Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

1

Above ground, it is raining. It has been raining for about seven hours without a break. The evaporated southern oceans, thrust into the upper atmosphere as steam, have returned, first as poison fog, and then as an apocalyptic deluge.

The burning population centres steam and sizzle, their fires inextinguishable. The molten cores of city-graves glow in sinkholes hundreds of kilometres across. Craters and impact scars fill with water, from the most massive hive sinkhole to the smallest bullet pock-mark. Plains turn to mud, an ooze as dark as blood. River basins flood. The forested sweeps of Calth’s highlands and valley systems crackle and roar as they combust, fire-fronts a thousand kilometres broad.

The rain forms a curtain as thick as the fog that preceded it.

There is a plague of rainbows. The downpour combines with the swelling blue-white radiance of the terminal star to decorate every prospect, every ruined street, every burning hab-block, every fire-blackened forest, with a scintillating rainbow.

4th Company moves underground.

The fighting group built around the elements of 4th Company retraces Ventanus’s steps through the sub-branch of the arcology, along the safe route built in colonial times by the early governors.

Despite subsidence from shock-damaged earth, which has split or slumped the tunnels in places, the passageways are intact and commodious. They offer an arterial that can take even the largest fighting vehicles.

Long stretches of the tunnel system are partially flooded, with still more water sluicing down through broken pipes and drains, and running through clefts and cracks in the roof. The rain is getting in wherever it can. Men wade, up to their waists. Tanks and carriers glide, pressing through the silty black water like reptiles, their slow-moving hulls stirring up little, flowing wakes.

Ventanus moves along at the front, with Vattian and the scouts. He leads the way, standard in hand.

Two hours after they leave the palace, the data and vox links are finally restored, thanks to Magos Uldort’s unstinting efforts. From the datalink, Ventanus learns that several strikeforces are closing to conjunct with him at the port zone, including a major taskforce punching down from Sharud Province, the assembled remains of the 111th and 112th under the command of a sergeant called Anchise. On another day, in another history, Anchise’s efforts to rally, compose, turn, and redirect his forces would become the stuff of instruction text and legend.

Today, on Calth, it is just another story of a man’s last hours alive.

Ventanus hopes that Anchise’s force arrives in time to render support. He doubts it will. The 4th is moving fast, and it cannot afford to wait or hesitate. Even if Anchise, or any of the other projected support units, make it through, there are still no guarantees. The port zone is in enemy hands. Numinus Port is a burning ruin, and Lanshear and the foundries have been overrun by the predatory hosts of Hol Beloth.

Beloth circles from the south. Foedral Fell approaches from the north-west. Ventanus wonders how much longer Uldort’s valuable datalink can remain active.

They have passed below the Shield Wall, and are drawing close to the service linkage where they will be obliged to surface, and move in the open.

Ventanus stops briefly to talk to his unit leaders: Cyramica, commanding the skitarii strength; Colonel Sparzi of the Army; Sydance and the company sergeants, Vattian of the scout force.

He has the battered golden standard in his hands as he talks to them. There are no orders, and no feeble efforts at oratory. He tells them how it is, and what has to be done. He tells them the practical, and he tells them what he expects from them.

They say nothing. They nod.

That’s all he needs.

They have what they need. They have their target. They have their practical.

They are ready.

It took the primarch about ten minutes to determine the target. Ten minutes. Thiel watched him work it out. Guilliman did it by eye, by observation, by consulting the reams of notes and scraps and stylus jottings he had scattered over the strategium.

He had the resolution long before the datalink from Leptius was re-established.

‘It has to be a functioning facility,’ he reasoned. ‘It has to have a data-engine rating of at least, what, 46nCog? It needs to have an active datalink, which we can probably detect using back-trace. The Word Bearers have done such a good job of destroying platform facilities, it makes it easier to spot the ones they’ve deliberately left alone.’

He pointed to the display.

Zetsun Verid Yard.

Then the practical had to be decided. Shipmaster Hommed recommended a ranged bombardment: primary spinals, lances. The Macragge’s Honour certainly has firepower enough. Gage seconded the suggestion. But if they didn’t make a direct kill with the first salvo, there was a real danger that the enemy could retaliate with the grid and finish the flagship.

Empion was all for close attack: flagship power to yield, shields up, throw off the enemy cruisers suckling around them and go for the yard. Blow it out of nearspace. Ram it, if necessary.

Except, the moment they moved, the moment they even rated a power condition, the Macragge’s Honour would become a target. The flagship could move rapidly, and with devastating effect, but faster than the weapons grid could be retrained and discharged? That was even supposing nothing got in their way, like a drive issue, or an enemy ship.

So Empion’s plan had also been dismissed, and Gage’s alternative considered: put all power into the teleport system. Transfer a kill squad, maybe two if the power lasted, direct to the Zetsun Verid. Do it the old way.

‘I will lead it, of course,’ said Guilliman.

‘I hardly think so,’ retorted Gage. Almost everybody present physically recoiled from the look the primarch shot his Chapter Master.

‘Very well,’ said Gage.

‘Damn it, Marius,’ growled Guilliman. ‘If not now, when?’

The first kill squad of fifty Ultramarines, led by Guilliman, Heutonicus and Thiel, assembles in the flagship’s teleportation terminal. If enough power remains, a second squad led by Empion will follow them.

The helms of Heutonicus and the section leaders are painted red to match Thiel’s.

Guilliman’s cleaned and polished wargear makes him look more like a vengeful martial god than ever. There are golden wings spread across his helm’s faceplate. His left fist is a massive power claw, and his right holds a superb bolter weapon, decorated to match his armour.

There is a stink of ozone in the chamber, a metallic tang rising from the heavy, matt-grey platform of the teleport system. Coolant vapour rolls like mist in the yellow light. Guilliman takes a cue from his squad leaders, then signals to the Magi of Portation behind their lead-lined screens.

Power builds. It builds to a painful pitch.

Like a storm, about to break and unload its fury.

Sullus can hear the rain beating on the roof. He watches the magos, Uldort, working in communion with the data-engine. It is as though she is in a trance. Data chatters and whirrs. Her hands make haptic motions across invisible touchpads.

Sullus hurts. He never told Ventanus or any of the others quite how much he had been damaged. He can feel bones grinding, refusing to mend despite the fever heat of biological repair throbbing through his body.

Pain, death, he doesn’t fear any of that. Only failure.

His helmet link bleeps. He gets up, picks up his sword and his boltgun, and limps up the passageway to the west entrance.

