The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

FIFTEEN The Cave of Hypnos / White Naga / Angel of Fire

A new Land Raider had been found for the Warmaster. Equipped with a flare shield, layered plates of bonded ceramite with ablative ion disruptors, shroud dispensers and frag-launchers, the Mechanicum had repeated their claim that it was proof against all but the weapons of a battle engine.

Horus let Ezekyle kill sixteen of them to remind them of the last time they had made that boast.

The Land Raider idled in the foothills of a mountain chain known as the Untar Mesas. Thousands of armoured vehicles surrounded it, connected together in laagers to form miniature fortresses. The Lord of Iron himself would have approved of the defences arranged around the Warmaster.

An unbroken chain of supply vehicles – tankers, ammo carriers and Mechanicum loaders – stretched back to the coast. Warhounds prowled the line of supply like watchful shepherds, and two Warlords in the colours of Legio Vulcanum stood sentinel over the Warmaster.

Horus climbed into the hills with the Mournival arranged around him in a tight circle. Farther out, Terminators of the Justaerin slogged uphill, looking more like relentless machines than living beings encased in armour.

Ger Gerradon’s Luperci were out there too, unseen in the darkness. Horus could feel their presence like a scratch on the roof of his mouth. Invisible, but impossible to ignore.

A sky the colour of disturbed sediment swirled overhead, and smoke curled from wrecked orbital batteries and missile silos on the mountaintops. Lightning split the night, a sky-wide sheet that silhouetted the jagged teeth of the mountain. Rain fell in a deluge. A hundred new waterfalls spilled from the cliffs. Horus knew grander peaks than these, but viewed from this perspective it seemed like they were the tallest he had ever seen. It looked like they might snag the moon at its passing.

Fire Raptors and Thunderhawks flew overhead through static-charged clouds. Their engines were distant burrs over thunder that sounded like artillery. Energy discharges from the fighting in low orbit had wreaked havoc in the planet’s atmospherics. A cascade effect of violent tempests was spreading all over Molech. Horus knew those storms were only going to get worse until a final apocalyptic event cleared the last of it.

‘It’s madness to stop like this,’ said Abaddon, his armour streaked with rainwater and moonlight. ‘We’re too exposed. First the gunships on Dwell and then those Knights. It’s almost like you’re trying to put yourself in harm’s way. It’s our job to take those kinds of risks.’

‘You’ve known me long enough to know I am not cut from that kind of cloth, Ezekyle,’ said Horus. ‘I am a warrior. I cannot always sit back and let others shed blood for me.’

‘You’re too valuable,’ pressed Abaddon.

‘We have been down this road before, my son,’ said Horus, letting all four of them understand that this was his final word on the subject.

Abaddon let the matter go, but like a hunting hound with the scent of blood in its nostrils, Horus knew he’d be back to that particular argument before long.

‘Very well, but every moment we delay, the deeper the bastards can dig in,’ said Abaddon.

‘You still believe this world matters?’ asked Noctua, as breathless as a mortal. Horus paused and listened to Grael’s heartbeat through the rain. His secondary heart was still catching up to the level of his original, and his circulation likely wouldn’t ever be as efficient as his supra-engineered biology required.

‘What do you mean matters?’ said Abaddon.

‘I mean as a military objective, something to be won in battle then held and consolidated?’

‘Of course,’ said Abaddon. ‘Molech is a stepping stone world. We control it and we control the Elliptical Way, easy access to Segmentum Solar’s warp routes and the bastions worlds of the Outer Systems. It’s a precursor world to the assault on Terra.’

‘You’re wrong, Ezekyle,’ said Aximand. ‘This invasion has never been about anything as prosaic as territory. As soon as we win this fight, we’ll abandon Molech. Won’t we, my lord?’

‘Yes, Little Horus,’ said the Warmaster. ‘Most likely we will. If I’m right about what the Emperor found on Molech, then it won’t matter what worlds we hold. All that’s going to be important is what happens when I face my father. That’s always been at the heart of this.’

‘So why are we fighting as if we give a damn about Molech?’ asked Kibre. ‘Why wage a ground war at all?’

‘Because what we will take away will be worth more than a hundred such rocks,’ said Horus. ‘You have to trust me on this. Do you trust me, Falkus?’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘Good, then no more questions,’ said Horus. ‘We should reach the cave soon.’

‘What cave?’ said Aximand.

