and what personal power they amass. When an inquisitor calls upon Imperial resources, he or she relies on the threat of authority, rather than any real organisation lending support to their needs. Their power is both utterly real and a cunning illusion, all at once.

Men and women with wildly differing ideologies, tactics and goals do exist, and they are invested with ultimate authority, but that is not a collective enemy we could face and fight. Inquisitors will often ally together, but rarely permanently. Even their precious ordos are lines of alignment, philosophies of specialisation and intent, not armies of organised allegiance.

They are, in all ways, the exact opposite of the Adeptus Astartes. Our temporal authority has been stripped back since the Heresy, yet we are essential to the Imperium and need no illusions of commanding great power. Our war fleets and brotherhoods speak for themselves.

Given the nature of the war, Armageddon’s cities were fairly thick with warbands of Ordo Xenos agents and their militant ilk, but to move against the Inquisition was to move against a colony of vermin. Trap one rat and it may still mean nothing to the nest. Any number of the inquisitors involved in the war would have nothing to do with the Lions’ persecution, and care little if they even knew what was being done to the Chapter. I could not simply approach the closest Inquisitorial representative and demand he reveal what he knew, for the chances were that he would know nothing.

Time was my worst enemy, for it was not on our side. I needed to cut right to the heart of the matter, but the Inquisition was not a beast with one heart. Every Inquisitorial warband was its own sovereign entity.

Few Chapters knew of what happened at Khattar, and even fewer ever spoke of it. Of those that were aware of the planet’s annihilation, I would wager that most did not regard it as a true threat to the autonomy of the Adeptus Astartes, preferring to focus on their own concerns and their own wars. As for the others, I can only speak of the Black Templars with any conviction, and even our Chapter is more akin to several dozen individual Crusade fleets with their own goals and traditions, united in lineage rather than united side by side.

What little I knew of Khattar came down to a conflict of pride and duty between the Lions and their Inquisitorial allies – the kind of conflict that takes place a thousand times each year across the Imperium’s vast spread of worlds. Many of these disagreements turn to bloodshed; what made the Lions’ situation so galling was that they had reacted with a measure of composure and reason, when they had every right to draw their bolters and finish it in a blunter, more efficient manner.

The Lions are a Chapter of storytellers and saga-singers. As the sun set over the besieged city walls, we remained in the outlying industrial sector, circled by tanks in the Lions’ makeshift armoury at the heart of a powered-down foundry. Beneath the rumble of growling, idling engines, I could almost hear the ghosts whispering among the bare bolter racks and empty ammunition crates.

We had agreed to speak of Khattar. I had the story of how my cousins had paid a butcher’s bill since coming to Armageddon. Now I wished to know what had happened before.

Seven Lions had gathered – the survivors of Ekene’s own squad – while the others prepared for the final assault to come, or patrolled on sentry duty. Cyneric was aiding them; I thought the experience of living among another Chapter would aid his perspective.

The air was charged with the expectation of attack, even this deep in an Imperial-held city. It left a foul taste in my mouth.

So I sat around a wreckage-fire with Ekene and his proud Lions, the firelight sending amber shadows dancing across our armour. This was how they had told tales on Elysium, though their savannah campfires would be set out under the stars, not beneath the arched ceiling of an abandoned manufactory.

‘You first,’ Ekene prompted me.

I did not understand, and said as much.

‘You first,’ he repeated. ‘You have come to our hearth and home. Tradition states the first tale must be yours.’

‘Outsiders always speak first,’ one of the other warriors said. ‘It is how they pay for their food and rest at a tribe’s camp.’

‘I have no stories.’

The Lions chuckled.

‘Everyone has stories,’ one of them said.

‘Tell us of Helsreach,’ said Ekene.

‘No.’ The word came out as sharp as a bolt shot, and they tensed at the suddenness of my reply. I had no desire to speak of Helsreach. The lessons I had learned were still scoring themselves on my soul.

They accepted my refusal with shared glances and murmured agreement, but a warrior with the name Jaur-Kem etched on his breastplate cleared his throat in almost amusing human politeness.

‘Reclusiarch,’ he said. ‘Tell us the tale of how you earned a Deathspeaker’s grin.’

I felt a strange discomfort creeping down my backbone. ‘The events of the Pelegeron Cluster are recorded in any number of accessible archives.’

The Lions laughed again, though there was no mockery in it. They were far too wise to insult a Chaplain, even one of other allegiance. Their laughter was for the many difficulties in two Chapters trying to share time in companionship, and the endless differences Space Marines of divergent bloodlines always faced in such moments.

‘Official records are dry and lifeless things, Reclusiarch.’ Ekene gestured in encouragement. ‘Tell us what happened through your eyes. You would do us great honour.’

I looked between them, from one face to the next, gunsight reticules chiming and unfocusing as they identified null targets.

‘Very well.’ I took a calming breath. ‘There is an ancient saying, a sentiment wedded to humanity’s bones, I think, for it emerges from countless cultures with slightly different phrasing each time. My mentor, Reclusiarch Mordred, despised it, saying its very core ran counter to the precepts of the Eternal Crusade, but I always enjoyed its funereal poetry. “There will never be a war to end all wars”.’

The Lions spoke in agreement. They had a similar sentiment on their home world.

‘On the fourth world of the Pelegeron system,’ I said, ‘they believed the opposite was true. Their sedition became secession, and their rebellion became war. “The Last War”, they called it. The “war to end all wars”. If they could throw the Imperium back with enough defiance, then mankind’s empire would let them drift away in peace, to live as they wished in the filth of their heresy. They truly believed this.’

Strange, how fierce the memories felt as they came back. There is always such bestial comfort in sweat and screaming rage.

‘Imagine a fortress formed from a most diseased mind,’ I said. ‘The capital of a world at the whim of tectonic rage, on one of the few landmasses stable enough to inhabit. Imagine this world’s priceless rock made living among lava rivers a necessity for hundreds of thousands of mining settlers, but the planet itself still cringes back from all human touch. That is Pelegeron IV, cousins. That is what it was like. A world only half-formed, still writhing in protracted birth throes, with magma for blood and smoke for air.’

Ekene was smiling. ‘You are a better tale-teller than you give yourself credit for, Deathspeaker Grimaldus.’

I was warming to the idea, myself. It was not so different from giving declarations of judgement, or reciting the Litanies of Hate.

‘This final fortress was called Apex, as was the volcano within which it was built. Few geological archives have ever chronicled a volcano to match the scale of Apex, for the mountain eclipsed even the Olympus forge-peak on Sacred Mars. Apex was a boil on Pelegeron’s crust, the size of lesser continents on saner worlds, with its infected roots digging all the way to the world’s core. In times of peace, the Imperium hollowed it out, and drilled ever deeper. When war came, it became the enemy cult’s final fortress. We had to strike at their last bastion before they could seal themselves inside.’

‘You said the foe called it the Last War,’ one of the Lions interrupted. ‘What did your black knights call it?’

‘The Vinculus Crusade,’ I replied. ‘And it ended at the Battle of Fire and Blood. Many archives record the final duel between Vinculus himself and the arch-heretic atop the cathedral.’ I shook my head. ‘It never happened. But when has the truth ever mattered to Imperial chroniclers?’

That earned a few grim laughs. I barely acknowledged them. I could feel the heat again. The insane heat of those final hours under the mountain.

‘Though the volcano had great transit vents wide enough for tankers and cargo haulers to drift in and out of the mountain’s industrial chambers, they had been sealed and shielded from aerial attack for weeks. It left us facing an assault on the main thoroughfare gate, despite the impossibility of landing an army there.’

I looked to each of the warriors with me, unsure if I was doing justice to the day itself. They listened, paying full heed to my words.

‘I stood among the Sword Brethren of High Marshal Ludoldus at the assault’s vanguard. We had to hold the fortress gate while the rest of the army marched up the mountainside. With no room to deploy in force at the gate, the Sisters of the Bloody Rose Order and our own brothers landed at stable plateaux and struggled up the rockslides from there. The vanguard deployed by drop pod, through atmosphere thick enough to choke a man without a rebreather. Thirty of us. Thirty knights – the High Marshal’s chosen.’

I met the Lions’ eyes, though they saw nothing but my eye-lenses. ‘That was how it began. Hold the gate, our liege lord demanded of us. Hold until the others reach us. Nothing more.’

He wants to vent his anger, but lacks even the breath to shout. Weary rage pulls at his limbs, miring him with its sluggish caress. Never has he felt so drained, so leeched of all vitality. War has become work – an exhausting slaughterhouse chore, reduced to the rise and fall of blades, with the push and pull of burning muscles.

Slain foes blanket the rocky ground in every direction. His brothers, those still standing, fight behind a barricade of armoured enemy dead. The shrieking madmen that come against the knights know nothing of fear. They spend their lives like copper coins, charging in a screaming horde.

‘Ai-ai-aiiiiiii,’ the bastards keep shrieking as they run to the butchers’ blades. ‘Ai-ai-aiiiiii.’

The knight hears his liege lord above the chaos. Not shouting orders, for no orders are needed when there’s nothing to do but fight or die. Neither is he crying defiance, for the knights’ refusal to run is defiance enough. No, he hears his lord – that golden warrior – laughing.

It is Ludoldus’s way. The High Marshal stands with one boot on the barricade of bodies, his ancestral sword swinging and spearing down in a ceaseless blur of charged steel. Laughing in the heat of battle-fever.

By contrast, Grimaldus barely has the breath to curse. The knight’s chainsword sings for him, its snarls switching between the roar of whirring teeth and the meat-muted growl of carving through human flesh.

Down the mountainside, the Imperial army hauls itself higher. At the main gate, the cultist-soldiers of Pelegeron, faced with their rebellion’s collapse, are no longer fighting for their twisted truth. They are fighting to survive, and they are losing. Their cities are in dust. Their stronghold endures siege.

Then it comes. That moment, disgustingly sharp and impossible to predict, when the defenders are no longer defending at all, but fighting a retreat. It’s a change in the toxic air, a divergence from the angry cries that rise from any army like an aural tide. Everything is different without any real warning, but it spreads the way fire devours a bracken forest. It is no longer a fighting retreat, but a rout. The defenders are broken, and the slaughter begins as they turn and flee. Soldiers who had faced the invaders with fanatical pride only moments before now die with their wounds on their backs. To the knight’s eyes, there is no surer testament to a coward’s death.

Grimaldus fights at his lord’s side, beneath the gaze of towering stone angels that beckon the faithful into the subterranean stronghold. His helm is gone, torn away almost an hour before, and his enhanced respiration labours in the thick air. But he stands, and he fights, and his sword never falls still.

The enemy flood around him, sacrificing their lives for the chance to pull at his limbs, seeking to drag him down. He kills them with blade, with boot, with fist. They are only human, he tells himself. Only human. Their bones break. Their blood stains his tabard a sick pink. He kills most of them fast enough that they can scarcely cry out. As for the others, without their insect-faced oxygen masks, they strangle and die without the need for a death earned by the blade. Smashing their respirator tanks is enough to leave them dead.

The great gates cannot close. Even if the black knights had not destroyed the mechanics with melta detonations upon arrival, the number of corpses spread across the avenue now defies any chance of the portals sealing shut. With animal desperation, the blasphemous faithful try to save their temple-city from defilement. Teams of sweating soldiers work to haul the immense stone gates shut as their brethren die on the black knights’ blades.

The first Imperial soldier to reach the knights is Vinculus himself, a lord of the Inquisition and temporary commander of the Adepta Sororitas forces. He, like the army behind him, has had to climb the barricade of bodies.

High Marshal Ludoldus of the Black Templars is waiting for him, with the remaining nine knights of his Sword Brethren. Grimaldus is one of them. Exhausted, his breath saws in and out.

There is no shame in kneeling. They have been fighting for almost three hours, alone and without even the whisper of reinforcement. The dead lie broken in their hundreds. Amongst them, the Sword Brethren kneel on weary limbs, catching precious respite. Some are too weary to even lift their heads. As Space Marines, they will recover within minutes where mere men would need days of rest. Yet, as mortal warriors, their flesh has been pushed through torment, and even bionic limbs have malfunctioned with overworked joints.