In the rain, the ruined grounds and collapsed frontage of the palace seem even more dismal. Water streams and patters down from the shattered roof, dripping on grand tiles and mosaics, cascading down inlaid staircases, turning fallen drapes and tapestries into lank shrouds.

He limps out onto the rubble. Rain drums on his armour. The sun, a toxic blue, burns malignantly through the cloud cover.

Arook Serotid is waiting for him.

‘They are here,’ says the master of skitarii.

Sullus looks out into the rain. Beyond the crumpled walls, beyond the earthwork ditch, beyond the ragged bridge, the enemy has assembled. They have come silently out of the downpour. They are not chanting. The black ranks of the brotherhoods line the ditch in rows a hundred deep, but behind them are the shapes of war machines, and the ominous gleam of red armour.

Behind that mass, there are larger shapes still. Giant things, obscured by rain, horned and hunched.

There are even more than Sullus imagined. Foedral Fell’s assault force numbers in the tens of thousands.

‘Now it ends,’ says Arook.

Sullus draws his sword.

‘Oh please, skitarii,’ he says, head up. ‘It’s only just beginning.’

2

4th Company strikes.

The first that the Word Bearers know of it is a savage, serial bombardment of light cannon and field pieces, supported by the immense firepower of a Shadowsword and a handful of other significant machines.

The Word Bearers had forces positioned along Ketar Transit, a main access way that linked the container stores to the northern facilities of Lanshear port. The forces were supposed to ward Hol Beloth’s main army from any counter-attack that came around the eastern sweep of the Shield Wall into Numinus territory.

The forces do not realise that, by occupying the zone around Ketar Transit, they are also effectively guarding the data-engine of the cargo handling guild in the bunker system below the majestic prospect of the guildhall.

It was a majestic prospect. Stippled with shell holes, the guildhall remains an inspiring building, crowned by statues of toiling guild porters and the proud Ultima symbol.

The area has not been razed wholesale. It is not military, it is commercial. Server Hesst chose it very well.

The barrage pummels the roadway, levels three blocks of habs, and scatters the enemy formation. Hundreds of knife brother warriors are killed by the shellfire, dozens of Word Bearers too. Armoured vehicles are destroyed and left burning in the rain. A traitor Warhound engine, suddenly alert and striding forward like an angry moa, hunts for a hot target. A torrent of cannonfire catches it, hammers it, and beats its void shields down with sheer relentless insolence. Then the Shadowsword speaks, and a spear of white light kills the Warhound like the lance of some vengeful god.

Debris showers for hundreds of metres, felling some of the retreating cultists. Others, urged by their raging crimson lords, dig in behind walls and barriers of wreckage, and begin to return fire.

Warp-flask messages chime and shrill across the zone; desperate calls for support.

The Land Raiders spur forward, hulls streaming with rainwater, kicking out spray from the rain-sheeted roadway. They drive down walls, rolling over the rubble, crunching over the knife brothers trapped and killed by the cover they had chosen to use. Sponson-mount lascannons rasp into the blue-white twilight, causing the rain to steam and swirl. Heavy bolters shred the air with their noise and drench the enemy positions with destruction.

Ventanus leads the foot advance behind the Land Raiders, double-time across the broken streets. To his left, the units led by Sydance, Lorchas and Selaton. To his right, the units led by Greavus, Archo and Barkha. Cyramica’s skitarii form a wide right flank, blocking and punishing an attempt by the Jeharwanate to regroup and counter-charge. Sparzi’s infantry mob in behind and to the left of the legionary assault, evicting knife brothers from their strongpoints and foxholes along the north-western end of the massive carriageway.

Word Bearers, a scarlet line in the rain, rise up to block the main charge. Missiles cripple the first of Ventanus’s Land Raiders, leaving it trackless and burning. There is fire from autocannons, the streaks of mass-reactive rounds, both of which drop cobalt-blue figures from the charge.

But the Word Bearers have developed a taste for cutting, an appetite for bladework. Perhaps it has come from their knife brother slave-hosts. Perhaps it is simply to do with the sacrificial symbolism of the sharpened edge.

Concentrated and well-directed firepower might have broken or turned Ventanus’s charge, but it is not used. The Word Bearers simply wait for the clash, relishing the prospect. They draw their blades. They want to test their mettle against the vaunted XIII in a skirmish, the outcome of which cannot possibly influence the final resolution of the Calth War.

The traitors want to prove themselves against the paradigms to which they have been compared so many times.

There is a crashing, hyperkinetic impact. The charging cobalt-blue bodies reach the solid red line. They tear into it. They rip through it, they mangle it, red and blue together, a blur. Blows are traded. Huge power, huge force, huge transhuman strength. Blood squirts in the driving rain. Bodies crash to the ground, spraying up water. Blade grips grow slick with rainwater, oil and blood. Shields chip and break. Armour fractures. There is a spark of ozone and power mechanics, the crackle of electrical discharge.

Ventanus is in the thick of it. Boltgun. Power sword. Standard across his back. He shoots away a head in a cloud of bloodsmoke. He impales. He chops off an arm, and smites a helm in two, diagonally.

He has never felt this strong. This driven.

This justified.

He has never known such an entirely fearless state.

There is nothing the Word Bearers can do to him any more. They have done their worst. They have burned his world, his fleet, his brothers; they have shed his blood and unleashed their daemons.

They can shoot him. They can stab him. They can grab him and tear him down. They can kill him.

It doesn’t matter.

It’s his turn. This is his turn.

This is what happens when you leave an Ultramarine alive. This is what happens when you make the foulest treachery your instrument. This is how it comes back to reward you. This is how Ultramar pays you back.

Carnage. Carnage. Absolute and total slaughter. The visitation of death in the form of a gold and cobalt-blue storm. A Word Bearer, reeling, arms spread, his carapace sliced open to the core, releasing a profusion of blood. Another, hands lost, stumps smouldering, sinking slowly to his knees with a bolter shell blast hole clean through his torso. Another, red helm caved across the left half, the bite of a power sword. Another, jerking and convulsing as mass-reactive shells blow out his body and overwhelm his transhuman redundancies. Another, cleft by a power axe. Another, disarticulated by a Land Raider’s cannons. Another, with the toothmarks of a chainsword.

Another.

Another.

Another. Grunt and spit and curse and gasp and bleed and strike and turn and move and kill and die.

Ventanus reaches the guildhall, leaps the barricades, and lands amongst knife brothers who shriek and flee before him. Red armour comes at him, a sergeant of the XVII, bringing down a thunder hammer. Ventanus dodges the swing, lets it pulverise rockcrete. He lunges and drives his sword, tip-first, through visor, face, skull, brain and the back plate of a helmet.

