PART III GHOSTS
TWENTY The Battle of Lupercalia
The Thunderhawk was wrecked, a gutted carcass that had survived just long enough to get them on the ground. It would never fly again, but who cared about that? Abaddon staggered from the flames and ruin of the crash site, throwing out hails to the Justaerin.
Two definitely dead, one not responding.
So, call it three dead. About what he’d expected in getting this close to the guns of Iron Fist Mountain. They’d lose more by the time they seized the trenches and blockhouses spread around its base and lower slopes like a steeldust fungus. Gunships flashed towards the mountain, barrages of typhoon missiles rippling from their launchers and shells sawing from their assault cannons and hurricane bolters.
Streaks of artillery and anti-aircraft fire slashed overhead. Explosions, flak and the continuous bray of gunnery dropped a constant rain of dust and ember flare. Storm Eagles made a more difficult target than Thunderhawks, but the sheer volume of fire coming off the mountain was swatting more of them from the sky with every passing second.
The wrecks of dozens of gunships were spread over the low foothills. Crashing hadn’t been the intent of the plan, but it had been a more than probable outcome and an accepted risk. Five hundred Terminators formed up amid the flames and smoke of the crash sites.
The Imperial gunners thought they’d repulsed the airborne assault on their right. They were wrong. Just because an aircraft went down didn’t mean the warriors within were dead.
Especially if those warriors were Sons of Horus.
A Storm Eagle slammed down on the rocks to Abaddon’s left. Exploding ordnance mushroomed from the wreckage. Falkus Kibre appeared through the swirl of black smoke surrounding it.
‘Did you even crash?’ asked Abaddon, seeing the Widowmaker’s armour was undamaged by fire or impact.
‘No. Pilot brought us down in the lee of a scarp,’ said Kibre, gesturing with his combi-bolter. ‘Five hundred metres east.’
‘I swear you are the luckiest bastard I ever met,’ said Abaddon, his voice grating and without the powerful tones he had once possessed. The Emperor’s angel of fire had stolen that aspect of him, burned it clean out of him and left him with this gargoyle’s rasp. Barring a few bruises, the Widowmaker had come through that encounter unscathed.
‘The more I fight, the luckier I get.’
Abaddon nodded. He checked the counter in the corner of his visor.
Four minutes.
The smoke and dust of the crashing gunships was still obscuring their presence, but that wouldn’t last for long. The thunder of artillery on the plain swelled. Still the heavier guns in the rear, the main assault waves yet to crash home.
‘Everything still on target?’ asked Kibre.
‘Seems to be.’
‘Best find some cover then.’
‘That cliff ahead?’
‘It’s not much.’
‘Best I can see.’
Abaddon nodded and opened the vox to the Justaerin.
‘New assault position,’ he said. ‘Advance to my marker and keep your damn heads down.’
‘Inspiring,’ said Kibre. ‘I can see why Lupercal made you First Captain.’
‘Now’s not the time for inspiring,’ said Abaddon. ‘Now’s the time to hope the damn Mechanicum don’t miss.’
Var Zerba was one of the oldest defence platforms orbiting Molech, and had accrued a sizeable arsenal over the decades. Torpedo racks, missile tubes, mass drivers, collimated boser weapons and innumerable batteries of macro-cannons had been designed with the goal of smashing attacking fleets to ruin.
But such weapons were equally capable of wreaking havoc on planetary targets.
Ezekyle Abaddon had seized Var Zerba virtually intact, and the frigates, Selenar’s Spear and Infinity’s Regret had almost burned out their reactors dragging it from its geostationary position over Molech’s oceans to a point fixed just above the agri-belt north of Lupercalia.
Farther west of the battlefield to account for the planet’s rotation, but otherwise in the perfect position to wreak havoc from above.
Orbital barrages were not subtle weapons, nor were they discriminate. Their use during battlefield operations was almost entirely unheard of. Their vast quantities of fire were too dangerous, too unpredictable and too destructive should something go wrong. A misfiring munition, a flare of atmospheric discharge or a simple miscalculation could be enough to send city-levelling ordnance wildly off-target.
But when the target was the largest mountain on Molech, perhaps the risk might be deemed acceptable.
The Bloodsworn knelt with their swords drawn and buried in the earth before them. Each warrior had anointed the crimson plates of their armour with the Black, and waited as Warden Serkan moved among them, smearing ash across the winged blood drop on their shoulder guards. As the shells crashed down on the advancing horde he offered each warrior a measure of his wisdom and listened to their last words.
No one was under any illusion that this would be anything other than a last stand. Drazen Acorah knew he would not live to see another sunrise, but the thought did not trouble him overmuch. That they had killed Imperial soldiers in the jungle was not in any doubt, even if he still could not explain how it had happened.
Not only had they murdered innocents and hunted like beasts, but they failed in their duties as exemplars of all that was good and noble in the Legions. The Warmaster had already tarnished the honour of the Legions such that none would ever trust them again, and the Blood Angels had allowed themselves to be party to that.
The Bloodsworn had come to Molech to fight, but they had come to this battlefield to die.
Vitus Salicar stood, and ninety-six Blood Angels rose to their feet behind him, each man holding his blade up to the sky in salute. Not to the enemy; they were unworthy of any recognition. This was a final salute to the Emperor and Terra, to Sanguinius and Baal.
Salicar used an oiling cloth to clean his power sword of dirt, and Acorah saw the ident-tags swing from the blood drop pommel. Acorah needed no psyker powers to feel the weight of guilt attached to them. The rust and unmistakable tang of mortal blood told its own tale.
Salicar saw him looking and sheathed the blade. The ident-tags rattled against the iron and leather scabbard.
‘You are still set on this course?’ asked Acorah.
‘I am,’ confirmed Salicar. He made a fist and lifted his arm, bent at the elbow. Ten Rhino armoured carriers fired their engines, jetting oilsmoke and setting the ground atremble.
‘You should not seek to dissuade me, Acorah. I would not sully this moment with having to discipline you.’
‘I seek to do no such thing,’ he said, though the rebellious thought had already crossed his mind. He’d dismissed it immediately. His powers were strong, but not so strong that he could alter a will so set in stone.
‘Do you believe this is penance?’ he asked.
‘I do,’ said Salicar.
‘You’re wrong,’ said Acorah, placing his hand on the partly obscured Legion symbol at his commander’s shoulder guard. A familiar gesture, almost too familiar. He and Salicar were battle-brothers, but they were far from friends.
Salicar looked down at Acorah’s hand. ‘Then what is it?’
‘It’s justice.’
‘Go!’ shouted Aximand.
Third Squad broke from cover, moving and firing as Ungerran Dreadnought Talon opened fire with their cannons and missile launchers. Streaming salvoes of high-calibre shells and spiralling missiles hammered the line of mesh fortifications. Filled with rubble and stacked like children’s blocks, they were ideal temporary fortifications.
Temporary or not, they were going to be bloody to overrun.
Behind him, the Stormbirds smoked in the flames of impact and hard burn landings. Nearly five hundred Sons of Horus poured onto the rugged landscape of the Untar Mesas, less than a hundred metres from the stepped defences.
No matter whether an assault came by land, sea or air, that last hundred metres would always need to be crossed by warriors willing to face the enemy head on.
This flank of the Imperial line rested on the mountain foothills, stretching away in a gentle crescent until it reached the towering peak of Iron Fist Mountain.
The twenty kilometres between here and there was an unbroken line of Imperial tanks and infantry. Well dug in, well positioned and, by the looks of things, well led. Jaundiced clouds of smoke drifted across the lines, the ejecta of Imperial guns mixed with the explosions of Lupercal’s heavy artillery.
Titans duelled with city-levelling ordnance, the thunder of their steps felt even from here. The Imperator at the centre of the line wasn’t marching. Its upper section turned only enough for it to bring its apocalyptic weaponry to bear. Its guns were tearing bloody wounds in the Warmaster’s army with every shot. Hundreds were dying with every blast of its hellstorm cannon and hundreds more to the plasmic fury of the annihilator. Missiles, laser blasts and hurricanes of bolter fire wreathed its upper towers and bastions in smoke.
Single-handedly, the Imperator was gutting Lupercal’s army.
Or at least the mortal portion of it.
Aximand’s attention was drawn from the destroyer Titan to a flash of brightness at the Titan’s base. Crimson-painted Rhinos surged forward in a wedge to split the attack in two. A glorious charge into the enemy ranks, the kind that only Legion warriors would dare.
‘Bold, but foolish,’ hissed Aximand. The enemy host was too vast for so few warriors to break apart, even warriors of the quality of the Blood Angels.
The hiss of a passing las-bolt brought him back to his own fight.
‘There,’ shouted Aximand, pointing at the base of a stepped salient where a flurry of Stormbird rockets had split the reinforced mesh. Rubble threatened to pour out. All it needed was a little encouragement. ‘Squad Orius, bring that wall down! Baelar, take it when it’s open.’
A burst of missile contrails arced from a patch of rocks to Aximand’s left. A towering explosion of rubble detonated from the defences. Blasted rocks fell in a rain of shattered stone and debris. Even before the dust of the explosion blew out, Squad Baelar were moving. Jump packs flared from the cliff above, where Aximand’s pure assault elements had landed.
Gunfire reached out to them. Six were blasted from the air before they reached the apex of their powered leap.
‘Did you see that?’ asked Yade Durso.
‘I did,’ said Aximand.
‘No mortal shooters did that.’
‘Agreed, that’s Legion.’
Thudd guns punished the defences where the shots had come from, but Aximand knew they’d hit nothing. If he was right in who was there, they would have already displaced. Squad Baelar landed just before the emplaced blocks and braced their legs for another leap.
The ground erupted in a sheet of fire as a line of remote-activated melta mines detonated.
Aximand ducked back as his auto-senses shut down to protect him from the brightness. Squad Baelar were all but incinerated. A single warrior got airborne, but only his upper half. Stuttering jets carried his corpse over the wall.
‘Just far enough away to need two jumps,’ hissed Aximand. ‘They knew assaulters would need to land there.’
‘Definitely Legion,’ said Durso.
‘Not Blood Angels,’ replied Aximand, which left only one possibility. ‘The Ultramarines are here.’
‘Third Squad is in position,’ Durso voxed. ‘Ungerran are ready.’
‘Hit them with everything,’ said Aximand. ‘Maximum suppression. We’re taking this wall ourselves.’
A pressure within Abaddon’s helmet was the first sign of the incoming barrage. His teeth ached and his visor dimmed in anticipation of impact.
‘You’re looking up?’ asked Kibre. ‘Do you want to be blinded?’
‘How often do you get to be this close to such awesomely destructive firepower?’
‘Even once is too often.’
Abaddon grinned, an unusual enough occurrence for him that he surprised himself. Since his injury he’d had precious little to laugh about. The angel’s fire had done more than take his voice, it left him with a constant smoulder in his bones. Like an underground fire that never goes out, but burns and burns even when no fuel remains to sustain it.
‘Think of it this way,’ said Abaddon. ‘When it hits, we’ll either walk right through the ruins or we’ll be dead. Anyway, if I die, Lupercal will need someone to be First Captain.’
‘I don’t want it earned this way.’
Anger touched Abaddon at Kibre’s sentimentality. ‘How else do you think you’ll get it?’
Kibre didn’t answer, and Abaddon turned his gaze to the heavens. Molech’s skies had been ripped with electrical storms and raging atmospheric disturbances since the invasion began. Low-hanging clouds seethed like overloading generators. Finally they burst apart, unable to contain the rampant energies within them.
Forking traceries of blue light arced between them and the mountain’s highest peaks, as though the holdfast were a vast lightning rod. Squalling clashes of expending void shields filled the sky with blooming oilspills of light. The lightning danced on the invisible barrier, stripping it back with every strike.
And with every screeching blast, the void shields grew closer to their extreme tolerances. Like a bubble stretched to its maximum expansion, they screamed as they blew out. A micro-storm blasted skyward as feedback detonated the generators and explosions geysered around the throat of the mountain.
But this was just the precursor.
Glassy rods of laser fire touched the mountain peak, coring deep into the rock. Superheated steam blasted skyward. Spurts of molten rock garlanded the high peak in a fiery golden crown.
Yet even this was a prelude.
Torpedo volleys and macro-cannon shells launched from Var Zerba at hyperfast velocities punched through the clouds on the coat-tails of the lasers. The mountain’s defensive guns sought to bring them down, but the catastrophic detonations of the void shield array had blown out almost every targeting cogitator.
Orbital munitions designed to penetrate subterranean bunker complexes slammed into the mountain, punching into the shafts bored by the orbital lasers. Iron Fist Mountain was hardened to resist aerial bombardment and ground based artillery, but an orbital barrage was many orders of magnitude greater than anything the builders of Legio Crucius had envisioned.
The top five hundred metres of the mountain simply vanished.
Warheads just short of atomic power struck deep into its heart, tearing apart the internal structure of the hollowed out mountain in a hellish firestorm. Vast buttresses of adamantium buckled and melted in temperatures normally found in the cores of stars. Bracing beams and load-bearing archways collapsed and a cascade of structural instability shook the entire mountain.
A flaming caldera formed as the weight of the mountain’s exterior fell inwards. Iron Fist Mountain crumbled like a sand sculpture, every second of collapse adding to the speed of its dissolution. Kilometres-high plumes of explosive gases and dust clouds billowed in a fire-shot mushroom cloud.
The shock wave of impacts and the instantaneous destruction of an entire mountain raced outwards in a pulsing series of seismic pressure waves. Abaddon gripped tightly to the rock as though the earth sought to shake him loose. Explosions of rock and flame shot from the mouth of the newly-formed volcano.
An avalanche of debris spilled downwards, millions of tonnes of shattered rock and steel. A tidal wave of destruction that buried the Imperial defences clustered around the mountain under hundreds of metres of rubble.
‘First Company,’ said Abaddon, as the shock waves began to dissipate.
Five hundred Terminators rose from cover and marched into the hellstorm surrounding the mountain’s destruction.
Vitus Salicar rode at the head of the Blood Angels, his crimson Rhino’s engines roaring like a mesoscorpion in heat. He’d ordered the Techmarines to overcharge the engines. They’d burn out within minutes, metal grinding on metal and erupting in flames as oil feeds burst under pressure. It wouldn’t matter. These Rhinos would never need to move again once this task was done.
‘An end for all of us,’ he said.
They left burning trails behind them where fuel manifolds had already cracked. The flames spread quickly through the fields, and a wall of smoke and fire rose behind them.
There could be no retreat now, even if they desired one.
The traitor line was an unbroken wall of flesh and iron, tanks and marching soldiers as far as the eye could see. Smoke banks from booming artillery obscured the rear ranks. Gunfire snapped and explosions cratered the ground.
Shots punched the up-armoured glacis of his Rhino, but didn’t penetrate. A las-round clipped his shoulder guard, vitrifying the ash and dirt smeared over his Legion symbol. A glassy scab formed over the blood drop.
He looked left and right. Like him, Drazen Acorah and Apothecary Vastern rode in the cupola of their Rhinos, while Warden Serkan squatted atop his vehicle like the savage tribal chiefs of Baal Secundus atop their chariots in ages past.
‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius!’ shouted Salicar as linked bolters on the roof of the Rhino opened fire. A few traitors in deliberately ripped Army fatigues and fetishised helms were punched from their feet.
He picked his target. Army Chimera with the Eye of Horus daubed in umber on the frontal glacis. A banner of ragged cloth streaming behind it with a bleeding eagle upon it. A vehicle for a commander or soldier of rank.
The engine behind Salicar blew out with a hard bang and a solid, concussive thud. He tasted burning promethium and lubricant. The vehicle gave one last spurt of power to the tracks before seizing with a dreadful clash of splintering metal and ripping gears.
The Rhino slammed head on into the painted Chimera. Metal buckled and deformed. The heavier Space Marine vehicle smashed the Chimera’s frontal section like foil paper. Salicar vaulted from the Rhino’s roof, using the collision to propel him deep into the enemy ranks.
His scaled cloak billowing behind him like golden pinions, the captain of the Bloodsworn sailed through the air and crashed down in the midst of the charging traitors. His sword swept out, its edges blazing with amber fire. Men died.
Behind him, the Rhino’s spiked bull bar had disembowelled the enemy vehicle like a carcass on a butcher’s slab. Black smoke billowed as the assault doors opened and the Blood Angels poured out. They slammed into the scattered traitors, bludgeoning them from their path with kite shields and short, stabbing thrusts of their swords.
Salicar moved and killed with grace and beauty, like a dancer whose every move was choreographed to match those of his foes. Mortals tried to cut him down, but his movements were too fast, too supple and too beautiful. His flame-lit edge opened their bodies, his gold-chased pistol spat headshots with every pull of the trigger.
Gun fire struck him on the chest and shoulders. Some of it even cut down the soldiers he was fighting. They knew they couldn’t fight Salicar on an equal footing and were looking to kill him any way they could. He kept moving, putting as many of the enemy around him as he could. If they planned to shoot him down, they would kill their own men to do it.
The Blood Angels formed arrowheads of red-armoured killers around their war-leaders. Warden Serkan smashed through a knot of bare-chested warriors with their flesh scarified by knife blades. His eagle-winged symbol of office carved them new wounds, but none that would ever heal.
Alix Vastern, the Apothecary who knew every inch of human physiology and who had spent a lifetime repairing it, now bent his every effort to destroying it. Drazen Acorah fought with a monstrous twin-bladed axe, hewing a red path through to a squad of augmented soldiers adorned in blood-lined flesh cloaks and whose weapons were those of the techno-barbarians that once warred over the ruined hellscapes of Old Earth.
Salicar pushed through the masses of packed soldiery to link with him. No blade touched him, but las-rounds and solid slugs gouged and bit his plate. In any other fight, the goal was to make space. To move, to find the gaps between the foe and drink deep of the killing thirst. Here, the aim was to fill that space with their flesh, to make them his shields.
All around, the charge of the enemy continued unabated. Chimeras roared past towards Tyana Kourion’s Grand Army of Molech. For all their trappings of savagery, the Warmaster’s army was disciplined.
Salicar beheaded a pair of mortals bearing a heavy bolter and kicked another with a demolition charge in the chest. The man’s ribs shattered and he flew back through the air. The charge he’d carried detonated and tore the sponson from a nearby battle tank. It slewed around and exploded a moment later.
Salicar knelt as the shock wave washed over him.
He rose to his feet and pushed on, his honour guard finally catching up with him. They had discarded their shields. Defence was now irrelevant, attack was all that mattered.
The bladed formations of the Blood Angels converged to form a single spear thrust right through the centre of the enemy. Perhaps a quarter of Salicar’s warriors were dead. Sheer weight of fire had done what the enemy’s individual prowess could not. They fled before his wetted blade. Gunshots smacked his arms and legs.
His visor display flickered with warnings, but he cared nothing for them. He was to die this day, and no warning would change that.
Drazen Acorah now fought at his side, his axe blades gleaming red and wet. His lieutenant saw him and gave a curt nod. All that could be spared in the fight’s fury. Salicar returned the gesture as he saw a hellish fire silhouette the mortals before him.
Acorah cried out and dropped to his knees, the axe falling from his grip. The press of bodies closed on him, knives and rifles and swords stabbing for him. Salicar thrust and cut, keeping the rabble back. A shot smacked into his back, a heavier round. He staggered. Another clipped his helmet and he fell to one knee.
He reached out and gripped Acorah’s shoulder guard.
‘Stand, brother!’ he ordered.
Acorah looked up.
Crackling lines of power hazed his helmet, and the lenses shone with inner light. A blood-red radiance of arterial wonder.
‘It’s here!’ cried Acorah. ‘Throne save us, it’s here!’
Salicar sprang to his feet as a towering fury surged through him, a killing rage like nothing he had ever known.
No, that wasn’t true.
He had known this once before.
Months before in the Kushite jungle. A red mist of unimaginable hatred and rage, the unbridled anger of a million souls. Every hostile thought and primal impulse given free rein.
Salicar gasped, an exhalation of feral savagery.
A figure moved through the flames before him, a warrior of transhuman scale. Its armour was blackened red and wreathed in fire.
Worse, it was armoured as he was. Wreathed by flames that seared the eye, the winged blood drop on its shoulder guard was unmistakable.
Whatever this thing was, it had once been a Blood Angel.
Chains dragged behind it and it hovered a full metre above the bloody ground. Its face was a scorched horror of eternally burning meat, fire-blackened and pulled tight in a rictus grin of horrified anger. In one hand it carried a severed head, that of Warden Agana Serkan.
‘Behold our kin,’ it said, and Salicar felt his ears bleed within his helm.
The mortals gathered around him fell to their knees. No longer seeking him dead, but supplicating themselves to the monstrous hellspawn. Salicar wanted to murder every one of them. Not fight them, not kill them, but slaughter them. He wanted to bathe in their blood, to strip himself of armour and slather his naked flesh with their entrails.
Their hearts he would devour. From their bones he would suck the marrow. Their eyes would be sweet, their blood ambrosia. Salicar’s every civilised move was stripped away as he saw himself drowning in the blood of his kills, each skull taken paving the way for his immortality.
‘This is what you all want, Vitus,’ said the fallen angel, reaching out to him. ‘Accept it. Your brothers have already drunk from the bloody chalice I offered them on Signus. They now slay in my name. They slake their thirst for blood without remorse. I know you felt the echoes of that moment in your own slaughters, Vitus. Feel no guilt for that, embrace the killer angel within. Join your brothers. Join me.’
Salicar felt a presence beside him and reluctantly averted his gaze from the daemon-thing. Drazen Acorah stood at his side, one hand holding his axe before him like a talisman.
‘I name you warp spawn!’ cried Acorah, the witch-light within his helm spreading over his body to envelop the blades of his axe.
‘I am the Cruor Angelus, the Red Angel!’ cried the fire-wreathed abomination as a pair of flaming swords erupted from its gauntlets. ‘Bow down before me!’
Apothecary Vastern moved to stand between the Red Angel and his captain. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You are Meros of the Blood Angels! My battle-brother of the Helix Primus, now and always. No power in the galaxy can break that bond!’
‘I am the ragefire, I am the sinister urge, the red right hand and the ender of lives!’ said the warp-thing. ‘Meros is long gone. He and Tagas lit the soulfires within me, but the soul of your primarch and his corruption is the blood in my veins.’
Salicar fought to contain his rage and resist surrendering to its red temptation. Every fibre of his willpower was fraying, searing to ash within his mind. To give in would be easy, to submit and accept the bloodlust within him.
Acorah reached out and placed a hand on Salicar’s shoulder guard. The fulgurite lightning bolt carved through the ash flickered and danced with golden light. Salicar drew a great draught of air into his lungs, like a drowning man finally reaching the surface.
He blinked away the bloody haze that had fallen across his vision. He ripped off his helmet and threw it aside. The fetor of the battlefield waxed strong in his sense. Blood and opened meat, urine and mud.
His Blood Angels knelt in the dirt around him, looking to him for guidance. Traitors surrounded them, looking to them as avatars of murder and slaughter, as newfound gods to worship. The thought sickened him, that they might be venerated by such dregs.
Firelight reflected on the ident-tags wrapped around the pommel of Salicar’s sword. And what had once been guilt became the promise of salvation.
We are the Blood Angels.
We are killers, reapers of flesh.
But we are not murderers, we are not savages.
Vitus Salicar turned so that every one of his warriors could see him. He reversed his grip on his sword. They met his gaze. They knew. They understood. They aligned their blades as he did.
‘Join me,’ said the Red Angel. ‘Be my blood-letters.’
‘Never,’ said Salicar, driving his gladius up through the base of his jaw and out through the top of his skull.
Two Warhounds of Interfector, a snapping engine named Lochon and a limping beast dubbed Bloodveil, gave covering fire. Aximand and the Fifth Company charged under a blitzing hurricane of turbo fire and vulcan shells. Portions of the mesh-block wall had already given way. The new-birthed volcanic explosion on the far flank had toppled loose blocks from the top of the makeshift barricade, and the fire from the two Warhounds did the rest.
‘Over it,’ shouted Aximand. ‘Take the fight to them.’
The Sons of Horus wove a path through the rubble, some firing from the hip, others pausing to aim. Aximand did neither. He kept his weapon pulled tight to his chest. Speed was his best hope of reaching the defences alive.
Ten Scimitar jetbikes flashed overhead, strafing the defenders with heavy bolter fire. Detonations rippled behind the blocks. The jetbikes turned hard, bleeding off speed for a quick turnaround.
A mistake, Aximand knew. As below, so above.
Speed was survival.
Shots from something rapid firing reached up and tore half the Scimitars from the sky, but a trio of larger attack speeders followed up with barking lascannon fire. An explosion clawed skyward, quickly followed by another. Gunfire chased the speeders, but by now the Scimitars were back on station and let rip over the defenders.
The crash of Titans made Aximand look up in time to see Lochon stamp down on a distant section of the walls. Debris spilled out and Sons of Horus swarmed over the breach. Bloodveil shadowed its impulsive cousin, firing controlled bursts of vulcan fire. Ejected shells spat from the rear of the weapon in a waterfall of scrap metal.
Behind the Warhounds came Silence of Death, a Reaver with deep gouges burned into its carapace. It had been wounded in the fight for Molech and one particular burn scar imparted a lopsided grimace to its pilot’s canopy.
The Titan braced its legs, appearing to squat slightly, like an animal about to defecate.