One still stands. He will not kneel. He will not kneel.

‘You fought well,’ his liege lord tells him. ‘I am beginning to believe you were born lucky, Merek.’

Grimaldus pulls a bayonet knife from the armpit joint of his scratched armour, and casts the blade aside without wiping his blood from it. He makes the crusader’s cross to his commander, letting the wound seal itself.

Ludoldus has fought unhelmed, letting his three lungs filter the filth in the breath-starved air. Grimaldus sees his commander’s eyes flick to the left, and turns to follow the High Marshal’s gaze.

Mordred, Reclusiarch of the Eternal Crusade, stands among the dead. He watches the newest of Ludoldus’s Sword Brethren, saying nothing, staring with red eye-lenses and a grinning silver skull for a face.

Within the Temple City.

The streets are vast tunnels worming through the rock. Homes and shrines are hollowed-out caverns, forced into stability by great stone pillars, defended by shrieking, chanting, cowering families.

The war has ended, and the massacre has begun. Gouts of chemical fire spray forth in hissing rushes from the charred muzzles of sacred flamers, while the crashing bang of bolters plays in relentless percussion. Flailing, burning bodies line the ground. Despite the ingenuity of the subterranean city’s ventilation engines, filtration systems are failing under the strain of cleansing the oxygen supply. Fire eats the air before the Space Marines and Sisters of Battle can breathe it. After needing rebreathers for the march up the mountainside, Imperial forces find themselves needing to don them again to prevent suffocation underground.

The mines run deep in the volcano, but the habitable sectors of the great city sit much closer to the surface. It takes less than an hour to reach the heart of the heresy, and Grimaldus – a warrior incapable of admiring allies and enemies alike – is awed by the cathedral hewn from the burning rock. Here, great landing platforms of magma-scarred metal sit beneath the sealed sky-tunnels, where once pilgrim shuttles and mining haulers came to refuel before journeying deeper into the volcano’s innards.

A geological monument to a whole world’s power takes up kilometre after kilometre of space in the great cavern. The cathedral itself is born right from the rock, its pillars and battlements moulded from the cave walls, suspended above a molten river. The running lake of magma puts him in mind, just for a moment, of the underworld rivers flowing through so many human myths.

The last survivors still flee before the advancing Imperials, spilling in a tide across the earthen bridges leading into the temple. They die with their wounds in their backs.

High Marshal Ludoldus leads them to the rock avenue over the molten chasm. He levels his blade at the angel-adorned walls of the heretic cathedral, and sends the black knights forward in a shouting tide.

‘Destroy the power generators,’ Inquisitor Vinculus’s orders crackle over the vox. ‘I want the sky shafts open before the sun rises over this worthless world.’

His voice is joined by the High Marshal’s. ‘And kill every living soul within that temple.’

Swords cut deep and blood runs cold. After the executions, they find the arch-heretic alone, unarmed, and weeping. He wears no flowing robes of priestly office, and he sits upon no ornate throne of gold and volcanic glass. What they find is a man in miners’ overalls kneeling in meditative prayer, his cheeks silvered by the slow flow of tears. He wears a breathing mask as he prays on the battlements of his cathedral, but doesn’t even open his eyes as his killers approach from behind.

Grimaldus is among them, at the shoulder of his liege lord. He is the first to tense, to move forward in an eager rush. Ludoldus restrains him with a gesture.

‘No,’ the High Marshal says to the black knight. ‘Not you.’ Grimaldus’s chainsword sputters to stillness, idling in the burning air.

It is Vinculus – too human and so very frail – who steps forward. His frame is weak next to the knights at his side, but his voice is cold iron.

‘In the name of the God-Emperor of Mankind,’ he says to the kneeling heretic, ‘I do judge thee diabolus extremis, unfit for existence within His Holy Majesty’s galaxy.’

‘You do not understand,’ the kneeling, weeping man replies. He makes no move to defend himself as Vinculus closes from behind, bearing doom in the form of a short, energised blade. ‘I am a vessel. Just a vessel.’

The tip of the sacred sword rests against his spine. Vinculus braces for the push that will finish the traitor’s life, and end the war.

The heretic’s watering eyes turn to the knights. ‘Forgive me.’

‘Wait.’ Grimaldus steps forward, a hand raised in warning. ‘Wait!’ Reclusiarch Mordred is at his side, saying the same words, giving the same order.

The sword lances home, biting deep into the man’s body. The self-proclaimed vessel falls to the stone, dying, breaking apart to free the thing within. Cancer spills from the wound, a ghost of oily smoke, leaping in a spreading cloud and clinging to the inquisitor’s wide eyes and open mouth. He damns himself to death the moment he breathes it in.

Mordred is the first to move, his crozius maul raised high. Sword Brother Grimaldus is a heartbeat behind him, chainsword revving. Vinculus falls back, screaming, tearing at his eyes, dragging them from his face with curled fingers. They come free, strings of viscera behind, and he holds them out, seemingly offering them to the two charging knights.

Vinculus falls, howling, vomiting wet blackness that has no place in a human body. Mordred and Grimaldus take him to pieces with their weapons, as if they can carve the corruption from its new host.

The inquisitor laughs through the excreted filth. Pressure builds in the air around them, as though heralding a peal of thunder. Just as it strikes, the inquisitor’s body bursts open.

Sourceless, directionless darkness falls, with the finality of a hammer blow.

The first thing he feels is the familiar pain of a broken body. Life is war, and war is pain: this is a truth he has survived a thousand times. There is no great secret to pain; he sees it no differently to the biorhythmic signs playing out on his retinal display. Pain is nothing more than a sign he is still alive.

Grimaldus drags himself to his feet, boots thudding on the scorched rock bridge above the chasm of liquid fire. His armour is halfway to annihilation, burned and scraped and chipped, bleeding sparks from severed power cables. The cathedral is a detonated ruin, and its besiegers have been cast across the cavern. Huge chunks of masonry still rain down on the cavern, plunging into the fire chasm.

Bodies lie everywhere. Dead knights, dead Sisters, dead heretics in their hundreds. Among the corpses, survivors begin to stir. But not enough. Some are already standing, weapons in their hands. But not enough.

Three minutes. According to his retinal display, he has been unconscious for three whole minutes. He will do penance for his weakness, if he survives this night. No matter that almost every soul in the cavern has suffered the same way – he sees it as a weakness that deserves punishment. Dorn’s martyring blood burns hot in his veins.

The daemon walks through the dead, hunting the living, smashing aside the few swords that rise to bar its way. It is a seething mass of deep-sea nightmare fears given form, that underwater sensation of looking into the endless black of the open ocean, never knowing what lies beyond the mist of human vision. No longer the size of the man inside which it hosted, the poisonous creature has swollen to a riper, truer scale, crushing bodies beneath its cartilaginous claws. It dances at the edge of Grimaldus’s focus, a thing of two worlds and at home in neither. The knight’s eyes water through the chiming pulses of target locks, his mind aching from the sin of witnessing the thing’s existence.

Ludoldus, High Marshal of the Black Templars, faces the beast on the black stone bridge. At his feet are the armoured forms of Jasmine, Canoness of the Bloody Rose, and Ulricus, Emperor’s Champion of the Vinculus Crusade. Two great heroes, champions of humanity in their own right, slain while Grimaldus surrendered to unconsciousness. He will ensure the penance for somnolence lasts a long, long time.

On a whim, he looks up, seeking any damage to the cavern’s expansive ceiling. He has no wish to be buried here, dead or alive. A moment later, he’s reactivating his vox link.

‘This is Sword Brother Grimaldus to the Eternal Crusader. Eternal Crusader, respond.’

‘Sword Brother.’

‘The power generators are down and the sky thoroughfares are open.’

‘Understood, Sword Brother. Gunships en route.’

The black knight reaches for a sword that isn’t there. In the absence of his own blade, he takes a weapon from the dead. The chain that had bound it to its former owner’s armour hangs loose and broken.

Ludoldus is forced onto the defensive, parrying rather than cutting, each lift of his relic blade warding away another sweep of fanged tentacles and fleshy claws. Soon enough, he’s stepping backwards, giving ground with silent curses.

He aches as never before. No single creature can be so strong. No beast of the warp has ever tested his warriors in this way. Ulricus, a warrior without compare, traded a mere seven blows with the creature before it gutted him with its talons. Jasmine lasted no longer – the two pieces of her body lie shrouded by the fall of her scarlet banner.

They cannot kill this thing. They cannot overwhelm it with numbers. Skill is meaningless against its speed. The beast’s blows weigh on him, numbing his muscles. Each of its breaths comes with a mucosal spray of rancid air, clouding the knight-lord’s sight.

The Sisters and knights fighting with him are smashed away, broken and cracked-open things tossed into the chasm of fire. Another knight reaches his side; slain in a heartbeat. And another, bashed aside by a flailing claw, knocked from the stone bridge to plummet into the magma river. Next, a Sister dies, melting and shrieking in the backwash of her own flame weapon as the beast roars the fire back against her. In a queasy blur, it looms back over Ludoldus.

He risks reaching for the grenade at his belt, but the creature’s assault batters at his blade. He needs both hands to ward the thing’s attacks away. He’s down on one knee now, kneeling among the beast’s kills, parrying above him. He needs a second – just a single second – to reach for…

The daemon pushes down against his blade. Ludoldus pours his strength into the parry, feeling his muscles crackle with tightening sinew. As the talon draws back, the High Marshal is already bringing his blade up again to block the claw’s next descent.

It never comes. The falling claw is blocked by a war maul. The weapon’s energy field crackles and strains, failing under the beast’s strength.

‘Mordred.’ Ludoldus is laughing.

It isn’t Mordred. Another warrior carries Mordred’s crozius arcanum.

Sword Brother Grimaldus’s red cloak is aflame. His armour is an ornate ruin of dented plate and blackened chains.

‘Sire,’ he breathes over the vox. An acknowledgement of fate.

The High Marshal frees one hand from his sword long enough to clutch at the holy incendiary buckled to his belt. The grenade comes free. Ludoldus thumbs the activation rune, hard enough to crack the orb’s armoured shell. He raises it, a holy icon, shouting defiance as the daemon bellows downward.

Ludoldus hurls it, not at the beast, but at the creature’s feet.

An Antioch orb is among the rarest weapons sacred to the Chapter. First created several thousand years before by Techmarine Antioch of the Black Templars, they are – by any measure – many magnitudes more lethal than the standard grenades available to other Chapters among the Adeptus Astartes. Consecrated oils and sacred acids are blended with compacted explosives, making each incendiary a personal masterpiece, inscribed with its own damnations, blessings and High Gothic mandalas. A grenade will kill the righteous and unrighteous alike, but an Antioch orb will ensure the blasphemous burn in agony as they meet their end.

The sacred sphere detonates as it crashes against the bridge. Ludoldus and Grimaldus are already retreating, refusing to show their backs to the foe, accepting flash blindness as the price of witnessing their enemy’s end. The explosion comes in a sunflare of white light, bathing the daemon in holy fire and blasting rock in every direction. The bridge starts to fall, crumbling, dragging many of the cavern’s support pillars down with it.

The beast is falling, aflame. Its shrieks don’t end even when it plunges into the magma. Grimaldus falls back from the shattered bridge, staring in disgusted disbelief as the creature thrashes in the molten rock, its flesh igniting further, spraying liquid rock from its flailing limbs. New arms form as others melt away. New mouths tear open in its grey-squid flesh, sealing closed after they’ve jettisoned their screams. Some swallow the lava, while others vomit it back out.

Ludoldus stumbles as gravity eats the ground from under him; Grimaldus’s gauntlet slams into the collar of his golden armour, dragging him back from the precipice.

‘Gunships inbound,’ the Sword Brother grunts as he pulls his lord to safety.

‘It isn’t dead,’ Ludoldus warns him.

Grimaldus can see that himself. ‘Not yet.’

They open fire. The crashing of bolters echoes from the walls as they fire down into the molten muck – remnants of the Sisters and the black knight squads, gathered in their bleeding dozens and standing among the hundreds of dead.