He snatches the blade out. The sergeant falls, flops over, blood welling up out of his holed visor like oil from a freshly drilled reserve.

The gutter is running with blood. Ventanus smashes down two of the Tzenvar Kaul foolish enough to attack him, and then shoots a Word Bearer who is coming down the shot-chewed front steps at him. The blast blows out the brute’s hip, drops him sideways. Ventanus kills him with his power sword before he can rise again.

Sydance passes Ventanus, ascending the steps. He’s firing his boltgun ahead of him, targeting Word Bearers at the top by the main doors of the guildhall. Shots streak back at him. The Ultramarine beside him, Brother Taeks, ends his service there, brains spilled. Sydance’s bolter shells put Taeks’s killer backwards through the panelled doors.

The first of the XIII are in the building. Ventanus is with them. Blood and rain drips from them onto the marble floor.

‘Back up,’ warns Greavus.

They make space.

A Land Raider drives in through the doors, collapsing them, splintering the wooden bulk of them.

Ventanus and his men cover the side hatch as it opens and skitarii lead Tawren out.

‘Haste,’ the server says to Ventanus.

‘Not a point that needs to be emphasised, server,’ he replies.

It will not take Hol Beloth’s assault leaders long to realise that this is not a counter-punch into Lanshear. The guildhall was a specific target.

Small-arms fire pinks at them from upper galleries in the huge atrium. Sergeant Archo waves up a kill team and heads away to scour the knife brothers out.

Artillery and heavy weapons continue to pound outside. The suspended lamps in the atrium swing and sway. Pieces of glass and roof tile fall in from the damaged clerestory far above.

Selaton locates the armoured elevator to the guildhall’s sublevels. They can rig power from the Land Raider to light and run the system, but it needs an override code.

Tawren enters it.

‘My birthdate,’ she says, noticing Ventanus watching her.

‘There were two codes,’ he says.

‘I have two birthdays. My organic incept, and my date of full-plug modification. Hesst knew both.’

‘You were close,’ notes Ventanus.

‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘He was, I suppose, my husband. My life partner. The Mechanicum does not think in such old-fashioned terms, and our social connections are more subtle. But yes, captain, we were close. A binary form. I miss him. I do this for him.’

The lift shutters open. For a second, Ventanus envies her loss. However approximate to standard human her relationship with Hesst might have been, it was still something. An analogue.

He is transhuman. He knows no fear, and there are many other simple emotions he will similarly never experience.

Outside, soaked in rain, Colonel Sparzi turns as gunfire kisses the walls behind him.

‘Oh damn and fug,’ he groans.

His men see it too.

Hol Beloth is coming.

He is descending on the guildhall with a vengeance. He is coming with punishment. He is coming with Titans and cataphractii and the Gal Vorbak.

3

The teleport burst scorches and jolts every molecule of their bodies.

It is an intensely risky operation. A considerable nearspace distance. A vast energy expenditure. Mass transfer – an entire armoured kill squad. A comparatively small target zone.

Thiel loathes teleports. It feels like you’re being pushed through the mesh of an electrified sieve. There is always a bang like a fusion bomb in your brain. There is always an aftertaste like bile and burned paper left in your mouth.

They materialise.

He stumbles, his balance screwed for a second. He’s on a deck. He hears a scream.

Given the risk factor and the atrocious error margins, the teleport can be considered a success. Forty-six of the squad have appeared with Guilliman on the transverse assembly deck of Zetsun Verid Yard. They have lost four.

Two of them are fused into the bulkhead wall behind them, parts of their visors and gauntlets and knees protruding seamlessly from the grey adamantium. Another has been reduced to a glistening red sludge by re-formation failure. He is spread over a wide area.

A fourth, Brother Verkus, has materialised bonded into the deck plates from the waist down. He is the one screaming. It’s not as though he can be pulled out. He is the deck now, and the deck is him.

It is troubling to hear a legionary scream with such a lack of restraint, but they say teleportation overlap is the most unimaginable pain.

Guilliman cradles his head and kills him quickly to end his suffering.

‘Move,’ he instructs the squad.

There’s no time for reflection, no time to take a breath. There’s no time to get over the stinging discomfort of the transfer. The squad confirms its arrival site against schematics of the yard and fans out. There is caution, but there is no loss of pace. They are transhumans moving with all the speed and efficiency they possess.

The transverse assembly deck was chosen because it was the largest interior space, and thus allowed for the greatest transfer imprecision. Their assault target is the yard’s master control room, two decks up.

The Word Bearers will have read the teleport flare. You can’t mask an energy signature like that.

Heutonicus confirms their transfer by vox to the Macragge’s Honour. Gage replies that there is insufficient power for a second transfer. Empion’s kill squad will not be following them, not for a while at least.

They move up through the deck gantries, past the massive airgate and mooring assemblies where ships are docked. The interior superstructure is brightly lit and filled with a vast network of chrome pipes, rods and cablework.

Word Bearers open fire on them from above. Shots rip past them, exploding against the bare metal and ceramite fabric of the yard. The blasts and impacts make huge booming sounds inside the artificial structure.

Two Ultramarines, Pelius and Dyractus, die in the first hail of shells. They are cut apart by sustained fire. Then Brother Lycidor topples over a rail, headshot. His cobalt-blue figure drops into the assembly area below, arms outstretched.

The Ultramarines fire back, covering the structures above them in a cloud of bolter blasts. Word Bearers topple, but there are more to fill their places. Many more.

Guilliman roars a challenge to them. He condemns them to death. He condemns their master to a worse fate.

He hurls himself at them.

The primarch is, of course, their greatest asset, Thiel realises. Not because of his physical superiority, though that is hard to overestimate.

It is because he is a primarch. Because he is Roboute Guilliman. Because he is simply one of the greatest warriors in the Imperium. How many beings could measure favourably against him? Honestly? All seventeen of his brothers? Not all seventeen. Nothing like all seventeen. Four or five at best. At best.

The Word Bearers on the upper structures see him coming. They are kill squad strength at least, the best part of a full company. At least a proportion of them are the vaunted Gal Vorbak elite.

But they see him coming, and they know what that means. It doesn’t matter what cosmic dementia has corrupted their minds and souls. It doesn’t matter what eternal promises the Dark Gods are whispering in their ears. It doesn’t matter what inflated courage the warp has poured into their veins along with madness.

Guilliman of Ultramar is coming right at them. To kill them. To kill them all.