‘Down!’ shouted Aximand, dropping to a crouch with his helmet tucked into his chest as far as it would go. The Reaver’s blastgun and melta cannon fired with a shriek of rupturing air. The path of the weapons ignited, an instantaneous flashburn of light.
Aximand’s armour warned of a cataclysmic spike in temperature that vanished almost as soon as it registered. Thunderclaps of superheated air washed over him in a thermal shock wave.
Paint blistered on his back and shoulders.
Aximand pushed himself upright. The middle of the wall was gone. Apocalyptic explosions had tossed what remained around, leaving the way open for the infantry.
Aximand ran towards the flaming ruin of the wall, threading a path through the blistering heat haze. The rock underfoot was molten and glassy. His auto-senses were lousy with thermals, just a bleeding mass of false target readings.
A series of ferocious explosions hurled Aximand into the air.
Massed battle cannon fire.
He came down hard on the fused remains of a block that had once been part of the defences. He rolled, his armour cracked open in a dozen places. His helmet was split down the middle. He tore it off, and struggled to find his feet. His innards felt like they’d been compressed in a Warlord Titan’s assault fist. Concussive trauma. His lungs fought to take a breath. When they did it was searing hot, painful. He tasted burned meat, scorched metal and stone.
Sons of Horus lay dead all around him, split plates and boiled meat. Yade Durso picked himself up, holding his hand as though he was in danger of losing it. Aximand saw an Interfector Warhound lying across the remains of the wall. One side was ripped away, its mechanical innards spilled and its crew a burned smear on the inner faces of its carapace.
Bloodveil or Lochon, he couldn’t tell.
Vapour ghosts made visibility a joke beyond forty metres. His eyes burned with the acrid fumes of melta residue. Shapes moved in the smoke. Tall, loping. Hunched low and racing through the geysers of superheated air.
Knights. At least a dozen. Aximand struggled to remember the force disposition documents he’d read.
Green and blue heraldry, a fire-topped mountain: House Kaushik. Arcology-dwelling House, low tech resources. Estimated six Knights maximum. Threat level: medium.
Coiled snake icon over a field of orange and yellow. House Tazkhar, southern, steppe-dwelling nobles of noted savagery and cunning. Estimated eight Knights in total. Threat level: high.
They came in pairs; one moving, one shooting. Heavy stubbers raked the walls and thermal cannons stabbed like bright lances through the smoke. Aximand experienced a moment of paralysis when he thought they were coming for him, but the Knights had bigger prey in mind.
Void shield flare blazed like sheet lightning behind him as the Knights went after the remaining Warhound and the Reaver. An unequal fight, but when had that ever mattered? The Knights swept past, over the ruin of the block wall, hunting horns blaring from their carapaces.
Then Aximand saw who was really coming for him.
Armoured in cobalt-blue and gold, a transverse crest of white on a legate’s helmet. Bright silver blades unsheathed.
XIII Legion.
Ultramarines.
The Justaerin were wasted in this fight. Nothing remained of the Imperial right flank. Ashen statues that had once been men, buried wrecks of tanks that had become inescapable ovens. Artillery positions were buried in rock, and the twisted barrels of Basilisks and Minotaurs jutted from drifts of hot ash.
Mewling survivors begged to be pulled from avalanches of rock that were slowly cooking them to death. Abaddon didn’t give them the mercy of a bullet.
He saw a Warlord on its knees, its lower legs fused and melted to the rock of the mountain. Its back was bent as it tried to right itself. All that was keeping it upright were its weapon arms, buried in ash to the elbows. Two Warhounds lay sprawled on their bellies, their canopies cracked open and wounded skitarii frantically digging to reach the crew.
The Terminators killed them without breaking pace.
The real fight was coming to them.
The Imperator Titan was on the move.
In the wake of the Ullanor campaign, Aximand had spoken at length to the warriors of the Ultramarines. It had been a tense time between the XVI and the XIII Legions. Together with the White Scars, the Ultramarines had acted as Lupercal’s unwitting decoy in force while the Luna Wolves struck straight to the heart of the greenskin empire.
Neither Guilliman’s nor the Khan’s warriors took kindly to being used as bait while the glory went to others. Many fanciful stories grew out of that campaign; some aggrandising it, some belittling it, but all agreed on the spectacular nature of the victory, with Horus and the Emperor fighting back to back. Aximand wondered if that particular story would ever be retold in years to come.
Ezekyle had been merciless in his not-so-gentle mockery of the laggardly Ultramarines.
‘Always late for the fight,’ Ezekyle had roared, strutting like a peacock. The challenge had come from a sword-champion named Lamiad, and Ezekyle had accepted. He had a head of height on the slender Ultramarine, but Lamiad had him on his back in under a minute.
‘If you must fight an Ultramarine, you have to kill him quickly,’ Lamiad warned Ezekyle. ‘If he is still alive, then you are dead.’
Sound advice, though until now, Aximand had never realised just how sound. The Ultramarines had seen the threat of the Silence of Death and withdrawn to positions prepared for just such an eventuality. Practical, indeed.
Now three hundred warriors in the blue of open skies came at the scattered warriors of the XVI Legion with hatred in their hearts. Aximand had somewhere in the region of four hundred, but they were scattered and spread through the ruins. At best, he had a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty immediately to hand.
The odds favoured the Ultramarines.
But since when had that ever mattered to the Sons of Horus.
‘Lupercal!’ shouted Aximand, swinging Mourn-it-all from its shoulder harness. The blade gleamed in the murder-light of battle. The runic script worked into the fuller shone with anticipation.
The Sons of Horus rallied to the Warmaster’s name as Aximand swung his blade up to his shoulder and charged the Ultramarines. Bolter shells filled the rapidly diminishing space between them. Armour cracked open, bodies fell. Not enough to halt the tides.
Aximand picked his target, a sergeant with a notched sword that struck him as being the very antithesis of all the XIII Legion stood for. He would be doing Primarch Guilliman a favour by killing this legionary – what sort of example was he setting his warriors?
The ocean green and cobalt-blue slammed together in a shattering crack of plate and blades. Pistols blazed, swords crashed and armour sundered. Aximand split the Ultramarines sergeant from clavicle to pelvis with one stroke. No photonic edge was ever sharper. He backswung and hacked through a legionary’s waist. The hosts became entangled, a heaving, grunting press of armoured bodies. Too close and cramped for sword work. Aximand slammed the hilt against a warrior’s visor. It cracked and spit sparks. A pistol shot blew it out.
Yade Durso’s sword had broken. He spun through the melee with two pistols. He took shots of opportunity, heads, spines and throats. Like a pistol master of the Scout Auxilia, he never stopped moving.
The fight was brutal. The blue had the better of it, fighting in ordered ranks, like a living threshing machine. Their blades and guns worked tirelessly, as though the Ultramarines fought to the unheard recitation of an unseen combat master.
It was war without heroics, without art.
But it was winning.
Already outnumbered, the Sons of Horus were fighting on their own, each warrior the hero in his own battle. But heroes could not win on their own, they needed battle-brothers. Aximand saw that ego had hamstrung them. They had come to Molech expecting an easy fight. It had made them forget themselves, and the XIII Legion were punishing them for that complacency.
Aximand roared and swung Mourn-it-all in a wide arc, clearing space. Ultramarines fell back from his unnaturally keen edge.
‘Sons of Horus, close ranks!’ shouted Aximand. ‘Show these eastern dogs how the mongrel bastards of Cthonia fight!’
Warriors gathered around him. Not enough to keep them from being pushed from the field, step after backward step.
A warrior of the XIII Legion came at Aximand with a long-bladed polearm. The leaf-shaped blade shimmered with power. It gave him reach. Aximand jumped back as the golden blade stabbed for him. The warrior was a vexillary, Aximand now saw, the long-shafted weapon he bore having once borne a flag. Its burned remains hung limply from corded red fasteners.
‘You lost the standard,’ said Aximand. ‘You ought to impale yourself on that spike of yours.’
‘You will all die here,’ said the Ultramarine.
Aximand turned the polearm aside with Mourn-it-all’s blade. He spun inside its reach. His elbow smashed the Ultramarine’s face.
The warrior staggered, but didn’t fall. ‘If you must fight an Ultrama–’
Aximand plunged Mourn-it-all through the vexillary’s breastplate until the quillons struck the glittering Ultima on his plastron.
‘I know,’ said Aximand. ‘Make sure you kill him.’
From the fire-warmed heat of his war tent, Horus watched a hololithic representation of the battle unfolding. With each update fed into the cogitator by the kneeling ranks of calculus logi, Horus barked manoeuvre orders to Scout Auxilia runners who carried them to the vox-tents.
Beyond the war tent, hundreds of Rhinos, Land Raiders and Thunderhawks waited to carry thousands of Sons of Horus into battle. The remaining Titans of Vulcanum, Mortis and Vulpa were spread through the legionaries. A force capable of utter destruction, but they too waited.
Maloghurst stood at his side, but had said little since the battle’s opening shots. Horus sensed his confusion at giving battle with a full third of the army yet to engage. Horus did not explain. His reasons would become clear soon enough.
‘Ezekyle’s Justaerin are pushing hard for the centre,’ said Maloghurst. ‘The destruction of Iron Fist Mountain has blown the left flank wide open.’
They’d felt the monstrous shock waves of the orbital barrage from Var Zerba like the rumblings of a distant earthquake. Fire-streaked smoke spread like embers on the horizon. It would rain ash for weeks, turning the entire agri-belt into a benighted wasteland.
‘Ezekyle will need support if he’s not going to be annihilated by Paragon of Terra.’
‘He’ll have it, Mal,’ Horus assured him.
‘From where, sir?’ said Maloghurst. ‘The Red Angel was supposed to drive the Blood Angels into madness, to break the centre for our Army forces to exploit. But the sons of Sanguinius are dead, and our centre has yet to make any significant impact. They’re dying in droves out there.’
Horus gestured over the hololithic display, already knowing what he would see. The Imperial guns were decimating his Army units at the heart of the advance. The fields before the ridge line were a killing ground of burning wrecks and corpses. Thousands were dead, thousands more still would die.
It irked Horus that the Cruor Angelus had not made good on its promise to turn the Blood Angels. Given that he had upset the schemes of Erebus to prevent that very thing on Signus, the irony was not lost on him.
‘And Aximand is bogged down on the right against forces from the Thirteenth Legion,’ continued Maloghurst. ‘It’s going to take a Sons of Horus speartip to get through that line. You need to deploy the rest of the Legion and Titan forces.’
‘Mal, are you telling me my business?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Good,’ said Horus. ‘Because I see the complexity of war differently to other men. Killing on this scale isn’t only about numbers and movement on a battlefield. Just by observing them I shape them and bend them to my will. Can you imagine any of my brothers mastering so chaotic an endeavour as war as I do?’
‘No, sir.’
Horus waved an admonishing finger. ‘Come on, Mal, you’re better than that. Stop sounding like a sycophant. Answer honestly.’
Maloghurst bowed and said, ‘Perhaps Guilliman.’
‘Too obvious,’ said Horus. ‘Some think he has no heart for war, that all he cares about are grand plans and stratagems. They’re wrong. He knows war as well as I do, he just wishes he didn’t.’
‘Then perhaps Dorn?’
‘No, too hidebound,’ said Horus. ‘Nor the Lion or Vulkan. And not the Khan, though he and I are so very close in alignment.’
‘Then who?’
‘Ferrus,’ answered Horus, tapping the lid of the ornately wrought box of lacquered wood and iron that sat next to him.
‘If he was so capable, then why is he dead?’
‘I didn’t say he was perfect,’ said Horus, leaning forward as the hololith hazed with static as it updated. ‘But he knew war like no other. Terra would already be ours if he had joined us, if my Phoenician brother had handled the approach with a modicum of subtlety.’
‘Subtlety was never Fulgrim’s strong suit,’ said Maloghurst.
‘No, but that lack has played in our favour here.’
‘It has?’
‘The power Fulgrim so willingly embraced has whispered honey in the dreams of Molech’s rulers for many years,’ said Horus. ‘Those dreams are about to become reality. And when they do, trust me, Mal, you’ll be glad we kept so far away.’
A stone lintel cracked and slammed down, blocking further progress along the trench. A firestorm raged overhead and Abaddon pressed himself flat against the vitrified stone wall as flames roared along its length. Fire was little threat to Terminator armour, but this was weaponised plasma from a Titan’s weapon.
An Imperator Titan.
Paragon of Terra’s guns were ripping the world apart.
Missiles, explosive shells, hurricanes of bolter fire, laser fire and killing beams from volcano cannon. What little was left of the trenches and strongpoints of this flank were being reduced to shot-blasted powder.
The Justaerin could survive a great deal, more than any other living thing on the battlefield, but the damned Imperator was going to kill them all. The walls of the trench blew inwards with the shock wave of another weapon system. Abaddon pushed away chunks of hot stone and metal.
A veteran hauled Abaddon clear with his one remaining arm. The other ended at the shoulder where the pressure wave of a passing gatling shell had ripped it away. Another weapon fired overhead, something with solid rounds, though Abaddon could no longer pick one weapon’s fire from another. The overpressure of the cycling rounds battered his armour like an army of aggrieved forge-smiths.
Everything merged into one continuous thunder of explosions, percussive hammer blows on the ground and searing thunderstorms of impossibly bright light that burned everything they touched.
The trenches had provided some cover, but they were no match for the holocaust-level destruction an Imperator could unleash. He doubted half his warriors had survived this far. Another few minutes and they would all be dead.
‘What was the Warmaster thinking sending us into this?’ yelled Kibre, stumbling from a blockhouse of adamantium made soft as butter by the plasma fire. Abaddon saw the corpses of at least a dozen Justaerin within. More filled the trench system around him, but he couldn’t see them. Too many red icons to know how many were dead, how many alive.
More dead than he’d ever thought to see among the Justaerin.
‘How are we supposed to get past that Imperator?’
Abaddon had no answer for the Widowmaker, and set off down the trench. Movement was their only ally. To remain static was to die.
More explosions shook the trenches. The ground split and vomited earth and smoke. It felt like the very bedrock of Molech was breaking apart. Abaddon half expected to see lakes of magma ooze up from the cracks in the earth. Hundreds of las-blasts roared overhead, a horizontal rain of killing light. More explosions, more fire, more detonations, more death.
His one-armed rescuer died as three spinning pieces of rebar sliced through his chest, pinning him to the rock. Two plunged into the ground less than half a metre from Kibre. Abaddon grinned and shook his head.
A world-shaking impact burst the walls of the trench. Fire-fused glass cracked and fell to the ground. Burned earth poured in from above. Ruptured bodies came with it, threatening to bury them alive with the men they had killed.
‘Now what?’ demanded Kibre, pushing along the corpse-choked trench behind Abaddon. Explosions chased them. Debris rained and the sky turned to fire.
Abaddon paused.
‘That wasn’t a weapon,’ he said.
‘Then what in the nine hells was it?’
‘A footstep,’ said Abaddon. ‘It’s the Imperator. It’s coming to crush us.’
The End Times had come to Molech. This was to be the last ride of the Stormlord, a final sally into the jaws of death. His noble vajra knights rode with him as they faced the daemon beast and the world’s ending.
It towered over everything, a mountain-sized creature of darkness that was swallowing the world with its every breath. The black and white of its scales was only eclipsed by the fire surrounding it.
Fire from its daemonic breath and fire from its sorcerous fists.
It was unmaking the world, and though it would surely cost him his life, he knew he had to try and stop it. His steed bucked beneath him, its animal brain understandably reluctant to ride into the fire of its doom.
He quelled it with a sharp thought.
But on the back of that thought came another, a treacherous and unbecoming one. A mortal thought.
This is not real, it said, this is fantasy...
The voice grew louder until it was screaming in his skull. The Stormlord tried to shut it out, but it only grew more intense. And for a moment the towering form of the dragon wavered. Its outline blurred and Albard saw just what he was charging towards.
Albard? Yes, Albard...
He was the Stormlord.
No, he was Albard Devine. Firstborn Scion of Cyprian Devine, Knight Seneschal of Molech, Imperial commander in the Imperium of Man. This was his world.
A poison veil fell from Albard’s fevered eyes and he saw the interior of the Banelash’s canopy through the mist of his one remaining eye. He reclined in a fluid place of unnatural angles and billowing musks. Of silks and gold and gems. The interior was no longer machine-smoothed metal, but possessed the fleshy, furred texture of a pleasure palace.
Where before he had interfaced with the Knight’s operation via the spinal implants, now his wasted body was a mass of writhing, serpentine ropes that oozed from the warped interior. Their ends were puckered with lamprey-like mouths. Tiny needle teeth buried in the meat of his limbs as they fed on him and filled his veins with their scented toxins.
‘No!’ screamed Albard, but laughter was his only answer.
One brother rejects me and tries to kill me – do you think I will let another do the same?
‘I am Albard Devine!’ he cried, holding onto his sense of self as blissful ecstasies filled his mind with pleasure. ‘I am...’
His protests died as the fronds caressing his limbs withdrew and he saw what he had become. Beneath the mouths of the mass of snake-like feelers, he was naked, but he was not the ravaged specimen of wretchedness he’d expected.
Albard wept to see strong thighs with well-defined quadriceps. His belly was flat and cut with abdominal muscles. His pectorals were the very epitome of sculpted perfection. He was a god among men, as perfect as the gilded statues of the Emperor’s sons that flanked the approach to the Sanctuary.
The years since his failed Becoming were wiped away and all that he could have been was revealed. This was what he should have been, this was what Raeven and Lyx had stolen from him.
This was what the Serpent Gods had offered Raeven and what he had selfishly thrown back in their faces. He would not make that mistake. Albard would live up to the promise of all he had been raised to expect. His would be a life of glory lived for the Serpent Gods.
What they offered was everything he had been denied.
The broken psyche that was Albard Devine had no chance against such blandishments and the force of his own ambitions.
‘I am yours...’ he whispered, and the lamprey-like mouths of the snake fronds fastened on his limbs once again. The pain of their teeth upon his perfect body was a welcome pain. He convulsed as the heady mix of daemonic elixirs coursed around his body. The sensation of bliss was unstoppable, matched only by his horror at the crippled thing he had once been.
Albard blinked and the interior of the pilot’s canopy was wiped from his sight.
The Stormlord’s warhorse rode towards the towering beast of black and white as it turned its killing fire on a host of brave foot knights making a last stand by a flame-belching crater where once had stood a mighty fortress.
‘Vajras!’ he bellowed. ‘Ride with me to victory!’
In the end, it wasn’t natural Cthonian ferocity or hot-as-hell-in-the-heart resilience that saved Aximand’s Sons of Horus. Nor was it any small-unit tactics of uncommon brilliance or heroic leadership from a charismatic officer.
In the end it was Titans that saved them.
Mourn-it-all had reaped a fearsome tally, its edge as sharp as the day the Warmaster had restored it. But a sharp sword and an arm to swing it weren’t enough. The Sons of Horus fought a desperate retreat through the maze of shattered blocks that was all that remained of the flanking wall, harried at every turn by vengeful Ultramarines.
Hundreds of warriors grappled and stabbed and shot one another in the fog of explosions and burning propellant. Wrecked vehicles lay strewn in the rubble. Random rounds cooked off and crackled in the flames. Mortal soldiers unlucky enough to be caught in the middle were killed within moments, crushed in the fray, hacked open or shredded in withering crossfire.
This was Legion war. Mortals had no place in it.
Bolter shells caromed off Aximand’s armour, swords gouged the bonded ceramite and explosions battered him with debris. All semblance of purpose and control among the combatants was eroded in the smoking, flame-lit nightmare. Even in the chaos, Aximand knew the Ultramarines held the upper hand. With every hacking sweep, every snatched pistol shot, the Sons of Horus were a step closer to defeat.
Aximand had killed seventeen Ultramarines.
An admirable ratio, but not without its cost.
Aximand’s right shoulder guard was gone, torn away by the heavy blast of an emplaced autocannon. The flesh beneath was burned black and every movement of the arm brought a hiss of pain to his lips. His plastron was cracked and the coolant pipes crossing underneath spewed chemicals down his legs in oily sheets. Regrown vertebrae protested at his sudden movements, the grafted bone not yet fully bedded in.
But the fight wasn’t lost.
For all their damned practical, for all that they held the upper hand, the Ultramarines couldn’t put the Sons of Horus to rout. Almost any other foe would have broken in the face of such a relentless killing machine of war, but the Sons of Horus were weaned on blood. They gave ground only in blood.
And that had earned them a reprieve.
Unimaginably powerful weapons discharged behind Aximand. The kind that would kill you without you even knowing it, the kind that would atomise every molecule of your body before the brain even registered the muzzle flash.
Now that weaponry was turned on the warriors of the XIII Legion.
A column of incandescent light erupted in the heart of the blue-armoured warriors. Plasma washed up like a geyser as the white heat of a blastgun turned its heat on the enemy infantry.
A one-armed Warhound climbed to the top of the rubble, its hull pitted with stubber impacts. Void shield haze clung to its ripped carapace like corposant, and oily blood streamed from its underside.
Bloodveil.
Its remaining arm unleashed a withering fan of turbo fire. Ultramarines were hollowed out, sliced open and boiled within their armour. Killing light speared through the ruins. Five metre spurts of vapour and fragmented armour stitched through the rubble. Two dozen warriors were cut down in the blink of an eye.
The white-heat of the laser weapon’s discharge burned the fog and Aximand punched the air like the old days when he saw the limping giant, Silence of Death, approaching. The Reaver had been taken apart, its armour in tatters and both its arms destroyed. The Knights had almost brought the Reaver down, but going head to head with a Battle Titan, any hope of victory had always been slender.
The Reaver’s apocalypse launcher filled the sky with dozens of missiles. Then a dozen more. Streaking darts of light arced overhead and slashed down in a hammering series of explosions that merged into one continuous roar of detonation.
Atop the rubble, Bloodveil threw back its head and loosed an ululating blast of its warhorn. A bellow of victory or a paean of loss? Aximand couldn’t tell.
Silence of Death crashed down onto its knees, its upper carapace swaying as flames erupted from the princeps canopy. The Interfector engine had turned the fight around, but it would take no further part in the battle.
The thunder of explosions shook the earth and Aximand gripped a bent iron girder jutting from the ruins to take a breath.
In the precious moment he had, Aximand reloaded his bolter.
Last magazine.
Then he saw he wouldn’t need it.
Withdrawing in good order from battle was one of the most difficult manoeuvres a formation could make. Doing it under fire made it next to impossible.
Yet that was what the Ultramarines had done.
Yade Durso staggered through the smoke, looking as though he’d gone toe-to-toe with the Knights himself.
‘You made it,’ said Aximand.
‘Lupercal helped me,’ said Durso, holding up his hand.
The golden Eye of Horus that Durso had carried was melted into his palm, forever to be part of his gauntlet. Its outline was heat softened, but still clearly recognisable.
‘I was bolter dry and sword broken,’ said Durso. ‘A Thirteenth Legion bastard had me dead to rights.’
‘So what happened?’
Durso clenched his fist. ‘I had to punch his damn head off.’
The hololith filled with multiple inloads coming from orbital survey tracks. A wealth of data filled the slate. New icons, new force vectors. Unknown contacts.
Unknown to the battle cogitators, corrected Horus.
Not unknown to me.
‘You are a wonder, my indomitable brother,’ said Horus. He stood and his presence filled the pavilion with bellicose intent.
Maloghurst bent to the slate, his eyes darting between the multiple inloads.
‘Send word to the Legion,’ said Horus, lifting Worldbreaker from the nearest weapon rack. ‘Full advance. It’s time to end this.’
‘Is that...?’ began Maloghurst, his finger tracing a line of sigils advancing from the south.
‘It is,’ said Horus. ‘Right where I need him to be and just when I need him.’
‘How could you know he would arrive right at this moment?’
‘I’m the Warmaster,’ said Horus. ‘It’s not just a pretty title.’
Tyana Kourion fought the Battle of Lupercalia from the interior of her Stormhammer. Even protected by many centimetres of layered adamantium and steel plating, the sturm und drang of the apocalyptic conflict was still a symphony of thunder and hammer blows on the side of the superheavy.
The roar of its engine and the world-shaking crash of its multiple weapon systems made ear-defenders a necessity. It was cramped, deafening and stank of oil and sweat and fear. Each second this battle raged, hundreds of her soldiers were dying. It was her job to win this battle quickly.
Half a dozen data-slates parsed inloading information from vox-reports, pict-capture, auspex feeds and visual tagging.
No battle ever went according to plan, and today was no exception. The loss of the Blood Angels had horrified her, but their suicidal charge had bowed the enemy line, giving her guns more chance to savage the advance.
Was that worth the deaths of a hundred Legion warriors?
No, but better to make use of it than lament it.
The fighting had evolved naturally into a shifting tide of heady charges, strategic withdrawals, outright routs and flowing thrusts. Imperial and traitor tanks duelled in their own miniature battlefields, each one a tiny piece of a greater whole; hooking flanking manoeuvres, pincer traps and staggered echelons.
The Titans of Gryphonicus and Crucius waged war on a plane far removed from that of the mortals fighting in their colossal shadows. They fought with weapons whose venting could burn an entire company to death. It was war on a scale where ejected shells could crush a squadron of armoured transports and a misplaced step could destroy an entire battalion.
Sensible commanders avoided being anywhere near engines at war, but sometimes there was no escaping their monstrous presence. Like giants among ants, the Titans crashed and battered one another and their deaths took hundreds of warriors on both sides with them.