‘The cave where the Emperor made us forget Molech.’

The woman’s hard-wearing fatigues suggested a port-worker, maybe a rigger. Hard to be sure with the amount of blood covering them. Her chest rose and fell in stuttering hikes, every breath a victory. She’d been brought to Noama Calver’s Galenus by a weeping man with two children in tow. He’d begged Noama to save her, and they were going to give it a damn good try.

‘What happened to her?’ asked Noama, cutting the woman’s bloodied clothes away.

The man didn’t answer at first. Sobs wracked his body and tears flowed down his open, earnest face. The two girls were doing a better job of holding it together.

‘I can do more for her if I know what happened,’ said Noama. ‘Tell me your name, you can do that, can’t you?’

The man nodded and he wiped his snot and tear streaked face with his sleeve like a child.

‘Jeph,’ he said. ‘Jeph Parsons.’

‘And where are you from, Jeph?’ said Noama.

The woman moaned as Kjell began cleaning her skin and attaching bio-readout pads. She tried to push him off, strong for someone so badly hurt.

‘Easy there,’ said Kjell, pressing her arm back down.

‘Jeph?’ asked Noama again. Keep your eyes on me.’

He was looking at the brutalised flesh of his wife’s body, seeing the blood dripping from the gurney. The woman reached up and took his hand in hers, leaving red marks on his wrist. She was a strong one, saw Noama, badly hurt but still able to offer comfort to those around her.

Jeph took a deep breath. ‘Her name’s Alivia, but she hates that. Thinks it sounds too formal. We all call her Liv, and we came from Larsa.’

The Sons of Horus had landed in force at Larsa, wiping out the Army forces stationed there in one brutal night of fighting. The port facilities were now in enemy hands, which could only be a bad thing.

‘But you got her and your children out,’ said Noama, ‘that’s good. You did better than most.’

‘No,’ said Jeph. ‘That was all Liv. She’s the strong one.’

Noama had already come to that conclusion. Alivia had the lean, wolfish look of a soldier, but she wasn’t Army. She had a faded tattoo on her right arm, a triangle enclosed in a circle with an eye at its centre. Blood covered the words written around the circle’s circumference, but even if it hadn’t they were in a language Noama didn’t recognise.

She’d caught shrapnel in the side, some glass in the face. Nothing that looked life-threatening, but she was losing a lot of blood from one particular wound just under her ribs. The readouts on the slate didn’t paint a reassuring picture of her prognosis.

‘We joined a column of refugees at the Ambrosius Radial,’ said Jeph, the words pouring from him now the dam inside had broken. ‘She thought she’d got out of Larsa quick enough, but the traitors caught up to us. Tanks, I think. I don’t know what kind. They shelled us and shot us. Why did they do that? We’re not soldiers, just people. We had children. Why did they shoot at us?’

Jeph shook his head, unable to comprehend how anyone could open fire on civilians. Noama knew just how he felt.

‘She almost did it,’ said Jeph, his head in his hands. ‘She almost got us out, but there was an explosion right next to us. Blew off her door and… Throne, you can see what it did to her.’

Noama nodded, digging around in the wound below Alivia’s ribs. She felt something serrated buried next to her heart.

A fragment of shrapnel. A big one. The volume of blood coming from the wound meant it had probably sliced open her left ventricle. With a proper medicae bay it would be simple procedure to save Alivia, but a Galenus wasn’t the place for such complex surgery. She looked up at Kjell. He’d seen the bio-readouts and knew what she knew. He raised an eyebrow.

‘I have to try,’ she said in answer to his unvoiced question.

The import of the words went over Jeph’s head and he kept speaking. ‘They killed everyone else, but Liv drove that cargo-five like it was an aeronautica fighter. Threw us all around the cab with tight turns, hard brakes and the like.’

‘She drove you out of an attack by enemy tanks?’ said Kjell, making his impressed face as he sorted out the instruments they’d need to cut Alivia open and get to her heart. ‘That’s a hell of a woman.’

‘Just about blew the engine out,’ agreed Jeph, ‘but I guess that’s why she wanted a ‘five. They’re not max-rated riggers, but their engines pack a punch.’

Noama placed an anaesthesia mask over Alivia’s mouth and nose, cranking up the delivery speed. The rate of blood loss meant they had to be quick.

‘You got your children out,’ she said. ‘You saved them.’

Alivia’s eyes opened and Noama saw desperation there.