Even though they stand a chance of hurting him, they waste it. They baulk. For a second, their twisted hearts know fear. Real fear.

And then he has them.

And then he is killing them.

‘With him! With him!’ Thiel yells. They surge forward. Mangled Word Bearers fly overhead, or crash into the decks around them. When Thiel reaches his primarch’s side, Guilliman has slain a dozen at least. His boltgun is roaring. His power fist crackles with cooking blood.

It is brutal close quarters. Thiel has the exotic longsword that has served him so well on this darkest of days. Two-handed, he wields it, cutting crimson ceramite like silk. Word Bearers blood looks black, as if it is sour and polluted. Thiel flanks his primarch, advancing steadily with the press of the assault towards the primary hatch.

They lose eight men. Eight Ultramarines. But they break through into the master control room leaving a carpet of enemy dead in their wake.

The real fight awaits them there.

A stunning barrage of bolter-fire greets them, killing Stetius, killing Ascretis, killing Heutonicus.

Kor Phaeron, master of the dark faith, master of the unspeakable word, orders his men forward.

Then he flies at Guilliman, trailing dark vapour, coruscating with black energies torn from the pits of the warp.

‘Bastard!’ Guilliman howls.

He does not flinch.

Not for a second.

The guildhall shakes. Titans are firing at it.

‘I need an update,’ Ventanus yells into the vox as blizzards of glass and masonry swirl around him.

He’s stayed on the surface to command the repulse. Selaton has ridden down into the armoured bunker with Tawren. All data and vox-links from Leptius Numinus shut down about five minutes ago. The palace has fallen. The only feed Ventanus has is close-range comms with his company.

‘The server has activated the engine,’ Selaton voxes back. ‘She is connecting. Connecting to the MIU.’

‘Is it working?’ Ventanus demands.

‘I don’t know what it looks like if it is working,’ Selaton replies.

‘I can guarantee it looks better than this!’ Ventanus responds.

Armour loyal to the Word Bearers is pushing relentlessly along the transit, covering their positions with a hail of shells and bulk las. Smoke and rain have cut visibility to almost nothing. Fabricatory buildings on the far side of the road have collapsed in welters of flame and stone. Two Reaver Titans, weapons mounts glowing from relentless discharge, are approaching through the smoke at full stride.

Cyramica is dead. Lorchas is dead. Sparzi is probably dead too. Ventanus can’t find Greavus or Sydance. The company line is broken. The 4th has done all it can.

It cannot match the overwhelming strength of Hol Beloth’s offensive.

‘The server has launched the killcode,’ Selaton reports. ‘She is launching it into the grid system. She is preparing for a purge.’

Ventanus ducks as Titan fire hurls a Land Raider into the air a few dozen metres ahead of him. It lands, burning, buckled, hitting the torn ground so loudly it sounds as though the sky is caving in.

The sky is caving in, of course. Blue-white fire crackles above the rain. Solar flares are searing Calth’s upper atmosphere, irradiating the stricken world, triggering massive, unnatural aurora displays as energetic charged particles strike the thermosphere. Light and colour jump and twist around Ventanus: light from the explosions, light from the agonised sky.

‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ Ventanus voxes back. ‘That’s good?’

‘Yes, captain,’ Selaton responds, ‘but it’s useless without control. She can’t take control of the grid until enemy control is taken away. And that hasn’t happened. She is telling me that hasn’t happened.’

A Gal Vorbak beast looms at Ventanus through the murk, swinging a power axe. He wears no helmet. His face is... not human.

Ventanus meets the charge and plants his blade across the haft of the axe, blocking the swing. They struggle. Ventanus is forced back by the killer’s bruising power. The locked weapons break apart, and Ventanus ducks hard to avoid the scything chop that follows.

Ventanus recovers quickly, ramming his blade upwards. His sword-tip glances off the Gal Vorbak’s axe, deflects into the enemy’s mouth, and skewers his head.

The Gal Vorbak doesn’t die. Not fast enough. He laughs around the blade impaling his mouth. Black blood pumps out over the sword hilt and Ventanus’s hand and arm. The Gal Vorbak puts his axe deep into Ventanus’s side.

Then he obliges, and dies.

Ventanus sinks to one knee.

‘A-anything?’ he voxes.

‘Captain? Are you all right?’ Selaton replies.

‘Is there anything yet?’

‘Your voice sounds strange.’

‘Selaton, has she got it yet?’ Ventanus growls.

‘No, sir. Enemy control is still in place.’

The Titans are close now. The last Shadowsword remaining with the 4th fires and damages one of the striding giants, but they reply together and turn the superheavy tank into a vast conflagration that levels the city blocks behind it.

Nothing else is coming. None of the support that they hoped might arrive to stand with them. None of the reinforcements.

Their hope was a good hope, but it was not strong enough.

The XVII Legion has won the Battle of Calth.

The Satric Plateau is bathed in aurora light. The local star spews energy across the entire Veridian System.

Erebus watches.

Rain is falling. The rain is blood. The daemons scream.

The storm breaks.

Kor Phaeron greets Guilliman with a beam of smoke-light, a column of wretched darkness that bursts from the palm of his right hand and smashes the XIII primarch into the chamber wall.

Guilliman gets back up, but he is shaken. The wall is crumpled where he struck it.

Kor Phaeron cries out, a bark of straining effort, and manufactures another ray of smoke-light. Guilliman is charging, but the beam slams him back into the bulkhead with a kinetic slap so powerful that it rings out with a deafening sonic boom.

Guilliman staggers up, falls, and then half rises, clenching his power fist. The ceramite of his breastplate is cracked. Guilliman coughs, and blood drips from his mouth. He tries to stand.

Kor Phaeron blasts him again, this time with a weird, negative electricity that crackles around Guilliman and causes him to seize in violent spasms.

Guilliman is left on his hands and knees, his cobalt-blue plating scorched, his head bowed, his whole form smouldering as the superheated armour burns his skin.

The Word Bearer draws his athame and steps forward.

Kor Phaeron can see a choice, and it delights him. He can end the life of the great Guilliman. A personal kill is so much more valuable than a distant or mass killing.

With his own hand, he can murder Roboute Guilliman.

Or, with his own hand, he can turn him.

Just as the Warmaster was turned.

Erebus did it. So Kor Phaeron can do it.

Guilliman is hurt, weak, vulnerable. The bite of the athame will free Guilliman’s sanity while he is in such a state, slice away his inhibitions. The painful burn of the athame wound will fester in him, and ultimately, through the lens of delirium, reveal the Primordial Truth in all its hellish glory.