Gryphonicus’s complement of Titans was primarily Warhounds, and they had harried the flanks. At least four were gone, either buried in the mountain’s ruin or surrounded and gunned down by Legio Vulcanum’s more numerous Reavers.
The enemy Titans had started the day with the numerical advantage, but Paragon of Terra had steadily eroded that advantage to the point where the engine forces were more or less at parity. At the current rate of attrition, the Imperial engines would soon outnumber those of the Warmaster.
‘More Chimeras and mass-transit carriers coming through on the right,’ observed Naylor. ‘We can’t ignore it any longer. Soon they’ll have enough massed to pose a serious threat there.’
‘Crucius and Gryphonicus aren’t stopping them?’ asked Kourion.
‘They’re wreaking bloody murder on the Mechanicum war machines and their superheavies, but they’re ignoring a lot of the infantry carriers.’
‘They’re beneath them,’ replied Kourion.
‘They’ll be right on bloody top of us unless we push them back before they’ve enough numbers to threaten that flank.’
‘Agreed,’ said Kourion, pulling the battle-inload from the right flank to her main slate. Her eyes scanned the dozens of icons there, quickly assessing their worth and combat effectiveness.
Nothing left alive there with the strength to mount an effective counterattack. She haptically swept up the centre and reserves.
One force icon stood out above all others.
‘There,’ she said, jabbing a finger. ‘That’s our best chance to throw them back. Get them in the damn fight.’
Naylor nodded. ‘Good choice. No combat degradation and perfectly positioned to support the Titans.’
‘Send the orders,’ said Kourion, turning her attention to the confusing haze of gross-displacement weapon discharges on the left where Castor Alcade’s Ultramarines were deployed. She didn’t know what was happening there and that was unacceptable.
Naylor dialed into the local vox-net.
‘Lord Devine,’ said Naylor, exloading a series of engagement vectors. ‘You and your knights are ordered to immediately engage the enemy at the following grid-sectors.’
Vox-static hissed in reply.
The multi-tiered command bridge of Paragon of Terra smelled of oil and incense, hot circuitry and anger. Two hundred calculus logi, servitors and deck crew were plugged into tactica-engines and command consoles, reviewing encrypted vox from every element of Tyana Kourion’s battle-net. A constant drone of low-level binary and hushed voices blended with hot, grainy static and clicking prayers. Heat bled into every system, the anger of the Titan’s machine-spirit rendering every system with a red haze.
Angled slates projected news from all over Molech, hanging in drifting entoptic veils of light. Each one only served to stoke the nuclear heart of the Titan’s rage.
An Imperator Titan was a land-bound starship, as powerful and as demanding a mistress as any void craft. Crewed by thousands throughout its towering height, it was as complex a machine as had ever been built by the hands of man. Only the secret designs of the Ark Mechanicum dared approach the complexity of an Imperator.
To give life to so immense a machine and set it to motion was an entirely different thing to setting a ship in space. Zero gravity forgave a great many things that planetary environments did not.
Its Manifold was a proud, regal thing. An apex predator without rivals, a lord of battle with fangs no other could match and a fury equalled only by its commander.
Princeps Kalonice stood at the jutting prow of the strategium, hands braced on her hips as she drank in the data inloads feeding into the Manifold. She swiped a mechanical hand through the various projections, parting them like smoke and inloading them instantaneously.
Encased in the body-carapace of a Lorica Thallax, all that remained of Etana Kalonice was her skull and spine, fused within the mechanised body of meticulous construction. With reverse-jointed piston legs and wheezing, clicking mechanical joints, she was a robot in all but consciousness.
Contoured plates of porcelain-white armour encased her organic material, and hair-fine copper mind impulse unit cabling allowed her to interface with the fiendishly intricate mechanisms of Paragon of Terra without a gel-filled casket. To be so bound to a machine body was exquisite agony, but Kalonice would rather face a lifetime of pain than permanent entombment.
Algorithmic resonators translated synaptic activity into sounds and allowed Kalonice’s voice to sound virtually human. It almost took away the edge of pain, but not quite.
A flurry of topographical images bloomed at her senior moderati’s station. Maps, threat vectors, combat prognoses. Paragon of Terra’s preferred targets jostled for his attention, but Sular suppressed them in favour of answering his princeps.
‘The Warmaster has fatally underestimated the resistance he would face, ma’am,’ said Sular, a torso with mechanised arms fused with the battle-logister. ‘The Imperial line has collapsed in a number of places, but not enough for a breakthrough. A good defence in depth and numerous flanking sallies have allowed General Kourion’s reserve forces to meet each breakthrough and contain it.’
‘With respect to General Kourion, the destruction of Iron Fist Mountain was unthinkable.’
The Legio Crucius fortress was gone, reduced to a seething, volcanic ruin by orbital fury. All their history, all their connections to their sister Legios gone. In one fell swoop, the Warmaster had brought Legio Crucius to the edge of extinction.
‘And we’ll make them pay for that,’ said Carthal Ashur, pacing the deck like a man on a crowded stage with no role to play.
‘Apologies ma’am,’ said Ashur, forcing himself onto a vacant supplicant’s bench.
She’d met Carthal Ashur many years ago, had even once bedded him when there was still enough of her to make such a prospect tenable. He’d been a disappointment, but his talent with words and mortals had persuaded her to keep him around as Calator Martialis.
‘Multiple targets inbound,’ reported Moderati Sular. ‘Two dozen main battle tanks. Six superheavies. Supporting infantry, battalion strength.’
‘Any Titan killers?’ asked Ashur.
Kalonice could taste his sweat over the scented oils of the bridge, a mix of eagerness and unfamiliarity. He’d been part of Legio Crucius for decades, but this was only his third time aboard a Battle Titan. His first in battle.
Moderati Sular looked to Kalonice, and she nodded her assent for him to answer Ashur’s question.
‘Shadowswords, aye,’ said Sular, sweeping the data over to the strategium. ‘Some traitor Mechanicum elements too. Highlighting.’
The local area around the Imperator was rendered in cascades of binary, illuminating forces both friendly and enemy. Tanks, infantry, Knights, artillery.
Each of the enemy icons already had a target solution plotted, the Mechanicum elements and superheavies assigned kill-priority.
Paragon of Terra was anticipating her, and Kalonice let it.
Ten Shadowswords with volcano cannons. Unidentified Mechanicum battle-engines – a mix of Ordinatus and Titan, each armed with weapons capable of wreaking great harm on her.
If they could be brought to bear.
‘Information – five seconds,’ answered Magos Surann from the raised gallery behind her, where plugged Mechanicum adepts sat in rows like a binary choir.
She felt stabbing prickles all across her body. Her void shields were taking hits, scrappy and uncoordinated, but hits nonetheless. The infantry she’d stepped over had heavy weapons. Nothing individually capable of harming her or taking out a void shield, but irritating nonetheless.
The Shadowswords were firing, the bright spears of their volcano cannons bursting shields and overloading the pylons.
‘The voids are taking hits,’ said Ashur, as though she wouldn’t already know that.
said Kalonice, issuing an engagement order to every weapon section.
Kalonice let each of her weapons systems have its head, allowing the moderati and techs to wreak their own devastation. They all deserved a measure of the spoils of vengeance. The recoil from so many vast weapon systems was dampened by multiple suspensor webs and pneumatic compensators, but still shook the command bridge with the force of so many discharges.
Enemy icons vanished from the Manifold, dozens at a time.
But she kept the plasma annihilator for herself, zeroing in on a towering engine of bronze and brass worked with skulls and lurching towards her on spiked wheels. A corrupted engine of the Mechanicum, a hateful reminder of treachery within her own order.
Kalonice drew power from the boiling reactor core at her heart. The heat was immense, and she drew and drew from the well of plasma fire until the screaming agony in her right fist was almost too much to bear.
The pain broke her hold on the plasma fury encased in her fist and the arm vanished in a furious supernova of white fire that rocked the Imperator back on its heels. Kalonice screamed, the resonators having no problem rendering the depths of her agony.
Her Thallax body fell to the deck, bio-feedback bathing her machine-wrapped spinal column in pain signals. The pain was overwhelming, all-consuming. Kalonice fought to shut herself off to the sensations, but Paragon of Terra’s pain was hers now. The reactor at her heart convulsed. Armour plating buckled, atomic bleed-off vented explosively from cycling louvres on the Titan’s rear quarters.
Alarms blared. Binaric horns screamed their agonies into the command bridge. Damage controls blew out in overload and the red light of anger became a blood light of horrifying pain. Kalonice struggled to hold on, to not let the loss of her arm break her grip on the Manifold. She heard the machine-spirit of the Titan howling, an animal vocalisation of impossible pain.
‘Etana!’ cried a voice. A flesh voice. One she knew.
‘It’s me,’ he said, hauling her to her feet. She looked down at her right arm, expecting to see it as a mangled, molten mess. But, of course, it was undamaged. Paragon of Terra had borne the hurt, but she had felt it. Oh, how she had felt it!
‘They hit us,’ said Ashur. ‘The bastards hit us hard.’
‘It came from inside the voids,’ said Ashur, flinching as the Imperator rocked with the force of impacts.
Kalonice felt the impacts. Searing, stabbing blades plunging into her machine body.
‘It’s House Devine!’ said Ashur.
‘The bastards have betrayed us,’ hissed Ashur.
The dragon was screaming. It bled smoke and light from its wounds, and the Stormlord closed for the kill. He rammed his lance into the beast’s flanks, hearing the splinter of bones and the hiss of slicing flesh. His other arm was a crackling whip, useless against such a towering beast, but lethal to the tiny, scurrying things that spilled from its legs.
He circled around again, bringing his lance to bear as a storm of spines blasted from the beast’s carapace. A knight fell, pierced through by one such barb and he came apart in an explosion of blood and horsemeat.
The towering beast staggered. Their sudden attack had caught it off guard and almost brought it to its knees. But he had not thought to humble it with one strike. Already it was reacting to them, but the Stormlord had not earned himself that name without good reason.
He wheeled around the crashing footfall of the beast. The thunderous impact shook the ground for kilometres in all directions. His horse reared in panic, but he quelled it with the force of his will.
His knights circled back and forth, closing in time and again to deliver thrusts of their lances and stabbing cuts from their reapers. They were hurting it, but it was too big to be brought down by such wounds.
He looked up and saw the beast’s wounded heart, a pulsing shimmer of light where the source of its power lay. Thick scales of draconic armour protected its heart from a frontal attack, but from behind...
From behind it was vulnerable. Even more so now. The Stormlord’s first thrust had hurt the beast and exposed its greatest weakness.
‘Warriors of Molech!’ shouted the Stormlord. ‘No one lance can pierce this beast’s armour. We must be as one in our ardour, as one in our thrust into its heart.’
A breath of fire incinerated another of his vajras. If the killing blow was not struck soon, the beast would overwhelm them. It was already turning its wounded heart away.
‘Your lances!’ screamed the Stormlord. ‘Unite them with mine!’
His knights formed up around him as they rode with all possible speed to chase the dragon’s wounded heart. It bled light and steam, the exhalations of a monster the world needed slain.
The Stormlord laughed as he felt the strength of his knights fill him. Their lance arms were now his. What he stabbed, they stabbed. What he killed, they would kill.
The leavings of the beast still streamed from its gigantic legs. Ants and bacterium shed from a desperate creature that knew its ending was at hand, but still clung to life. Hundreds of them, thousands perhaps. The vajras fought and killed them with their battle blades alone, for their lance arms were now his to command.
His armour shuddered with impacts, his shield arm was just as strong as his lance arm. He felt the heat of the conjoined lances in his fingers, the potency of a weapon on the brink of release.
The dragon knew what he was doing.
It knew he had the power to kill it.
He was too fast for it, the fleetness of his steed more than a match for its cumbersome power. No matter how fast it tried to turn, he would be quicker. It spat a breath of fire to the ground, incinerating a host of its own defenders in its desperation. The Stormlord felt one of his vajras die, and cried out as he felt the righteous fury of the knight fill him.
The spirits of the dead flowed into him, filling his skull with their death screams. Any other man would have been driven mad by now, but he was the Stormlord. He was the hero, the saviour of Molech and he would end this beast.
And then he saw it exposed, the beast’s one weakness.
The Stormlord thrust his lance deep into the exposed heart of his prey.
And where he stabbed, so too did his warriors.
What remained of the XIII Legion forces followed pre-prepared evacuation routes down the Untar Mesas. Three Rhinos with little of the cobalt-blue of Ultramar left on their structure after the devastating barrages of plasma fire.
Barely a handful had survived the slaughter. The Sons of Horus had the left flank, and were pouring in heavy armour. Army units of artillery were racing to occupy the high ground and more Interfector engines were pushing to complete the flank’s collapse.
The slate before Arcadon Kyro completed its auspex sweep, but came up empty. No Ultramarines armour locators that weren’t already aboard the withdrawing Rhinos.
‘Are there any more?’ asked Castor Alcade, and the desperate hope Kyro heard was a whip to an already bloodied back.
‘No, sir,’ he replied, his voice strained and hoarse. A breath of superheated air had scalded the inside of his lungs. If he survived this battle, they’d need replacing. ‘This is it.’
‘Three damn squads!’ hissed Alcade, slamming a fist against the buckled interior of the Rhino. ‘How can that be all that’s left?’
‘We were hit by Titans,’ said Kyro. ‘We’re Thirteenth Legion, but even we can’t soak up that kind of firepower.’
‘Keep looking,’ insisted Alcade.
‘If anyone else made it out, I’d know by now,’ said Kyro.
‘Keep looking, damn you. I want more of my men found.’
‘Sir, there’s no one left,’ said Kyro. ‘It’s just us.’
Alcade sagged and Kyro hated that he had to be the bearer of yet another turn of fate that saw his legate further humiliated.
He’d lost his helmet in the fighting, and his armour was blackened all over where a backwash of plasma had caught him. He’d suffered burns to most of his exposed flesh, and could feel the puckering tightness of wounds that would never heal.
Hot winds rammed into the Rhino through a gaping wound in the glacis. Virtually the entire frontal section had been sheared off in an explosion, leaving the driver’s compartment exposed. Instead of seeing the battlefield through external pict-feeds or a slender vision block, Kyro had a gaping hole large enough for two legionaries to climb through abreast of one another.
‘Any word from Salicar?’ asked Alcade. ‘We should link with the Blood Angels, pool our resources.’
Kyro didn’t answer, his attention snared by the hideous sight far across the battlefield. Even the intervening smoke of battle couldn’t obscure the horror of what he was seeing.
‘What in Guilliman’s name is going on over there?’ said Alcade.
Kyro shook his head. What it looked like was impossible.
The Knights of House Devine were attacking Paragon of Terra. Something had already wounded it. One arm was missing, and it staggered with shrieking feedback agonies. It bled corrosive fogs and fire. It had been hurt badly.
The Knights’ battle cannon punched craters in its legs. Their reapers were cutting down the skitarii and Army troops stationed in its leg bastions by the hundred. They darted in to fire thermal lances into its upper sections, peeling back its rear armour like foil paper.
‘What do they think they’re doing?’ demanded Alcade.
‘They’re traitors,’ hissed Kyro, unwilling to believe it, despite the evidence of his own eyes. ‘Raeven Devine has been with Horus this whole time!’
‘Then his life is mine,’ said Alcade.
Kyro ignored the legate’s bombasts, and fixed his attention on the lead Knight. A red gold machine with a golden banner streaming from its carapace and a crackling energy lash whipping at its side. He knew it as Banelash.
It skidded to a halt behind the Imperator and braced its legs.
‘They can’t hurt it can they?’ said Alcade. ‘They’re too small, surely. An Imperator’s far too big to–’
Raeven Devine’s Knight unleashed a stream of white-hot fire from his thermal lance. And for a fleeting second, Arcadon Kyro believed his legate might be correct.
Then that hope was dashed as every Knight of House Devine combined their lance fire into one incandescent beam of killing light. Combined to hideous effect, the lance fire punched through the weakened armour of Paragon of Terra.
Kyro’s senses were enhanced. He saw in spectra beyond those of unaugmented mortals, and knew immediately that the Imperator was doomed. He read the breaching of the vast reactor at the heart of Paragon of Terra as clear as the slate before him. Soaring temperature increases, coupled with spewing gouts of radioactive fire throughout the Titan’s superstructure told a cascading tale of the Imperator’s death.
The Knights knew it too and were already fleeing from their murder. Banelash led the Knights of House Devine towards the rear of the Imperial army, sprinting for all they were worth.
Paragon of Terra stood unmoving, and Kyro wept to see so magnificent an icon of mankind’s mastery of technology brought low.
‘Come on, come on,’ he hissed, willing the Mechanicum adepts and their servitors to vent the reactor, to eject what they could and save the rest, even though he already knew it was too late.
The thermal auspex blew out in a haze of sparks.
Kyro turned away and his auto-senses dimmed in response.
‘Don’t look at it,’ he warned.
Castor Alcade was more or less correct when he surmised that the Knights were far too insignificant to do more than inconvenience an Imperator. Their uncannily concentrated fire had caused a cascading series of reactor breaches within the engineering decks, but even that damage could have been contained.
As the adepts aboard Paragon of Terra initiated damage aversion protocols to avert a catastrophic reactor breach they were betrayed from within as well as without. Many of the Sacristans they had been forced to employ within the reactor spaces were those belonging to the Knight Households.
And by some considerable margin, the majority of these men had come from House Devine.
Quiet sabotage of venting systems, disabling of the coolant mechanisms and, in the end, the brutal murder of senior adepts, made an apocalyptic reactor breach inevitable.
The reactor empowering a Titan was a caged star.
Not a tamed one, never that.
And the reactor at the heart of an Imperator was orders of magnitude greater than all others.
The breach vaporised the entirety of Paragon of Terra in the blink of an eye and a seething eruption of plasma blew out in a cloud of expanding white heat.
The flash blinded all who looked upon it, burning the eyes from their skulls. Everything within a fifteen hundred metre radius of the Imperator simply vanished, incinerated to ash or reduced to molten metal in the blink of an eye.
Nightmarish temperatures and pressures at the point of detonation turned the earth to glass and blasted hot gaseous residue from the centre of the explosion at ferocious velocities. Contained within a dense hydrodynamic front, the explosion was a hammering piston compressing the surrounding air and smashing apart everything it struck. A hemispherically expanding blast wave raced after the roaring plasmic fireball, but quickly eclipsed its blazing fury.
The overpressure at ground zero was enormous, gouging a crater deep into the surface of Molech and hurling even the largest of war machines through the air like grains of wheat blown from a farmer’s palm.
In the first instant of detonation, the death toll on both sides was in the tens of thousands. It rose exponentially in the following seconds. Mere mortals within four kilometres of the explosion were killed almost instantly, pulped by the overpressure as it rolled outwards.
Beyond that, those soldiers in cover or within reinforced blockhouses survived a few seconds longer until thunderous blast waves hammered down. Every strongpoint and trench system collapsed, and only the very fortunate or heavily armoured survived this stage of the explosion.
Towards the flanks, the seismic force swatted soldiers to the ground and halted the fighting as the enormity of what had just happened hit home.
A smoke-hazed mushroom cloud of plasma bled into the sky, reaching up to a height of thirteen kilometres and surrounded by ever-expanding coronas of blue-hot fire. Searing winds roared across the agri-plains north of Lupercalia, searing them of vegetation and life.
Those that survived would have plasma burns to rival any mark earned on other worlds torn apart by war. The centre of the Imperial line was gone, but thousands of soldiers and armoured vehicles remained to fight.
The destruction of Paragon of Terra was only the beginning of the end for Molech.
To the north and south, just beyond the farthest extent of the blast wave, dust clouds hazed the horizon as fresh forces were drawn to the vortex of battle.
Castor Alcade gripped tight to the battered flank of his Rhino, disbelief warring with horror at the sight of the Imperator’s destruction. The field of battle was in disarray, men and women crawling from the wreckage and trying to make sense of what had just happened.
Virtually the entire muster of Imperial war engines had fought in the shadow of Paragon of Terra, and were little more than smouldering wrecks, barely enough of them remaining to identify which engine was which.
‘It’s over,’ said Didacus Theron, stepping down from his Rhino.
‘No,’ said Alcade, pointing to where scattered command sections struggled to impose a semblance of order on what was left of their forces. ‘We march for Molech.’
‘But we don’t have to die for it,’ said Theron.
‘Hold your damn tongue,’ said Kyro.
‘And remember your place,’ snapped Theron, coming over to stand beside Alcade. ‘Legate, we don’t have to die here, not when Ultramar is at war and the Avenging Son needs us at his side.’
Alcade said nothing, for once in his life at a loss of what to do. Theoretical was everything, but what was the theoretical when every practical ended in death?
Amid the raging fire-swept wasteland below, Alcade saw the enemy had not been spared the horror of the explosion either. Their numbers were just as devastated. Only the enemy Titans had survived the blast intact, though even they had suffered heinous damage.
They stalked as shadows through the wall of dust and smoke thrown up by the explosion. Giant killers with nothing to oppose them. Even if the Imperial commanders below could rally their troops, what weapon did they have remaining that could fight traitor war engines?
‘We need to go back to Lupercalia,’ said Theron.
‘And then what?’ demanded Kyro.
‘We leave Molech,’ said Theron.
‘How? We have no ship.’
‘Then we take one from the enemy by force,’ said Theron. ‘We find an isolated vessel and storm it. Then we blast out-system and get back to the Five Hundred Worlds.’
‘You already censured a dozen legionaries that dared to voice that sentiment, Theron,’ said Kyro. ‘I see a few red helmets among our pitiful survivors.’
‘That was before the war was ended at a single stroke,’ countered Theron, turning his attention back to Alcade. ‘Sir, we can’t stay here. Dying on Molech will achieve nothing. There’s no practical to it. We need to go home and fight in a battle we can actually win.’
‘We have a duty to Molech, Theron,’ said Kyro. ‘We’re oathed to its defence, bound by the word of the Emperor.’
Castor Alcade let his subordinate’s words wash over him, knowing both were right, and both dead wrong. He rubbed a hand over his face, wiping away the grit and blood of battle. He blinked at yet another black mark against his name, another failure to add to the tally of near-misses and also-rans.
‘Sir, what are your orders?’ asked Kyro.
Alcade turned and put one foot up on the running board of the scorched Rhino, sparing a last look at the hell unleashed below. On the horizon were the unmistakable dust clouds of advancing armour. Lots of armour.
‘Get us to Lupercalia,’ said Castor Alcade.
‘Sir–’ began Kyro, but Alcade held up his hand.
‘That is my order,’ said Alcade. ‘It’s to Lupercalia.’
Tyana Kourion crawled from the wreckage of her Stormhammer, half blinded and burned. Her dress greens were black with oil and stiff with blood pulsing steadily from her stomach. Some ribs were broken, and she doubted her left leg would ever bear her weight again. Her right hand was a fused mess of blackened stumps. It didn’t hurt yet. It would hurt later, assuming she lived long enough for there to be a later.
The superheavy lay on its side, one half black and folded in on itself like a plastek model left too close to the fire. The rubber of its joints and cupolas dribbled like wax and she saw the skeletal remains of her crew that had been flung from the explosion.
She didn’t know where they were.
Her ears were ringing with detonation and concussion. Sticky fluid leaked from each one. She could hear, but everything was muted and subdued, as though filtered through water. Dust gritted her eyes, but she saw flashes of the nightmare through lifting clouds of smoke, as though the rogue thermals knew enough not to haunt her with too many scenes of horror in too short a time.
She heard howls of wounded soldiers. Ammunition cooking off. Fuel tanks ablaze and thudding footfalls that could only be enemy war engines on the hunt. Bloodstained soldiers sometimes wandered through her blurred field of vision. Men and women with missing limbs and shattered, glazed looks on their faces. Some turned at the sight of her, but if they recognised their commanding officer, they gave no sign.
Her army was gone. Destroyed in a heartbeat of Devine treachery.
She’d heard the last snatches of vox-intercept from Paragon of Terra, but hadn’t understood them until she’d reversed the Stormhammer to face the Imperator. She’d only just turned away from the pict-slate when the explosion came.
How long ago had that been? Not long surely.
Her tank was nowhere near where it had been dug in, swatted hundreds of metres by the force of the blast. She should be dead, and didn’t like to think what horrendous forces had been exerted on the Stormhammer’s hull. The impact of landing had crushed pretty much everyone in her tank but her.
Right about now, it felt like she’d gotten the raw deal.
Kourion propped herself up against the underside of the Stormhammer. Blood pooled in her lap. She knew a mortal wound when she saw one. She fumbled for her pistol with her left hand. She’d never bothered to procure a fancy sidearm, and had no family heirlooms like some of the more stuck up regimental commanders. This was just a standard, Mars-pattern laspistol. Full charge, textured grip and iron sights. Functional, but without embellishment.
Just like her.
It would have to do. It was the only weapon she had left, and she’d read somewhere that it was good for a soldier to die holding a weapon.
A shadow moved in front of her. Something with a living being’s bulk and fluidity. Something that shouldn’t be here. A huge monster covered in grey-furred scales lumbered past her, its arms and shoulders corded with inhuman musculature.
She struggled to remember the local name for the beast.
Mallahgra. Yes, that was it.