‘Please, the book… it says… have to… get to… Lupercalia,’ she gasped into the mask. ‘Promise me… you’ll get us… there.’

Alivia took Noama’s hand and squeezed. The grip was powerful, urgent. Conviction and courage flowed from it, and the need to make Alivia’s last wish a reality was suddenly all that mattered to Noama. It only relaxed when the gas began to take effect.

‘I’ll get you there,’ she promised, and knew she meant it more than she’d meant anything in her life. ‘I’ll get you all there.’

But Alivia didn’t hear her promise.

In the decades since Molech’s compliance, something large and predatory had made its lair in the cave. Bones lay scattered by an entrance large enough for a Scout Titan, and not even the rain could cover the stench of partially digested remains. The earth at the cave mouth was a sopping quagmire, but blurred impressions of clawed feet wider than a Dreadnought’s crossed and recrossed.

‘What made these, sir?’ said Aximand, kneeling by the tracks.

Horus had no answer for him. The tracks were from no beast he remembered from Molech, though given the fractured recall of his time on this world that shouldn’t have surprised him.

And yet it did.

The Emperor hadn’t erased his memories, only manipulated them. Greyed some out, blurred others. He knew the indigenous beasts of Molech. He’d seen their heads mounted on the walls of the Knightholds, had studied their images and dissected corpses in illuminated bestiaries.

So why did he not recognise these tracks?

‘Sir?’ repeated Aximand. ‘What are we going to find in there?’

‘Let’s find out,’ said Horus, pushing aside his doubts and marching into the darkness. The Justaerin’s suit lamps swept the wide entrance, and the claws of Horus’s talon shimmered with blue light as he followed them inside. Strobed shadows painted heavily scored walls. Abaddon went next, then Kibre, Aximand and Noctua.

The cave corkscrewed into the mountain for perhaps a hundred metres, lousy with distorted echoes and strangely reflected light. As tall as a processional on a starship, the passage shimmered with rainwater seeping through microscopic cracks in the rock. The shifting beams caught falling droplets and shimmering rainbows arced between the walls.

They paused as the low, wet growl of something large and hungry was carried from deeper in the tunnels. Territorial threat noise.

‘Whatever that is, we should leave it alone,’ said Kibre.

‘For once I’m in total agreement with you, Falkus,’ said Noctua.

‘No,’ said Horus. ‘We go on.’

‘I knew you were going to say that,’ said Abaddon.

‘And if we run into whatever that is?’ asked Aximand.

‘We kill it.’

The Mournival drew closer to Horus, each with a bladed weapon and firearm drawn. Moisture drizzled the air. It pattered on armour plates and hissed on powered blade edges.

‘You know what it is, don’t you?’ said Aximand.

‘No,’ said Horus. ‘I don’t.’

The sounds of animal breath rasping over dripping fangs came again. It drew Horus on even as some primal part of his brain told him that whatever lurked in the darkness beneath the mountain was something not even he could defeat.

The thought was so alien that he stopped in his tracks.

The intrusion to his psyche was so subtle that only a thought so incongruous to his self-image revealed its presence. It didn’t feel like an attack though, more an innate property of the cave.

Or a side effect of whatever had happened here.

Horus pressed on, the passageway eventually widening into a rugged cavern thick with dripping stalactites and blade-like stalagmites. Some ran together in oddly conjoined columns, wet and glistening like malformed bones or mutant sinews.

A stagnant lake filled the centre of the cavern, its surface a basalt mirror. Rotted vegetation, festering dung and heaps of bone taller than a man were heaped at the water’s edge. The ambient temperature dropped by several degrees, and plumes of breath feathered before the Warmaster and his sons.

Horus’s skin tingled at the presence of something achingly familiar yet wholly unknown. He’d felt something similar at the base of the lightning-struck tower, but this was different. Stronger. More intense. As though his father were standing just out of sight, hidden in the depths and watching. Shadows stretched and slithered as the beams of the Justaerin’s lamps swept around the chamber.

‘I have been here before,’ he said, removing his helmet and hooking it to his belt.

‘You remember this cavern?’ said Aximand as the Mournival and Justaerin spread out.

‘No, but every fibre of my body tells me I stood here,’ said Horus, moving through the chamber.

Light refracting through the translucent columns and crystalline growths imparted colour to the walls: bilious green, cancerous purple, bruise yellow. They were standing in the guts of the mountain. Literally. A chamber of digestion. A suitlight played over the lake, holding steady enough for Horus to picture it as a low-hanging moon.