They came to Calth to kill Guilliman and his perfect warriors. How much more will it mean to return to the court of Lorgar and Horus Lupercal with Guilliman as a willing and pliant ally?

Guilliman, crowned with horns. Guilliman, invested in the iridescent cloak of daemonhood.

Kor Phaeron stoops beside the crumpled primarch. Guilliman’s breathing is fast and ragged. His armour smokes, discoloured, and his blood pools beneath him.

‘There is so much you don’t understand,’ says Kor Phaeron. ‘The truth will shock you, Roboute. I’m sorry, it will. But you will learn to accommodate it. I’m happy to share my knowledge with you. To help you understand. To grow in appreciation.’

‘Get away from me,’ Guilliman gasps.

‘Too late. Embrace this.’

Thiel is too far away to stop it. Locked in the unyielding fight raging on the opposite side of the control chamber, Thiel glimpses what he knows is likely to be the final few seconds of Roboute Guilliman’s life.

He tries to break through, screaming out his rage and frustration. The Word Bearers have driven Guilliman’s kill squad back, slaying most of them. Thiel and the others fight to reach their primarch’s side, but they cannot. There are too many of the enemy. And these are the enemy elite.

Three warriors obstruct Aeonid Thiel. One is Sorot Tchure. Tchure blocks every strike and thrust Thiel makes, as surely as a practice cage set on maximum extremity level.

Kor Phaeron puts the blade of the athame to Guilliman’s throat.

4

The upper storeys of the guildhall collapse. Ventanus finds Sydance, Greavus and the remnants of their squads, and backs across the outer concourse. The severity of his wound is making him shuffle, his gait uneven.

The enemy is all around them. Two more Titans have just loomed out of vapour to the east. Two more. It is laughable. It is academic. The enemy strength has long since passed the tipping point. Hol Beloth has employed maximum overkill.

At least, Ventanus considers, they have taken a lot of them down. A lot of them. The Word Bearers have had to pay dearly to reach the end of this world.

Sadly, they do not seem to care.

The guildhall will fall next, and no matter how well-armoured the bunker in the sublevels is, the XVII will dig it out, kill Tawren, and smash the data-engine.

One of the Titans opens fire.

Another of the Titans explodes from the waist up. A giant fireball bellies out from its upper section, consuming it, swirling yellow and white flames into the sky.

Three hundred metres below the guildhall, the bunker trembles. The noise of the terminal war overhead is a dull grumble, a vibration masked by the whirr and rattle of the powerful data-engine.

Tawren, connected in machine communion by the MIU, frowns.

Selaton sees her expression change. The Ultramarine has never experienced such exasperation. He is absent from the fight, useless, destined to do nothing except monitor and report on the silent haptic operations of an inscrutable Mechanicum magos.

‘What?’ he asks. ‘What is it?’

‘Two Titans have vectored into the fight,’ she says quietly, scanning streams of moving data invisible to him. ‘The Titans that have just appeared are not traitor machines.’

‘What?’

‘They are loyalist instruments,’ she says. ‘The Burning Cloud and Kaskardus Killstroke. One has just made an engine-kill against the Word Bearers-aligned Titan Mortis Maxor.’

‘We are supported?’ Selaton asks.

‘It seems–’

‘Server, are you telling me that reinforcement forces are arriving to supplement the 4th?’

‘Yes, sergeant, I am. The data supports this supposition. According to the data, that is the case.’

Tawren remains entirely calm. She seems to show no relief. She studies the rapidly updating datastream, winnowing out its information.

‘Captain Ventanus’s force was facing an annihilation projection of three minutes and sixteen seconds. That limit is being revised up to six minutes and twelve seconds. To eight min... to ten minutes and fifty-one seconds.’

Tawren watches the datafeed. It streams from a thousand different picture and data sources: the visor capture of the Ultramarines legionaries, the optic feeds of the skitarii, the auspexes of loyalist vehicles, the guildhall zone sensors, the parts of the city cogitation network still operating. She watches events unfold.

The reinforcement strength explodes into the Lanshear Belt from the east, fast and mobile. It comes along Tarxis Traverse, Malonik Transit, Bedrus Oblique and the Lanshear Arterials. It pushes through the conurb structures behind the cargo depots and the ring of habitats to the east of Port Dock 18. A column of Land Raiders and armour support three Titans: two Reavers and a Warlord. An infantry force follows, moving rapidly. She identifies them by insignia, heraldry, trace codes and unit marker transponders. The force is mostly XIII and Mechanicum elements from Barrtor and the Sharud muster, but there are twenty thousand Army troopers too, bringing lighter armour and support weapons.

She switches rapidly between pict-supporting feed views to track the advance. The relief force forms two prongs of assault. One is a Legion force led by a sergeant of the 112th called Anchise, and a captain of the 19th called Aethon. The other is predominantly Army, and is commanded by a colonel of the Neride 41st called Bartol, but it is physically being led by Eikos Lamiad and a lumbering Ultramarines Dreadnought.

Before she was lost, Tawren’s loyal junior Uldort fulfilled her duties with extraordinary diligence, and coordinated all the force and firepower she could contact.

Lamiad. Eikos Lamiad, Tetrarch of Ultramar, Primarch’s Champion. He leads a ragged host of soldiery collected from the desert and the burning hills around the Holophusikon. He raises his sword in his one good arm and sweeps his warriors into the street fight.

Telemechrus, the Contemptor, strides beside him, expending ammunition as he drives a wedge into the enemy formations. His munitions tally records two kills among Hol Beloth’s senior commanders. Assault cannon. Most efficient.

Tawren switches views again. She follows other code tags.

Justarius, the venerable, walks with Aethon’s squads. A second Dreadnought brought to the fight. And in the shadow of the Titans, a second tetrarch too: Tauro Nicodemus, who has spent the day fighting up from the south and the slaughterfields at Komesh.

Switch view. Switch view. Tawren watches the data, almost startled by the speed of update, the rapid turn of the battle’s balance.

She finally becomes aware of Selaton’s desperation, and starts to tell him what she can see.

Hol Beloth’s forces flinch at the unbridled force of the attack. It is not just the firepower, it is the coordinated strength of it. The shattered survivors of the XIII should not have been able to organise with such precision and effect. In the midst of chaos, confusion, a world ablaze, they should not have been able to rally and focus around such a strategically specific point.

Tawren checks her annihilation projection.

It now stands at forty-seven minutes and thirty-one seconds.