What the hell was a mallahgra doing this far north? Weren’t they all confined to the mountains and jungles? Then she saw it wasn’t alone. Dozens of identical beasts rampaged through the bloodied survivors of her army, mauling and feasting with abandon. Their speed was prodigious and they swept injured soldiers with clawed arms and tore them apart before feeding them into their meat-grinder mouths.
Giant feline predators the size of cavalry mounts bounded across the battlefield. Uniformed bodies hung limp in their jaws. Packs fought for spoils of flesh as though starved. Flocks of loping bird-like creatures with long necks stampeded over the battlefield. Their snapping jaws snatched up fleeing soldiers and bit them in half. Only a few hours ago, this had been Kourion’s grand army. The noise of the beasts receded, replaced with the rumble of engines and the tramp of heavy, booted feet.
Shapes moved in the smoke and dust, humanoid, but bulkier and taller than even the abhuman migou. Armoured in filthy plates of ivory, they ploughed through the fog as though born to it, led by a giant in rags and plate who bore a towering reaper blade.
And marching towards him, with arms open, was a warrior of equal stature, shrouded in shadows, but upon whose breast burned an amber eye. He hadn’t even deigned to draw the great maul slung across his shoulders.
Words passed between the giants, words of a battle fought and a world conquered. Blood poured out of Kourion, and she fought to hear what the giants said, knowing now who spoke. She should despise these traitors, these godlike beings who had slaughtered her army, but hated that she felt only awe.
Her vision began to fade.
Spots of grey grew in her peripheral vision.
The Warmaster took Mortarion’s hand in the old way, wrist to wrist. A way that in an earlier epoch had been born of mistrust, but which now stood as the grip of honourable warriors.
‘Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, brother,’ said Mortarion, ‘and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.’
Horus looked around him at the devastation, the dead bodies, the ruined weapons of war and the bellowing monsters. He grinned.
‘In war, they will kill some of us,’ said Horus. ‘But we shall destroy all of them.’
The last thing Tyana Kourion saw was the two primarchs coming together in a clatter of plate, embracing as dearest brothers.
Embracing in victory.
TWENTY-ONE Hope to die / The man next to you / Legacy of Cortez
The streets of Lupercalia were crowded with people flocking towards the transit platforms. Alivia watched them through the vision blocks of the Galenus as it rumbled towards the upper reaches of the valley. Men, women and children were carrying everything they could on their backs or in overloaded groundcars.
Near the top of the valley she saw vapour trails of packed shuttles, lighters and supply barges struggling to get airborne.
‘What do you see?’ asked Jeph from farther back in the Galenus.
‘I see a lot of frightened faces,’ she answered.
Alivia knew they were right to be frightened.
None stood better than a one in hundred chance of getting off-world. Yet for all the fear she saw in the crowds pushing uphill, they still allowed the Galenus through. Some deep-rooted respect for the symbol of the Medicae made them get out of the way, and Alivia hated the fact that she considered her need greater than theirs.
After all, who was she to judge who should get off Molech and who should remain behind? And for the briefest moment she resented the one who had put her here and charged her with keeping watch over his secret.
She glanced down the length of the medicae vehicle, where Jeph, Vivyen and Miska sat with Noama Calver and Kjell. Five people she needed to get off-world. Five people whose escape would deny five others a chance of life. It was a trade off Alivia was more than willing to make.
But that didn’t make it sit any easier in her heart.
The vox-caster crackled, repeating the same message it had been transmitting for the last two hours. The speaker was concise, direct and eloquent in the way only career military men could be.
She’d suspected a trap, of course. False hope dangled for the sake of spite or some other malicious reason, but as she listened to the message, she’d heard the gloss of unvarnished truth.
There was a way off Molech.
An Imperial ship had survived the void war and found refuge in the asteroid belt. Repaired and rearmed, its captain had brought his ship back in an act of supreme courage.
Molech’s Enlightenment stood ready to evacuate refugees and survivors of the Warmaster’s invasion. The window of opportunity was narrow and shortening by the minute. Enemy ships would even now be lighting their reactors to break orbit and intercept it.
If Molech’s Enlightenment didn’t get away soon, it never would.
‘Coming up on the Windward Platforms,’ said Anson from the driver’s compartment. Alivia heard the anxiety in his voice. He wanted nothing more than to halt the Galenus and go get his girl, but Alivia didn’t have time to indulge him.
The Warmaster’s army would be here soon and she was already risking far too much by coming here first. But mission be damned, she wasn’t going to let her children die on Molech.
She smiled. Her children.
‘Don’t worry, Anson,’ said Alivia, clouding his anxieties and imparting a sense of wellbeing to him. ‘I’m sure Fiaa’s waiting for you here. She wouldn’t leave without you.’
‘No, she wouldn’t,’ said Anson, sounding relieved.
She justified the lie by telling herself it would keep him alive.
The Galenus rumbled to a halt and Alivia hauled open the side door of the vehicle. The smell of the city hit her first, warm spices and metallic smoke coming down from the fires burning beneath Mount Torger.
That and the smell of the thousands of shouting people mobbed before the gates to the landing platforms. The mood was ugly and ranked units of Dawn Guard were doing their best to keep a riot at bay. The mix of emotions was potent. Alivia did her best to shut them out, but there was only so much she could do.
She stifled a sob and leaned back into the Galenus.
‘Jeph, bring the girls,’ she said. ‘Noama, Kjell, time for you to get out too.’
She banged the driver’s door with her palm.
‘Anson, get out,’ she said. ‘I need you too.’
Jeph clambered out of the Galenus, his mouth dropping open in wonder at the scale of the city around him. Noama Calver and Kjell helped the girls down and kept them close as the press of nearby bodies closed in.
‘What about us?’ asked one of the wounded soldiers who’d hitched a ride with them back to Lupercalia.
‘You all stay put,’ she said, adding an emphatic push to her words. ‘I’m going to need you all. You, what’s your name?’
‘Valance. Corporal Arcadii Volunteers.’
‘Ever driven a Galenus before?’
‘No, ma’am, but I put some time in on a Trojan,’ said Valance. ‘Won’t be that much different.’
‘Good, get up front and keep the engine running. When I’m done here, we’re going to have to move fast to get to the Sanctuary. Are we clear?’
The man nodded and went forward into the driver’s compartment.
Alivia turned to the others and said, ‘Hold hands, and don’t let go for anything. Not for anything, you understand?’
They nodded, and she felt their fear. They linked hands and Alivia held hers out. Vivyen took one hand, Miska the other and with the adults trailing behind her in a narrow V, she pushed into the crowd.
The gates to the landing fields was perhaps a hundred metres away, and with every roar of struggling engines lifting off the mood of the crowd was souring further. She didn’t know what criteria the Dawn Guard were using for deciding who got through and who didn’t, but she guessed that most of the people here wouldn’t meet it.
Hostile stares and curses met her as she pushed forward, but she turned them all aside. The effort was draining. She’d never found this sort of thing as easy as John seemed to. Her talents lay towards empathic, less overt, means of manipulation. It took real effort and each calming touch took more out of her than the last.
But it was working, the crowds were moving aside for her.
She had her Ferlach serpenta loaded and tucked in the inside pocket of her coat should things get really ugly. She didn’t want to think what might happen to the girls if things got that bad.
Angry voices came from the gates. Querulous demands, pleading entreaties and desperate attempts at persuasion. Most were falling on deaf ears, but the occasional clang and clatter of a postern told her that at least some were getting through.
Alivia pushed her way to the front. A man in a richly-embroidered frock coat turned to berate her, but stepped aside with a puzzled expression.
‘No, after you, miss,’ he said.
Alivia nodded and turned her attention to the gate guards. She’d have to work fast. The man beside her might be accommodating enough to let her past, but the people behind him wouldn’t be so understanding.
The guard through the gate had a slung rifle and held out a data-slate and stylus. A list of approved personnel, quotas? It didn’t matter, it was her passport into the landing fields.
‘We need to get through,’ said Alivia, using a blunter form of persuasion than she would normally employ. ‘We’re on the list.’
‘Name?’
‘Alivia Sureka,’ she said, turning to push the others to the front and giving the guard their names. His face furrowed as his eyes scanned the slate. Alivia struggled to alter the perceptual centres of his brain. He was Munitorum. Unimaginative. A man born to live his life by lists.
‘Look, there,’ she said, reaching through the gate to put her hand on his wrist. ‘We’re on that list.’
The man shook his head, but Alivia conjured the image of her family’s names and those of Kjell and Noama into his mind.
‘I’m not seeing your... ah, wait, here they are,’ he said, nodding to the squad of soldiers at the gate controls. ‘Five coming in.’
The gate was a turnstile affair, unlocked to allow the requisite number of people through. The kind of gate that couldn’t easily be stormed once it was open.
Kjell and Anson went first, only too happy at this unexpected chance to get off-world. Noama went to follow them, but Alivia pulled her into a tight embrace before she went through.
‘Look after them for me,’ whispered Alivia.
Noama nodded and said, ‘I would have done anyway. You don’t need to do whatever it is you’ve done to the guard to me.’
‘Sorry,’ said Alivia with a flush of guilt. ‘I know you will.’
‘Take care,’ said Noama. ‘And whatever it is you’re going to do, be quick about it. These girls need you.’
Alivia nodded as Jeph steered the girls towards the gate. She put her arms around him and said ‘Be safe, and take care of our beautiful girls.’
He smiled. Then the import of her words hit him.
‘Wait, what? You’re staying?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I have to.’
‘You’re not coming with us?’ said Vivyen, her eyes brimming with tears. Alivia knelt beside the girl and took her in her arms.
‘There’s something I still need to do here,’ she said.
Miska put her arms around her. ‘Come with us, Liv. Please.’
Alivia hugged them tightly and just for a moment she considered just going through the gate. Getting on a shuttle and heading up to Molech’s Enlightenment. Who would blame her? What could she do against the might of an entire army?
The moment passed, but the thought of never seeing the girls again was a cold knife in her heart. Tears ran down her face as she held Vivyen and Miska tight.
‘I’m sorry, but I can’t come with you.’
‘Why not?’ sobbed Vivyen. ‘Please, don’t leave us.’
‘You’ve got your father,’ said Alivia. ‘And Noama and Kjell will look after you. I’ve got something I need to do here, so I can’t leave. Not yet. I made a promise a long time ago, and I can’t break it. As much as I want to.’
‘Come with us,’ said Miska. ‘Please, I love you and I don’t want you to die.’
‘I’m not going to die,’ said Alivia. ‘And once I get done I’ll come and join you.’
‘You promise?’ said Vivyen.
‘Hope to die,’ said Alivia, knowing she’d never make good on that promise. She’d broken a lot of promises over the years, but this one hurt worst of all.
She eased the girls’ fears with a gentle push.
‘Listen, you’ve got to go now. There’s a shuttle that’s going to take you to a starship, and that’s going to be the biggest adventure you’ve ever had. And once I get done here, I’ll see you on board. We’ll share the adventure together, yeah?’
They nodded, and the belief she saw in their faces almost broke her heart. Alivia wanted nothing more than to get on that shuttle with them, to turn her back on Molech forever, but that earlier promise had a stronger hold on her.
She reached into her coat and pulled out the battered storybook. It had been with her for longer than she could remember, but it wouldn’t do any good where she was going. She didn’t like the thought of the book ending its days lost forever beneath the surface of Molech and pressed it into Vivyen’s hands.
She closed the girl’s fingers around the book’s spine.
‘I want you to look after this for me, Viv,’ said Alivia. ‘It’s a very special book, and the stories in it will keep you from getting scared.’
Vivyen nodded and clutched the book to her chest.
‘Is everything going to be okay?’ asked Miska.
‘Yeah,’ said Alivia through her tears. ‘It’s going to be okay.’
Old breath sighed across his neck, chill and sharp despite the insulation of his armour. Loken moved slowly, trying to fix on the backplate of Ares Voitek’s armour. Three of the servo-arms were drawn in tight, a fourth with a passive auspex monitoring the surrounding spaces.
This high in the Vengeful Spirit, there were internal security surveyors, and each time Voitek raised a palm, they would stop and Tubal Cayne would develop a workaround. Often these would take them to places worthy of marking, and Bror’s futharc symbols became ever more elaborate in their directions.
‘What if one of the Sons of Horus sees these?’ asked Varren.
‘They won’t,’ said Bror. ‘And if they do, so what?’
‘Well, won’t they just erase them?’
Loken had wondered the same thing, but Bror just shrugged. ‘They will or they won’t. No use worrying about it.’
Loken heard a sound, like a palm slapping on pipework. He halted and dropped to one knee with a fist in the air.
‘What is it?’ hissed Nohai.
‘Thought I heard something.’
‘Severian? Anything ahead?’
The vox chirruped with burbling static. There’d been a lot of that the closer they’d moved to the vessel’s prow. Voitek said it was the increased density of machine-spirits, but Loken wasn’t so sure, though he couldn’t have named what he thought it might be.
‘Don’t you think I’d have said so?’ answered Severian.
‘Is that a no?’
‘Yes, it’s a no. Now shut up and let me work.’
They passed into the forward galleries, taking one of the service tunnels that ran the length of the ship. Following Cayne’s plotter towards the prow, Loken realised that this portion of the ship was one he had seen before.
Or, more accurately, it felt like somewhere he’d visited.
He paused to make sure he wasn’t mistaken.
No, this was one of the places, a lonely forgotten pocket within the ship’s layered superstructure. Dark now as it had been then, brackish water drizzled from conduits bolted to the roof. The remains of burned down tapers floated in oily puddles.
‘Something wrong?’ asked Varren.
‘I can’t say,’ replied Loken.
Varren grunted and moved ahead. Loken let Nohai and Tyrfingr pass him. Rubio paused at his side.
‘You’ll tell me if you start hearing things, yes?’
‘Of course,’ said Loken.
They moved on, entering, as Loken had known they would, a stagnant, vaulted space of old echoes and drifting flakes of ash. Iron bars framed the interior and numerous empty oil drums lay scattered throughout, spilling grey mulch over the deck.
The pathfinders circled around Severian and Cayne, who knelt in the centre of the space, conferring softly over a map hastily scrawled in the ash.
‘Where are we?’ asked Nohai. ‘This doesn’t look like anything worth marking. I thought the plan was to seek out places of importance.’
‘This place is important,’ said Loken. ‘More than you know.’
‘It’s just a hold,’ said Rubio, wrinkling his nose. ‘It stinks.’
‘This is where they first met, isn’t it?’ asked Qruze.
Loken nodded.
‘Where who met?’ asked Voitek.
‘The quiet order,’ said Loken.
‘The what?’
‘A warrior lodge,’ said Rubio, circling the chamber. Scaffolding still clung to the walls, ribbing them like steel bones. Discarded dust sheets hung like unpainted banners, as though a host of craftsmen might return at any moment. ‘This is where it began, the corruption.’
‘No,’ said Loken. ‘It began long before this place, but here’s where it took root.’
‘Were you a member?’ asked Severian.
‘No. You?’
Severian shook his head. ‘After my time. What about you, old man?’
Qruze pulled his shoulders back, as though offended by the notion. ‘I most certainly was not. When Erebus brought it to the Legion I didn’t know why we needed such a thing. Said so then, and I say so now.’
Loken moved through the space, thinking back to the time he’d attended a meeting with Torgaddon at his side.
‘I came here once,’ said Loken. ‘Not this space exactly, but one just like it.’
‘I thought you said you weren’t a member,’ said Bror.
‘I wasn’t. Torgaddon brought me here, thinking I might want to become part of the order.’
‘So why didn’t you?’ asked Varren.
‘I went along to see what sort of things the order did,’ said Loken. ‘A warrior of my company had... died. He’d been a member and I wanted to see if the order had anything to do with his death.’
‘Did it?’
‘Not directly, no, but even after I’d seen that it looked like nothing more than a harmless gathering of warriors, I felt there was something off about it. They’d gotten too good at keeping secrets, and I couldn’t bring myself to entirely trust any group that shrouded itself in that much secrecy.’
‘Good instincts,’ said Rubio.
Loken nodded, but before he could answer, Rama Karayan dropped from the scaffolding lining the walls. A Space Marine in full armour was a considerable weight, but he managed to land almost soundlessly.
‘Get into cover,’ said Karayan. ‘Someone approaches.’
They came in groups of three or four, mortal men in masks and heavy, hooded robes. Loken watched them assemble around what he’d at first assumed to be a defunct conduit hub. Roped down tarpaulin covered it, but when the first intruders to the chamber cut the ropes and pulled the covering away, Loken saw how wrong he’d been.
This wasn’t a lodge space, at least, not any more.
He groped for the word.
Temple. Fane.
An altar lay beneath the tarpaulin, a blocky plinth of dusty, baked ochre clay that looked oddly familiar. It took him a moment to recall where he’d seen stone just like it.
‘Davin,’ he whispered. ‘That altar stone, it came from Davin.’
Severian looked up as he spoke, shaking his head and placing a finger to his lips. The devotees continued to arrive, silently and reverently, until the space was filled with over a hundred bodies.
No words were spoken, as though they were about some solemn business. Some knelt before the altar, while others righted the toppled oil drums and relit the fires with rags, sheafs of paper and vials of viscous oils.
The fuel took hold swiftly and the heat of the flames soon warmed the chamber. Shadows swayed on the walls, cut and sliced by the bodies moving in time to some unheard music.
At last a group of eight appeared, marching a partially naked figure towards the altar. His physique was clearly transhuman, bulked out with muscle and sub-dermal bone sheaths. A long chasuble of purple cloth draped his shoulders and hung to just below his waist.
Severian tapped two fingers against his eyes and then pointed them towards the naked figure with his eyebrows raised.
Loken shook his head. No, he didn’t recognise him.
The figure was led to the altar, where he was bound with chains to the deck. The chasuble fell from his shoulders, and only then did Loken see the Ultima tattoo on the legionary’s scapula.
The warrior was of the XIII Legion.
Loken looked across the space to where Rubio was hidden. He couldn’t see him, but a barely perceptible movement in the darkness showed that he too had seen the warrior’s tattoo.
‘Why doesn’t he fight?’ whispered Loken, and this time Severian answered.
‘Drugged maybe? Look at his movements.’
Loken did and saw Severian was most likely correct. The warrior had the slack features of a sleepwalker. His arms were loose at his sides and his head sagged over his chest.
With the Ultramarine bound to the deck, the robed figures began a droning chant of garbled syllables, a collision of unsounds that Loken’s auto-senses registered as piercing static like insect bites.
At the height of the chant, another figure entered the chamber, this one just as genhanced as the bound warrior. He too was robed and hooded, but Loken instantly recognised him by his purposeful stride and swaying shoulders.
‘Serghar Targost,’ he said. ‘The lodge master.’
Loken’s fingers curled around the hilt of his chainsword, but Severian reached down and clamped his hand around its pommel. He shook his head.
‘He has to die,’ said Loken, as Targost scooped a handful of ash from a blazing drum and pressed it against the bound warrior’s chest.
‘Not now,’ said Severian.
‘Then when?’
Targost lifted a short bladed sword from beneath his robes, a gladius with a hemispherical pommel. The Sons of Horus did not favour the gladius. Too short and too mechanical. More suited to warriors who fought as one entity.
Its blade glittered dully as though sheened with coal dust, and Targost used it to cut radial grooves in the captive’s flesh. The Ultramarine did not cry out, whether due to his own fortitude or an induced fugue state, Loken couldn’t tell.
‘When?’ demanded Loken. Too loud. Heads turned upwards, searching the darkness. They were invisible, but Loken held his breath as the lodge master continued his ritual mutilations.
Severian’s eyes blazed with anger, then flicked over to the highest point of the scaffolding across the chamber. Loken could see nothing, just a confluence of girder and roof. A place the flames cast no shadow where they ought to.
‘Karayan?’
Severian nodded. ‘Let him take the shot.’
It irked Loken that someone not from the XVI Legion would get to kill Targost, but Severian’s logic was sound. He released the sword hilt and opened his fingers to show assent.
‘Be ready with that blade,’ said Severian. ‘No one gets out.’
Severian looked up to the shadows and tapped a finger against the centre of his helmet, right between the eye lenses.
He held up three fingers. Two. One.
A muted muzzle flash lit the shadows and Rama Karayan’s outline flickered against the roof. Loken paused just long enough to see Targost fall before pushing himself out from hiding.
He dropped seven metres and landed with a booming thud that buckled the deck plate. His sword roared from its sheath as he waded into the cultists. The blade’s teeth ripped them up, chewing meat and bone and robes with every slash and downward cut.
Loken raced to the arched entrance through which they’d entered and stood like a mythical sentinel barring a hero’s passage onwards. But these were no heroes, these were the scum of humanity, flotsam and jetsam swept up by the promise of easy gain offered by the corrupt powers at work within the Legion.
Unfit for war, all they could do was chant and pray and spill more worthy blood to corrupting alien powers. They came at him in a rush, with curved blades or clubs sourced from debris around the ship’s degenerating interior.
He let them come and cut them down without mercy.
The other pathfinders dropped into the midst of the cultists. Varren’s chainaxe hacked a bloody path. Voitek’s servo-arms lifted men from the deck and pulled them apart like a cruel child with a captive insect. Tyrfingr fought with his bare fists, roaring as though raucously brawling with trusted comrades.
Loken lost count of how many he killed.
Not enough, but eventually there were no more to slay.
He was blooded from head to foot. Through the entirety of his killing fury, he felt the presence of another at his shoulder, like a fencing master guiding his every strike. The sound in his helmet was hoarse, echoing, though he was not out of breath.
He blinked away the seconds the slaughter had taken.
Rubio stood amid a pile of corpses, his fists wreathed in killing fire. Cayne’s axe was dripping with gore, and Severian cleaned his combat blade on the robes of a headless corpse. Bror Tyrfingr spat blood not his own and wiped an elbow over his smeared chin.
Qruze and Cayne warily approached Serghar Targost, but Loken ignored the fallen lodge master. Instead, he went to help Ares Voitek and Nohai with the captive Ultramarine. While Voitek’s servo-arms cut through the chains binding him to the deck, Nohai knelt beside him, lifting his head and pressing a hand to the side of his neck.
‘What have they done to you, my friend?’ asked Rubio, tearing off his helmet. The light no longer danced in the crystalline matrix around his head, but the fire in his eyes was banked high.
‘You know him?’ said Loken, seeing recognition in Rubio’s eyes.
‘Proximo Tarchon,’ said Rubio. ‘An officer of the Twenty-Fifth Company. We marched with them on Arrigata, when Erikon Gaius led us.’
Loken recalled that blood-soaked world all too well. He glanced up at Varren and saw he too remembered it. But now was not the time for past regrets.
‘How in the Throne’s name did he end up here?’ asked Loken.
Rubio knelt beside the swaying captive and said, ‘How do any of us end up where we are? Chance, bad luck? The Sons of Horus must have taken him in battle.’
‘So Ultramarines are letting themselves get captured now, are they?’ said Varren, picking the blood from his axe-teeth.
Rubio shot him an angry glare, but didn’t waste words with the former World Eater. Instead, he turned to Altan Nohai.
‘What have they done to him?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Nohai, sliding a data-slug into the threaded sockets cored into Proximo Tarchon’s body. ‘Powerful drugs most likely, but I’ll know more soon. Don’t worry, we’ll get him back.’
Rubio’s fingertip followed the cuts made in Tarchon’s flesh, and Loken felt distinctly queasy at their precise nature.
‘You recognise these?’ asked Loken.
‘I have seen similar markings in primitive tribal cultures the Thirteenth Legion were forced to eradicate during the early years of the Crusade,’ said Rubio, his fists clenched and his voice betraying the depths of his fury. Cold fire shimmered at his hood, and Loken’s breath misted.
‘What are they?’ he asked.
‘Precursors to evocation.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means maleficarum,’ said Bror Tyrfingr, jerking a red thumb back towards Targost. ‘The dead one was trying to raise a wight of the Underverse and clothe it in this one’s flesh.’
‘A simplistic way of putting it,’ said Rubio, holding up a hand to forestall Bror’s rising choler, ‘but essentially correct.’
‘And this isn’t his first time,’ growled Bror. ‘Look at the cut lines. No hesitation, no mistakes. He’s cut them before. On too many other bodies, many other times. Lucky for this one we were here.’
Loken left them to it and returned to where Qruze and Cayne knelt beside the body of Serghar Targost.
The lodge master lay on his back, his hood ripped away by the passage of Karayan’s custom shell. What was left of his head was a splintered mass of leaking brain matter and bent metal fasteners. Bone hooks dangled from flaps of skin and skull fragments. One eye was a pulped scrap of exploded tissue, the other a blood-filled orb that wept red tears.
‘Too easy an end for you,’ said Loken.
‘Samus is here,’ said Targost and sat up.
Qruze fell back on his haunches as the lodge master’s fist punched into Cayne’s throat, tearing through the gorget seals with his bare hands. The former Iron Warrior didn’t have breath to cry out as the ruined, dead thing ripped out the ropy, meat-pipes of his throat.
The blood spray was catastrophic. Life ending.
Cayne fell back, vainly trying to stem the flood as Targost got to his feet. A black flame in the vague outline of a skull filled the ruined space where Targost’s head once sat.
‘Samus is the man next to you,’ he said.
Sabaen Queen burned fiercely, pillars of thick black smoke boiling from the Stormbird’s gutted interior and drawn up to the cavern hangar’s roof. The other gunships were just as useless. Melta bombs had turned their engine cores to slag and handfuls of kraks and frags smashed every control mechanism in their cockpits to scrap metal.