Not Molech’s moon, but Terra’s moon, as though the lake wasn’t a body of water at all, but a window through time. He’d sat with his father on the shores of the Tuz Gölü and skimmed rocks at the image of the moon and for a moment – just a fleeting moment – he could smell its hypersaline waters.

The light moved on and the water was just water. Cold and hostile, but just water.

With a growing sense of purpose, Horus made his way towards the water’s edge. Shadows where no shadows ought to be stretched over the walls, and a thousand muttering voices seemed to rise from the water. He glanced back at the Mournival. Could they hear the voices or see the shadows? He doubted it.

This cave was not entirely of this world, and whatever was keeping it anchored was fraying. Just by being here he was tugging on its loose threads. The image of bones and sinews returned, something organic, the architecture of the mind.

‘That’s what you did here,’ he said, turning on the spot. ‘You cut through the world here and reshaped us, made us forget what we’d seen you do…’

‘Sir?’ said Aximand.

Horus nodded to himself. ‘This is the scab you left behind, father. Something this powerful leaves a mark, and this is it. The bruise you left behind when you shaped your lie.’

The frayed edge pulled a little more. The scab peeled back.

Ghost shapes moved through the cavern, given life by his picking at the wound in the angles of space and time. Each was numinous and smudged, like figures seen through dirty glass. They were indistinct, but Horus knew them all.

He walked among them, smiling as though his brothers were here with him now.

‘The Khan stood here,’ said Horus as the first figure stopped and took a knee on his left. A second figure knelt to his right.

‘The Lion over there.’

Horus felt himself enveloped in light, cocooned by its cold illumination. He’d retraced the steps he’d taken almost a century ago without even knowing it.

Horus moved back, detaching from a rendering of his own body in ambient light. Like his spectral primarch brothers, his radiant doppelgänger knelt as a figure approached from across the lake. Gold fire and caged lightning; the Emperor without His mask.

‘What is this?’ demanded Abaddon, his bolter raised and ready to fire. The figures were only now becoming visible to them. Horus waved their weapons down.

‘An imprint left over from days past,’ he said. ‘A psychic figment of a shared consciousness.’

The ghost of his father walked over the surface of the lake, wordlessly repeating whatever psycho-cognitive alchemy he had wrought to reshape the pathways in the minds of his sons.

‘This is where I forgot Molech,’ said Horus. ‘Maybe here is where I will remember it.’

Aximand raised his bolter again, aiming it at the numinous being on the water. ‘You said that thing is an echo? A psychic imprint?’

‘Yes,’ said Horus.

‘Then why is it boiling the lake?’

The chirurgeon’s metallic fingers trembled as they applied yet another flesh-graft to Raeven’s right arm. The skin from pectorals to wrist was pink and new like a newborn’s. The pain was intense, but Raeven now knew that physical suffering was the easiest pain to endure.

Edoraki Hakon’s death meant the task of keeping the thousands of soldiers who’d escaped Avadon alive had fallen to him. Legio Fortidus had won the retreating Imperial forces a chance to properly regroup in the wooded vales of the agri-belt. With luck and a fair wind, they should link with forward elements of Tyana Kourion’s Grand Army of Molech outside Lupercalia in two days.

Coordinating a military retreat was hard enough, but Raeven also had to deal with an ever-growing civilian component. Refugees were streaming in from the north and east. From Larsa, Hvithia, Leosta and Luthre. From every agri-collective, moisture-farm and livestock commercia.

Borne in an armada of groundcars, cargo carriers and whatever motive transport could be found, tens of thousands of terrorised people had been drawn to Raeven’s ragamuffin host.

He’d welcomed the burden, the role so consuming it kept him from dwelling on the loss of his sons. But with the threat of immediate destruction lifted, Raeven’s thoughts turned inwards.

Tears flowed and grief-fuelled rages had seen a dozen aides beaten half to death. A hole had opened inside him, a void that he only now recognised had been filled by his sons.

He’d never known joy to compare to Egelic’s birth, and Osgar’s arrival had been no less wonderful. Even Cyprian cracked a smile, the old bastard finally pleased with something Raeven had done.