In that time, the assembled survivors of the Calth Atrocity will express their fury and their vengeance, and they will do massive damage to the enemy. They may even temporarily drive the Word Bearers back out of the Lanshear Belt.

But it is only a last, gratifying chance to rage into the face of death.

For Hol Beloth, it will simply add an hour or two to the fight. In many ways, it serves to concentrate his victims in one convenient killing ground. He can draw in supporting divisions from all directions.

The XIII cannot.

If they hoped to fall in glory, they are about to get their wish.

Tawren has no grid control with which to shift the combat dynamic. She has the killcode, but no damned control.

The athame bites. Guilliman’s blood wells up around the sliced flesh. He grunts through clenched teeth.

‘Let it go,’ whispers Kor Phaeron. ‘This is the beginning of wisdom.’

Guilliman mutters something in reply.

‘What?’ asks Kor Phaeron, cupping a hand to his ear, mocking him. ‘What did you say, Roboute?’

Every single word is an effort.

‘You made an error,’ Guilliman gasps.

‘An error?’

‘You chose the wrong practical. You had a choice. Toy with me. Kill me. You chose the wrong one.’

‘Really?’ smiles Kor Phaeron.

‘You should not have let me live.’

‘I let you live so I could share the truth, Roboute.’

‘Yes,’ says Guilliman, sucking in each ragged breath. ‘But all the while I’m alive, I can do this.’

There is a sharp sound. A sudden, wet crack. An explosive spray of blood, as though a skin of red wine has burst between them. Kor Phaeron makes a tiny noise; a thin, ceramic sound like a wet finger sliding down glass.

Guilliman rises. Though its power has long since shorted out and failed, he has buried his armour claw in Kor Phaeron’s chest. He has crunched through plate, through muscle, through augmented ribs. Kor Phaeron twitches, impaled on Guilliman’s fist. His feet are off the deck, his elbows digging into his sides. He shudders, head flopping on his neck.

The athame falls from his fingers and rebounds off the deck.

Sorot Tchure hears the noise his master makes. He is focused on his combat with the Ultramarines raiders, but he cannot help but turn his eyes for a second. Less than a second. A microsecond.

Thiel sees his opening. His practical. It is infinitesimal, a tiny chink in the Word Bearer’s guard. It lasts a microsecond, and it will not be repeated.

He puts his sword through it.

The longsword shears the right side of Tchure’s helm away. Cheek, ear and part of the skull separate with it. Tchure stumbles, bewildered by the pain, the shock, the disorientation.

For a moment, Tchure thinks it is Luciel. He thinks it is Luciel who has risen up to punish him for a trust so miserably betrayed.

Thiel shoulder-slams him aside into one of the other Word Bearers, spattering blood over them all. He ducks the sword slash of the third, and decapitates him.

He is the first to break clear and rush to Guilliman’s side.

Guilliman looks Kor Phaeron in the eyes. Kor Phaeron’s lips quiver. He blinks hard and bubbles of saliva form around the corners of his trembling mouth.

Guilliman wrenches the claw out. It is clutching Kor Phaeron’s heart.

Kor Phaeron crashes to the deck, bitter black blood coursing from under him in all directions. He retches, and covers the floor with a vile lactic spatter.

Guilliman throws the mangled heart aside.

Thiel steadies him to stop him falling.

‘Never mind me, sergeant,’ Guilliman rasps. ‘Kill the damned systems. Do what we came to do.’

Thiel races to the system consoles. The brass cogitation banks of the data-engine chatter and clack in front of him. He doesn’t know where to start.

‘In the name of Terra,’ Guilliman snarls. ‘Thiel, shoot the bloody thing!’

Thiel is out of ammo. But he has his sword. It has one more job to do today.

The control codes release. Tawren sees it happen. She sees the digital sequence suddenly shift across the noospherics. Control suspended (engine failure). Control suspended (engine failure). Control suspended (engine failure). Control suspended (engine failure)...

It is like a moment of data-revelation. A profound data sequence change. All values alter. All authorities reset.

She doesn’t hesitate. Hesst would not have. She runs the killcode directly into the suddenly open system, and watches as it burns through the corrupted numerics of the Octed scrapcode.

The killcode is her vanguard. Her praetorians. Her Ultramarines kill squad. Her Ventanus. She follows it in with her authority codes.

She takes control. She selects the discretionary mode. Thousands of automatically generated firing solutions instantly present themselves. She sorts them using subtle haptics, code-forms and binaric cant.

‘Server?’ Selaton is addressing her. ‘Server?’

Tawren ignores him. She opens a vox-link.

‘Server Tawren, addressing the XIII Legion Ultramarines, and all forces allied to their standard. Brace for impact. Repeat, brace for impact.’

The first beam-weapon strikes hit Lanshear. They come straight out of the sky, columns of dazzling vertical light. They stream from orbital weapon platforms, platforms that the Word Bearers left intact for their own use.

The beams, generated by lance batteries, particle tunnels and meson weapons, strike with surgical accuracy. They cauterise the city-zone around the guildhall in the northern depot area. They obliterate Titans, dissolve armoured vehicles, and reduce brotherhood and Word Bearers formations to ash.

Sheltering, in some cases, less than half a kilometre from the impact sites, Ultramarines and Army forces are untouched. Their eardrums burst. Their skin burns. They are half-blinded by the light, and hammered by the concussion, e-mag pulse and violent after-pressure, but they endure.

The negative pressure causes the rain to swirl cyclonically around the zone, a whirlpool of smoke and ravaged climate.

Ventanus looks up, dazed by the blast. Hot ash has plastered their wet armour, covering them all; ash that was Word Bearers only seconds before.

The Ultramarines around him look pumice grey, gun metal grey, the colour of the XVII’s old livery.

Tawren has not finished. She deploys the grid elements available to her, she hits other surface targets. Simultaneously, she retasks orbital platforms, and retrains lance stations. She begins to systematically exact punishment on the Word Bearers fleet.

For the first time since the cataclysmic orbital strike, it’s the crimson-hulled warships that explode and die in nearspace. Cruisers and barges detonate in multi-megaton conflagrations, or are crippled by devastating impacts.

This is a dynamic combat shift. This is the game changed. Hesst would approve. Guilliman would approve.

On the auxiliary bridge of the Macragge, Marius Gage sees the first of his enemy’s ships sputter and torch out. He watches as phosphorescent green and white beams stripe out from the orbital grid, spearing Word Bearers vessels.

He looks at Hommed.

‘Statement of yield, please?’

‘We are currently at fifty-seven per cent yield, Chapter Master,’ says Hommed. ‘Enough to transport Empion’s kill squad.’