The dying beast has abandoned all pretensions of humanity. With thrashing, coiling limbs too numerous to count, the subaqueous, cephalopodic thing is revealed as an avatar of pain, manifest as spraying magma and steaming screams. It defies size, for it defies mortal sight. It is the size of a man’s trapped soul; it is the size of a monster from myth, swelling and pulsating, abused by the thousands of explosive shells raining against its form.

Bolts burst inside its body, sending lava spraying in place of blood and flesh. Still it climbs. Metre by agonising metre, the thing of rock and molten sludge hauls itself up the cavern walls, seeking the lives of the insects that still volley their pinprick torment. They can feel its hate like a wind against their faces. It despises them for the sin of living. That hatred is enough to fuel its manifestation past the point of destruction.

It doesn’t reach for them. It reaches for the cavern’s support pillars. Wrapping round them. Gripping them. Cracking them.

Breaking them. One after the other, the monstrous soul claws its way from pillar to pillar, bringing down the cavern in its rage.

Nothing in the material realm can ignore its wounds forever. As the rocks begin to fall, the creature’s howls turn to whines. The sacred orb, and the bursting wounds of so many bolt shells, rip free the last of its strength. It flails at another pillar, its winding limbs failing to latch on, leaving it thrashing and tumbling to the ground among the rain of rock. Boulders shatter on the cavern floor and the ruined bridge, filling the air with dust.

The knights and Sisters ring the fallen horror, executing it with blade and flame. Feeble struggles claim no more human lives. The thing collapses in on itself, dissolving, tainting the air with clouds of stinking vapour from its scabrous wounds.

There is no silence after any victory. A battlefield will still clamour with the cries of the dying and the growling flames of burning tanks. Here, beneath the earth, any silence is slain by the thunder of falling rock and the guttural rumble of the shaking ground.

The first gunships stream in through the sky vents. On the ground, knights and war-maidens look to the vaulted cavern ceiling, praying for each Thunderhawk that weaves between the plummeting debris. Stalactites drop in a torrent of earthward spears. The burning, rolling hulks of destroyed gunships smash across the ground alongside the monsoon of lethal stone.

A blow crashes into Grimaldus, the sudden crash staggering him. It was no rockfall: Reclusiarch Mordred looms above him, coldness staring out from the red eye-lenses of his silver skull facade.

‘It is a sin most foul,’ the warrior-priest growls, ‘to steal a Chaplain’s weapon.’

Grimaldus stares up at the Reclusiarch from the ground. Instinct almost has him launch back to his feet and throw himself at his attacker, but temperance prevails at the heart of the rock storm.

‘I thought you were dead.’

Mordred doesn’t reply. He holds out his hand, waiting with insane, silent patience as the world falls down around them.

‘That is all?’ asked Ekene. The Lions were all watching me.

‘That was how the battle ended.’

‘So you earned the skull-smile through valour.’

I did not know the answer, myself. Mordred had always ignored the question when I had asked it, considering it meaningless. The result matters, he always replied, not the decisions made to reach it.

‘I was one of the last still standing at the gate. I was the first to sense the change within Vinculus, and act with Mordred. I guarded my liege lord’s life with the Chaplain’s weapon, and pulled Ludoldus back from the chasm’s edge.’

‘Those acts look fine on a roll of honour,’ Ekene said. The Pride Leader was no fool. He could tell I was holding something back. ‘But I sense there is more.’

‘There is,’ I admitted. ‘Nothing of drama and heroism. Just a moment of curiosity I have never been able to set aside.’

Only two gunships remain.

The first rises on protesting engines, whining for altitude as the boulders fall. One moment it lifts from the crumbling ground, landing gear folding closed in a clanking chorus of technology – the next it detonates in a heartsick flash of promethium fuel. Its wreckage, crushed beneath a toppled pillar, gives an animal-corpse twitch as its engines die.

The last gunship breathes lung-burning jet wash as it begins its own rise. The last knights run and leap for the gangramp, hauled up by their waiting brothers.

‘The void,’ orders Ludoldus, breathing heavily with his back to the cargo bay wall. ‘Get us into the void, Artarion.’ The pilot voxes acknowledgement as the Thunderhawk climbs higher.

‘Grimaldus.’ The High Marshal rests back next to Mordred, his weathered features in stark contrast to the Chaplain’s cadaverous faceplate.

‘Sire?’ Grimaldus replies.

‘You are the last of my knights still wearing a red cloak.’

For a moment, the knight hesitates, almost arguing that it cannot be true. But he stood with the High Marshal watching the survivors evacuate, unwilling to leave the field of battle before his men and their allies. He saw no other Sword Brothers among the living.

‘That may be true, sire.’

‘It is true.’ Ludoldus turns to Mordred. ‘I told you fate favoured him, did I not?’

Mordred says nothing, just staring with that skullish grin.

The Lions nodded among themselves, sharing smiles.

‘Not just valour, then,’ Ekene ventured. ‘Luck, as well. You were marked out from your brothers by fortune as well as ferocity.’

‘It is a possibility,’ I confessed. ‘Mordred was a mercurial soul. I have never known why he chose me.’

‘Or why he was told to choose you.’

‘Or… what?’ In all my life, I was so rarely speechless. That night, I felt my words and breath both catch in my throat.

Why he was told to choose you. As I was told to choose Cyneric.

‘I meant no offence,’ Ekene replied.

‘None offered, and none taken.’ I almost smiled, though they would never have seen it even if I had. My faceplate – Mordred’s faceplate before it was mine – revealed nothing of emotion. ‘My tale is told, cousins.’

‘Not enough blood,’ one of them said, earning agreement from his brothers.

‘And yet another reason never to trust the weak little souls claiming inquisitor rank,’ said Ekene. That earned another few chuckles. ‘I would, however, have engaged the beast myself. Blade to claw.’

‘Of course,’ the other Lions join in, with good-natured growls.

I was starting to realise the informality in their ranks was not one of ill-discipline, but unreserved brotherhood. Curious, how two Chapters from the same gene-stock can be so different. Birth world meant everything to these warriors. To the Templars, almost nothing.

‘So, cousins,’ I said. ‘I have paid your toll. Tell me what I wish to know. Speak of Khattar.’

V

Death Sentence

‘Khattar.’ Ekene made a curse of the name.

‘Khattar,’ several of the others echoed. They were unhelmed, their dark faces bronzed by the flames. As rank and file troopers, they seemed reluctant to look at me for long. I caught them making occasional glances in my direction, at my tabard, heraldry, or the polished silver of my skull faceplate.

‘That was no war,’ one of them said.

‘Nothing but a slaughter,’ chimed another, from the other side of the fire. Their way of retelling tales seemed be almost ritualistic. Every voice was equal. Everyone’s story mattered.

Ekene was leading the storytelling gathering. ‘I was never present at meetings of Chapter command,’ he said. ‘But I was there. I was on Khattar.’

‘I was there,’ the others chorused, in their low voices.

Around us, Lions patrolled between the hulls of the few remaining tanks left to the Chapter. The vehicles were worn down by gunfire, with smoke taint darkening their cerulean paintwork. Ekene and his brothers could have been spirits themselves, drifting among the memories of their dead Chapter.

‘Khattar was a world of priests and preachers,’ he began. ‘Of followers and the faithful.’

‘An Ecclesiarchy world,’ I said. They did not regard it as interruption. Most of them nodded, and Ekene smiled.

‘As you say, Reclusiarch. A world in thrall to the ivory tower priests of the Imperial Creed.’

‘But it soured,’ one of the others added. From the scrollwork on his shoulderguard, the warrior’s name was Jehanu. He looked young, scarcely out of his Scout trials. Space Marines show their age in their scars.

‘Their faith rotted on the vine,’ Jehanu said. ‘And they called for us.’

‘The priesthood fell into deviancy,’ Ekene took over, ‘as so many do, in so many of our tales in this Final Age of Man. They prayed to the Gods behind the Veil, and their dark untruths carried the faithful masses away from the Emperor’s light, spreading to the highest echelons and furthest reaches.’

Jehanu interjected again. ‘You ask what could those priests have chanted to poison the souls of a whole world?’

Were the Lions mission briefings relayed in the same warrior-by-warrior retelling of facts? A curious custom.

‘Blasphemy,’ said another Lion with an amused snort. ‘Blasphemy and lies, compelling enough to sound like truth to a society weary of their prayers going unanswered.’

The Lions nodded. I wondered how true that was, across the galaxy. The Emperor was immortal and mighty beyond reckoning. But he was no god. Mankind – in its blessed ignorance – worshipped him as one.

Yet false gods cannot answer prayers. How tempting it must seem to those sects and societies far from Terra to seek other answers when pleading with the Emperor brings only silence.

‘Where were the world’s defenders, I hear you ask?’ Ekene showed his teeth in a feral shadow of a smile. ‘The planetary defence forces did not rise up to purge the revolt. They joined it. And more were still to come: Imperial Guard regiments in nearby systems did the same – such was the ferocity of Khattar’s blasphemy.’

‘Apollyon,’ Jehanu spoke up again. ‘Apollyon was the inquisitor who pleaded for our support, for his efforts to crush the faithless lies had met with failure after failure.’

Ekene stared into the fire as he agreed. I could see the sparks of memories in his eyes. ‘He had a Naval blockade, but nothing in the way of surface troops. So in the wake of his failure, we made planetfall in full force. Hundreds of us, Reclusiarch. We rained holy fire, sacred iron and true faith on a world that had forgotten the taste of all three.’

‘Slaughter followed,’ said Jehanu.

‘What chance did they have?’ another Lion, Ashaki, put forth. ‘They were mere men, following the lies of false prophets. We destroyed them.’

‘All of them,’ Jehanu grinned. ‘Every man and woman with a weapon in their hands.’

Ekene took over once more. ‘We quenched the rebellion in a matter of weeks. No armies existed once we were finished with Khattar, not even a town militia. Nowhere on that world did a single priest still draw breath. With the armed resistance annihilated, we returned to our ships. Whatever heresy lingered among the defenceless population was under the eyes of others now – no longer a matter for bolters and blades.’

Jehanu barked a nasty laugh. ‘Such faith in our allies, we had that day.’

‘As with any cleansing,’ Ekene continued, ‘we expected preachers of the Creed to take over, shepherding the lost populace back to enlightenment.’

Ekene had been cleaning his bolter. Now he lay it aside, looking back into the fire. ‘It took several days to recover our materiel, honour our dead, and prepare to leave. Apollyon’s underlings worked on the world below, assessing the population of eight billion for signs of further deviancy. We were scarcely out of orbit when Apollyon’s warship opened fire on the world below. The rest of the Imperial Navy blockade fired with him, targeting cities and population centres.’

‘We watched them,’ said Ashaki, ‘spitting fire onto the world we had just bled to cleanse of corruption. Our honour burned with those cities. Every shot we had fired, betrayed as a waste.’

I remained silent, waiting for the rest.

‘Our lords demanded the blockade cease fire and answer for its actions,’ Ashaki spat into the fire. ‘Apollyon claimed he had determined the entire population tainted beyond salvation. He even thanked us for our “worthy efforts, though they were in vain”.’

‘An hour later,’ said Jehanu, ‘Khattar’s cities were dust.’

I took a slow breath, shaping the words to suit my reply. ‘It is possible that he was astute in his observations. Heresy had clearly taken root through Khattar’s society. Perhaps it had wormed as deep as Apollyon claimed.’

The Lions bristled. I could tell they ached to show their anger, but the skull helm I wore stayed their hands. That, and the fact I could kill any one of them without breathing hard.

Ashaki was the one to speak. ‘Are you saying he was capable of determining the taint running through several billion souls in a handful of days?’

‘No. I am saying nothing more than the fact it has taken me a single heartbeat to see corruption in the minds of men before, and a man in Apollyon’s position can afford no chances.’

‘You stand with him?’ Ekene was growling now.

Words came to me in that moment, Mordred’s words. I could have merely opened my mouth and spoken them for him, as surely as if he were still alive, still telling me what to think and who to kill.