Banan had struggled to enter the world. Birth complications had almost killed him and his mother, but the boy had lived, though he had ever been a brooding presence in the feast halls. Hard to like, but with a rebellious streak Raeven couldn’t help but admire. Looking at Banan was like looking in a mirror.

Only Osgar now remained, a boy who’d displayed no aptitude or appetite for knightly ways. Against his better judgement, Raeven had allowed the boy to follow Lyx into the Serpent Cult.

The chirurgeon finished his work and Raevan looked down at the crimson, oxygenated flesh of his arm. He nodded, dismissing the man, who gratefully retreated from Raeven’s silver-skinned pavilion. Other chirurgeons had been less fortunate.

Raeven rose from the folding camp-seat and poured a large goblet of Caeban wine. His movements were stiff, the new flesh and reset bones of his chest still fragile. Banelash had been badly damaged, and the repercussions of the Knight’s hurt were borne by his body.

He swallowed the wine in one gulp to dull the ache in his side. He poured another. The pain in his side dimmed, but he’d need a lot more to dull the pain in his heart.

‘Is that wise?’ said Lyx, sweeping into the tent. She’d arrived from Lupercalia that morning, resplendent in a crimson gown with brass and mother-of-pearl panels.

‘My sons are dead,’ snapped Raeven. ‘And I’m going to have a drink. Lots of drink in fact.’

‘These soldiers are looking to their Imperial commander for leadership,’ said Lyx. ‘How will it look if you tour the camp stumbling around like a drunk.’

‘Tour the camp?’

‘These men and women need to see you,’ said Lyx, moving close and pushing the wine jug back to the table. ‘You need to show them that House Devine stands with them so that they will stand with you when it matters most.’

‘House Devine?’ grunted Raeven. ‘There practically isn’t a House Devine anymore. The bastard killed Egelic and Banan, or didn’t you hear me tell you that when you got here?’

‘I heard you,’ said Lyx.

‘Really? I just wanted to be sure,’ snapped Raeven, turning and throwing his goblet across the pavilion. ‘Because for all it seemed to affect you, I might as well have been talking about a particularly good crap I’d had.’

‘Horus slew them himself?’

‘Don’t say that name!’ roared Raeven, wrapping a hand around Lyx’s neck and squeezing. ‘I don’t want to hear it!’

Lyx fought against him, but he was too strong and too enraged with grief. Her face crumpled and turned a livid shade of purple as he squeezed the life out of her. He’d always thought of her as fundamentally ugly, even if her outward appearance suggested otherwise. She was broken inside, and the thought sent a spasm of loathing through him. He was just as broken as her.

Perhaps they both deserved to die.

Maybe so, but she’d go first.

‘My sons were to be my immortality,’ he said, almost spitting in her face as he pushed her back against the pavilion wall. ‘My legacy was to be the honourable continuance of House Devine, but the bastard Warmaster has put paid to that dream. My sons’ armour rusts on Avadon’s beach, and their bodies lie rotted and unclaimed. Food for scavenger birds.’

He felt something sharp at his groin and looked down to see a hooked naga fang pressed against his inner thigh.

‘I’ll slice your balls off,’ said Lyx, pressing the needle-sharp point hard against his leg. ‘I’ll open your femoral artery from your crotch to your knee. You’ll empty in thirty seconds.’

Raeven grinned and released her, stepping away from his sister-wife with a grunt of amusement. Colour returned to her face and he was sure that the excitement he saw in her eyes was mirrored in his own.

‘Cut my balls off and House Devine really is finished,’ he said.

‘A figure of speech,’ said Lyx, massaging her bruised throat.

‘Anyway, your womb will be as barren as the Tazkhar steppe by now,’ said Raeven as Lyx poured them both a drink.

He shook his head and took the goblet she offered him. ‘We make a pair don’t we, sister dearest?’

‘We are what our mother made us,’ replied Lyx.

He nodded. ‘So much for your talk of turning the tide.’

‘Nothing has changed,’ said Lyx, putting a hand out to stroke the pink flesh of his neck. He flinched at her touch. ‘We still have Osgar, and he knows full well the importance of the continuance of the House name.’

‘Shargali-Shi is more of a father to that boy,’ said Raeven, only now understanding what a mistake it had been to allow him anywhere near the Serpent Cult. ‘And from what I hear, he has no interest in taking just one consort nor becoming father to a child. He won’t be the one to keep the Devine name alive.’

‘He doesn’t have to be a father, so long as he puts a child in the belly of a suitably pliant consort,’ said Lyx. ‘But that’s a talk for when this war is concluded.’