The thirty Ultramarines who’d survived the slaughter watched their escape from Molech’s surface burn to ruin. Their Rhinos idled behind them, engines coughing and retching as they too died.
Arcadon Kyro stood defiantly before the inferno of his own making and planted an Ultima vexil of the XIII Legion next to him, the one thing he had saved from Sabaen Queen’s interior after emptying it of weapons and ammunition.
His helmet was mag-locked at his waist and the ribbed arms of his experimental servo-harness were folded at his shoulders.
Tears streaked his ash-smeared features.
‘What did you do?’ said Castor Alcade in disbelief.
‘What I had to,’ replied Kyro. ‘I did it because you wouldn’t.’
Didacus Theron marched towards the unrepentant Techmarine, but Alcade held him back. Bad enough that legionary was fighting legionary, but for Ultramarine to fight Ultramarine? Unthinkable, even in a time when such thoughts were the norm.
‘You’ve killed us all,’ said Theron. ‘You’ve dug our graves on this miserable rock.’
‘A miserable rock entrusted to us by the Emperor,’ Kyro reminded him. ‘Or have you forgotten the oath we swore?’
‘I have forgotten nothing,’ said Theron.
‘You’ve forgotten where the power of your oath comes from.’
‘Then remind me.’
‘That by making it you ask the Emperor to bear witness to the promises you make with an expectation of being held accountable for how you honour them.’
Theron wrapped his hand around the hilt of his sword. Alcade knew that with but a moment’s provocation, he would draw it and strike Kyro down. Theron was Calth born and bred. Rough and ready, but with a nobility of heart that was all that kept him from killing Kyro where he stood.
‘My home world is burning,’ said Theron. ‘But Ultramar can still be saved. This world is lost. What will it achieve if we all die here? How does that serve the Emperor, Kyro? We are His Angels of Death, and this war against Horus has upset the board.’
Theron reached up to the scorched oath paper fluttering at his shoulder guard where a melted seal of wax affixed it to the curved plate. He tore it off and threw it aside.
‘An oath to die in vain is no oath at all,’ he said. ‘Calth needs us and you have kept me from her.’
‘Trying times don’t negate our duty to keep an oath,’ said Kyro. ‘They demand it, even more than when it’s easy to keep.’
Theron drew his sword, knuckles white.
Alcade took a breath. This had gone on long enough.
‘Centurion!’
Theron turned, his face ruddy with anger.
Alcade knew that anger. He felt it too, but with the horror of the massacre in the north behind them, cold practicality reasserted itself.
‘Leave him be, Didacus, he’s right,’ said Alcade, letting out a long, resigned breath. ‘An oath is not an oath if it can be set aside when it suits our desires. We swore to defend Molech, and that’s what we’re going to do.’
‘We can still get off-world, legate,’ said Theron, his anger undiminished, but bleeding out of him with every word. ‘We can seize another orbital craft. Capture a warp-capable ship and fight on. We can still make a difference. Thirty Ultramarines is not a force to be easily dismissed.’
‘I have made my decision,’ said Alcade. ‘The matter is closed. We march for Molech.’
Theron mustered his arguments, but Alcade cut him off before he could argue any more.
‘I said the matter is closed.’
For a moment he wondered if Theron might attack him, but decades of devotion to duty crushed any thought of disobedience.
‘As you say, legate,’ said Theron. ‘We march for Molech.’
Alcade waved his warriors towards the piled crates of ammunition and weaponry Kyro had removed from the gunships.
‘Gather up all the guns and blades you need,’ he said.
He marched to stand before Kyro and said, ‘On any other day I’d have you bear the red of censure, but I need every bolter I can muster. Rejoin the ranks, and bring that vexil with you. If we’re going to die here, we’re going to do it under the Ultima.’
Movement at the mouth of the hangar drew Alcade’s attention.
A wide-base Army vehicle lurched into the cavern, and thirty bolters snapped to face it. Automated weapon systems tracked it, but Kyro swiftly issued an override command at the sight of the red caduceus emblazoned on its glacis.
A heavy door rolled back on its side and a slender woman in a bloodstained coat and hard-wearing fatigues several sizes too big for her jumped down. Five men emerged behind her. Army by their bearing. Each was armed, but they were no threat.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded.
The woman smiled in relief.
‘Legate Alcade,’ she said. ‘My name is Alivia Sureka and I very much need your help.’
TWENTY-TWO Not Ullanor / This is fear / Hellgate
In contrast to Alivia Sureka’s arrival, Lupercalia felt deserted when the Warmaster entered the city. Columns of Legiones Astartes came first, marching beneath wolf-headed vexils and tribal runes of Barbarus as the sun dipped towards dusk.
Aximand’s company bore bloody trophies taken from the vanquished XIII Legion, while Ezekyle’s Justaerin dragged scorched Legio Crucius banners behind them for others to trample.
Tyana Kourion’s body was nailed to a Contemptor’s sarcophagus.
Smoke-blackened tanks and the striding engines of Vulpa, Interfector, Vulcanum and Mortis came after the infantry, their warhorns braying in triumph.
Those citizens who had not already fled to the surrounding countryside or risked travelling to the upper transit platforms in the hope of securing passage off-world huddled fearfully in their homes. Farther ahead, a last few shuttles blasted skyward.
Suspicious eyes watched the arrival of his army from the cover of parapets and shutters. Behind the curiosity, behind the masochistic need to see their conquerors, Horus recognised bone-deep fear.
‘The last time I entered this city, I was parading in glorious triumph with Jaghatai and the Lion,’ said Horus. ‘I marched at father’s right hand, and the people cheered my name.’
Mortarion grunted with grim amusement. ‘Aye, not exactly Ullanor, is it?’
Horus turned to address the three members of the Mournival who marched behind him. They were a sorry looking group, scarred and burned by war, but victorious nonetheless. Ezekyle in particular was looking the worse for wear, his eyes downcast and his mien truculent.
‘What do you think, my sons?’ he asked as they passed beneath the towering arch of the second wall.
‘About what?’ asked Aximand.
‘Why do these people not welcome our arrival?’
‘Aside from the fact that we killed their army?’ said Kibre.
Horus waved that trifling objection aside.
‘They’re afraid,’ said Aximand.
‘Of what, that I’ll have them all put to death?’
‘Perhaps, but more likely they fear change. Right now, most of these people are wondering what our arrival will mean for them. Will they be enslaved or freed? Richer or poorer? Like all tiny cogs in a great machine, they know that it matters little whose hand is at the crank, only that it turns.’
‘Give it time,’ said Horus. ‘They’ll be cheering my name again when I bring them the crown of Terra.’
‘A crown is it now?’ said Mortarion. ‘Being made Warmaster wasn’t enough, so now you’re going to be king?’
‘Have you forgotten already?’ said Horus as the citadel’s rearing towers and gilded domes came into view.
‘Forgotten what?’
‘I’m not going to be king, nor even Emperor,’ said Horus. ‘I’m going to be a god.’
Targost, or the thing within Targost, reached for Iacton Qruze. The flesh of its face was bubbling like the surface of a muddy swamp. The stench was appalling. Qruze scrambled away on his backside, fumbling for his pistol.
Bror Tyrfingr charged the Samus-thing, but it was like trying to tackle the leg of a Warlord Titan. Samus slapped the Fenrisian away, like a man swatting an irritating fly. Bror landed on a flaming drum and rolled, spilling its contents in a shower of embers.
The creature’s jaw cracked wide open and oozing black ichor boiled up from the interior of its skull. Serrated triangular teeth pushed out from the stump of its neck and a host of lashing, vertical tongues emerged, rough and forked. A multitude of glowing eyes formed in the roiling, glutinous mass of its phantom skull.
Its form stretched upwards, diseased roots sprouting from its lower limbs and infesting the deck like oily ropes.
‘I’m Samus...’ it gurgled with mucus-thick breath, and the name struck a dreadful chord in Loken’s heart. The air tasted of static and biting on metal. Shadows moved on the wall, independent of the firelight.
Samus, he knew that name. He knew it from a world made compliant a long time ago in another life. He’d heard it over the vox and in the air of Sixty-Three Nineteen. He’d heard it spoken by Xaver Jubal just before he’d opened fire on his brothers.
The Whisperheads.
Loken was there again, in that glistening cave, fighting his fellow legionary as the foundations of his world came apart.
He had a sword in his hand, but he couldn’t raise it.
This is fear.
This was what mortals dealt with every day of their lives. Fear of the alien, fear of war, fear of pain, of disease. Fear of failing those who trusted them.
How could anyone live like this?
Loken was paralysed, his limbs leaden at his sides.
Varren charged, burying the smile of his axe in the Samus-thing’s belly. Sawing teeth bit deep. It bent over and plucked Varren from the ground, its circular mouth fastening on his shoulder. Blood sprayed and Varren’s arm spasmed, releasing the axe grip.
Voitek’s arms hacked at its flanks, as Severian sliced through gristle-like fronds whipping from Targost’s transforming flesh. A shot from above punched through its wraith skull.
Karayan.
Qruze finally had his pistol out and was pumping shot after shot into the creature’s chest. The mass-reactives were swallowed whole without effect.
The Samus-thing laughed and tossed Varren aside. He landed forty metres away beside the altar of Davinite stone. Bror Tyrfingr picked himself up, shouted something to Qruze and Severian. Loken heard Altan Nohai shout something in return, sounding surprised.
Loken’s armour registered a sudden drop in temperature.
Then Rubio was there.
The former Codicier threw himself at the Samus-thing, his sword a sliver of flame-wreathed bluesteel. Varren’s axe had achieved little, but Rubio’s blade sliced deep into the meat of the thing. The fire leapt from his weapon onto Samus, and the remains of Targost’s robes went up in flames with a roaring whoosh of ignition.
It screamed, finally hurting.
Loken felt something grip his leg and looked down to see Tubal Cayne’s hand scrabbling at his armour.
The other hand was clamped around his own neck. Blood welled between his fingers, pumping enthusiastically from the awful chasm in his throat. He’d ripped his helmet off and his eyes took Loken’s in an iron grip. Anger, vindication and something Loken couldn’t identify poured out of Tubal Cayne. Flickering reflections of Rubio’s white fire shimmered in his widening pupils. The dying warrior tried to speak, but only wet, liquid gurgles emerged.
Loken watched his eyes turn to glass and knew that he was dead.
And the fear that held him rigid vanished.
He’d fought Samus before.
He and Vipus had killed it.
Loken brought his sword up and charged.
Rama Karayan tracked the battle below through his bolter’s scope. Something was affecting it. The thing his brothers faced wasn’t registering. He could see Bror, Macer and the others, but not the thing they fought.
But prey could be hunted by its absences as much as by its leavings.
His hunter’s eye had been honed as a youngster in the darkened mine workings of Lycaeus. The lords of the Ravenspire had recognised his gift and developed it. Not invisible enough for the Shadowmasters, but perfect for the silent killers of the Seeker squads.
His auto-senses were linked directly with the scope of his modified bolter, and he took a breath, innately interpolating the locus of his brother’s attacks. Peripheral sight picked out the pellucid white flames of Rubio’s sword.
He found his centre and drew in a breath.
Held it.
He fired. A spent casing dropped to the scaffold boards.
It bounced, slower than should be possible. A web of frosted lines crazed its surface in a pale web.
Strange shadows moved on the walls. Impossible shadows. They were all around him, like stalking wolves in a twilit winter forest or the dust devils of Deliverance’s ash wastes.
Karayan felt grave-cold air and the hard, sharp edge of a blade at his throat.
‘Nice rifle,’ said a rasping voice. ‘I think I’ll take it.’
Karayan moved. Not fast enough.
The blade sliced deep, cutting back to bone.
Loken’s sword tore through the Samus-thing’s scorched belly. Bubbling laughter spilled from its smoking skull. Ash and greasy meat cinders billowed around it. Furnace-red light shone through wounds torn in its charred flesh.
Targost’s arms reached for him, stretching and cracking like timbers splitting in a fire. Loken put a bolt-round into its chest and hacked the hand from the arm. Another writhing appendage squirmed into existence at the stump, but it was a twisted, malformed thing.
‘It’s vulnerable!’ cried Rubio. ‘Its link to the warp is fraying.’
The pathfinders surrounded the daemon-thing, hacking and shooting it. Even in such desperate straits, each shot was carefully aimed, each strike precisely placed.
‘I know you, Garviel Loken,’ it hissed, looming over Loken. ‘I claimed your brother’s soul in that mountain cave. He screams in torment still.’
‘Don’t listen to it,’ shouted Rubio, blocking a whipping appendage of glistening dark flesh. The Librarian’s hood blazed with blue white fire.
‘Silence, witcher!’ bellowed the Samus-thing. The force of its words drove Rubio to his knees. It spat a torrent of black fire from its writhing, toothed gullet. Rubio threw up a shimmering wall of witchfire and the flames guttered and died.
Severian closed and slashed his blade into the daemon’s back, tearing upwards. Loken hadn’t even seen him move. Looping coils of what might once have been guts, but were now mouldering loops of dead meat spilled out.
The beast spun around and clubbed Severian to the deck with unnatural speed. It hurled Voitek and Qruze away with a scream of pure force and slammed Loken to the deck with slithering arms like blistered snakes.
Loken saw the gladius Targost had used to mutilate the Ultramarine prisoner. The ivory Ultima on its pommel glittered in the firelight. Its blade was dark, yet sheened with starlight. He reached for it, but a hand of scabbed knuckles and bruised fingers picked it up first.
‘This is mine,’ said Proximo Tarchon.
Loken sprang to his feet as the carved warrior of Ultramar threw himself forward. He rolled beneath the Samus-thing’s writhing arms and thrust his gladius up into its belly.
The effect was instantaneous and devastating.
Targost’s body fell apart, as though every single molecular bond within its flesh was instantly sundered. Its form turned to liquid and collapsed in a stinking pool of rancid matter.
The pathfinders scattered. Severian dragged Cayne’s body away from the spreading lake of smoking fluid. Loken lowered his sword and let out a shuddering breath that felt like it had been held within him for decades.
Altan Nohai rushed to Cayne and knelt beside him.
‘There’s nothing you can do for him,’ said Loken.
‘He that is dead, take from him the Legion’s due,’ said Nohai as the reductor portion of his gauntlet slid into place.
Loken registered the muted crack of the gunshot a fraction of a second before the faceplate of Nohai’s helmet exploded outwards.
The Apothecary slumped over Cayne’s body, a smoking entry wound drilled through the back of his helmet.
Armoured warriors dropped to the deck from the upper reaches of the chamber. Sons of Horus. Two dozen at least, armoured in blackened plate the colour of night. Their helm lenses flickered with dead light, as though cold flames seethed behind them.
Most were armed with bolters. He saw a plasma gun. A melta too.
Loken fought the urge to reach for his own weapons.
‘Raise a single weapon and you all die,’ said a warrior without a helmet. Loken didn’t recognise him, but saw the planed features of what they’d once called a true son.
‘Noctua? Grael Noctua of the Warlocked?’ said Severian.
Loken’s head snapped around.
Severian shrugged. ‘He was Twenty-Fifth Company, same as me.’
‘Severian?’ said Noctua, his shock evident. ‘When the Warmaster said two faithless cowards had returned with the prodigal son, I had no idea he meant you. And Iacton Qruze? Your name has been a curse ever since you deserted the Legion at the moment of its greatest triumph.’
Qruze flinched at Noctua’s words, but he squared his shoulders and said, ‘You mean the moment my Legion died.’
Loken had never respected Iacton Qruze more.
The pathfinders reluctantly divested themselves of their weapons as the black-armoured Sons of Horus closed the noose on them. Now that he looked closely, Loken saw their proportions were subtly wrong, asymmetric and out of true, as though the warriors within were not legionaries at all, but things ill-formed and unnatural.
Or that was what they were becoming.
‘And you, Thirteenth Legion’ said Noctua. ‘Especially you.’
Proximo Tarchon slowly laid down his gladius, and Loken saw a depth of calculating hatred in his clear eyes like nothing he’d ever seen before. The blood had hardened to scabs on the ritual cuts, and the smeared ash would mark the scars forever.
‘When I hold this again, it will be to put it through your heart,’ said the Ultramarines warrior.
Noctua smiled at that, but didn’t reply.
‘Grael Noctua, you little bastard,’ said Severian, setting his blade down. ‘Did you know I advised against your advancement three times when your name came up? I always said you were too sly, too eager to please. Not good qualities in a leader.’
‘Looks like you were wrong,’ said Noctua.
‘No,’ said Severian. ‘I wasn’t.’
‘I think you were, I’m Mournival now.’
Loken’s heart skipped a beat at the mention of the Mournival, that confraternity to which he and Torgaddon had once belonged. A brotherhood as close to the Warmaster as it was possible to be.
‘Did someone say Mournival?’
The speaker dropped from the roof spaces, and Loken groaned as he saw the modified bolter he carried. Rama Karayan’s weapon. Blood dripped from the breech and muzzle.
‘I remember the Mournival,’ the warrior said.
Like the others surrounding them, his armour was black and non-reflective. Like Noctua, he went without a helm, and something in his saturnine, cocksure swagger struck him as hideously familiar.
He retrieved Tarchon’s gladius from the deck and turned the darkly-sheened blade over as though curious at what had been done to it. He shook his head and slid the weapon into an empty shoulder sheath.
‘Poor bloody Samus,’ he said to Loken with a grin. ‘He’d only just earned his return after a warrior as straight up and down as you killed his host flesh on Calth. It’s getting to be a thing.’
‘Who are you?’ said Loken.
‘No one remembers me,’ said the warrior. He grinned, exposing perfect white teeth. ‘I’d be hurt if I wasn’t already dead.’
‘You’re Ger Gerradon,’ said Qruze. ‘One of Little Horus Aximand’s scrappers.’
‘The body is his, admittedly,’ said Gerradon. ‘But he’s long gone, Iacton. I’m Tarik reborn, he-who-is-now-Tormaggedon.’
Alivia led the Ultramarines and her five soldiers ever downwards along a twisting series of switchback stairs beneath the Sanctuary. The walls were glassy and smooth, cut down through the geomantic roots of Mount Torger by the colossal power of the galaxy’s most singular mind.
No light shone this deep, and only the Ultramarines suit lights pierced the darkness. If felt like nobody came here precisely because nobody ever came here.
‘How much deeper is this gate, mamzel?’ asked Castor Alcade. The smell of plasmic fire still clung to his armour, and his breath had the hot flavour of burned stone to it.
‘It’s not far,’ she said, though distance would become a somewhat subjective quantity the deeper they went.
‘And how is it that you know of it?’
Alivia struggled to think of a way to answer that without sounding like a lunatic.
‘I came here a very long time ago,’ she said.
‘You’re being evasive,’ said Alcade.
‘Yes.’
‘So why should I put my trust you?’
‘You already have, legate,’ said Alivia, turning and giving him her most winning smile. ‘You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t.’
She’d told them of what lay beneath the Sanctuary, a gate closed in ages past by the Emperor and which Horus planned to open. She told them that beyond the gate lay a source of monstrously dangerous power, and thankfully that was enough for them.
She’d not relished the prospect of trying to exert her empathic influences over the legionaries of the XIII Legion, but as things turned out there hadn’t been any need to apply pressure to the legate’s psyche.
It wasn’t hard to see why.
She’d offered him a last lifeline to achieve something worthwhile, and he’d seized it with both hands.
‘Thirty men facing the might of two Legions sounds grand in the honour rolls,’ he’d said after she’d told him what she wanted of him and his men. ‘But last stands are just the sorts of theoreticals we’ve trained our entire lives to avoid.’
‘This isn’t a fight we’ll walk away from either,’ she’d warned.
‘Better to fight for something than die for nothing.’
He’d said it with such a straight face too. She hadn’t the heart to tell him that sentiments like that were what had kept men fighting one another for millennia.
They’d found the citadel filled with refugees. Most had ignored them, but some begged for protection until Didacus Theron fired a warning shot over their heads.
The Sanctuary and its secret levels, the really interesting levels that not even the Sacristans or Mechanicum knew about, were beneath the deserted Vault Transcendent. Alivia took every confounding turn through the catacombs and located every hidden door as though she’d walked here only yesterday.
The last time Alivia had climbed these particular steps, her legs were like rubber and fear sweat coated her back like a layer of frost. She’d helped him come back to the world; her arm around his waist, his across her shoulder. She’d tried to keep his thoughts – normally so impenetrable – from reaching into her, but he was too powerful, too raw and too damaged from what lay beyond the gate to keep everything inside.
She’d seen things she wished she hadn’t. Futures she’d seen in her nightmares ever since or inked in the pages of a forgotten storybook. Abominable things that were now intruding on the waking world, invited in by those who hadn’t the faintest clue of what a terrible mistake they were making.
‘Do these steps ever bloody end?’ asked Theron.
‘They do, but it’ll seem like they won’t,’ answered Alivia. ‘It’s kind of a side effect of being so close to a scar in the space-time fabric of the world. Or part of the gate’s defence mechanisms, I forget which. It’s amazing how many people just give up, thinking they’re getting nowhere.’
‘I’ve been mapping our route,’ said a Techmarine called Kyro with a superior tone that suggested he was equal to anything this place could throw at him.
‘You haven’t,’ said Alivia, tapping a finger to the side of her head. ‘Trust me.’
Kyro flipped up a portion of his gauntlet and a rotating holographic appeared. A three-dimensional mapping tool. Right away, Kyro frowned in consternation as multiple routes and divergent pathways that didn’t exist filled the grainy image.
‘Told you,’ said Alivia.
‘But do they ever end?’ asked Alcade.
Alivia didn’t answer, but stepped out onto a wide hallway that she knew every one of the Ultramarines would swear hadn’t been there moments ago. Like everything else here it had a smooth, volcanic quality, but light shone here, glittering within the rock like moonlight on the surface of an ocean.
Wide enough for six legionaries to walk comfortably abreast, the hallway was long and opened into a rough-hewn chamber of chiselled umber brick. The Emperor never told her how this chamber had come to be or how He’d known of it, save that it had been here before geological forces of an earlier epoch raised the mountain above.
Ancient hands had cut the stone bricks here, but Alivia never liked looking too closely at the proportions of the blocks or their subtly wrong arrangement. It always left her strangely unsettled and feeling that those hands had not belonged to any species known by the galaxy’s current inhabitants.
The Ultramarines spread out, muscle memory and ingrained practical pushing them into a workable defensive pattern. Alivia’s human allies, Valance especially, kept close to her like a bodyguard.
‘Is that it?’ asked Alcade, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice. ‘This is the Hellgate you spoke of?’
‘That’s it,’ agreed Alivia with a smirk. ‘What did you expect? The Eternity Gate?’
She’d told them something of what lay beyond the gate, but Alivia had to agree it didn’t exactly look like the most secure means of keeping something so hideously dangerous out. Irregular chunks of dark stone veined with white formed a tall archway in the darker red of the mountain’s foundations.
The space between the arch was mirror-smooth black stone, like a slab of obsidian cut from a perfectly flat lava bed. Nothing within the chamber was reflected in its surface.
‘We expected something that looked like it would take more than a rock drill or a demo charge to breach,’ said Kyro.
‘Trust me,’ said Alivia. ‘There’s nothing you or the Mechanicum could bring that would get that open.’
‘So how does Horus plan to open it?’
‘He’s blood of the Emperor’s blood,’ she said. ‘That’ll be enough unless I can seal it.’
‘You said the Emperor sealed it,’ said Theron.
‘No, I said He closed it,’ said Alivia. ‘That’s not same thing.’
Alcade looked at her strangely, as though now seeing something of the truth of what she was.
‘And how is it you know how to seal it?’ he asked.
‘He showed me how.’
Kyro tapped the black wall with one of his servo-arms. It made no sound whatsoever. At least in this world. ‘If what’s beyond here is so terrible, why didn’t the Emperor seal it Himself?’
‘Because He couldn’t, not then, maybe not ever,’ said Alivia, remembering the gaunt, aged face she’d seen beyond the glamours. He’d been gone no more than a heartbeat to her, but she saw centuries carved into the face she’d watched go into the gate.
‘The Emperor couldn’t seal it, but you can?’ said Kyro. ‘You’ll forgive me, Mamzel Sureka, if I find that hard to believe.’
‘I don’t give a damn what you find hard to believe,’ snapped Alivia. ‘There are things a god can do and things He can’t. That’s why sometimes they need mortals to do their dirty work. The Emperor left armies to guard against obvious intruders, but He needed someone to keep out the lone madmen, the seekers of dark knowledge or anyone who accidentally stumbled on the truth. Since I’ve been on Molech, I’ve killed one hundred and thirteen people who’ve been drawn here by the whispered poisons that seep from beyond this gate. So don’t you dare doubt what I can do!’
She took a calming breath and shrugged off her coat, tucking the loaded Ferlach serpenta into the waistband of her fatigues. She felt foolish for losing her temper, but every emotion was heightened in this place.
‘How old are you, Mamzel Sureka?’ asked Alcade.
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ said Alivia, though she knew exactly where he was going with this.
‘The Emperor was last on Molech over a century ago,’ said Alcade. ‘And even with juvenat treatments, you’re nowhere near old enough to have been at His side.’
Alivia laughed, a bitter, desperate sound. ‘You don’t know how old I am, Castor Alcade. And, right now, I wish I didn’t either.’