The innocent will always die when the guilty are punished. Is that wrong? By what scale of virtue do we judge morality? This is life. This is duty. This is necessity. We mourn the innocents lying in mass graves with the guilty, and we move on. The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Imperium.

I said none of this, though it was as true as anything else. Ekene took my silence as disregard.

‘You believe he was justified?’ the Lion almost snarled the words. ‘That he slaughtered billions of men, women and children on the chance they were all tainted, and it is our place to ignore it?’

Before Helsreach, yes, I would have said exactly that. But no longer. Balance, I thought. Balance between wrath and wisdom. I looked at him, still saying nothing. He seemed to recall to whom he was speaking, and nodded a subtle apology.

‘Calm your spite, Ekene, for it is meaningless here. Apollyon acted within the rights granted by his rank; he did as many of his Inquisitorial kindred would do. He also did as many Chapter Masters would have done. That does not make it wise, or right, or virtuous. It merely makes it real.’

‘It makes it an effort to hide some filthy secret,’ Jehanu insisted, and his brothers nodded. ‘The tale reeks of a man seeking to hide some grievous error, does it not?’

‘Perhaps. But if he had so much to hide, why summon a Space Marine Chapter? Perhaps Apollyon was merely a hasty fool to whom life meant little, and that mournful truth is one we have to live with. He is hardly the first man of exalted rank to decay in a position of power.’

‘You are as cold as any Deathspeaker,’ Ekene said, but the anger was bleeding from his words.

Cold-blooded off the battlefield, hot-blooded upon it. This is your place. More of Mordred’s words.

‘I will not pass judgement on a moment I never saw, between men I do not know. That is not my place. I judge my brothers – their actions and their souls – not the pathetic intricacies of Imperial Law. Tell me what came next. Did you fire on his fleet?’

Ekene shook his head. ‘No, never. Chapter Command sent word throughout the subsector, warning all Imperial outposts and regional governors what had occurred and decrying the actions of the Inquisition. Word was also sent directly to Terra – a delegation of Deathspeakers and Warleaders chosen for the task, to show the gravity of the situation.’

‘They never reached Terra.’ I did not need to guess the fate of those well-intentioned souls. They would never set foot on the Throneworld. ‘They were never seen again.’

‘Oh, we saw them again,’ Jehanu said, quietly.

‘We found their vessel two years later,’ Ekene admitted. ‘Dead in the void, deep in greenskin space. All damage was indicative of a ruinous warp flight. No signs of weapons fire on the hull.’

I had seen the interior of several vessels gutted by warp storms. All life torn into genetic scrap; all metal mutated and poisoned beyond salvage.

‘And then?’

‘We kept demanding an investigation into the Khattar Massacre. We sent word to any Imperial officials who would listen, from planetary regents to the priest-kings of Ecclesiarchy worlds. If any such investigation took place, it remained a mystery to us. Armageddon called, and we answered. Which brings us… here.’

Jehanu gestured at the hollow armoury as Ekene finished. ‘They want to silence us.’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘Far from it.’

The Lions looked at me, seemingly unsure if I were making some dark jest. But I was not; the Inquisition were not acting to silence the Lions, and I was certain Julkhara had known that when he reached out to me.

‘Then what?’

‘They are using you,’ I told the survivors around the scrap-fire. ‘They are using you to make an example. The Lions are the most recent casualty in the institution’s campaign to rein in the autonomy of the Adeptus Astartes. The Inquisition tolerates no attacks on its sovereign rights – yet you challenged them. And now all will bear witness to the price of your rebellion. The sabotages, the conflicting orders, the ambushes. A Chapter will not just suffer for defying the Inquisition and slandering its virtue. A Chapter will die in shame for it. Millions will hear of how you were killed on Armageddon. A mere handful will know the truth behind your deaths, and each of those will be Adeptus Astartes officers who will tread with much more caution when they deal with the Inquisition in the future. The lesson will be learned, just as Apollyon’s cronies wish.’

The Lions digested this in silence. Eventually, Ekene spoke, looking into my eye-lenses.

‘We are going back to Mannheim,’ he said.

I had been waiting for those words.

‘I know.’

‘Many of the Gargants are gone, but it is still a well-defended stronghold. It remains a cancer of enemy presence in Volcanus’s territory, and it must fall.’

That seemed idealistic, at best. ‘It will not fall, Ekene. Not to a handful of Lions, no matter how noble and proud.’

He spread his hands in calm acceptance. ‘Then we will die trying.’

Akashi leaned forward, adding his voice to his sergeant’s. ‘That is where we have chosen to die. It has to be there. Our bones shall lie alongside our brothers’.’

Jehanu nodded. ‘Remember us, Reclusiarch.’ His voice was low, and his tone plaintive. ‘Take the truth with you when you leave this world. Spread it among the Chapters that share Dorn’s bloodline.’

They were asking a great deal of me. If I did as they asked, it could all too easily draw the Inquisition’s ire upon the Black Templars. Even so, they should have known they had no need to ask. Of course I would do it. It was the valorous truth. I could no more hide that than I could forsake the Eternal Crusade and retire to a life of ignorant peace.

‘The truth will sail with me,’ I vowed. ‘And you are fools for believing it might not.’ They shared smiles again; that curious tribal brotherhood. ‘You mean to fight alone?’ I asked.

‘We must,’ replied Ekene. ‘Volcanus cannot spare its Guard regiments. Even with Mannheim emptied of Gargants in the weeks since the massacre – a fact we still cannot be certain is true – it is still a brutal target, rich with enemy presence. Five of our battle companies failed to take it. A few thousand Guardsmen will be nothing more than spitting into the wind.’

Ashaki snorted in derision. ‘And we can trust none of them, anyway. The Inquisition’s talons are everywhere.’

Ekene growled, little different from the beast that gave his Chapter its name. ‘I just want one chance to kill the warlord that devoured our dead. I will die content if I drag him to the grave with me.’

I breathed the stale, recycled air of my suit’s internal oxygen supply. It tasted of sweat.

‘Mankind’s galaxy will mourn the loss of the Celestial Lions.’

‘Let them mourn.’ Ekene’s lip curled in disgust. ‘If this is our reward for loyal service, they are welcome to their grief.’

Something in my demeanour must have warned him, for he continued more cautiously. ‘This is how it has to end, Deathspeaker. Let it finish in fire, not in centuries of painstaking laboratory work to preserve our bloodline. We will die as warriors.’

Yes, they would. A hundred warriors, dying in glory… and denying the possibility of thousands of warriors who might be needed in a darker future.

As the stories and oaths came to a close, the unwelcome truth was that I heard nothing but empty promise in their words. Was there worth in glory, even if defeat was the only legacy? I had watched the Shadow Wolves die, and been inspired by their sacrifice. Now the Lions threatened to make the same journey, down the same path. But my blood ran cold, beating from a calmer heart.

A Chaplain is the future of his Chapter. He must guard its rituals and traditions and histories, as well as his battle-brothers’ souls. It was not senseless violence that shaped our worth, but focused ferocity. Ferocity in war, when we killed our foes. Ferocity in peace, when we shepherded our kindred’s souls. Our place was to make the decisions others could not be trusted to make. Ferocity was our weapon against ignorance or blind faith, the same as it was our weapon against humanity’s enemies.

It was Dorn’s way to fight no matter the odds. Death against overwhelming odds was no shame to us, or to any warrior of Imperial Fists gene-seed. Yet, those were lessons first taught ten thousand years ago – those words again – when the Imperium was so, so much stronger. The last centuries of this Dark Millennium had all but bled man’s empire dry.

So I admired Ekene for his hunger to taste a glorious death, even if it was in a last charge few would remember.

But viciousness and glory were no longer enough. Killing enemies in battle was no longer enough. I wanted to fight the Eternal Crusade. I wanted to win the war.

Cyneric was right. The Lions’ deaths now would be a disservice to the Imperium, no matter the greatness of their glorious last stand; no matter the heroism of individual warriors as they spent their life’s blood.

Ekene was not finished. He cleared his throat, sensing the dissipation of my thoughts.

‘One more thing, Reclusiarch. Would you perform the Heart’s Thunder Dirge for us?’

The Heart’s Thunder Dirge. I did not know the words, but I could guess their meaning. Among my Chapter, we called it the Rite of the Forlorn Knight, in honour of a warrior’s last battle. A prayer for the dying. I felt my skin crawl, and my teeth close together.

‘I said I would speak of your death. That I understand it. Now you wish me to bless your damnation? To give your extinction my personal blessing?’

The Lions were all looking at me, but now none sought to meet my eyes. ‘We have no Deathspeakers,’ said Ekene. He recoiled, slowly but surely, the way the Salamanders had recoiled from me months before in the ruins of Helsreach.

I was merciless, for I wanted to be absolutely clear. ‘You wish me to give my blessing to warriors of another Chapter, sharing the Templars sacred rituals, and vowing before the Emperor and Dorn that your death is a noble testament to the Imperial Fists bloodline. You wish me to endorse your deaths. That is what you ask?’

‘Yes, Reclusiarch.’ Several nodded at Ekene’s affirmation. ‘It is a curse to die unblessed.’

‘When do you intend to make this last stand?’

‘What benefit is there in delaying the inevitable?’ he replied. ‘We will gather our resources tomorrow at our forward base, and make one last scouting run for supplies and survivors. The Lions charge to war at dawn the day after.’

The Eternal Crusader would break orbit the same day, in pursuit of Armageddon’s arch-warlord. I would have to time this very well.

‘Will you bless our last hours, Reclusiarch, and consecrate our final deeds?’

I looked across the foundry’s junkyard, where Cyneric patrolled with another Lion, bolters in their hands. I rose to my feet amidst their desperate, respectful silence. Ekene started to object, to ask me to stay, but my mind was ironclad. The decision had been made.

‘No.’

VI

Choices

We could not return to Helsreach. The Season of Fire played its tempestuous games around my city, harsh enough to kill sky traffic but not quite violent enough to slay vox signals. The storm was predicted to last between three and nine hours. The former would be an acceptable flaw in the plan; the latter would leave precious little time to do anything at all. If the storm died down at all.

Aboard the Eternal Crusader, I walked the cold halls of the Temple of Dorn. Relics of war and glory rested behind shimmering auras, atop marble plinths housing rattling, grinding stasis field generators. War banners hung proud from the vaulted gothic ceiling. There was always something skeletal about the temple, and it derived from more than the arched architecture. I always believed it reminiscent of some sepulchral afterlife, where warriors walk after their deaths in battle. Legacies go there to die.

Cyneric walked with me, astute enough to know that when I was silent, I was silent for a reason. He did not push me to talk. I would not say that I liked him then, but I was finding it easier to tolerate him.

In truth, I had not gone there to be alone with the Chapter’s revered treasures. I had gone there to put plans in motion. From the great bay window, I looked down on the embattled, scarred globe of Armageddon. Its cities were smoking scabs. Its canyons were dirty scars. Its oil-rich oceans were graveyards for dead greenskin ships.

A lesser man might see a world at war, and feel sorrow for the loss of life. All I could feel was hate. I hated the greenskins for defiling our territory. I hated the planet itself for defying our attempts to save it.

A lesser man. There is the lack of humility that so coloured Mordred’s thoughts. An unchanged man, then. A true human, one not altered by the Emperor’s genetic designs, would feel sorrow.

The fleet was at anchor, relishing a respite from the near-constant void warfare that still broke out in the skies. No new alien reinforcements had translated in-system for almost a week – the longest ceasefire yet. Shuttles, gunships and cargo haulers drifted between our vessels – the final refuelling and rearming taking place before we left in pursuit of the alien warchief.

It felt as though I waited an age for my handheld hololithic transmitter to give a signal pulse. Cyneric kept his distance, paying reverence to the weapons and suits of armour on display, each one waiting to be claimed by a worthy warrior from our generation, or the generations that would follow.

‘Vox link established,’ came the bridge servitor’s voice. Using the Eternal Crusader’s communications array had been the only way to amplify my transmitter’s signal. A hololithic avatar started to form, ghostly blue, above my palm.

‘Colonel Ryken,’ I greeted the flickering image.