Raeven nodded and accepted more wine. He felt a calming fuzziness at the edges of his perception. Wine and pain-balming chems were a heady mixture. He struggled to remember what they’d been talking about before their lover’s tiff.

‘So do you think I’m still the one whose actions will turn the tide of this war?’

‘If anything, I’m even more certain of it,’ said Lyx.

‘Another vision?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I saw Banelash in the heart of the great battle for Molech. In the shadow of Iron Fist Mountain. The tread of war gods shakes the earth. Flames surround the Knights of Molech. Death and blood breaks upon Banelash in a red tide and you fight like the Stormlord himself.’

Lyx’s eyes misted over, cloudy with psychic cataracts.

‘A battle to end all battles rages around your Knight, yet no blade, no shell, no enemy can lay it low. And when the appointed hour comes, the mightiest god on the field is slain. Its fall is a rallying cry, and all about scream the Devine name!’

The opaqueness of Lyx’s eyes faded and she smiled, as though a great revelation had just been revealed to her.

‘It’s here,’ she said, breathless with excitement.

‘What is?’ said Raeven, as the air turned chill.

‘The White Naga.’

‘It’s here? Now?’

Lyx nodded, turning around as though expecting to see the avatar of the Serpent Cult within Raeven’s pavilion.

‘The blood sacrifice made at Avadon has brought its divine presence into the realms of men,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘The deaths of our sons has earned you the right to speak with it.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In the forest,’ said Lyx.

Raeven snorted at the vagueness of her reply. ‘Can you be more specific? How do I find it?’

Lyx shook her head. ‘Ride Banelash into the forest, and the White Naga will find you.’

It moved faster than anything Horus had ever known.

Faster than an eldar blade-lord, faster than the megarachnids of Murder, faster than thought. Its body was mist and light, sound and fury.

A Justaerin was the first to die, his body split down the middle as though he’d run full tilt into a bandsaw. His body emptied of blood and organs in a heartbeat.

Horus moved before anyone else, slashing his taloned gauntlet at the glittering light. His claws cut empty air and a golden fist slammed into his stomach. Doubled over, he saw Aximand shooting. The Widowmaker hunted for a target.

Noctua was down on one knee, clutching his chest. Abaddon ran to his side, a long-bladed sword held low. Stuttering muzzle flare lit the cavern in strobing bursts. Suit lights swayed and danced. Hard volleys of mass-reactives shattered crystalline growths, blew out fist-sized lumps of calcified stone. The Justaerin moved to interpose themselves between their attacker and the Warmaster.

Noctua fired from his knees. Kibre added his combi-bolters to the sweeping barrage, not aiming, just firing.

They hit nothing.

The cavern was suddenly gloriously illuminated. An angel of fire, with swords of lightning held outstretched. Faceless, remorseless, Horus recognised it for what it was. A sentinel creature, a final psychic trap emplaced by the Emperor to destroy those who sought to unpick the secrets of His past.

Horus could barely fix on the beast.

Its radiance was so fierce, so blinding. Its swords unleashed forking blasts of lightning, and Aximand was hurled across the cavern. His smoking body slammed into a wall. Stone and armour split. Horus knew the impact trauma was enough to break his spine.

Coruscating blue swords lashed out like whips. Abaddon dived to the side, his pauldron sheared clean away. A portion of the First Captain’s shoulder remained inside, and bright blood sheeted his arm. One of the Justaerin took a step towards his downed captain before remembering his place.

The creature turned its gaze upon the Terminator. The warrior staggered. The combi-bolter fell from his grip as he struggled to tear off his helmet. His screams over the vox were agonised. Liquid light writhed in the joints of his armour, spilling out in blistering streams of white-green fire.

Horus shucked his taloned gauntlet, slamming shells into the breech of the inbuilt bolters. He often spoke of the murder-haruspex of Cthonia that led him to the weapon in an arming chamber of a long-dead warlord. That wasn’t entirely accurate, but the truth was for Horus alone. The gauntlet’s baroque craftsmanship was unmatched, and though Horus had been little more than a callow youth at the time, the gauntlet fitted his blood-scabbed hand as though fashioned just for him.

A two metre tongue of flame blazed from the weapon. The recoil was savage, but Urtzi Malevolus had built his armour well and suspensor compensators kept it on target. Scads of light flew from the angel like molten steel. Torn from its body, its essence dimmed, dissolution turning it to vapour in seconds.