Loken felt as though every cubic centimetre of air had been crushed from his lungs. He wanted to deny what the thing wearing Gerradon’s face had said, but the voice, the posture... everything, told him it was true.
When you see me, kill me.
The words he’d heard whispered in the shadows of his quarters on the Tarnhelm returned to him. No, that wasn’t right. They weren’t a memory, it was like he’d heard them again. As if some fragment of what had once been his friend was still speaking to him.
Loken’s sword and bolter lay on the ground before him. It would be easy to sweep them up, but could he put a bolt through Gerradon before the others gunned him down? Did that even matter?
He forced down the killing urge.
‘Tarik?’ he said, the name forced through gritted teeth.
‘No,’ said Gerradon with an exasperated sigh. ‘Weren’t you listening? I’m Tormaggedon. I was waiting in the warp when Little Horus cut off Tarik’s head and plucked the bright bauble of his soul before any of the warp whelps could feast on it. He screams and begs like a whipped dog, you know. Fulgrim did the same, and he was a primarch. Just imagine how bad it is for Tarik.’
‘Don’t listen to it, Loken,’ warned Rubio. ‘Warp spawn feast on the pain their lies cause.’
Grael Noctua kicked the back of Rubio’s knee, driving the psyker to the deck. The butt of a boltgun sent him sprawling. Bror Tyrfingr snarled at Noctua, but Severian shook his head.
Loken knew sorrow. He’d grieved at the death of Nero Vipus and had mourned battle-brothers he’d lost along the way. Tarik’s death on Isstvan had all but broken him and driven him into an abyss of madness he wasn’t sure he’d ever really escaped.
Until now.
He lifted his head and the fists he’d made unclenched.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Tarik would never beg. Even in death he’d be stronger than that. You say he’s screaming? I believe you. But he’s not screaming in pain, he’s screaming at me to kill you.’
‘I am the first of the Luperci,’ said Gerradon. ‘The Brothers of the Wolf. And you can’t kill me.’
Loken rubbed a hand across his chin and tipped his head back. When he next looked at Ger Gerradon, he was smiling.
‘You know, if you’d just let him die, I wouldn’t be here,’ said Loken, now able to admit out loud to the sights and sounds that had plagued him since the visitation on the edge of the Mare Tranquillitatis.
‘I’ve seen and heard Tarik Torgaddon at every step of this journey,’ said Loken. ‘He’s long dead, but he brought me back to the Vengeful Spirit. He brought me back to kill you and set him free.’
Gerradon tossed Karayan’s rifle to one of the dead-eyed legionaries and took a step towards Loken with his arms open.
‘Then take your best shot,’ said Gerradon.
‘Stand down,’ said Grael Noctua. ‘He can’t kill you? Well you can’t kill him, either. The Warmaster wants him alive.’
Gerradon grinned and gestured to the transformed warriors in black, those he had called the Luperci.
‘Take a good look, Garvi,’ said Gerradon. ‘You’re going to be just like them. I’m going to put a daemon in you.’
TWENTY-THREE Blood price / Obsidian Way / A god amongst men
‘So this is the best defence our father could muster?’ said Mortarion as bolter shells punched the walls of glassy rock beside him. The Death Lord snapped off a pair of eye-wateringly bright shots from the Lantern.
Aximand didn’t see if they hit, but it was safe to assume the XIII Legion were two warriors fewer.
‘A few petty cantrips and a handful of legionaries?’
Aximand heard the Death Lord’s disdain, decades in the making, but even in the heat of battle, he couldn’t let the comment go unremarked.
Not after the blood he had shed.
Not after so many warriors under his command had died.
‘That’s not all he left,’ snapped Aximand as a grenade thrown back along the passageway detonated with a compressed bang. ‘He left millions of men and tanks. He left armies the Sons of Horus fought and crushed. What did the Death Guard do? Razed a jungle and massacred a defeated enemy.’
Mortarion regarded Aximand with the scrutiny a man might give an upstart child. His fingers tightened on Silence. Those Deathshroud who weren’t shooting along the passageway took a step towards Aximand until Mortarion waved them back.
‘You might once have been a true son, Little Horus,’ said Mortarion, his voice a low, rasping growl, ‘but look in a mirror. You’re no Sejanus anymore.’
Aximand leaned out to shoot. A blue helm vanished in a fan of ceramite and blood. ‘What has that to do with anything?’
The Death Lord leaned in close, his words for Aximand alone. ‘It means that you think you’re special? You’re nothing. It means that, Mournival or not, I’ll end you if you speak that way again.’
‘Lupercal would kill you.’
‘My brother would be displeased at your death, but he would forgive me. You’d still be dead though.’
Horus appeared at Aximand’s side with a feral grin of anticipation making him seem younger and more vital than ever. He leaned out into the passageway and unleashed a roaring blaze of fire from his gauntlet-mounted bolters.
‘There will be others,’ said Horus ducking back into cover as an interlocking pair of bipod-mounted heavy bolters raked the passageway. ‘Father wouldn’t rely on mortals to keep his secret. He’ll have a failsafe of some kind.’
‘All the more reason for you to let me send Grulgor up there,’ said Mortarion over the hammering impacts and detonations of explosive munitions. ‘He’ll end this quickly.’
Horus shook his head. ‘No, we do this my way. So close to the gate, Grulgor could kill us all.’
Grulgor?
Aximand knew the name, he’d read it in casualty lists. He looked back to where the Justaerin were locking their boarding shields into position. Aximand was not surprised to see Abaddon and Kibre holding flanking positions. Their shields were splashed with blood in bladed radial patterns that were not accidental.
‘Ready, Ezekyle?’ asked Horus of his First Captain.
Abaddon slammed his shield on the floor and slotted his combi-bolter into the firing notch by way of answer.
‘All yours, brother,’ said Horus, moving back and taking up position at the head of the Justaerin’s formation. One of the Terminators locked a shield onto Lupercal’s armoured forearm. Against his mighty frame it looked woefully inadequate protection.
Mortarion waved forward two warriors armed with rotary missile launchers.
Horus nodded and a hammering salvo of bolter shells filled the passageway. The two Death Guard stepped forward and ripped out a volley of missiles. Warheads streaked down the passageway. Aximand heard the metallic cough detonations. Shroud bombs and frags.
One warrior dropped to his knees with the back of his helmet blown out. The other staggered with most of his ribcage detonated from the inside by penetrating mass-reactives.
‘Lupercal!’ shouted Abaddon as Horus led the Justaerin forward.
Shields braced, marching in relentless lockstep. Boots like mechanised pistons as they pushed into the passage. Heads down, shields out, they filled its width. Gunfire pummelled them.
Not enough to stop them.
Nowhere near enough to stop them.
Alivia traced the patterns she’d memorised all those years ago over the surface of the gate. Each movement sent a rippling shiver of painful disgust through her.
She knew what lay beyond the gate better than most.
She knew how it hungered for what lay on this side.
A closed gate was better than no gate, and the howling, mad, devouring things on the other side weren’t about to give up even this tenuous hold without a fight.
Alivia’s empathic gift was now a curse. This close to the gate, every hateful thought she’d ever had was magnified. She relived the pain of every lover who’d betrayed her, every attacker who’d wounded her and every person she’d abandoned.
And not just hers. Valance and his four men knelt beside her with their rifles shouldered. They were soldiers, and had a lot of bad memories. All of them crowded her thoughts. Tears streamed down her face and wracking sobs spasmed in her chest.
Not for the first time, she cursed in a dead language that she had been left to do this. She knew that he couldn’t do it. After what he had taken from the realm beyond, it would be suicide for him to draw so near to those whose power he’d stolen.
Every mantra she whispered was faltering, every line she drew in lunar caustic was fading before she could empower it. She couldn’t focus. All the years she’d spent waiting in readiness for this moment and she couldn’t bloody concentrate.
Hardly surprising, really.
The sound of battle was incredible. Bolters and other, heavier weapons were filling the passageway with explosive rounds, but she knew it wouldn’t be enough to stop the Warmaster.
She had known that Horus would find this place eventually, but he had found it quicker than she’d hoped. She’d never agreed with the decision to obscure the existence and nature of the warp, but if Alivia’s long life had taught her anything, it was that finger-pointing after the fact was beyond futile.
Four Ultramarines stood with her and her bodyguards, a living shieldwall of flesh and ceramite. This was the only place mortals could survive – being without armour in the midst of a Legion firefight was a sure-fire way to end up dead.
Castor Alcade oathed the warriors protecting her little band to fight as though the Emperor Himself stood behind them.
These men would die for her.
They weren’t the first to do so, but she dearly hoped they’d be the last.
An explosion shook the chamber and she coughed on the acrid propellant fumes. She could taste aerosolised blood misting the air. Not good. Especially with the aggression flaring from every man in the chamber. Ultramarines were all about their practical, but they had sacrificed too much to fight clinically with the cause of their hurt so close.
Alivia breathed deeply, picturing Vivyen and Miska. Even Jeph, with his sad, hangdog eyes and absurd belief that he had to protect her. She missed them, and hoped Molech’s Enlightenment was already accelerating towards the system’s Mandeville point.
No, that wasn’t helping. She needed something more, something cherished. She remembered when the auspex of a trans-loader from Ophir had failed and it ran into a submerged mine in Larsa’s harbour. She hadn’t been on the ship, but had seen it go down with all hands. Only when she returned home did she find out that Vivyen and Miska thought she’d been aboard, and they’d wept for hours believing that she was dead.
She remembered her arms wrapped around them both when they finally succumbed to sleep. Their warm breath and the smell of their hair reminded Alivia of a time long gone, of a life now ended, when she’d been blissfully ignorant of her true nature and the doom approaching Arcadia.
She had been happy then, and she used that to push down the violent thoughts intruding on her psyche. Alivia pictured the symbols she’d been shown: precise arrangements of intersecting lines that couldn’t possibly intersect; curves that broke every established rule of calculus; the geometry of the insane.
She spoke the words that weren’t words, pouring every inch of her desire to see this gate sealed into what she was doing. Her hands described the motions she pictured, moving across the surface of the smooth black barrier.
It looked and felt like a solid barrier, but it wasn’t.
It was a scab over a hole that should never have been torn open, an impossible object that existed in an infinite number of possible existences. It was neither real nor unreal.
A doorway to hell Alivia now attempted to unmake.
Her surroundings faded to grey, a monochrome facsimile of the world where she was the only splash of colour. She heard gunfire, screams of pain and explosions. All were muted and dulled, as though coming from a distant battlefield.
Her hands were radiant, leaving echoes of warp light in their wake. A pattern began to emerge, disjointed knowledge seeded throughout her psyche coming together in a multi-dimensional lattice that was part unbreakable seal, part demo charge.
She smiled, seeing the cunning that had gone into its design, the care it had taken to hide within her. So intricate was its construction, she almost didn’t mind being used like this.
She certainly didn’t mind that its completion would kill her.
A spray of blood drenched Alivia and she cried out as one of her protectors dropped with a hole blown through the cobalt-blue of his breastplate. A concussive pressure wave hit her and slammed her to the ground. A spinning fragment of hot metal sliced across her shoulder. Pain blazed as blood ran down her back.
Her surroundings bled back into her awareness. The noise, the fear and the choking clouds of smoke. She heard heavy footfalls, all thudding in unison. Short, tramping steps and the scrape of iron on stone. Alivia rolled onto her side, blinking away tears of pain from her shoulder.
Her left arm felt useless and the stink of burned meat filled her senses. Valance lay on his back next to her. He’d taken the brunt of the blast that had knocked her to the ground. What was left of him was only recognisable by the half of his head that remained.
She looked up in time to see a ridged line of interlocking shields barge its way into the chamber. Sons of Horus with breacher’s shields. The Ultramarines couldn’t hope to hold their position, scattered by the missile explosions and overwhelmed by suppressive volleys.
Concentrated bursts of fire took them down in twos and threes.
The shield line widened as the chamber opened up. Sons of Horus warriors following behind pushed the line out and brought yet more guns to bear.
Arcadon Kyro put a hole in the shield line with coordinated blasts from the plasma one-shots on his mechanised arms. Each bolt impacted at precisely the same time, and blew apart one of the shields and the warrior behind it.
Massed bolter fire brought him down, a ridiculous amount of overkill that shredded his flesh unrecognisable and thoroughly dismantled his mechanical augmentations. Didacus Theron and Castor Alcade pushed into the gap Kyro had opened, looking to tear it wider.
Theron’s power sword cleaved through a shield and the arm holding it. His bolt pistol fired point-blank into the face of a Terminator. Such hulking war-monstrosities all but eliminated the need for mortal flesh entirely. The bolts detonated on impact, but left the warrior beneath unharmed.
The Terminator’s crackling energy-fist pistoned out and rammed through the centurion’s body. He came apart in an explosion of disembodied limbs and shattered plate.
Alivia tried to drag herself back to the gate, pushing along the floor on her backside with her heels.
Her work was almost done. Just a little more and her obligation would be over. No more long, wearying years, no more lies and isolation. No more anything.
A towering figure broke free of the shield line.
A giant, a demigod, a beautiful avatar of all that humanity could achieve in greatness. She’d heard all these epithets and more used to describe the Warmaster, but they’d been coined by those viewing him at peace.
Seeing him in battle was something entirely different.
Horus Lupercal was a monster. A daemon of war and ruin made flesh. He was a destroyer, an unmaker and the face of all humanity ought to have turned its back on millennia ago.
His was the face of uttermost evil...
And he didn’t even know it.
It was the worst thing Alivia had ever seen.
Castor Alcade vaulted away from the Terminator bearing down on him and ran to put himself between her and the Warmaster. There was no way Alcade could defeat the Warmaster, no hope of even a fair contest.
Alcade was dead the moment he moved, but he did it anyway.
It was the best thing Alivia had ever seen.
The legate of the XIII Legion thrust with his gladius.
It snapped on the amber eye at Horus’s breast.
The Warmaster’s titanic maul swept out and Castor Alcade was obliterated as though he had never existed.
Alivia pushed onto her feet and threw herself at the gate, her hands slippery with blood. She traced the final lines and opened her mouth to speak the last of the apotropaic words.
All that came out was a scream of pain.
Alivia looked down and saw four parallel blades jutting from her chest. They pinned her to the black wall and her blood ran down the blades and into the gate.
‘I don’t know who you are, but I need that open,’ said the Warmaster.
‘Please,’ said Alivia as the pain finally caught up to her.
Horus snapped the talons of his gauntlet from Alivia’s body. She fell, and it felt like she fell for a very long time before she hit the floor.
She looked up into the Warmaster’s face.
She saw no pity, no mercy. But, curiously, she saw regret.
Alivia struggled to speak, and the Warmaster knelt to hear her valediction as the life bled out of her.
‘Even... souls ensnared by evil... maintain a small... bridgehead of good,’ she said. ‘I want... you... to remember that. At the end.’
Horus looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled. And for a moment, Alivia forgot that he was the enemy of humanity.
‘You shouldn’t put your faith in saints, mamzel,’ said Horus.
Alivia didn’t reply, looking over the Warmaster’s shoulder.
The gateway of black obsidian was bleeding.
Horus stood from the body of the dead woman.
He wished she hadn’t died so he could ask her how she had come to be here. But she had stood against him and tried to stop him from achieving his destiny. And that was a death sentence.
‘Who was she?’ asked Mortarion.
‘I don’t know, but I felt the touch of father upon her.’
‘She met Him?’
‘Yes,’ said Horus, ‘but a long time ago I think.’
Mortarion looked up at the gate, clearly unimpressed. Horus saw his brother’s expression and put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Don’t underestimate what our father did here,’ said Horus. ‘He broke through into another realm, a realm no other being has breached and lived. Such a journey would make the climb to your first father’s hall seem like a pleasant stroll.’
Mortarion shrugged. ‘I don’t much care what He did,’ he said. He tapped the butt of Silence against the body of the woman. ‘She was here to seal the gate. Do you think she succeeded?’
Horus reached out and laid his palm flat against the black wall. He felt micro-tremors in its surface, too faint to be perceived by anyone save a primarch.
‘Only one way to find out,’ said Horus, unsnapping the seals across his breastplate. ‘Take that reaper of yours and cut me.’
‘Cut you?’
Horus shed his armour, letting each plate fall to the ground until he stood clad only in a grey bodysuit.
‘I was told this gate can only open in blood,’ said Horus. ‘So cut me and don’t spare the edge.’
‘Sir,’ said Kibre coming forward. ‘Don’t. Let one of us do it. Spill my blood, use as much as it takes, even if it kills me.’
Little Horus and Ezekyle joined their voices in opposition to his desire for Mortarion to cut him deep.
Horus folded his arms and said, ‘Thank you, my sons, but if I’ve learned anything from Lorgar, it’s that somebody else’s blood won’t do for something like this. It has to be mine.’
‘Then let’s get this done,’ said Mortarion, hefting Silence and readying its blade. Where some of Horus’s brothers might balk at the thought of wounding him, Mortarion had no such qualms. If his brother sought to usurp him, this was his chance.
Horus locked his gaze with his brother.
‘Do it.’
Mortarion spun Silence around his body.
The blade flashed.
Horus howled as the Death Lord’s reaper cut him from clavicle to pelvis. The pain was ferocious. Its savagery took him all the way back to Davin’s moon, and Eugan Temba’s stolen blade.
Blood jetted from the wound and sprayed the black wall.
Through eyes wet with pain, Horus saw unfinished sigils and arrangements of arcane significance. Their brightness was dying, washed away by the tide of his blood.
The gouges his talons had torn were bleeding.
His blood and the woman’s mingled, and Horus saw hair-fine cracks spreading from where he’d marked the wall.
He grinned through the pain. Worldbreaker swung to his shoulder.
‘Time to earn your name,’ he said.
The Emperor’s gift swung round in a sledgehammer arc.
And smashed the wall to shards.
Absolute darkness spilled into the chamber like a physical thing, as though an ocean of dark matter filled the mountain above and was now pouring out.
Horus felt hurricane winds tear at him, yet was unmoved.
He felt the cold of space, a soul-deep chill that enveloped him in ice. He was alone, floating in an empty void.
No stars illuminated him.
He had no memory of passing through the gate, then berated himself for so literal an interpretation. The gate beneath the mountain was not a literal portal separating one space from another, but an allegorical one. Just by spilling his blood upon stone that was not stone he had passed through. By enacting his desire with Worldbreaker, he had hurled himself heedless into the domain of gods and monsters.
A realm he knew of only in myth and the ravings of lunatics put down in proscribed texts and lurid works passed off as fiction. This was a place unconstrained by the limits of the physical world. The laws governing existence in the material world held no sway here and were endlessly flouted.
Even as he came to that understanding, the void surrounding him conspired to refute that notion. A world faded up, a terrible place of bone white sands and blood-red mountains and orange skies lit by global fires.
The air tasted of ash and regret, of sorrow and fecundity.
Horus heard the clash of swords, but no battle. The plaintive cries of lovers, but no flesh. Whispers surrounded him, plotting and scheming as he felt the cyclic entropy of his flesh. Old cells dying, new ones born to replace them.
He blinked away the heat of the sky, now seeing it wasn’t the orange of a reflected blaze, but the blaze itself.
The heavens were on fire from horizon to horizon.
A firestorm blazed over distant mountains, swollen by forks of ruby red lightning rippling upwards from their summits.
Horus felt the ground beneath him become more solid, and looked down to see that he stood within a circle of flagstones fashioned from obsidian. Eight radiating arms vanished into the far distance, and the landscape twisted in hideous ways along each of the pathways.
Acres of wire grew with the moaning bodies of his closest sons hung upon barbed spikes. Flickering lights skimmed desolate bogs that burped and hissed with the decay of rotting corpses. Silken deserts of serpentine fogbanks of perfumed musks. Labyrinthine forests of claw-branched trees clung to a series of rounded hills, each with eight doors set around their circumferences.
‘I’ve travelled realms like this before,’ said Horus, though there was no one to hear. No one obvious, at least.
Each of the four cardinal paths ended at a mountaintop fortress to rival that of the Emperor’s palace. Their walls were brass and gold, bone and earth. They glimmered in the ruddy light of the firestorm. Screams issued from each of them and booming laughter of mad gods rolled down from the peaks.
‘They are mocking you,’ said a voice behind him.
Horus turned, knowing what he would see.
The Cruor Angelus was the red of a battlefield sunset, its armour no longer splintered and broken, its face no longer a charred nightmare of agony. The chains encircling its body were gone, but the light of extinguished suns still burned in its dead eyes.
‘Why are you here?’ said Horus.
‘I am home,’ said the Red Angel. ‘I am unbound. The cold iron Erebus hung on me has no power here, nor do the warding oaths cut into my skin. Here I am the sum of all horror, the thirster after blood and the devourer of souls.’
Horus ignored its grandstanding. ‘So why are they mocking me?’
‘You are a mortal in a realm of gods. You are an insect to the Pantheon. Insignificant and unworthy of notice, a fragment of dust in the cosmic wind.’
Horus sighed. ‘Noctua was right, all you warp things are ridiculously overwrought.’
Razored bone talons ripped from its gauntlets. Curling horns tore from its brow. ‘You are in my realm, where you will see only what we wish you to see. I can snuff you out like a candle flame, Warmaster.’
‘If you’re trying to intimidate me, you’re doing a poor job of it,’ said Horus, taking a step towards the daemon. ‘Let me tell you what I know. You exist in both realms, but if I destroy your body, your time in my world is over.’
The Angel laughed and stepped to meet his advance.
‘Daemons never die,’ it said.
‘No, but they do get incredibly tiresome,’ said Horus, reaching up to wrap his hand around the Red Angel’s throat. He lifted it from the ground and squeezed. It spat black ichor and the fire in its eyes blazed.
‘Release me!’ it roared, clawing at his arms. Blood welled from the cuts and splashed the mirror-black flagstones. Black veins of disintegrating blood vessels spread down Horus’s arm at the daemon’s touch. He felt the internal mechanisms of his body decaying, but only crushed the daemon’s neck harder.
‘You will die for this!’ spat the daemon.
‘One day perhaps,’ said Horus. ‘But not today. You weren’t sent here to kill me.’
Horus nodded to the vast citadels in the mountains. ‘You’re here to guide me. Your masters need me, so take me to their fortresses, speak my name and tell them the galaxy’s new master would treat with them.’
Horus dropped the Red Angel and for a moment he thought it might fly at him in a rage. Booming thunder rolled down from the mountains, bellows of anger, squeals of delight and more sibilant whispers. A million voices swept the nightmarish landscape, and the Red Angel’s claws retreated into its gauntlet.
‘Very well, I will take you to the Ruinous Powers,’ it said with a hiss of venom that curdled the air. ‘The Obsidian Way is the eternal road. It is perilous for flesh and soul. It is not for mortals to walk, for its dangers are–’
‘Shut up,’ said Horus. ‘Just shut the hell up.’
Aximand cried out at the awful sensation of blindness. His helmet’s auto-senses had failed the instant the Warmaster’s hammer struck the black wall. He tore his helmet off, but was still in the dark. Not just a darkened space, but a place of utter absence, as though the very idea of light had yet to become real.
‘Ezekyle!’ he yelled. ‘Falkus! Sound off!’
No response.
What had happened? Had they failed? Had Lupercal inadvertently unleashed some hideous apocalypse on them? Aximand felt as though his entire body was enveloped in viscous glue. Every breath was laden with toxins, with bile and with sweet, cloying tastes that sickened him to the core.
‘Ezekyle!’ he yelled again. ‘Falkus! Sound off! Anyone!’
And almost as soon as it had begun it was over.
Aximand blinked as the world came back again. He spun around, seeing the same confusion in the faces of his brothers. Even Mortarion appeared discomfited. The Deathshroud gathered close to their master as the Justaerin looked around for someone to protect.
‘Where is he?’ demanded Abaddon, though Aximand wasn’t sure who he was addressing. ‘Where is he?’
‘Exactly where he intended,’ said Mortarion, looking at the black gate. It had previously appeared to be a slab of polished obsidian, but now it was a vertical pool of black oil. Rippling concentric rings spread over its surface, as though raindrops were falling on it from the other side.
‘Do we go in after him?’ asked Kibre.
‘Do you want to die?’ said Mortarion, rounding on the Widowmaker. ‘Only one other being has passed into the warp and lived. Are you the equal of the Emperor, little man?’
‘How long has it been since he went in?’ said Abaddon.
‘Not long,’ said Aximand. ‘Moments at most.’
‘How do you know that?’
Aximand pointed to the ruby droplets running down the Death Lord’s reaper. ‘His blood is still wet on the blade.’
Abaddon appeared to accept his logic and nodded. He stood before the portal, as though trying to drag Lupercal back with the sheer power of his will.
Kibre stood with him, Abaddon’s man to the last.
Aximand took a breath of deep-earth air. Not even the horror of Davin could have prepared him for this moment. The Warmaster was gone and Aximand didn’t know if he would ever see him again.
A cold shard of ice entered his heart and all the light and colour bled from the world. Was this what the Iron Tenth had felt when Ferrus Manus died?
Aximand felt utterly alone. No matter that his closest brothers stood with him. No matter that they had just won a great victory and fulfilled the Warmaster’s ambitions for this world.
What would they do without the Warmaster?
No use denying that such a thing could ever happen. Fulgrim’s slaying of Manus proved a primarch could die.
Who else but the Warmaster had the strength of will to lead the Sons of Horus? Who among the true sons could achieve what Horus had failed to achieve?