‘That is not the case,’ the hololithic ghost replied, in a voice husky with flawed vox. Details of the soldier started to drift into resolution. It was not Colonel Ryken – as if the man’s reply had not revealed that already. ‘This link is not so good, eh? I have no visual feed. Also, forgiveness please, but Colonel Ryken is away doing other soldierly things. He is not here. He is gone.’

I took a breath, inwardly counselling myself to be patient.

‘I need to speak with him at once.’

‘As do I, I assure you, for the colonel owes me money. A serious matter, yes? If he dies before paying me back, my temper will be terrible to behold. I am Captain Andrej Valatok of the Legion. How may I be of serving use to you?’

‘Have your adepts relay this signal to–’

‘What is wrong with this vox link? Mountain bears growl less than you, I am thinking. You sound like a Space Marine.’

‘I am a Space Marine.’

‘Aha! I am, if not good friends, then at least well acquainted with Reclusiarch Grimaldus of the Black Templars. The Hero of Helsreach, you know? I saved his life one time. He even thanked me.’

‘Andrej,’ I replied, making every letter a slow threat. ‘This is Reclusiarch Grimaldus.’

‘Hail, Reclusiarch! You sound angry.’

‘Listen to me. I need to speak with Colonel Ryken, Adjutant Tyro or General Kurov.’

‘They are all gone from Forward Command, yes? But I am here. I am overseeing the storm trooper divisions in the northern and western engagement zones.’

Cyneric approached, gesturing to the hololithic image in its trenchcoat and steel helmet.

‘He is not what I expected in a storm trooper.’

I let that pass unanswered, but Andrej did not. ‘Technically, no, we are grenadiers. Yes. But it is slang. Also, it is for reference. The paperwork is a bitch. You know how it is, eh? The only easy day was yesterday. But I sense trouble. That is why you summoned me, no?’

‘Hear me well, Andrej. This is important.’

The conversation that followed took longer than was entirely necessary. Andrej, I gathered, was bored. Soldiers do not deal well with tedium, especially soldiers left in a command bunker with nothing to do and no one to shoot.

When Andrej disconnected the link, he had a wealth of orders to obey, and I was braced for several hours of coordinating Helsreach’s defences from high orbit. A great many Guard officers were going to vox skyward for confirmation in the hours to come.

Time passed, in the voices of eighty-one Imperial Guard officers and eleven Naval captains. Images were inloaded and exloaded from my data-slate in a constant stream of encrypted information. My clearance was Rubicon-grade. No one hid their answers from me. No one in Helsreach denied me the lore I sought. No one refused what I asked of them.

‘Is this not exceeding your authority?’ Cyneric asked me at one point.

I was still unused to being questioned, and swallowed the rising bile of my temper.

‘Elaborate,’ I said instead of snarling at him. It took some effort.

Cyneric had removed his helm, and was unhealthily pale beneath the blue-gleam illumination globes mounted in the walls. His expression was not challenging; rather, it was subtly keen.

‘May I?’ he asked, nodding to my handheld auspex. I handed it to him, and he cycled through orbital images of Helsreach suffering another storm. The wounded central spire remained constantly in sight, but the rest of the city swirled in frequent dustcloud obscurity.

‘Speak,’ I bade him.

He kept cycling through the images. ‘I was given to understand you surrendered active command over the hive city’s forces when you left the field after the Battle of the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant. General Kurov is listed as active commander in the Helsreach region.’

And he had heard General Kurov two hours ago, one of the many voices heeding my requests.

‘If you object to my actions,’ I said, ‘then say so without fear of retribution.’

‘It is not an objection, sire.’

I felt my blood run cold at his passivity. ‘If you are to be inducted into the secrets of the Reclusiam, I will need you to speak your thoughts.’

‘The Lions will march to their deaths tomorrow while the Eternal Crusader’s engines are priming to fire. We will be gone from Armageddon in pursuit of the alien warlord, and whatever transpires at the Mannheim Gap will take place without us. But you mean to save the Lions, do you not? To force them to preserve their Chapter.’

I looked at him, and at the streams of bio-data scrolling next to his austere features.

‘I do. You made it clear you believe their duty is to survive and rebuild their Chapter, as well. If you cling to that belief, how do you find flaw in my plans?’

‘Their survival would be for the best,’ he allowed. ‘It is the path of the greatest good. But you do so by deceiving them. There is the question of honour.’

Honour is life. More ancient words.

‘Nothing so crude,’ I replied. ‘My last words to Pride Leader Ekene were to refuse his request to perform a ritual, and to bid him die well among the bones of his brothers. There is no deception at work, here, Cyneric.’

Cyneric was relentless. ‘But if you deplete Helsreach’s defences to march alongside them at Mannheim…’

‘The city is vastly overdefended now, with entire battalions sitting idle and awaiting redeployment.’ An irritating truth; would that we had such a problem when the real war was being fought.

‘And are you not playing on the people’s regard for you? The Hero of Helsreach calls them to war. Of course they will follow. But is this their war?’

‘They are soldiers on an embattled world.’ I snarled the words at him, and forced myself to hold a facade of calm. He deserved commending for thinking of so many facets in this matter, not enduring my anger for daring to question me. Apprentices were a chore, and I wondered how often Mordred had struggled with me over the years.

‘It is their world, Cyneric. And it is the only chance the Lions have.’ I rested a hand on his shoulderguard, as Mordred had done with me in moments of quiet instruction. His eyes locked to mine, just as mine had locked to my mentor’s so often, through so many years. ‘The Lions’ unseen enemies may well allow them to die in the glory they deserve. But you were right to argue with Ekene. They must survive. Their deaths serve nothing but to ease the soreness of wounded pride. They must not die on Armageddon. Without help, the Lions are doomed. But if I can take Mannheim…’

Cyneric was immediately on edge. ‘If you can take Mannheim?’

I nodded, and handed him a sealed scroll case of black iron. ‘Bear this to the High Marshal. I have always despised farewells.’

He tensed, jaw clenched tight. ‘If you fight with the Lions, I will fight with you.’

‘That is your choice.’ I admired him for that decision, though it did not surprise me at all. Helbrecht had chosen this one well. ‘But you will take this to him now.’

He made the crusader’s cross, and went to do as I had asked.

Alone once more, I turned back to my plans. Everything centred on just how fast my former forces at Helsreach could break out from the storm, and redeploy halfway across the world.

VII

Ink

Helbrecht,

I am remaining on the war-world. Someone must fight alongside the Lions, saving them from futile glory and the worst excesses of their otherwise pure blood. I will rejoin you when I am able. We both know it is likely to be several years, given the whims of the warp, just as we both know my first prophecies may prove right after all, and I will die on this world.

Forgive these words reaching you in ink on parchment, but I have little time and even less inclination to hear you remark how Mordred would let the Lions meet the end they believe they have earned. I will not argue with you about which war matters more. I see no degrees of import in this. The alien king must pay for his transgressions on Armageddon, and it is the Templars’ glory to be chosen for the chase. But these are warriors of our blood. To abandon them is to betray Rogal Dorn, and the Imperium he fought to forge.

Both battles matter, so we will fight both battles.

Months ago, I cursed you for leaving me on the surface while you earned all the glory in the skies. How times change.

Hunt well in the stars. I will do the same on this world’s cursed soil.

If you cannot condone my decision, then remember this. The Lions have no Chaplains remaining, and they are our cousins. Honour and brotherhood demand this of me.

Honour is more than glory. If Helsreach taught me nothing else, it taught me that. Honour is loyalty. Honour is control over our baser instincts, mastering rage into the most potent weapon it can be, not spending it purely to earn a saga around the campfire, or an annotation in a roll of victory.

Honour is not bowing to the whims and schemes of fearful weaklings. The Inquisition has already claimed its pound of flesh. I will not let a proud bloodline fall into shadow to sate the endless hunger of starving fools.

The Lions cannot call upon the resources of their hive city, but they will not fight alone. Let Volcanus hide behind its walls. Helsreach is going to war.

VIII

Gathering

Planning with Helsreach’s command teams took all night. I had wondered if the Lions would have already left their fallen fortress by the time we arrived, marching towards their last stand.

Dawn was less than an hour away as we broke the cloud cover. The Lions had not left us behind. The opposite was true – half of Helsreach’s army had already arrived before us.

Unwilling to secure one of our own Thunderhawks, Cyneric had arranged for a Navy shuttle to carry us down to the surface. We descended through a sky cut apart by the contrails of Lightning fighters, with hunched gunships alighting on the landing pads of the Lions’ ruined fortress stronghold.

One building – the crenellated central enclave – was plainly serving as the central hive of activity. Almost every other building was abandoned. Battlemented bunkers with anti-aircraft cannons stood in silence. The fortress’s walls were pulled down, bent beneath the aliens’ rage when they had first swept through the Lions defences in the hours after the massacre at Mannheim. But the final enclave still held firm. Four dust-blasted and paint-stripped Thunderhawks were nesting on the wide rooftop landing platform, marking where the Lions had touched down hours before. Dozens of inelegant, blocky troop landers were joining them there, as well as dusting off outside the enclave’s tumbled walls.

Cyneric looked through the shuttle bay window, down at the organised carnage of an Imperial army making ready for war.

‘I see a Baneblade,’ he said, gesturing to a bulk lander – beetle-ish in its densely armoured shape – releasing a gigantic tank from its payload claws.

‘The Grey Warrior,’ I replied, feeling my voice thicken in gratitude. ‘General Kurov is taking to the field.’ The tank’s storm-flayed hull was pockmarked and proud, so it had not been idle in the weeks since the war began to ease.

We wished to land at the central enclave, but the pilot struggled to locate an unmarked, untaken patch of ground, let alone a free few metres on a landing pad.

‘Break off the descent,’ I voxed to him. ‘Get back into orbit. Be ready to compensate for the bay doors opening in ten seconds.’

Cut off from our brothers in the void, we were ready for any eventuality. The shuttle’s confines were a testament to the fact it had been built to ferry a dozen humans in restraint thrones – not two warriors of the Adeptus Astartes in full battle armour. Our jump packs threatened to clang against the walls each time we moved, and we would have to abandon the additional ammunition crates at our boots, but no matter.

Cyneric struck the bay release plate with a fist, admitting the roaring wind. We stepped out to meet it, falling through the sky.

As far as I am aware, I do not dream. If I do, perhaps I simply never recall what takes place in the theatre of my subconscious, but the result is the same. Many medical records cite humans referring to nightmares of falling, ending abruptly the moment before impact. I have always found that curious. Humanity is such a fragile condition, fearing every imaginable loss of control. Nightmares of falling makes even gravity a psychological enemy to them.

Fear. The rancid piss-stink of it. I cannot envision a more disgusting emotion.

High altitude insertions are no rarity among the Adeptus Astartes, even without drop pods. We leaned forward, diving hard, plunging through the gold spit of tracer fire that had no hope of ever hitting us. Cyneric fired his back-mounted boosters once, to veer clear of an Imperial Guard hulk rising from the fortress.

Altitude runes chimed and flared as the ground rose. My engines whined into life a moment later, slowing the descent enough that it wouldn’t be terminal. We landed with twin thuds, denting the landing platform and spreading a cobweb of cracks from each of our boots. The sky above us was alight with the whirring, revolving anti-air turrets automatically and harmlessly tracking the inbound gunships and troop landers.

With portentous timing, a communication rune chimed on my retinal display the same moment my boots ground into the deck.

‘Reclusiarch? My lord… I demand an explanation for this.’

‘So ungrateful, Ekene.’ I found myself laughing for the first time since the cathedral came down upon me. ‘We thought you might appreciate the extra bodies.’

That day marked the first time I have ever been embraced by a human. Less than an hour after we landed, Cyneric and I walked outside the fortress walls, surveying the gathering battalions. Vulture gunships rattled overhead. The very air breathed with engine smoke from the idling tanks. Entire regiments of Steel Legion soldiers were packing munitions, and themselves, into Chimera transports and six-wheeled Shedu-class overlanders.

The man to embrace me was not, as one might have guessed, Captain Andrej of the Steel Legion. It was General Kurov – an otherwise distinguished and greying gentleman officer, who greeted me with a sabre at his hip and tears in his eyes.