‘I intend to take rather more direct action than that. Engage the drive and move towards the yards. Raise the shields.’

‘Sir, there are three enemy cruisers clamped to our hull.’

‘Then I imagine they will suffer, shipmaster. Raise void shields. While you’re at it, shoot them off our back.’

The titanic flagship lights its shields. One of the cruisers buckles as it is caught and torn in the void field, blowing out along its centre line and voiding significant compartments to space. Its wrecked bulk remains clamped to the Macragge’s Honour as the flagship surges forward, drives glowing white hot.

A second cruiser falls free, clamps blown and cut. The flagship’s batteries begin to pick it apart before it can stabilise its motion.

The third is pounded repeatedly at close range by the flagship’s starboard guns. Gage refuses to order cease firing until the side of the cruiser facing him is a molten hell, burning up, with inner decks exposed.

The executed cruiser drops away, glowing like an ember, and falls out of the plane of the ecliptic.

The master control room is on fire. Flames and smoke are rapidly filling the habitats of the Zetsun Verid Yard. Thiel and the remainder of the kill squad retreat rapidly towards the transverse assembly deck. They pack tight around the wounded, limping primarch.

‘The flagship is inbound,’ says Thiel.

Guilliman nods. He seems to be recovering some strength.

‘The sun,’ murmurs one of the squad.

They look up through the vast crystalflex observation ports and see the Veridian star. It is stricken, its light ugly and sick. A bubonic rash of sunspots freckles its surface.

‘I think we have won something just in time to lose everything,’ says Guilliman.

Thiel asks him what they should do, but the primarch is not listening. He has turned his attention down, to something he can see on the through-deck beneath the assembly layer.

‘Bastards!’ he hisses. ‘Can’t they just burn?’

Thiel looks.

He can see half a dozen of the surviving Word Bearers. They carry the bloody carcass of Kor Phaeron. Somehow, the wretched Master of the Faith seems to be alive, despite the fact that Guilliman tore out his primary heart. He is twitching, writhing.

Leading the party, Thiel sees the Word Bearer whose helm and skull he cut away.

Tchure turns to look at them, sensing them. The side of his face is gore, teeth and bone exposed.

Thiel draws his boltgun, reloaded with ammunition from a fallen brother. The other Ultramarines start to fire too.

The Word Bearers shimmer. Spontaneous frost crackles out in a circle around their feet, and corposant winds around them. They vanish in a blink of teleport energy.

‘Gage! Gage!’ Guilliman yells.

‘My primarch!’ Gage responds over the vox-link.

‘Kor Phaeron is running. He’s gone from here, teleported out! He’ll have run to his ship.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Just stop him, Marius. Stop him dead, and send him to hell.’

‘My primarch–’

‘Marius Gage, that’s an order.’

‘What about you, sir? We are moving into the yard to recover you.’

‘There are ships docked here,’ Guilliman replies. ‘The Samothrace, a couple of escorts. We’ll board one and be secure enough. Just get after him, Marius. Get after the damned Infidus Imperator.’

The Word Bearers battle-barge Infidus Imperator turns in the debris-rich belt of Calth nearspace, ships dying in flames behind it. It engages its drive and begins a long, hard burn towards the outsystem reaches.

As it accelerates away, raising yield to maximum, the Macragge’s Honour turns in pursuit, its main drives lighting with an equally furious vigour.

It is the beginning of one of the most infamous naval duels in Imperial history.

Fate has twisted, dislocated. Erebus can see that plainly. He does not care, and he is not surprised. Ways change. He knows this. It is one of the first truths the darkness taught him.

Calth is dead. The XIII is crippled and finished. His ritual is complete, and it is entirely successful. The Ruinstorm rises, a warp-storm beyond anything space-faring humanity has witnessed since the Age of Strife. It will split the void asunder. It will divide the galaxy in two. It will render vast tracts of the Imperium impassable for centuries.

It will isolate and trap forces loyal to the Emperor. It will divide them, and block their attempts to combine and support one another. It will shatter communication and chains of contact. It will even prevent them from warning each other of the heretical war breaking across their realm. The Ruinstorm will cripple the loyalists, and leave Terra raw and alone, infinitely vulnerable to the approaching shadow of Horus.

But... somehow the enemy salvaged something. They were defeated from the very start, and they remained defeated throughout, and in the aftermath, the Word Bearers can salt the XIII’s scattered bones. Yet they won something back. Some measure of retribution. Some degree of pride. They did not yield, and they forced a surprising price for their lives.

Erebus is sorry to leave any of them alive. They say you should always kill them. Ultramarines. If you make one your enemy, do not allow him to live. Do not spare him. Leave an Ultramarine alive, and you leave room for retribution. Only when he is dead are you safe from harm. That is what they say.

They are fine words. The proud boast of an unfailingly arrogant Legion. They mean little. The Ultramarines are done. Calth has gutted them. They will never more be a force to be reckoned with.

Horus no longer has to worry about the threat of the XIII.

The poison light of the sun falls across the Satric Plateau. Erebus basks in it. He raises his hands. The daemons sing in adulation.

The Dark Apostle feels the rising winds of the Ruinstorm snatching at his cloak. He is finished here. He has carried out the duty that was entrusted to him by Lorgar. It is time for his departure.

Reality has worn thin at the edge of the black stone circle, thin like bleached and ancient cloth. Erebus takes out his own ornate athame dagger, and cuts a slit in the material fabric of the universe.

He steps through.

5

Guilliman watches the rising storm from the bridge of the Samothrace, a replacement command crew at the control stations. Every reliable authority says it will be the worst in living memory.

‘We must translate from the system, my primarch,’ says the shipmaster. ‘The fleet must exit before we are swept away.’

Guilliman nods. He understands the imperative. If nothing else, firm and clear warnings of the daemonic threat must be conveyed to the Imperial core sectors, and to the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar.

‘There are still hundreds of thousands down there,’ he says to Thiel, looking at scans of the ravaged planet.

‘We extracted as many as we could, with whatever ships we had, sir,’ Thiel replies. ‘Further evacuation is now impossible.’

‘What about the rest?’ Guilliman asks.

‘They are fleeing to the arcologies,’ Thiel says. ‘There is a good chance that the subterranean hab systems and catacombs will protect them from the effect of the solar radiation. They may be able to ride out the storm until such time as we can return with a Legion fleet to evacuate them.’

‘That could be years.’

‘It could,’ agrees Thiel.

‘If ever.’

‘At worst, years,’ says Thiel. ‘We will return. They will be saved.’