Horus is weak. Horus is a fool.
The words struck him like a blow. They were without source, yet Aximand knew they had issued from beyond the black gate. Delivered straight to the heart of his skull like an executioner’s dagger.
He blinked and saw a time a long time ago or yet to pass, an echoing empty wasteland of a world. He imagined a death. Alone, far away from everything he had once held dear, dying with a former brother at his feet whose cruel wounds bled out onto the dust of a nameless rock.
Breath sounded in his ear. Cold and measured, the breath of nightmares he’d thought banished with the ghost of Garviel Loken.
A fist of iron took Aximand’s heart and crushed it within his chest. He couldn’t breathe. Transhuman dread. He’d felt it briefly on Dwell, and now it all but overpowered him.
The feeling passed as a bitter wind blew from the gateway.
‘Stand to!’ yelled Abaddon. ‘Something’s happening.’
Every weapon in the chamber snapped to aim at the portal. Its surface no longer rippled with the gentle fall of raindrops, but the violence of an ocean tempest.
Horus Lupercal fell through the oil-black surface of the gate and crashed to his knees before Abaddon and Kibre. Behind him, the darkness of the gate vanished with a bang of displaced air. Only a solid wall of mountain rock remained, as though the gate had never existed.
Aximand rushed forward to help them as the Warmaster held himself upright on all fours. His back heaved with breath, like a man trapped in a vacuum suddenly returned to atmosphere.
‘Sir,’ said Abaddon. ‘Sir, are you all right?’
Even through his gauntlets, Aximand felt the glacial ice of the Warmaster’s flesh.
‘You’re still here?’ said Horus without looking up, his voice little better than a parched whisper. ‘You waited for me... after all this time...’
‘Of course we waited,’ said Aximand. ‘You’ve only been gone moments.’
‘Moments...?’ said Horus, with a fragile, almost frantic edge to his words. ‘Then everything... everything’s still to be done.’
Aximand looked over at Abaddon, seeing the same lingering doubt in the face of the First Captain. None of them had the faintest clue as to what might happen beyond the gate or what the consequences of venturing into such an alien environment might be.
They had let their lord and master walk into the unknown and not one of them had known what to expect.
That lack of forethought now horrified Aximand.
‘Brother,’ said Mortarion, cutting through Aximand’s self-recrimination. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’
Horus stood to his full height and Aximand’s eyes widened at the sight of him.
The Warmaster had aged.
Cthonia had shaped him, moulded him into a warrior of flint-hard lines and cruel beauty. Two centuries of war had left no mark upon him, but moments beyond the gate had done what the passage of time could not.
Silver streaked the stubble upon his scalp, and the grooves at the corners of his eyes were deeper and more pronounced.
The face Aximand had devoted his life to serving was now that of an ancient warrior who had fought for longer than he could ever have imagined, who had seen too much horror and whose campaigning days had bled him dry.
Yet the fire and purpose in his eyes was brighter than ever.
Nor was that fire simply confined to his eyes.
What Aximand had taken to be cold flesh was the power of the empyrean distilled and honed within the body of an immortal being. Horus stood taller, fuller and more powerfully than before. Lupercal had always found Warmaster to be an awkward fit, a term never fully bedded in or taken as read.
Now he owned the title, as though it had been his long before there was any such office to take. He was now, naturally, and without equivocation, the Warmaster.
Aximand, Abaddon and Kibre backed away from Horus, each of them dropping to their knees in wonder as the power filling the primarch bloomed in the material world.
Even Mortarion, that most truculent of primarchs, bent the knee to Horus in a way he had never done for the Emperor.
Horus grinned and all trace of the war-weary ancient was banished in the blink of an eye. In his place was a mortal god, brighter and more dangerous than ever. Filled with a power that only one other being in all existence had wielded before.
‘Yes,’ said Horus. ‘I found exactly what I was looking for.’
TWENTY-FOUR Leaving Lupercalia / Ill met by moonlight / Hunter’s eye
Lupercalia was burning.
The Sons of Horus had not lit the fires, but Aximand watched them spread through the knotted streets of the lower valley as the Warmaster’s Stormbird cleared the citadel’s walls. The Knights of House Devine stalked the streets of their city like vengeful predators, burning and killing with wanton abandon.
One machine, a burn-scarred thing with a lashing whip weapon danced in the light of the revel fires, its warhorn hooting as though its pilot were drunk.
Aximand forgot the Knights as the angle of the gunship’s ascent became steeper and a number of Thunderhawks took up station on either wing.
‘It’s strange to be leaving a world so soon after arriving,’ said Falkus Kibre, scrolling through a data-slate bearing a force disposition assay. ‘Especially when there’s still armies to fight.’
‘No one worth fighting,’ grunted Abaddon from farther along the compartment. He’d said little since they’d emerged from the catacombs beneath the citadel. ‘The fight before Lupercalia destroyed the best of them.’
Kibre shook his head. ‘Orbital surveys say there’s tens of thousands of soldiers and dozens of armoured regiments have fled across the mountains on the edges of the southern steppe.’
Abaddon said nothing. Aximand knew Ezekyle better than most and knew when to leave well alone.
This was one such moment.
‘The Kushite Eastings and Northern Oceanic were largely wiped out at Lupercalia and Avadon,’ continued Kibre who, as Abaddon’s second, should have known not to press the issue. ‘But van Valkenberg and Malbek are still unaccounted for.’
‘Then you go down and bloody finish them!’ snapped Abaddon.
Kibre took Abaddon’s outburst stoically and replaced the slate in its niche.
‘Ezekyle,’ said Kibre. ‘We fought the hardest down there, you and I.’
Aximand scowled at that. The Fifth Company had fought their way through the XIII Legion to break the line, and they’d done it without the support of an orbital weapons platform.
‘We faced a bloody Imperator and lived,’ continued the Widowmaker, ‘So don’t make me come up there and slap you for being unmindful of what we did.’
Aximand revised his assumption that he knew Ezekyle better than most when, instead of killing Kibre, Abaddon grunted in laughter.
‘You’re right, Falkus,’ said Abaddon. ‘It does feel somehow... unfinished.’
That at least, Aximand understood. Like all true fighting men down through the ages, he hated to abandon a mission before it was finished. But Ezekyle had things wrong.
‘It is finished,’ he said.
Abaddon and Kibre looked back down the fuselage at him.
‘We came here for Lupercal,’ he said. ‘This was his mission, not ours. And it’s done.’
‘We’re just going to have to fight those men again on the walls of Terra,’ said Kibre.
‘You’re wrong,’ said the Warmaster, emerging from the pilot’s compartment and sitting on the dropmaster’s seat. ‘Those men will be dead soon. Mortarion and Grulgor will see to that.’
Horus had always been a demi-god among men, but looking into the Warmaster’s eyes now was like looking into the heart of a star on the verge of becoming a self-immolating supernova.
‘We’re leaving the Fourteenth Legion to finish the job?’ said Kibre.
Horus nodded, shifting his bulk on the seat. It was patently too small for him, more so now that his natural presence was enhanced by his journey across the dimensions.
‘Molech now belongs to Mortarion and Fulgrim.’
‘Fulgrim?’ said Aximand. ‘Why does the Phoenician get a share of the spoils?’
‘He played his part,’ said Horus. ‘Though I doubt he’ll remember his time here fondly. Plasmic fire to the face tends to be an unpleasant experience. Or so Lorgar told me from Armatura.’
‘What was Fulgrim doing?’ asked Aximand.
Horus didn’t answer immediately and Aximand took a moment to study the chiselled lines of the Warmaster’s face. The extended age Aximand saw in his gene-father still unnerved him. He dearly wanted to ask Lupercal what he’d found, what wonders he’d seen and how far along the road he’d travelled.
One day, perhaps, but not today.
‘Fulgrim reaped a crop sown here many years ago,’ said Horus. ‘But enough of my brother, let’s savour the moment ahead.’
‘What moment?’ said Kibre.
‘A reunion of sorts,’ said Horus. ‘The confraternity of the old Mournival is about to be remade.’
Lupercal’s Court. The dark jewel in the crown of Peeter Egon Momus.
If Loken’s return to the Vengeful Spirit had been hard before, moving stealthily through its hidden corridors and secret niches, being within Lupercal’s Court was an exquisite torture. Loken had stood at the Warmaster’s side when they had planned the Isstvan campaign.
He’d been proud then, prouder even than the day he’d been chosen to be one of the XVI Legion. All he felt now was confusion.
Gerradon and Noctua had dragged them through the ship, marching them onto a pneu-train bound for the prow. At first, he’d thought they were heading to the strategium, but after debarking at the Museum of Conquest, he’d realised exactly where they were going.
The high ceiling was still hung with uncommon banners, some fresh, some mouldering and dusty. Shadows clung to the thick pillars, making it impossible to tell if they were alone. The twenty-three Luperci – he’d counted them as they passed through the Museum of Conquest – spread out and marched them towards the towering basalt throne at the far end of the chamber.
‘Kneel,’ said Gerradon, and there was little to do but obey.
Iacton, Bror and Severian were to Loken’s left, Varren, Tarchon, Rubio and Voitek to his right. The Luperci surrounded them like executioners. They knelt facing the throne, looking out into the vastness of space through the one addition to the chamber, a cathedral-like window of stained glass.
Pinpricks of light from distant stars glittered at unimaginable distances, and Molech’s moons painted the floor in lozenges of milky radiance.
‘Nice throne,’ said Varren. ‘The traitor still thinks he’s a king, then. Should have seen this coming long before.’
Ger Gerradon kicked the former World Eater in the back. Varren sprawled, and bared his teeth, reaching for an axe that wasn’t there. Four Luperci kept their bolters trained on him as others hauled him back to his knees.
‘A king?’ said Gerradon with a grin Loken wanted to split wide open. ‘You World Eaters always did think small. Horus Lupercal doesn’t think he’s a king. Haven’t you felt it? He’s a god now.’
Severian laughed and Grael Noctua backhanded a bolter across his face. Still laughing, Severian rolled onto his side and picked himself up. Loken wanted to mock Gerradon’s theatrics, but he could barely take a breath. That he would soon be face to face with the Warmaster was sending his sense memory into overdrive.
The corners of Lupercal’s Court were shadowed ruins where the dead of Isstvan gathered, hungry for flesh. The moonlight painting the floor was the flash of atomic firestorms, and the breath at his ear was that of his killer.
‘Loken,’ said Qruze.
He didn’t answer, keeping his gaze fixed on the black throne.
‘Garviel!’
Loken blinked and lifted his head.
The great iron doors to Lupercal’s Court were opening.
And there he was, looking right at Loken with paternal pride.
His gene-father, his Warmaster.
Horus Lupercal.
The Warmaster had always been the mightiest of the primarchs, a fact acknowledged by all Sons of Horus, though hotly debated by legionaries from most other Legions.
To see him now would surely end that debate.
Horus was possessed of a powerful dynamism, a charge that passed from him to those he beheld. To be in his presence was to know that gods walked among men. A hyperbolic sentiment, but one borne out by those fortunate enough to have met him. That power, that essence was magnified now.
It was magnified a hundredfold, and it all but emptied Loken’s reservoir of hate to keep from throwing himself at the Warmaster’s feet and begging for forgiveness.
His feet, look at his feet.
A piece of advice he’d been given when Lupercal still served the Emperor. As true now as it was then. Loken kept his eyes down. He took a breath and held it. His heart thundered, a hammer beating on the fused bone shield of his ribcage.
His mouth was dry, like the eve of his first battle.
‘Look at me, Garviel,’ said Horus, and every pain Loken had suffered since the first bombs had fallen on Isstvan was washed away in that moment of recognition.
He couldn’t help but obey.
The Warmaster was an all-conquering hero, clad in armour as black as wilderness space. The volcanic eye on his chest was slitted and veined with black, his claws unsheathed like a jungle predator closing on a kill.
His face was as heroically self-aware as Loken remembered.
Loken knew other warriors accompanied Horus, but they were as ghosts in the obscuring corona of the Warmaster’s presence. He heard their shocked voices and understood that he knew them, and they him, but he could not tear his gaze from his former commander-in-chief.
The urge to remain kneeling through fealty rather than captivity was overwhelming.
Horus said, ‘Stand. All of you.’
Loken did so, and told himself it was because he chose to.
None of the other pathfinders followed his example. He faced the Warmaster alone. Just as he’d always known he would. However this ended, now or in years to come, it would come down to just two warriors locked in a fight to the death.
The figures surrounding the Warmaster emerged from his shadow, and Loken felt his choler flare at the sight of his former Mournival brothers.
Ezekyle, scarred and bellicose, hatred etched on his eyes.
Horus Aximand, pale and wide-eyed, his face pressed onto his skull like badly set clay. He looked at Loken, not with hatred, but with... fear?
Was it possible for Little Horus to fear anything?
Falkus Kibre, hulking and unsubtle. Following Abaddon’s lead.
Nothing new there.
Grael Noctua took his place with them, and Loken immediately understood the skewed dynamic between them. A reborn Mournival, but one with its humours grotesquely out of balance.
‘I never thought to see you again, Garviel,’ said Horus.
‘Why would you?’ said Loken, mustering his reserves of defiance to speak with clarity and strength. ‘I died when you betrayed everything the Luna Wolves ever stood for. When you murdered Isstvan Three and the loyal sons of four Legions.’
Horus nodded slowly. ‘And despite all that, you come back to the Vengeful Spirit. Why is that?’
‘To stop you.’
‘Is that what you told Malcador?’ said Horus, before turning to regard the rest of the pathfinders. ‘Is it what he told you?’
‘It’s the truth,’ said Loken. ‘You have to be stopped.’
‘With what, a squad?’ said Horus, cocking an eyebrow. ‘I don’t think so. The galaxy isn’t a sterile place without a love of melodrama, Garviel. You know as well as I that this doesn’t end with kill teams or assassins or a pre-emptive strike thousands of light years from Terra. It ends with me looking into my father’s eyes, my hands around His neck, and showing Him everything he loves burned to ash by His lies.’
‘You’re insane,’ said Bror Tyrfingr. ‘The Wolf King will stop you, he’ll carve his name on your heart and give your bones to the wyrd to tell the future for eternity.’
Horus snapped his fingers and said, ‘Russ? Ah, so that’s what this is.’
Loken willed Bror to shut up, but the damage was already done.
‘Leman didn’t slake his thirst for blood on Prospero?’ continued Horus with a rueful shake of his head. ‘I wonder, does the Emperor even know you’re here or did the Wolf King set this up himself? He always was eager to spill his brothers’ blood. Did he convince Malcador that sending you here was the only way to end the war before it got to Terra?’
‘Russ stands on Terra’s walls a loyal son,’ said Qruze. ‘Walls the Master of Stone has strengthened beyond your power to breach.’
‘Perturabo assures me differently,’ said Horus. He bent to take Qruze’s chin in his hand. ‘Ah, Iacton. Of all my sons, you were the one I never expected to turn from me. You were old guard, a warrior with roots on both Terra and Cthonia. You were the best of us, but your time is over. Tell me, how did you even get aboard?’
Loken kept his face neutral and hoped Qruze could do the same.
He doesn’t know about Rassuah or the Tarnhelm.
‘We came here to mark the Vengeful Spirit for Russ,’ said Loken, hoping a measure of truth might divert the Warmaster from Rassuah.
‘Yes, Grael told me he saw some futharc scraped on the walls.’
‘Bloody Svessl,’ hissed Bror. ‘Is there anyone he didn’t tell?’
Horus moved on and walked a slow circuit of the remnants of the pathfinders towards his throne.
‘Marking a route for Russ,’ he said. ‘That sounds plausible, but come on, Garviel, you and I both know that’s not the only reason you’re here. There’s more to your return than you’re telling.’
‘You’re right,’ answered Loken, turning to face Ger Gerradon. ‘I came to kill him. To free Tarik’s soul.’
‘Maybe that’s part of it,’ conceded Horus, taking his place upon his throne, ‘but why don’t you tell your comrades why you really came here. And don’t be coy, Garviel. I’ll know if you’re lying.’
Loken tried to speak, but the Warmaster’s gaze pinned him in place, dredging the very worst of his treacherous fears out through his eyes. He tried to repeat what he’d just said, but the words wouldn’t come.
Enthroned in the glow of the moon shining through the stained glass windows, Horus was regal and magnificent, a lord for whom it would be worth laying down a life.
A hundred lives, a thousand. As many as he asked for.
‘I...’
‘It’s all right, Loken, I understand,’ said Horus. ‘You came back because you want to rejoin the Sons of Horus.’
This was the moment Bror Tyrfingr had feared since they’d left Terra. Not death, that moment held no fear for him. He’d considered himself dead the moment he foreswore the frost blue of the Rout and taken Yasu Nagasena’s outstretched hand.
No, death was not his fear.
Loken took a step towards the Warmaster’s throne.
Bror had watched Garviel Loken’s mental dissolution the way an aesthete might lament the slow degradation of a great work of art.
If Loken bent the knee to Horus, Bror was under orders to kill him. He understood why the duty had fallen to him. He was VI Legion, the Executioner’s son, and could be counted on to do the unthinkable, no matter what bonds of brotherhood might be forged in adversity.
He let his breath come slowly.
The warriors gathered around him could be counted on to rally to him, but they were grossly outnumbered. Bror had the positions of the Luperci embedded in his mind. They wouldn’t stop him. They might once have been Legion warriors, but now they were maleficarum.
Bror was unarmed, but a warrior of the Rout needed no weapons.
He could break Loken’s neck without blinking.
And if he died a heartbeat later, so be it.
Bror closed his eyes, feeling the hackles rise on the back of his neck. He’d first felt it in the forests of Fenris, stalked by the great silver wolf the Gothi said would one day kill him.
He’d proven them wrong and taken its pelt for a cloak.
Bror looked up and saw Tylos Rubio staring at him. His eyes were wide and pleading. They flicked over towards Ger Gerradon. No words passed between them, but the meaning was clear.
Be ready.
Loken felt himself moving forward. Step by step towards the Warmaster’s throne. What Horus was saying was ludicrous. He couldn’t go back to the Legion, not after all the blood and betrayal that had passed between them.
And yet...
He wanted it. Deep down, he wanted it.
‘Loken, don’t do this,’ said Qruze, rising to his feet. ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s betrayed us all, made us monsters in the eyes of the very people we were wrought to protect.’
Abaddon’s fist sent Iacton to the deck, streaks of red in his hair like blood on snow.
‘Shut your mouth, Half-heard,’ said Abaddon.
‘Loken!’ cried Qruze, coming forward on his hands and knees.
...he is the Half-heard no longer... his voice will be heard louder than any other in his Legion.
Loken blinked as he heard Mersadie Oliton’s words in his head.
No, they weren’t Mersadie’s words, they were Euphrati Keeler’s.
If you saw the rot, a hint of corruption, would you step out of your regimented life and stand against it? For the greater good of mankind.
He’d heard those words aboard this very ship, on the residential decks once occupied by the remembrancers. Euphrati had reached out to him, scared and alone. She’d tried to warn him of what was coming, but he’d dismissed her fears as groundless.
‘Garviel,’ said Horus, and he turned to see the Warmaster holding out his gauntlet. ‘Don’t hate me for what’s happened.’
‘Why shouldn’t I hate you?’ said Loken. ‘You did the worst thing that anyone can do to another person. You let us believe we were loved and valued, then showed us it was all a lie.’
Horus shook his head, but his hand remained outstretched. Behind him, a crenellated warship passed over the face of the moon. The Eye of Horus adorned its prow, but it was a crude thing, painted on like graffiti.
‘Come back to me, my son. We can rebuild what was lost between us, renew our bonds of fellowship. I want you at my side as I reforge the Imperium anew.’
Loken looked back at the warriors on their knees behind him. Men he’d fought and bled with. Men he’d called brother in the darkest of times. He looked into their eyes, seeing their defiance and more. Rubio’s fists were clenched and the tension in Voitek’s neck was like a straining machine about to throw a gear.
He saw the cold eyes of Bror Tyrfingr upon him and remembered the words he had spoken at their first meeting.
If I think your roots are weak, I’ll kill you myself.
He gave an almost imperceptible nod to his fellows and took a step away from the Warmaster, feeling the threads of loyalty and brotherhood that bound him to this moment pull tight.
Horus rose to his feet as the passing warship completed its transit of the cathedral window.
Dazzling moonlight poured into Lupercal’s Court once more.
It haloed Lupercal, limned him in silver to cast the darkest shadow across the deck. The flared back of the Warmaster’s throne gave that shadow wings, like the faceless daemons from the lurid books Kyril Sindermann had loaned him.
‘Part of me wishes I could, sir,’ said Loken. ‘Believe me, I want the warmth that being part of something greater brings. I want to belong. I had that with the Legion, but you took that away from me when you stabbed us all in the back.’
‘No,’ said Horus. ‘Garviel, no. That’s not–’
But Loken wasn’t about to stop now. ‘Turning my back on everything I knew, being cut off from the Legion that made me who I am? That was the worst moment of my life. It drove me insane. More than Tarik’s death or being buried alive on Isstvan, it was the heartbreak and yawning emptiness that finally broke me.’
‘Then come back to me, Garviel,’ said Horus. ‘Feel that warmth again, don’t you want to be part of the greatest endeavour the galaxy has ever seen?’
‘I already was,’ said Loken, turning his back on Horus. ‘It was called the Great Crusade.’
Rubio nodded and Bror Tyrfingr vaulted across the deck, his hand a hard axe blade. He rammed into Ger Gerradon and barrelled him from his feet. Voitek moved with him. The leader of the Luperci went over backwards, sprawling on the deck in surprise.
Gunfire exploded and the harsh blurt of binaric pain told Bror that Ares Voitek was hit. He smelled lubricant and hot oils.
Qruze and Severian were moving, turning on the Mournival.
Bror hadn’t time to spare for them.
More gunfire. Shouts. He’d taken in the positions of the Luperci, but that was seconds ago, and his situational awareness was now hopelessly outdated.
‘Kill him, Bror!’ shouted Rubio. ‘He’s blocking my powers!’
‘Trying,’ grunted Bror. ‘He’s stronger than he looks.’
Gerradon’s face twisted in rage. For a moment Bror saw the dark flame twisting within him. He slammed his forehead against Gerradon’s face. His cheekbone caved in and foul-smelling blood burst across his split skin.
Even as they struggled, the blood flow stopped and the cut in Gerradon’s cheek sealed itself.
He laughed. ‘You think you can hurt me? You Wolves really are stupid.’
Voitek’s servo-arms pinned one of Gerradon’s, and Bror scrambled to drag the man’s blade from its sheath. Gerradon’s fist thundered into Bror’s belly, cracking the plate and driving the air from him.
Gerradon kicked him away and he lost his grip on the handle.
He staggered as a bolter shell punched him in the back. Another blew out the meat of his thigh. Pain swamped him, but he hurled himself at his enemy again.
Gerradon caught him around the throat with his free hand and slammed him against Ares Voitek. The impact was ferocious. Plate cracked.
Bror saw something glitter at Gerradon’s back. A gleam of moonlight on an ivory Ultima. A stolen weapon jutting from a shoulder scabbard. He reached for it. Too far away. Gerradon’s grip tightened, crushing the life from him. He tensed every muscle in his shoulders and neck, his face purpling with the effort.
Then he saw it.
Proximo Tarchon’s gladius held aloft like a gift from the ancient gods of Asaheim.
Grasped in the manipulator claw of Ares Voitek.
The servo-arm stabbed the blade into Gerradon’s back.
The daemon within Gerradon howled as its hold on the dead man’s mortal flesh slipped. The iron grip on Bror loosened.
Not much, but just enough.
Bror pulled Gerradon’s arm from his neck. He pounced and fastened his sharpened fangs on the Luperci’s flesh.
Their eyes met and Bror relished the sudden fear he saw.
He wrenched his jaw back and ripped out Ger Gerradon’s throat.
Lupercal’s Court was in uproar. The Luperci filled the space with sporadic bolter fire, their outlines wavering as though something bestial sought to escape their flesh. Muzzle flare split the cold glow of moonlight. An arcing sheet of blue lightning from Rubio’s gauntlets hurled six of them back in a coruscating blast.
Their armour clattered to the deck, the monsters within burned to ash. Loken ran towards Aximand, scooping up a fallen chainsword that still smoked with Rubio’s witchfire.
He knew he couldn’t hope to kill Aximand, but was past caring.
He’d faced the Warmaster and rejected him.
None of them were going to leave the Vengeful Spirit alive.
Severian was right. Getting in had been the easy part.
Iacton Qruze had come back to the flagship with one aim in mind and one alone. As gunfire filled the chamber, he dived towards where Ger Gerradon fought to stem the tide of blood from his mauled throat.
The sinews and skin were trying to knit, but the wound was too awful, the blood loss too catastrophic for the daemon’s host to survive. He dragged Gerradon’s sword from its sheath as bolt shells cratered the deck beside him.
A ricochet sliced the skin of his cheek. If he lived he would have a neat scar from jawline to temple.
Loken and Bror were struggling with Little Horus Aximand and Falkus Kibre, a brutal, gouging, bloody brawl they were losing. Kibre was all strength and ferocity, but Bror Tyrfingr was giving as good as he got.
Loken had a chainsword, Aximand a blade with a powered edge. That wasn’t going to end well. Rubio fought Abaddon with a sword wrought from blue lightning and bolts of witchfire. The First Captain was a monster now, a giant with cadaverous features and black, gem-like eyes.