‘Reclusiarch,’ he said by way of greeting. The embrace was swift, and surprising enough that I had no reaction to it. His head scarcely reached the heraldry on my chest before he stepped back, looking up at me. ‘The Hero of Helsreach calls, and his city answers.’

My skin still crawled in the aftermath of his nearness. His affection made sense, in that he was born, raised and trained in Helsreach; the War for Armageddon represented a bitter homecoming for him, and he held me in a paragon’s regard. Amazing, however, the difference in this meeting, and our very first. The levels of warmth in the latter, and coldness in the former, were difficult to align.

‘It is good you are here, general,’ I replied, trusting he would not be offended by my absolute neutrality.

Cyneric, sensing my unease, stepped to my side. ‘I am Cyneric,’ he greeted the general, looking down at the man, and I heard my brother’s dark little chuckle at the way Kurov performed the crusader’s cross rather than the Imperial aquila.

‘Such an effect you had on these men, sire,’ he voxed to me.

The war council that day was a blunt and brutal thing, as our plans were ordained before a battalion of revving tanks. Guard officers crowded around Cyneric and myself, several of them touching my armour for good fortune in the coming fight. These I ignored, as I had ignored the embrace. Let them keep their strange superstitions if it would work to the betterment of morale.

‘Did you bring what I left in Helsreach?’ I asked Kurov, during a pause in proceedings.

He nodded in the affirmative, smiling to himself.

The plan was simple. We would march into the Mannheim Gap, and we would destroy anything that moved or breathed.

‘I like this plan.’ Andrej was sitting on the dozer blade of a gunmetal grey Chimera, thumping his ankles on the hazard-striped metal. His opinion was met with nods and murmurs of agreement from the gathered Legion officers, who stood at ease in their trenchcoats, helmets and gasmasks not yet fixed in place.

Ekene stood with me at the heart of the impromptu conclave, silent all the while. His anger was a palpable thing, an aura he bled in my direction. Only at the end did he speak, as if almost a hundred human officers were not nearby, and as if they had not just dedicated their lives to aiding his last charge.

‘You overstep your authority,’ he said to me. His helm’s vox speaker made the words a growl, though I suspected they needed little assistance in that regard.

‘I do as my duty bids. Nothing more, nothing less.’

He aimed a chainsword to the horizon, where the mountains rose and his brothers’ bodies rotted.

‘This is our fight.’

I could have struck him, knocking him to the ground for addressing me in such a tone. The temptation was there, and I certainly had the authority to do so. I refrained partly because I did not wish the Guardsmen to witness division in the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes, and partly because I understood Ekene’s rage; even sympathised with it. It simply needed redirecting. Now was a time for me to be cold-blooded, not hot. He needed guiding, not beating and shaming.

‘It is still your fight,’ I told him. I doubted he had missed the way many of the Guard officers had clutches rifles tighter or rested their hands on their holstered pistols, when Ekene had addressed me with such aggression. ‘The difference is, cousin, now it is a fight you can win.’

He turned – ever so subtly – to regard the crozius maul I had over one shoulder. I perceived the true nature of his complaint in that moment. It was not that I had summoned thousands of Guardsmen to aid his assault. The humans had nothing to do with it.

It was me. I was the source of his unease.

‘If we face the warlord…’ Ekene began, and I silenced him with a gentle gesture.

‘Vengeance will be yours, Lion. My duty is to get you to your prey. Honour demands you kill him yourself.’

‘That is all I ask, Reclusiarch. He must die to a Lion’s blade.’

‘Then see that he does.’

I turned back to the Guard officers, tasting the charcoal and promethium stink of so many idling engines, seeing the ochre-on-grey tide of their trenchcoats and battle tanks.

‘Speech!’ Andrej called. Laughter followed this demand. I waited until it subsided.

‘Not this time. This time, we go to war for honour and revenge, over survival. Such virtues need no speeches to enhance them, for they are inherently righteous. But I will say this.’

I hefted my war maul, sweeping it in a slow arc across the front line, encompassing every soldier, every vehicle, every supply crate.

‘You have all heard that almost five hundred Space Marines died in the canyon I have asked you to conquer today. The number is staggering, it defies belief. Why then do I request that you spend your blood and sweat in a battle that has already cost so many of my cousins their lives?

‘The answer, warriors of Helsreach, is not because I value your souls less than those of the Adeptus Astartes. It is not that I would waste your blood like coins of copper in a futile gamble. It is because you taught me the tenacious strength of the human spirit when my brothers bled for your city, and I can trust no other men and women to stand with us now. We answered you in your hour of need, and you have answered us in ours. For that, I thank you. We all thank you, Lion and Knight alike.

‘As for whether you will live to fight another day, I will speak the words of a much wiser man. My gene-sire, the Lord Rogal Dorn, primarch and son of the Emperor, said these words: Give me a hundred Space Marines. Or failing that, give me a thousand other troops.’

I paused to take in the sight of the gathered masses again. This was a poor portion of Helsreach’s full garrison, but given the complexities of orbital redeployment and transcontinental passage, it was a blessing to see so much flesh and iron under aquila banners.

‘Look at your own numbers. By the war poetry of the Emperor’s own blood-son, you are worth three times the number of Lions that fell at Mannheim. Cling to courage, no matter what madness awaits us in that canyon. You are here because I intend to win. And you are here because you should be here – you deserve, more than any others, to be on the battlefield the first time these relics go to war.’

General Kurov signalled to a Valkyrie gunship waiting nearby. The rear gangramp lowered on squealing hydraulics thirsting for oil, and three servitors lurched forward, bearing the relics of the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant in their cyborged grip. The first bore the great aquila statue on his shoulders, heaving it like a man condemned to carry his own crucifix. The second bore the tattered scraps of the city’s founding charter high, the way a herald brings forth a war banner. The last carried a bronze globe of the fallen temple’s blessed holy water. Mindless they marched, slaved to my will. How glad I was that I had left them in Helsreach rather than sending them up to the Eternal Crusader.

The humans cheered loud and long, raising rifles and bayonets to the cloudy sky. I was almost – almost – transported back on the city walls, as the green tide surged towards the city. Our city. Our world. Our city. Our world.

Grimaldus. Grimaldus. Grimaldus.

Cyneric’s voice broke through the uproar of several thousand men and women chanting my name.

‘I thought you said you would give no speech.’

‘You have a great deal to learn about being a Chaplain,’ I replied, ‘if you consider that a speech.’

IX

Mannheim

Any parsing of the archives on the Eternal Crusader will offer no shortage of detail on the events of the Second Mannheim Siege. It is fair to say, with the result so easily accessible, what matters most in this personal archive are the moments of heroism and humanity that led to the endgame. They are what I was asked to record, and I will endeavour to do so as my chronicle moves towards its conclusion.

What then, is thus far not recorded in the archives? All reports indicate the vast force and the exact regimental strength we hurled into that lethal ravine. Similarly, every report cites the immense force we encountered upon laying siege. Every hope we had possessed that Mannheim would be near devoid of enemy Titans was crushed before the first Steel Legion soldier had set foot on the loose rock slopes leading down into the canyon. Each prayer that the orks’ infesting numbers would be culled by battles elsewhere were likewise shown to be wasted breath.

The enemy was present, and present in grotesque force. Great sockets in the rigging and stanchions along the canyon walls marked the absence of several Gargants, but many more were undergoing repair or reawakening after fighting in recent battles. The ravine was choked by living aliens going about their work, and thousands of mouldering corpses piled up into a sea of decaying organic matter. What foulness inspired them to leave their dead unburied? Was there no end to their pestilential influence?

Gold armour, darkened and soiled by waste, showed among the barricades of the looted dead. The dead Lions had been heaped in undignified repose with their xenos murderers, and their ceramite plate – useless to the junkyard heresy that constituted greenskin technology – was left to encase the rotting warriors amidst their flesh cairns.

We advanced over this sea of the disrespected dead. Tearing the barricades down was not an option, leaving us to climb and wade and ride on the hulls of our tanks. Grey Warrior was the first to reach the mounds of the slain, its treads hauling its immense bulk up the corpse piles and grinding them into compacted meat beneath its weight. Lesser vehicles struggled manfully; others blasted holes in the dead-wall with their turret weapons; still others followed Grey Warrior and the super-heavies that led the way.

Above the advance rode the gunship fleet – Valkyries, Vultures and Vendettas, all flanking the four remaining Thunderhawks in the Lions’ arsenal. The moment they streaked through the ravine’s trench, cannonfire began to bring them down in tumbling fireballs.

Official chronometers cite the joining of battle with the first shot fired in anger at exactly five hours, thirty-one minutes and twelve seconds after dawn. That shot was a blast from the main armament of General Kurov’s own Grey Warrior. From the Thunderhawk above, I saw that shot impact against the distended belly armour of an enemy Gargant, showering the nearby alien technicians with blazing wreckage.

Chronometers also cite that the engagement lasted a few minutes short of three hours. As one of the only Space Marines to survive the Second Mannheim Siege, I can confirm this is true: my helm’s auto-senses recorded the same figure.

The Legion did not baulk at the sight of such a vast enemy horde. They ploughed into the enemy’s disarrayed ranks, slaughtering them to make room on fields of their bodies for the gunships to land.

The first hours of that battle were remarkable only for their ferocity. There is nothing unique or worthy of remembrance in two armies grinding in a deadlock over their own dead. The Imperial Guard’s massed cannonades devastated the greenskin war machines. In reply, the aliens butchered the Guard at every point along the advance where it fell to men and women with bayonets to hold the line. As is so often the way with the Guard, they had the stronger steel, but the enemy had the stronger flesh.

The orks fought for their mad religion and their madder joy at butchery. The Guard fought because this was their world, and because they believed it was a battle worth fighting.

When human and ork blood runs together, the result is something as black and viscous as refined, thinned oil. By the third hour, each step through the canyon splashed in a river of mixed blood that had nowhere to run. The earth was too rocky to drink it, and the ravine itself was a natural basin. The land itself made a bowl for the blood we spilled in offering.

I saw Andrej, black to the knees, bayonetting an ork in the throat with two of his Legionaries. The corpse of their slain foe drifted away once they pulled their blades from its body – taken by the liquid muck. The smell of it, the sheer reek of the mixed-blood lake we were wading through, penetrated even Guard rebreathers. Soldiers constantly fell back to throw up when they could, or vomit where they stood and fought.

In such a grinding lock of armies, winning and losing is relative. We were pushing deep into the canyon, no different from a needle pushing into a boil and expelling the corruption within. But at what cost? Hundreds of men and women were falling face down into the dirt. Every second brought another crunching pop of a tank’s engine catching fire and bursting its hull apart.

Andrej and his squad reached my side, using me as cover to reload their weapons. I killed the orks that reached for them, crushing the aliens’ fungal bones with swing after swing.

My cenobyte servitors struggled at my side, too mindlocked to realise the efforts they were putting their muscles through. The artefacts of Helsreach were as filthy as its army, but time and again they rallied the Steel Legion to where I stood… whether I willed it or not. The orks seemed blind to the significance of my cyborged slaves, hunting only those of us who carried guns and blades.

Ekene reached us in the same time, and he turned his defence into a crude art of spinning and hacking with knife and chainsword, more like dancing than duelling. The Lion’s armour was black with ooze. Breathlessness savaged his voice as he spoke through his helm’s mouth grille.

‘Do you still feel fortunate, Deathspeaker?’

‘We still live, Ekene.’ The chain binding my weapon to my armour was severed by a greenskin’s axe, but I still held the maul in my hands. ‘There is your answer.’

‘And do you yet regret not sailing with your brothers?’

I executed an alien at my boots, caving in its chest with my maul. ‘I am with my brothers,’ I told the Lion. My voice was as rasping as his.

Andrej crouched in the slop, firing down the canyon at the aliens vaulting the next barricade.

‘The Reclusiarch is the luckiest man I know,’ he said with curious calm, not bothering to look away from the orks he was killing with beams of laser light from his hellgun. ‘A cathedral fell on him once, and still he is here, to ask me to run into a canyon full of monsters with him.’