Guilliman nods.

‘You’ll excuse my mood, Thiel. I have lost a world of Ultramar. I have lost... too much. You are not seeing the best of me.’

‘Theoretical,’ replies Thiel. ‘The reverse of that statement is true.’

Guilliman snorts. His face is grey with lingering pain.

‘Anything from Gage?’

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘And of the forces we extracted, was Ventanus among them?’

‘No, sir,’ replies Thiel. ‘He was not.’

Ventanus takes the vox-horn.

‘This is Ventanus, Captain, 4th,’ he begins. ‘I am making an emergency broadcast on the global vox-cast setting. The surface of Calth is no longer a safe environment. The local star is suffering a flare trauma, and will shortly irradiate Calth to human-lethal levels. It is no longer possible to evacuate the planet. Therefore, if you are a citizen, a member of the Imperial Army, a legionary of the XIII, or any other loyal servant of the Imperium, move with all haste to the arcology or arcology system closest to you. The arcology systems may offer sufficient protection to allow us to survive this solar event. We will shelter there until further notice. Do not hesitate. Move directly to the nearest arcology. Arcology location and access information will be appended to this repeat broadcast as a code file. In the name of the Imperium, make haste. Message ends.’

He lowers the device and looks at Tawren.

‘I have set it to repeat transmit,’ she says.

‘Then we must go. There is very little time, server. Disengage from the data-engine.’

‘I do not know about these caves,’ she says. ‘I think it will be unpleasant down there.’

‘Not as unpleasant as it will be on the surface,’ says Selaton.

‘This is not a discussion,’ says Ventanus. ‘It is not an elective matter. We are retreating to the arcologies. We will endure there. End of debate.’

‘I understand,’ she says. ‘You realise that enemy strengths left on the planet will flee underground too?’

‘I do,’ says Ventanus.

‘So what do we do?’ asks Tawren.

‘We keep fighting,’ Ventanus tells her. ‘That’s what we always do.’

6

The world has never seemed so dark. It is impossible to tell where the rolling blackness of the sea ends and the twisted darkness of the sky begins.

Only the star remains, poisonous and fierce, like a baleful eye, gleaming through the smoke and fog.

They ground the skiff off a shingle beach and come ashore. Oll checks his compass. They start trudging up the beach, heading inland.

‘Where are we?’ asks Bale Rane.

‘North,’ says Oll. ‘The Satric Coast. The great plateau is that way.’

He gestures at the darkness.

‘Fine country,’ Oll says. ‘Even been up that way and seen it?’

Rane shakes his head.

‘What are we doing here?’ asks Zybes.

Strange, daemonic voices hoot and gibber in the distance, echoing down the inlet.

Zybes repeats his question with more urgency.

‘I don’t understand any of this,’ he says. ‘We’ve come all this way in that damned boat! Why? It’s no safer here. It sounds like it’s worse, if that’s possible!’

Oll glances at him, tired and impatient.

‘We’ve come here,’ he says, ‘because this is the only place we can get out through. The only place. It’s our one chance to live and do something.’

‘Do what?’ asks Krank.

‘Something that matters,’ Oll replies, not really listening. He’s seen something. Something on the beach by the boat.

‘Who is that, Trooper Persson?’ Graft asks.

There is a man on the beach behind them. He’s following them. He passes their grounded skiff, walking briskly. Another small launch, presumably the one that brought him in, is turning slowly in the black water off the beach, abandoned.

‘Shit,’ murmurs Oll. ‘Get behind me, all of you. Keep moving.’

He turns, sliding his rifle off his shoulder.

Criol Fowst is black on black, a shadow of a figure. Only his face is pale, the drawn skin white and streaked with dried blood from his head wound. He approaches, his feet crunching over the shingle. A laspistol hangs in his right hand. Oll faces him, weapon ready.

‘No closer,’ Oll calls out.

‘Give it back,’ Fowst shouts. ‘Give it back to me!’

‘I don’t want to fire a weapon or spill blood here,’ Oll warns, ‘but I will if you make me. Go back and leave us alone.’

‘Give me my blade. My blade.’

‘Go back.’

Fowst takes a step forward.

‘They can smell it, you know,’ he hisses. ‘They can smell it.’

‘Let them smell it,’ replies Oll.

‘They’ll come. You don’t want them to come.’

‘Let them come.’

‘You don’t want them to come, old man. Give it back to me. I need it.’

‘I need it more,’ says Oll. ‘I need it for something. It’s why I came here. I need it for something more important than you can possibly imagine.’

‘Nothing is more important than what I can imagine,’ replies Fowst.

‘Last chance,’ says Oll.

Fowst screams. He screams at the top of his voice.

‘He’s here! Here! Right here! Come and get him! Come and feast on him! Here! Here!’

The rifle cracks. Silenced, Fowst falls back on the stones of the beach.

But things are stirring. Things disturbed and drawn by the sound of Fowst’s cry and the noise of the shot. Oll can hear them. He can hear batwings flap in the darkness, hooves scrape on stone, scales slither. Voices mutter and growl abhuman sounds.

‘Hey!’ Oll shouts to his travelling companions, who are cowering in the dark. ‘Come back to me! Come back. Gather round.’

They hurry to him. Krank and Rane. Zybes. The girl. Graft is the slowest.

‘What is that?’ Krank asks, hearing the sounds that the things are making as they close in around them through the darkness. ‘What’s making that noise?’

‘Don’t think about it,’ Oll says, working hard, trying to remember a simple sequence of gestures. ‘Just stay close beside me. It might be all right here. It might be thin enough.’

‘What might be thin enough?’ asks Rane.

‘What’s making that noise?’ Krank repeats, agitated.

‘Something’s coming,’ says Zybes.

‘It’s all right,’ says Oll. ‘We’re just leaving anyway.’

He has the dagger in his hand. The athame, unwrapped. He murmurs to his god for protection and forgiveness. Then he makes a cut.

‘How are you doing that?’ asks Katt.

They all look at her.

Oll smiles.

‘Trust me,’ he says. He pushes the knife harder, deepens the cut. He makes the slit vertical, the height of a man. He makes a slit in the air, so that reality parts.

The daemon sounds come closer.

Oll draws back the edge of the cut like a curtain. They gasp as they see what’s on the other side. It isn’t here. It isn’t Calth. It isn’t a broken, pitch-black beach.

Oll looks at them.

‘I won’t pretend this is going to be easy,’ he says, ‘because it isn’t. But it’s better than staying here.’

They stare at him.

‘Follow me,’ he says.