Rubio bled from where Abaddon’s tearing fists had ripped open his armour, its steeldust plates sheeted with red.
The Librarian had ploughed all his powers into attack, sparing nothing for defence. Varren lent what aid he could, but the wounds bound by Altan Nohai were bleeding freely again.
Qruze couldn’t see Severian. Armed once again with his altered gladius, Proximo Tarchon stood sentinel over Ares Voitek, who spilled litres of sticky red-black fluid from half a dozen sword cuts and bolter craters.
An impact smashed into Qruze’s hip, a searing bloom of pain that almost drove him to his knees. He turned as four of the Luperci raced towards him. They carried axes, swords and weapons that looked like they’d been looted from the Museum of Conquest.
‘Come on!’ roared Qruze, mashing the sword’s activation trigger. ‘Let this old dog show you he still has some bite.’
The first swung his axe for Qruze’s neck.
‘Too risky for a first attack,’ he said, ducking low and hacking his chainblade through his opponent’s gut. ‘The beheading cut leaves you far too exposed against a low blow.’
He swayed aside from a sword thrust, bending to snatch the bolt pistol from the downed warrior’s holster. Fully loaded, safety off. Sloppy.
‘Too much weight on your forward foot,’ he grunted. ‘No control to evade a counterstrike.’
He drove the tip of his sword through the Luperci’s spine. He spun and wrenched the sword blade out through its chest.
The last of the Luperci had at least learned from the deaths of their fellows. They split up and circled Qruze warily, swords in the guard position, their footwork cautious.
Qruze shot them both in the face, a classic double-tap. Their helmets exploded as the mass-reactives registered threshold densities for detonation.
‘And if your opponent has a gun when all you have is a sword,’ he said, turning towards the Warmaster upon his basalt throne. ‘You’re going to die.’
With every meeting of their swords, Loken lost teeth – whickering triangular shards flew from his chainsword as Aximand’s shimmer-edged blade bit the unshielded metal.
‘Mourn-it-all is going to kill you,’ said Aximand.
Loken didn’t reply. He’d come to slay Aximand, not waste unnecessary words on him.
‘No words of hate for the life I took on Isstvan?’ said Aximand.
‘Just deeds,’ said Loken, fighting to keep his temper.
An angry swordsman was a dead swordsman.
He cursed as Aximand used his momentary inattention to launch a lightning fast thrust to the groin. Loken swept the blade aside with the flat of his sword, trying to keep the disruptive edge from further damaging his weapon.
‘Tarik always said you were so straight up and down,’ said Aximand, using small wrist movements to move the tip of his sword in tight circles. ‘I never really knew what he meant until now. It’s only when you try to kill a man that you see through to his true character.’
Loken was too experienced a swordsman to fall for so obvious a gambit and kept his eyes fixed on Aximand’s. Alone of his once-proud features, his eyes remained unchanged from how Loken remembered them.
Pale blue, like ice chips under a winter sun.
‘Who gave you the new face?’
Aximand’s reattached dead skin mask twitched.
‘Who was it that beat you?’ asked Loken, ducking a waist-high sweep of Mourn-it-all. He aimed a low cut at Aximand’s knees.
‘A Chogorian named Hibou Khan,’ said Aximand, driving the blade into the deck. It screeched with red sparks. ‘Why do you care?’
‘So I can tell him I finished the job.’
Aximand roared and attacked with relentless fury. Loken blocked as fast as he could, but every killing blow he warded off cut portions from his weapon until it was next to useless.
He tossed the broken blade, looking over Aximand’s shoulder.
‘Now, Macer!’ he shouted.
The former World Eater’s fist crashed into the back of Aximand’s helmet. And had Macer Varren not been horrifically wounded, his strength might have split Aximand’s skull wide open. As it was, he crashed into Loken and the three of them fell to the deck in a thrashing tangle of limbs.
Mourn-it-all skittered away, its edge dimming without its bearer’s grip.
Aximand smashed his elbow into Varren’s face.
Loken kicked Aximand in the gut. They grappled. Fists bludgeoned, elbows cracked and knees slammed. It was an inelegant fight, not one the sagas would speak of in glowing heroic terms.
Even outnumbered two to one, Aximand was having the better of the fight. Loken reeled from a hammering series of bodyblows. Varren stumbled as Aximand thundered his foot against the wounds Altan Nohai had bound.
‘I dreamed of you,’ said Aximand between breaths and sounding more regretful than angry. ‘I dreamed you were alive. Why did you have to be alive?’
Loken rolled upright as Aximand curled his fingers around Mourn-it-all’s leather-wrapped grip.
He brought the sword around. Its blade bit plate and flesh.
Blood rained.
‘No more dreams,’ said Aximand.
Proximo Tarchon was down, sprawled over the body of Ares Voitek with three mass-reactive craters blasted through his body. Ger Gerradon’s legs still kicked weakly, but whether he was still alive or was just twitching in death was open to interpretation.
Severian had a combat blade in one hand, a bolt pistol in the other.
He’d killed a dozen Luperci in as many shots or cuts, moving through the fighting like a ghost. People saw him, but they didn’t see him, didn’t recognise the significance of what they were seeing until it was too late.
Severian never needed more than one cut.
Usually that was enough, but Abaddon had merely staggered at his thrust and kept fighting. At least it had allowed Varren to break from the fight to go to Loken’s aid.
The battle had devolved into individual skirmishes, but it couldn’t go on like that for long. His pistol was empty. He tossed it as dead weight.
Severian saw his target and moved like a displaced shadow towards Grael Noctua.
The sergeant of the Warlocked saw him coming, which was unusual enough in itself. He grinned and took out his own blade.
‘Twenty-Fifth to Twenty-Fifth,’ said Noctua. ‘A battle with a pleasing symmetry to it, yes?’
‘So long as you’re dead at the end, symmetry can go to hell.’
The two of them faced one another as though in the training cages. Crouched low, blade to blade, hands extended, eyes locked.
Noctua made the first move, feinting right. Severian read it easily. He countered the real blow, spun low and stabbed into Noctua’s groin. Forearm block, return elbow smash that hit thin air. Severian trapped Noctua’s arm, slammed his forehead forward.
Noctua threw himself backwards, dragging Severian with him.
They rolled, fighting to free their knife hands.
Severian got his free first. He stabbed into Noctua’s side. The blade scraped free as Noctua rolled with the blow. Severian pushed clear. Noctua’s weapon sliced the side of his neck, a hair’s breadth from opening his throat.
‘I always hated you, Severian,’ said Noctua. ‘Even before ascension.’
‘I never cared enough about you to feel hate.’
They came together again. Thrust, cut, block, spin. Their blades like striking snakes. Both warriors had drawn blood. Both were evenly matched. Much longer and it wouldn’t make any difference.
‘You’re good,’ said Severian.
‘The Twenty-Fifth teaches its warriors well.’
Severian flicked his blade at Noctua’s face. Blood spatter hit his eyes, and Severian slipped into that fraction of a second’s distraction.
He rammed his dagger through the centre of Noctua’s chest, twisting the blade into his heart space.
Noctua’s face contorted in pain.
‘Not as well as Cthonia,’ said Severian.
The pain was incredible, the worst Loken had known.
It filled him and crushed him. It bypassed every bio-engineered suppression mechanism. It kept the pain gate in his spinal column wedged open.
Where Mourn-it-all had cloven his ribs, he felt the toxic afterburn of something vile enter his bloodstream. Had the blade been poisoned?
He fell onto his side, struggling not to curl up and weep.
Aximand stood over him and the script worked along the length of the fuller drew threads of crimson from the edge. Loken turned onto his front, keeping one hand clamped to the rift gouged in his armour. He crawled away, knowing it was useless.
Varren lay moaning in a pool of his own blood. Aximand’s return stroke had taken his right arm at the elbow and split open his chest. Old wounds bled afresh, and his helmet was cracked across the centre.
Loken lifted his head. The air in Lupercal’s Court grew thick, and he saw their last stab at a measure of victory horribly snatched away.
Abaddon had finally put Rubio down and had Bror Tyrfingr pinned to the deck. The Fenrisian was still fighting the First Captain, but even his strength was not the equal of Terminator armour. Voitek’s servo-arms wheezed and clicked, trying and failing to lift him upright. Proximo Tarchon lay unmoving next to him. The Ultramarine still clutched his bloody gladius, but his head hung low over his cratered chest.
Only Severian still stood, but he was surrounded by the Luperci with nowhere to go. The bodies of Ger Gerradon and Grael Noctua lay at his feet, their blood mingling in a spreading lake. Severian’s eyes darted from side to side, seeking a way out, but finding nothing.
Loken heard his name being shouted and blinked.
The gelid quality of the air receded and he took a great sucking draught into his lungs. It burned and the pain stabbed through him from the grievous wound in his side.
He turned to the source of the shout.
But what he saw made no sense.
Iacton Qruze knelt before Lupercal’s throne with his back to Loken. The Warmaster held him clasped to his breast, whispering something in the Half-heard’s ear.
Then Loken saw the Warmaster’s talons jutting from Qruze’s back.
Horus wrenched his arm back and pushed Qruze away.
Iacton crashed to the deck and Loken saw the gaping wound in his chest. Held aloft in the Warmaster’s dripping gauntlet were the twin hearts of Iacton Qruze. Both organs were bright with oxygenated blood and beat one last time.
‘No!’ cried Loken. ‘Throne, no!’
He fought through the screaming fire saturating his body and scrambled over to where Iacton Qruze lay. The Half-heard’s eyes were wide and filled with pain. His jaw worked up and down, trying to speak, trying to make his last words meaningful.
But nothing was coming. The pain was too intense, the shock of his imminent death too much.
Loken held him, helpless to do anything more.
Even had Altan Nohai lived, there would be no saving Qruze.
Lupercal’s Court held its breath. None of the gathered enemies moved. A hero was dying and such a moment was worthy of pause, even in the midst of bitter fratricide.
Loken’s pain was inconsequential in the face of what Qruze was enduring. Loken met Qruze’s gaze and saw an urgent need to communicate in them, a desperate imperative that superseded all other concerns.
Qruze took Loken’s wrist in an iron grip.
His gaze was unflinching. His ruined body spasmed as pain signals overwhelmed his brain. Yet even in the throes of the most agonising death, Qruze still put his duty first.
‘Iacton, I’m sorry...’ said Loken. ‘I’m so very sorry.’
Qruze shook his head. Anger lit his face.
He held his free hand out to Loken. He pressed something into his palm and closed his fingers over it. Loken went to lift it, but Qruze shook his head again, eyes wide. A pleading imperative.
Not now, not here.
Loken nodded and felt Qruze’s grip slacken on his wrist.
The light in the Half-heard’s eyes went out, and he was dead.
Loken laid Qruze down on the blood-soaked deck plate and reached down to a pouch at his waist. He pulled out the two Cthonian mirror-coins Severian had given him in the shadow of the Seven Neverborn and placed them on Iacton Qruze’s eyes.
Loken’s grief was gone, burned away by anger.
He pulled himself to his full height and looked up at Horus.
The Warmaster stood before his throne, Iacton Qruze’s blood still weeping from the long talons of his gauntlet.
‘I didn’t want it to come to this, Garviel,’ said Horus.
Loken ignored the ridiculous platitude and stood taller than he had ever stood before. Prouder than he had ever stood before.
All the uncertainty, all the confusion and every shred of the madness that had kept him wrapped in delusions vanished. All compunction to revere the Warmaster was purged in an instant of loathing.
Iacton Qruze was dead, and the last link with what the Legion had once been was broken.
And with it, any last shred of belief that the Warmaster possessed any nobility or trace of the great man he had once been.
Loken felt the words well up from a depthless reservoir of certainty within him. A valediction and threat all in one.
‘I guarantee that before the sun sets on this war, even if you win, even if I die here, you’ll rue the day you ever turned your back on the Emperor. For every planet you take, the Imperium will exact a fearful tally of Cthonian blood. I guarantee that even if you conquer Terra the fruits of victory will taste like dust in your mouth. I guarantee that if you don’t kill me today, you’ll meet me again. I will stand against you at every outpost, every wall and every gate. I will fight you with every sword at my command, with every bolter and every fist. I will fight you with bare hands. I will fight you with the very rocks of the world you seek to conquer. I will never give up until the Sons of Horus are dead and no more than a bad memory.’
Loken took a breath and saw the Warmaster’s acceptance of his threat. Horus understood that Loken meant every word of what he had just said, that nothing could ever sway him from his course.
‘I wanted you back,’ said Horus. ‘Tormaggedon wanted to make you like him, but I told him you would always be a Son of Horus.’
‘I was never a Son of Horus,’ said Loken. ‘I was and remain a Luna Wolf. A proud son of Cthonia, a loyal servant of the Emperor, beloved by all. I am your enemy.’
Loken heard a chirrup of crackling vox.
He heard it again, coming from the helmet mag-locked to Qruze’s belt. He recognised the voice and despite the body at his feet and all they had lost to get this far, Loken smiled.
He bent and lifted the helmet to his lips as a ghost-shadow moved across the silver orb of the moon through the glass of the great cathedral window.
‘How’s that hunter’s eye, Rassuah?’
‘I have him,’ replied the Tarnhelm’s pilot. ‘Say the word.’
‘Just take the damn shot,’ said Loken.
The window blew out in a blizzard of shards. Sheeting lasers blasted into Lupercal’s Court as the Tarnhelm’s guns filled it with killing fire. The loss of atmosphere was sudden and absolute, over in an instant of ruthless annihilation.
Air blasted into space, along with weapons, bodies and anything not mag-locked to the deck. Spent bolter rounds, stone fragments blasted from the walls and chips of broken ceramite. Glass and debris went too.
Loken let the explosive decompression take him, hurling him from the Vengeful Spirit and into the void of space. Qruze’s body spun away from him.
A crushing sensation of awful solidity seized his chest. His internal organs were shock freezing. Life-support systems in his armour registered the sudden change. It fought to equalise the pressure differential and forced his lungs empty to avoid lethal hyperdistension, but without a helmet it was a losing battle.
Silver light bathed Loken.
Fitting that a Luna Wolf should die by the light of a moon.
Loken’s vision fogged. He felt sudden, shocking cold in his throat, as though his windpipe was filling with liquid helium.
He tried to howl a last curse, but hard vacuum kept him silent.
Loken closed his eyes. He let the moon’s light take him.
And the Vengeful Spirit spun away in the darkness.
TWENTY-FIVE The road to Terra / Half-heard no more / Okay
Great skeins and shawls and clusters of bright stars winked through the great viewing bay. The light of a galaxy that would soon belong to him.
Horus stood at the farthest prow of the strategium, his hands laced behind his back. He was no longer clad in armour, but a simple training robe of pale cream, belted at the waist with a thick leather belt.
The Sons of Horus fleet was breaking anchor, mustering for the next stage of the march to Terra. Scores of transports still ferried men and machines from Molech’s surface, but Boas Comnenus expected to be ready for system-transit within four hours.
Ezekyle and Kibre wanted to send fast cruisers after the Imperial Cobra-class destroyer, but Horus denied them. His First Captain had railed against that decision, as he had when Horus refused to remove the futharc sigils.
Horus was adamant – Molech’s Enlightenment was to be unharmed.
Let word of this world’s fate fly ahead of the Vengeful Spirit on wings of terror. Despair would be as potent a weapon as tanks and Titans, warriors and warships in the coming years.
Horus turned from the vista of stars and made his way back to the ouslite disc at the heart of the strategium. The Mournival awaited his orders, standing patiently as though the natural order of things would continue as it had before.
He saw them all differently now.
Horus knew them better than they knew themselves, but now he saw the things they kept hidden; the secret doubts, the cancerous thoughts and, deep down, the fear that they had taken a path that could only end badly.
The war on Molech had stoked the fires of Ezekyle’s ambitions. Not for much longer would he be satisfied with a captaincy, even a First Captaincy of the Sons of Horus. Soon he would need something grander to lead. A Legion of his own perhaps? With the power Horus now commanded and the ancient sciences of Terra, the means to create new Legiones Astartes was within his grasp.
Why shouldn’t his greatest warriors become their own masters?
Falkus Kibre... a simple man, one unfettered to grander ambitions. He knew his place and any thoughts of bettering his station were purely in service of the Warmaster. Falkus would be loyal unto death.
After his moment of doubt in the wake of Isstvan V, Aximand had painstakingly rebuilt himself. Even Dwell, with all its painful associations, had served to invigorate Little Horus with the desire to see the war won. The revelation of Garviel Loken’s survival had shaken them all, but it had hit Aximand particularly hard. The melancholy he had so long denied was his ruling characteristic now shrouded him in with the fear that Loken had been right to reject the Warmaster.
Yet it was Grael Noctua who had experienced the most profound change. Horus saw the twin flames burning within him, one darkly gleaming and malevolent, the other bruised and subjugate. The Fenrisian had ruined Gerradon’s flesh, and the daemon that Targost had summoned needed a new body to host its essence.
‘Sire, what are your orders?’ asked Kibre.
Horus smiled at the extra vowel at the end of the honorific. A natural development, given the power that now filled him.
Power that had almost cost him his life to obtain.
Not that to look at him anyone would know that.
The many hurts he had suffered to win Molech had healed years ago it seemed. It was hard to be sure. His sons told him he’d only been gone moments, how could he tell them different?
Molech was a far distant memory to Horus now.
He’d fought wars, slain monsters and defied gods in those moments. He’d wrested the power of those same gods at the heads of vast armies of daemons. He’d fought in battles that would rage unchecked for all eternity.
He’d won a thousand kingdoms within the empyrean, billions of vassals to do with as he pleased, but he’d refused it. Every pleasure and prize was his for the taking, but he’d denied them all. He’d taken the power his father had taken, but he’d done so without deception.
He’d taken it by force of arms and by virtue of his self-belief.
There was no bargain made, no promise to honour.
The power was his and his alone.
Finally, after everything, Horus was a god.
‘Sire, what are your orders?’ said Ezekyle.
Horus stared at the veil of stars, as though he could see all the way from Molech to Terra. He extended a clawed hand, as though already cupping the precious bauble of humanity’s cradle.
‘I am coming for you, father,’ said Horus.
The Tarnhelm had always been a cramped ship, but hidden in the shadow of Molech’s Enlightenment, it now felt obscenely spacious.
Loken sat on his bunk, stripped out of his armour and wearing nothing but a bodyglove, a chest-hugging synth-skin bandage and dermal-regenerative.
Varren was in an induced coma, as were Proximo Tarchon and Ares Voitek. The former Iron Hand’s servo-harness had exercised a hitherto unsuspected level of autonomy to take hold of Proximo Tarchon as Lupercal’s Court vented into space.
Rubio sat alone at the table where they had shared a drink in the company of Rogal Dorn. The empty spaces where their brother pathfinders used to sit weighed heavily on the former Ultramarine.
That any of them were here at all was nothing short of a miracle. Or rather, it was thanks to Rassuah’s preternaturally dextrous hands at Tarnhelm’s electromagnetic tether controls and their armour translocator beacons. She had followed their progress through the Vengeful Spirit and got them back aboard the Tarnhelm within a minute of shooting out the shielded window to Lupercal’s Court.
She’d blasted clear of the Vengeful Spirit, weaving a path back through the gaps in the defensive net she and Tubal Cayne’s device had torn. There’d been no pursuit, which she’d attributed to Tarnhelm’s superior capabilities, but Loken wasn’t so sure.
They’d caught up to the Imperial destroyer as it powered past the system’s fifth planet. Its engines were burning hot, its captain clearly expecting pursuit.
But nothing was coming.
The Warmaster’s fleet was still anchored around Molech.
Loken looked up at a knock on the hatchway.
Severian and Bror Tyrfingr stood at his door, clad in bodygloves and simple knee-length chitons. Loken hadn’t spoken to any of the pathfinders beyond operational or medical necessity since the Vengeful Spirit.
Severian looked as fresh as he had the day they’d set out on their mission, but Bror’s face was bruised and raw from the beating Ezekyle Abaddon had given him.
‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ said Bror.
‘He’s lying,’ said Severian. ‘It’s far worse.’
‘He’s lucky to have walked away from a fight with Ezekyle at all,’ said Loken. ‘Not many people can say that.’
‘I’ll get him next time,’ said Bror. ‘When the Wolf King leads the Rout back to the Vengeful Spirit.’
‘What is it you want?’ asked Loken.
Bror held out a plastic bottle filled with clear liquid. Loken could taste its caustic flavour from the other side of the room.
‘What’s that?’
‘Dzira,’ said Severian, pulling over a stool and producing three cups into which Bror poured them all a measure.
‘I thought we drank it all,’ said Loken. ‘And Voitek can’t possibly be well enough to distil more.’
‘He might be mostly metal, but we’ll be back on Terra before his sedation wears off,’ said Bror, limping over to take a seat. ‘No, I made this. There’s not a lot one of the Vlka Fenryka can’t rustle up after we’ve tasted it.’
Loken took a cup and swallowed a fiery mouthful.
He sucked in a breath as it went down. ‘Tastes just like it. Maybe even stronger.’
‘Aye, well, can’t have folk thinking the Wolves make something weaker than the X Legion,’ said Bror. ‘We’d never hear the end of it.’
‘So what is it you really want?’ said Loken. ‘I’m not much in the mood for company.’
‘Don’t be foolish, man,’ scoffed Bror. ‘Any time you walk away from a fight is just the time to be with your brothers.’
‘Even when I failed?’
Bror leaned forward and aimed his cup at Loken. ‘We didn’t fail,’ he said. ‘We did what we set out to do, we marked the Vengeful Spirit. When the Wolf King comes to fight Horus, he’ll have an easier time of it because of what we did.’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Loken not wishing to dwell on broken promises. ‘But Lupercal knows about the futharc sigils.’
Bror sighed. ‘He won’t find them all, and do you think I’d make them all work by being seen. Ah, Loken, you’ve a lot to learn about how clever the Rout really are.’
‘I lost half the men under my command.’
Bror refilled his cup and said, ‘Listen, you didn’t lose them. They died. It happens. But you don’t make sense of deaths in solitude. Mortals might, but we’re not mortals. We’re a brotherhood. A brotherhood of warriors, and that’s what makes us strong. I thought you knew that?’
‘I think maybe I’d forgotten,’ said Loken.
‘Aye, you and this one both,’ said Bror, nodding towards Severian.
‘Alone is where I do my best work,’ said Severian.
‘That’s as maybe, but the rest of us fight best when we fight with our brothers,’ said Bror, knocking back his drink and continuing without pause. ‘It’s fighting for the man next to you. It’s fighting for the man next to him and the one next to him. I heard what you said to Horus, so I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. But what you’re after? You already have it. Right here, right now. With us.’
Loken nodded and held his cup out for a refill.
‘Right, enough with the sermonising,’ said Severian. ‘We want to know what Iacton Qruze gave you. Do you still have it?’
‘I do, but I don’t know what to make of it.’
‘Let’s see it then,’ said Bror.
Loken reached up to a small alcove above his bunk and lifted down a metal box. A box very like the one he’d left aboard the Vengeful Spirit, filled with his few keepsakes of war.
He opened it and lifted out the object Qruze had pressed into his palm. A disc of hardened red wax affixed to a long strip of yellowed seal paper.
‘His Oath of Moment?’ said Severian.
‘The one Mersadie Oliton had me give to Iacton.’
Loken turned it around, so that Bror and Severian could see what was written on the oath paper.
They read the word and looked at Loken.
‘What does it mean?’ asked Bror.
‘I don’t know,’ said Loken, staring down at the word.
Its letters were inked in red that had faded to rust brown.
Scratched by something needle-sharp and precise.
Murder.
The corridors of Molech’s Enlightenment were cold and cramped. Vivyen didn’t like it here, there were too many people, and no one seemed to know anything about what was happening. She’d seen lots of soldiers, and daddy told her that meant they were safe.
Vivyen certainly didn’t feel safe.
She huddled in a widened transit corridor, below a ventilation duct that sometimes blew warm air and sometimes blew cold. Her daddy talked in low voices with Noama and Kjell, and they gave her funny looks when she asked if they’d ever see Alivia again.
Miska had her head on Vivyen’s shoulders.
She was sleeping.
Vivyen needed to pee, but didn’t want to wake her sister.
To take her mind off her filling bladder, she pulled out the dog-eared storybook Alivia had given her in the press of bodies at the starport. She couldn’t read the words, they were in some old language Alivia had called Dansk, but she liked looking at the pictures.
She didn’t need to know the words. She’d heard the stories often enough that she could recite them off by heart. And sometimes when she looked at the words, it was like she did understand them, like the story wanted to be read and was unfolding itself in her mind.
The strangeness of that thought didn’t register at all.
It made sense to her and it just… was.
She flipped through the yellowed pages, looking for a picture to conjure the right words into her head.
A page with a young girl sitting at the edge of the ocean caught her eye and she nodded to herself. The girl was very beautiful, but her legs were fused together and ended in the wide tail of a fish. She liked this story; the tale of a young girl who, for the sake of true love, gives up her existence in one realm to earn a place in another.
Someone moved along the corridor. Vivyen waited for them to pass, but they stopped in front of her, blocking the light.
‘I can’t see the words,’ she said.
‘That’s a good story,’ said the person in front of her. ‘Can I read it to you?’
Vivyen looked up in surprise and nodded happily.
‘Didn’t I tell you it was going to be okay?’ said Alivia Sureka.
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