None of us could say more. We were separated again by the charging enemy tide. I saw Andrej sprint for a passing Chimera, hauling himself up the side. Then he was gone.

War is psychology and momentum, more than fire and blood. The press of regiments and hordes against one another; the ebb and flow of advance and fall back. Every battle between mortal beings comes down to a fulcrum moment, when the balance threatens to shift irrevocably. It is the moment the warriors of one side see enough of the wider scheme to realise they are losing. Or, rather, that they believe they see enough – they bind themselves to the belief that their side will be defeated, or has achieved an unbreakable advantage.

This can come at any moment, striking at any soul upon the battlefield. A moment of imbalance only occurs when the individual’s actions inspire and influence those nearby.

It might be the front rank of soldiers fleeing an enemy they fear to attack, or charging headlong in pursuit of their foes’ broken ranks, against all mandate and wisdom. It could be the rearmost soldiers believing their lives will be wasted if they suffer the same fate as their kindred ahead, or pushing forward too fast and too far to reach the battle, preventing their fellows from attaining an otherwise sound tactical retreat. It could just as easily be a general viewing a rout from behind the lines, who waits a handful of seconds too long to assign orders of redeployment and counterattack. Or it could be one warrior, a champion, falling to enemy blades in view of his or her brothers and sisters; thus the champion’s death becomes the fulcrum on which the battle turns. In another life, on another world, a champion’s defiance turns a retreat into a killing charge; whether by deeds or by words he rallies his flagging kin.

I have seen every stripe of victory and defeat, always rising from this simple truth: war is psychology. This is the primary strength of the Space Marine Chapters that serve mankind. That they ‘know no fear’ is merely the truth’s shadow. They devote their lives in absolution to training, training, training – forsaking all else in the quest for purity of purpose, in a life of war.

A front-line soldier sees nothing, nothing, of the wider battlefield. What he experiences around him is the entire reality in which he lives, and that is a flickering moment-by-moment assault of blades, shouting enemies and bleeding kindred. He makes judgements based upon these stimuli, and lives or dies by how he deals with them. This is why planning, communication, and trust change everything in war. With planning, you know where your brother-warriors should be elsewhere in the fight. With communication, you know how they fare as they fight away from you. With trust, you rely on them to survive and succeed, as they rely on you. Most important of all, you have eyes elsewhere in the dust, the chaos, the storm of blades and bolter shells. You know where your leaders wish you to be.

This is where Space Marines excel above all other mortal warriors. They live their lives in perfect trust of their battle-brothers. They possess more accurate and damage-resistant communication than any other human soldiers, down to the individual level. They are scourged of all emotion in battle, and trained to fight without concept of retreat until at last told to lower their weapons above the corpse of their slain foes.

This evolution is as much denial of flaw as addition of merit. Take a child, allow it to develop without ever understanding the frailties of human weakness, and force it to grow through ingesting nothing but the virtues of obedience, loyalty, and combat prowess. Surround it in ceramite. Arm it with fire. Tell it that it answers to no authority beyond its equally powerful, equally unrestrained brothers.

That is a Space Marine. Not a human trained to be a weapon, but a weapon with a human soul.

When the humans look upon us and cannot tell us apart but for the markings on our armour, this is why. We are hollow men by comparison to their brief, ignited lives of high passion and the weak, vulnerable frenzy of emotion.

It is not mockery of Guardsmen to acknowledge these fundamental truths of the Adeptus Astartes. It does the human men and women of our Imperium no disservice, nor does it exalt the warriors of the One Thousand Chapters to undeserved heights. We are the chosen, the Emperor’s Finest. Those words have meaning, and these are the reasons why.

During the Helsreach Crusade, the fulcrum moment of so many battles rested on my shoulders. My knights would look to me for the word to charge or fall back; they would rally behind my cries, or withdraw at my silence. The human officers were reluctant to push too far ahead without my promise the Templars would join them; and most obvious of all, wherever I stood, the fighting was always at its thickest, whether I willed it or not. I hunted the enemy champions. I stood to stem the tide. But my heraldry drew alien commanders to me as often as I fought my way to them, and they would bellow their own inhuman names into my faceplate as we battled, so their brethren – and presumably, I – would know which alien champion was risking his life to slay me.

It happened again at Mannheim, though I did all I could to avoid it. Yet the fulcrum moment once more came down to me. The largest of the beasts, doubtless hunting me by heraldry, launched itself at me from the back of a bouncing, crashing truck of scrap iron.

How many tattooed, roaring warlords did we slay that day? An eidetic memory only allows perfect recall of the foes you face yourself. I cannot speak for the Steel Legion, or the Lions that fell in what may have been the longest three hours of my life.

Behind us lay a graveyard of tanks – practically all our own, all lost to enemy cannonfire. Lining the canyon’s walls were the burning metal corpses of towering god-constructs, holed by missiles and tank shells, melting to slag in the flames of the Imperial Guard bombardment. Stubber fire rattled against our ceramite in a teeth-grinding drizzle, but scythed Guardsmen down in droves. Still we advanced, sloshing through the rising blood. It was knee-deep to most of the humans, turning all advancement into a sweating wade through filth. I wanted more of it. I wanted it to rise high enough to fill the ravine, and flood down into the cavern mouths, drowning any of the alien beasts that still hid below ground. I wanted to choke every living ork with lungfuls of this unholy fusion of blood from the just and unjust alike. Even the smell of it was wrong, like something alchemical and profane.

Before the warlord attacked, Cyneric carved his way to stand with me. His chainsword was a toothless ruin, welded into his fist by alien blood. His other arm ended at the elbow, severed in a ragged mess of cauterised meat and sparking armour cables.

‘I do not know when it happened,’ he confessed, utterly unfazed.

‘Brother.’ I wanted to thank him for standing with me in this day of darkness, though it seemed a war without end, perhaps even fought for unsalvageable pride. ‘Brother.’

The alien overlord hit me from the side. I heard Cyneric’s warning scarcely a heartbeat before the thing struck, and then we went down together, rolling through the oily blood. It was a thing of blunt fangs, sinewy muscle and hammering limbs – larger than me, stronger than me, faster than me. Even confessing that gives me shame, but there are beasts and daemons in this galaxy more than a match for a single Adeptus Astartes warrior. Just as I accept my gifts, I must accept my limits.

I made it to my feet first, the maul still in my hand, and laid into the beast as it rose from the muck. Armour bent and wrenched aside. Dark blood made a mist in the stinking air, but it was far too late to worsen the smell of what we were all breathing in. The thing moved as if immune to everything I inflicted, reaching for me with its great iron claw.

‘Reclusiarch!’ I heard a Lion call from nearby. ‘He is Ekene’s kill!’

From striking in anger, I turned my blows to guard myself. The thing was wounded, but what are bruises and broken skin to a thing that size? Kurov – of all the soldiers who could ever have been so foolish – joined me with a useless slash of his sabre. The brute beast aimed a dismissive swipe at the general, blocked only by my maul less than a hand’s breadth from Kurov’s face. Sparks rained onto the general’s face, forming a cosmos of falling stars in his eyes.

‘Back away,’ I breathed, my arms trembling. ‘It’s not your fight.’

The general obeyed, thank the Emperor.

The next strike smashed me from my feet, for the beast launched himself at me a second time. Again, I was up first, casting about in the slime for my fallen crozius. Sure enough, when the overlord rose, he held my mentor’s war maul in his grip. It was a cudgel to him, a pathetic club with its length of severed chain. I backed away, shame burning with every retreating step.

Las-fire lanced into the creature, going ignored against its armour, and equally ignored as the volleys scored fingertip holes in its flesh. One of the Lions threw himself at the ork, only to be caught in his leap and compacted in the monster’s mangling claw. The warping of ceramite was the same plaintive abuse of metal that sounds out as tanks melt in chemical fire.

The corpse was hurled aside. I had my pistol, drained of all power an hour before, and a metre of severed chain forming a useless whip. The thing, in its hulking iron plate armour, stalked forward through the marsh made by the blood of our companions.

Steel Legionaries were charging in, shouting wild cries, firing uselessly at close range. I ordered them back, both because they could do nothing to this beast, and because it would be disaster if, somehow, they did.

Cyneric threw himself onto the ork’s back, slapping down with his fangless chainblade. Each blow shed sparks, but no blood. The warlord gave a carnosaur’s bellow and threw my brother away into yet another mound of the sodden dead. I heard something give with a wet crunch over the vox, and I prayed – out loud and with no shame – it was not Cyneric’s spine.

‘Emperor’s ghost.’

Throne of Mankind’s Master, the thing spoke Gothic. Not well, not with any grace, but enough to convey meaning. Because of their mangled jaws, I understood precious few of the greenskin breed. This one was levelling my own mace at me, aiming at my face, and speaking my lord’s name.

No, not at my face. At my faceplate. The Emperor’s skullish, eternal visage. ‘Emperor’s ghost,’ it said. ‘Emperor’s ghost.’ It had the tones of a Dreadnought, freshly woken from stasis frost. I had no conception, then or now, of how a living thing could speak with a volcano’s voice.

‘I am the living will of the Immortal Emperor,’ I spoke through teeth as clenched as those of my avataric face mask. ‘And you will pay for your transgressions against the armies of humanity.’

It came for me in a lumbering run. I moved aside, ducking and weaving, giving up yet more shameful ground. Lashing back with my chain-whip was loud but fruitless, as was the gunfire poured on in spurts by the Steel Legion. The las-fire became more sporadic; this close, they risked hitting me.

‘Ekene…’ I voxed, but managed nothing more. I caught the maul on the ninth swing, clutching its haft with every iota of energy I could burn from my aching flesh. The alien drove me to the ground, down to my knees, but to release my grip was to die by my own weapon.

The beast swung its other hand with a driving whine of overworked servos. No dodging the claw – it crashed into the side of my armour, breeding the same wet crunches I’d heard from Cyneric – and hurling me aside into the muck. My retinal display told me the same as the pulses of pain dancing along my left side. Broken bones. Pain nullifying adrenaline injections. Warning runes chiming of biological trauma and armour damage. I ignored all of it. Ekene’s kill or not, I would not tolerate this vile slug to wield my crozius.

Ekene came between us with a leap and a roar, neither of which would have shamed the great cat his bloodline was named for. He held a hand back, bidding me remain away, and forcing myself to obey was a yield I could never countenance in any other circumstance. But we had fought this battle for a bloodline’s pride, and here was the moment of reckoning.

Ekene beat his blade against his chestplate, staring at the greenskin lord in its powered suit of tank armour scrap. Despite the sound of the battle above and around us, I heard his words as clearly as if they left my mouth instead of his.

‘In whatever underworld your foul breed believes, you shall tell your pig-blooded ancestors that you died to the blade of Ekene of Elysium, Lion of the Emperor.’

I did not know, not then, that Ekene was the last Lion still standing.

Would it have changed anything, had I known? I cannot say.

Ekene attacked. His chainsword was worthless against the beast’s claw; he had just as little hope of parrying my war maul with his combat knife. So what he lacked in strength, he poured into speed – never blocking, always dodging.

The battle did not pause around us. General Kurov, half of his face missing from the descent of some nameless, artless junkyard blade, blinked away blood as he sought to reload his pistol. His bodyguard of storm troopers fought around him, spearing out with bayonets and firing in closed ranks.

I saw no other Lions nearby. I heard none on the vox. None responded to my hails.

Cyneric, with bloody slime running in rivulets from his war-plate, tore his stained tabard free with his remaining hand, moving to my side. Together we slammed through the greenskins threatening to overwhelm Andrej and Kurov. I beat one to death with my fists, and strangled a second, feeling sick, primal joy at the life dying in its porcine eyes. Gasping, scrabbling with its weakening talons against my faceplate, it died in my grip.

A hole flash-burned in the thing’s forehead after I dropped it into the slime. Andrej, who had no hope of seeing my instinctive snarl behind my faceplate, raised his rifle in salute from a few metres away.

‘Just in case,’ he said.

‘Do not do that again,’ I growled.

Cyneric lifted his boot from the throat of another greenskin, a final stamp enough to crush whatever alien equivalent of a trachea it had possessed.

He chuckled as he watched it die. I have recorded elsewhere that what earned Cyneric his commendations to the Chaplaincy were his other numerous virtues and fervent insights, but in this personal accounting I can confess it was then, in that moment, as he laughed at the asphyxiating alien’s pain, that I made my decision.

His hatred was pure – what lesser warriors might call cruel or gratuitous, a Chaplain considers holy. Cyneric belonged behind a skull helm.

‘Where is the Grey Warrior?’ I called to the general. He was up to his thighs in filth.

‘Dead.’ He turned his ruined face to me. I could see bone beneath the flesh wreckage, yet he was still grinning. ‘We’ll mourn her later, Reclusiarch. Captain! How long now?’

Andrej wrestled with an incendiary control pack over a comrade’s shoulder, thumping it with a fist to straighten its readings.

‘One minute. One hour. This is broken, okay, general? That is the truth, I–’

A Vulture gunship laboured above us, its central turbine coughing as it chewed ork bullets instead of breathing air. The thing fell, flames already breaking out across its steel skin, and I pulled the closest two soldiers with me as I threw myself to the side.

As they picked themselves up, one thanked me profusely. The other was Andrej, who did no such thing.

‘That was a dramatic reaction, I am thinking. Yes. Yes, indeed.’ He shook blood from his hellgun, and prayed to its machine-spirit that it would still fire after being submerged in the muck. The scattered squad came together again, around the gunship’s wreckage.

More greenskins were barrelling their way closer. ‘Kill them,’ I ordered the Guardsmen, and turned to run back towards Ekene.

A burning Gargant close to the canyon’s entrance broke from its gantries, setting the ravine quaking as it crashed earthward. I felt the same bitter amusement that had gripped me as the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant came down in a hailstorm of marble and stained glass, but no laughter followed this time. The shaking earth bubbled the blood at our boots, and threw hundreds of soldiers from their feet. I kept running, Cyneric at my side.

Ekene and the warlord were still engaged, both bleeding from scores of wounds. The chainsword had licked out at armour joints and plunged into soft tissue; the power claw had mangled my cousin’s armour each time it fell. He was backing away now, just as I had. Fighting such a beast was no task for one warrior alone, no matter the pleasure of pride.

Then came the electrical burst – a thunderclap like nothing else – turning the air to charged static. Orks and men in their droves cried out in pain at the sonic boom.

My helm protected me, though it chimed with alert runes at the sudden atmospheric instability. Serpents of lightning danced between my fingertips. The parchments on my shoulderguards caught fire. The air itself was alive with dispersing force. It felt as though I was inhaling the breath of another living being.

‘The shield,’ Cyneric cried, gripping my pauldron with his remaining hand. ‘The orbital shield!’

I looked up, no longer seeing the mother-of-pearl distortion of the kinetic barrier energised in place above the canyon. At some point in the hours of melee, while I fought with the Lions, the Steel Legion had laid explosives at the void shield reactor. The Emperor alone knew when, where, and how. I had abandoned my delusions – and desires – of general command upon leaving the Helsreach in the hands of its Guard leaders.

No sooner had the shield imploded, spitting its static charges in all directions, than a powerful and priority channel vox-rune chimed loud on my retinal display.

I activated it, watching Ekene and the ork lord stagger around each other, wounded animals too proud to die.

‘Brother,’ came the voice, lifting my heart.

‘You are still there.’

‘For now. Not for much longer. Give the word if you require it, Merek. Just give the word.’

Helbrecht’s name-rune pulsed, red, gold, fierce. I broke into a run towards Ekene, replying as I moved.

‘Do it,’ I ordered my liege lord. ‘Blacken the sky.’

Ekene was down before I reached him. The beast clutched his arm in its mangling claw, crushing it at the bicep before ripping it free. He retaliated by ramming his chainsword in an awkward thrust into the creature’s throat. Deflected by armour, it barely bit. His assault came at the cost of his left leg, as the iron claw scissored through the limb at the knee, dropping him on his back into the slime.

I was on the beast’s back a heartbeat later, secure where one-armed Cyneric had been easily thrown, digging into the creature’s armour with my boots as I wrapped my weapon chain around its bleeding, sweating throat. The chain garrotted taut, and my broken bones throbbed in narcotic-dulled sympathy with the creaking, cracking sinew in the beast’s throat. The iron claw battered at me, shearing chunks of ceramite away. It staggered without toppling, gasped without truly suffocating. Even this – even strangling it with my last remaining weapon – could not kill it. All I could do was buy Ekene the moments he needed to crawl free.

He did. And Cyneric was waiting, a bolter in his remaining hand. The mutilated Lion reached up for it, clutching it one-handed in a pistol grip, and aimed it up as he lay back in the sludge.

I dropped back. Not completely, but enough to pull the chain tighter, adding my weight to my strength, and wrenching the beast’s head back to bare its throat.

I heard the bolter sing once, and the kick of something heavy striking near the chain. With a muffled burst, the head came free, tumbling back over its shoulders and landing with me in the filth. The armoured body stood there without anything existing above its neck – still too stubborn, too strong, to fall.

First I reclaimed my maul from its fingers. Then I tossed the thing’s slack-jawed head to Ekene where he lay.

The battle continued to rage, as the men and women I had led here fought their way further down the canyon.

With ideal atmospheric conditions, it takes less than two minutes between a drop pod’s launch and the impact of planetfall. Ekene was looking up at the darkening sky. I did not need to, nor did Cyneric. The Lion’s only reaction was to rise as best he could, and pull his helmet clear.

‘Help me stand. I cannot meet the High Marshal on my back.’

Cyneric and I hauled Ekene up between us. While we did so, the vox link I shared with the Imperial Guard erupted in cheers, as Lord Helbrecht blackened the sky with Templar drop pods.

Epilogue

Farewells

Three events remain to account in this personal chronicle, away from the battlefield. These were my last acts before leaving Armageddon.

The first, such as it was, took three entire days and nights. I memorised the names and regiments of every Steel Legion soldier lost at the Mannheim Gap, and etched them myself onto a pillar of black marble, erected in the courtyard of the foundations that would become – in the years after we departed – a new Temple of the Emperor Ascendant.

I wrote each of the six thousand, eight hundred and eleven names myself, etching them in gold leaf script onto the black stone.

The inscription above the names read, in simple Low Gothic:

‘Their names and deeds will be remembered, always, by the Emperor’s own sons,

And by the city they saved.

Honoured for their sacrifice,

And respected for their courage.

These words are carved by Merek Grimaldus,

Reclusiarch of the Eternal Crusade, Son of Dorn, Hero of Helsreach.’

Among the inscribed names of the fallen were General Arvaley Kurov and Captain Andrej Valatok.

The second was the farewell offered to Chapter Master Ekene Dubaku of the Celestial Lions, escorted with his surviving few warriors onto the Black Templars strike cruiser Blade of the Seventh Son, with its course plotted for the distant world Elysium.

His bionic leg clanked on the deck, and he still bore a limp, his physiology not entirely adjusted to the augmetic replacement yet. His armour was the gold war-plate of an ancient Imperial Fists champion, granted as a gift from the Eternal Crusader’s halls of memory. His cloak was that of Helbrecht’s own Sword Brethren, red on black, elegantly cast over one shoulder. I had worn one of those cloaks once, in a luckier life. For all I knew, it had been the very one Helbrecht had granted to Ekene when he forced him to take the oath of lordship over his depleted Chapter.

The honour guard ready to bid him good journey consisted of myself, Cyneric, and the High Marshal’s household knights, clad in ceremonial colours.

‘Chapter Master.’ I inclined my head in farewell. Cyneric did the same.

At Ekene’s hip, bound by a chain of black iron, was the flayed, polished skull of the greenskin warlord we had killed together. My name rune was etched into the bone, as was Cyneric’s, alongside Ekene’s own mark. An honour indeed, to be named on a Chapter Master’s prime trophy.

‘It should feel petty,’ he remarked, his dark face showing a smile, ‘to take such overwhelming vengeance on the site that killed my brothers. But it does not. Thank you, both of you.’

Cyneric’s skull helm dipped in further acknowledgement, but he said nothing. I could not resist a last lecture.

‘Vengeance is never petty, Chapter Master. It does, however, sometimes serve better to strike with the aid of trusted brothers.’

He made the crusader’s cross. ‘I will remember that.’

I hope most fervently, as time passes, that his efforts in reconstructing the Celestial Lions and training the generation to follow him are going well.

We will never meet again. Ekene is sworn to a life of defending what he can hold, and the Black Templars always sail forth to attack.

The third and final event worthy of chronicling came in the very last hour before the Eternal Crusader departed Armageddon’s orbit. I was alone in the Chamber of the First Proclamation, leaning on the guardrail before the great window overlooking the burning, wretched, priceless world beneath.

Bootsteps from behind did not draw my attention. Not until I realised there were two sets of them, and only one was twinned with the whirr of active battle armour.

I turned, to see Cyneric escorting a human, who walked with his hands in his pockets. Humans did not come here. I could not recall the last time one had walked this hall. This one, however, seemed absolutely unimpressed, staring not at the relics, but only at me.

‘Hey. Yes, you. I am not dead, eh? You can see this, so very plainly. Go back down there and scratch out my name, yes? I demand satisfaction in this.’

Cyneric turned to leave, abandoning me to this moment of acute discomfort now his escorting duties were done. Because of his helm, I could not tell his humour in this matter, but I suspected he was enjoying it.

I was not.

‘You were listed in the rolls of the dead,’ I said, which was perfectly true.

The slender Steel Legionary raked his fingers back through his hair, one eye narrowed in… I could not tell exactly what emotion or expression it was meant to convey. He seemed angry, or distressed, or perhaps amazed.

‘Must I sing a song or perform a dance in this museum here to convince you I am not dead?’

‘Please do not do either of those things.’

‘No? Very well. I shall scratch out my name myself. Then perhaps I can collect my pay again, eh? They cease monthly credit wages once you are registered deceased, you know? Now I have a heroic name and no money. Your brother Cyneric brought me to you. He tells me you will fix this.’

The ship shivered underneath us.

Andrej’s eyes went wide.

‘No,’ he said, as if one man could simply speak a single word and shift the tide of inevitability. ‘No, no, no. The ship moves. This is unacceptable. If I fly away from the war, I will be shot as a deserter, and then I shall truly be dead. And,’ he added, looking past me at the globe below, ‘continue going unpaid.’

How could he be shot as a deserter if he was nowhere near his regiment? I did not understand the workings of his mind, and I was not sure what to say. So I said nothing.

‘Stop this ship, okay?’ He reached to adjust his goggles where they sat back on his helmet. ‘Yes. Do that, please. I am apologetic for my angry words.’

The Crusader gave another shudder. Dozens of decks away, thousands of slaves were feeding the furnaces, igniting the great power drives. We were already moving from high anchor. The stars began to drift.

‘If you run,’ I suggested, ‘you may reach a shuttle bay in time. I will vox clearance ahead of you.’

He nodded, a gleam in his eyes, beginning to back away towards the door. ‘Yes. Clearance. That will be good, eh? Where is the closest shuttle bay?’

‘Approximately two kilometres away, if you move straight down the ship’s central spinal thoroughfare.’

He hesitated, and went bloodlessly white. ‘Please be joking.’

‘You may wish to start running, captain.’

He looked at me, shook his head in some subtle human dismissal I could not entirely gauge, and started running.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aaron Dembski-Bowden is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Betrayer and The First Heretic, as well as the novella Aurelian and the audio drama Butcher’s Nails, for the same series. He also wrote The Talon of Horus, the popular Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Helsreach, the Grey Knights novel The Emperor’s Gift and numerous short stories. He lives and works in Northern Ireland.

Fresh from the Ghoul Stars Crusade, High Marshal Helbrecht musters the Black Templars and sets out to Armageddon, where Ghazghkhull's second invasion is underway.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in 2012.
This edition published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

© Games Workshop Limited, 2012, 2014. All rights reserved.

Cover illustration by Kai Lim of Imaginary Friends Studios.
Internal artwork by Sam Lamont.

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ISBN: 978-1-78251-758-0

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