It shrieked and the air between it and Horus buckled with concussive force. The last Justaerin flew apart, shattering like an assembly diagram of something vastly complex. His skeleton and internal biology atomised in a flash burn of intense light.

Horus flew back, as though lifted by a hurricane. He came down hard in the water, its freezing temperature ramming the breath from him with an explosive fist. His mouth filled with black water. Throat muscles reacted instantly to seal his lungs and shift breathing to secondary respiratory organs.

He spat black mouthfuls and rose from the water in time to see Abaddon pinned in place by blazing tridents of lightning. Light poured from the First Captain’s mouth. Kibre’s gunfire sprayed the angel of fire, surrounding it in swarms of phosphor embers. Enough mass-reactive shells to put down a bull-grox achieved precisely nothing against the blazing sentinel.

Horus marched from the lake, whips of fire arcing from his talon. Noctua plunged his sword into the angel’s back. The blade melted in an instant and Noctua cried in pain, clutching his ruined hand. Aximand crawled towards the fight, spine cracked, legs useless.

Horus didn’t bother to shoot the angel. He killed the power to his talons with a thought. Its essence was godly and mortal weapons were useless. He reached for his only other option.

The angel spun to face him, releasing Abaddon from its crackling barbs. The First Captain fell to his front, broiled near death by divine fire.

The angel descended on Horus, wings of bright flame erupting from its back. The swords of lightning became elongated claws. Furnace heat blazed from its body.

Horus stepped to meet it.

He swung Worldbreaker in an upward arc, like a hammer thrower from an ancient age. A weapon forged by the Emperor’s own hand, Worldbreaker was a gift from a god. Its killing head buried itself in the flaming body of the angel.

Only one thing could end this creature, and that was the power that had birthed it.

The angel exploded. Streamers of fire arced from its death like blazing promethium. It shrieked as the power binding it to this place was shattered. By the time the Warmaster’s maul had completed its swing, the angel was no more.

Its scream lingered long, echoing throughout the mountain, all across Molech and through uncounted angles of space and time. The embers of its sun-hot core drifted to the cavern floor like grave-bound fireflies.

And with its death, Horus remembered Molech.

He remembered everything.

SIXTEEN Flagship / Exogenesis / Infiltration

Even after everything that had happened, the betrayal, the massacre and all that came later, the sight of the Vengeful Spirit still had the power to take Loken’s breath away. She was monstrous and beautiful, a gilded engine whose only purpose was to destroy.

‘We should have known it would end this way,’ he whispered, as the image of his former flagship shimmered on the slate.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Rassuah.

‘We set out from Terra to make war,’ said Loken. ‘That’s all. Sigismund was right. The war will never be over, but what else should we have expected when we crossed the stars in ships like that?’

‘It was a crusade,’ said Rassuah. ‘And you don’t set out to reclaim the galaxy with kind words and good intentions.’

‘Ezekyle had a similar argument with Lupercal before we reached Xenobia. He wanted to make war with the Interex straight away. The Warmaster told him that the Great Crusade had evolved, that since the human race was no longer on the edge of extinction the nature of the Crusade had to change. We had to change.’

‘Change is hard,’ said Rassuah. ‘Especially for people like us.’

Loken nodded. ‘We were created to fight, to kill, and it’s hard to change what you were born to do. But we were capable of so much more.’

He sighed. ‘Whatever else we might have achieved, we’ll never get the chance. From now on there is only war for us.’

‘It’s all there is for any of us,’ said Rassuah.

They’d translated into Molech’s system space on the very inner edge of the Mandeville point. A risky manoeuvre, but with a ship as fine as Tarnhelm and a pilot of finesse, it was worth the risk.

The approach to Molech was made in near silence, with Tarnhelm’s systems running at their lowest ebb. A brief burst of powerful acceleration during a moment of sunspot activity hurled the stealth ship towards Molech. Momentum would do the rest.

In the three days since, the pathfinders had spent their time in solitary reflection, preparing their wargear and running through individual preparations. For Rubio that involved meditation, for Varren and Severian the obsessive dismantling and reassembly of weaponry. Voitek and Qruze played Regicide every hour, while Callion Zaven honed the monomolecular edge of his hewclaw blade. Alten Nohai spent his time teaching Rama Karayan a form of martial art that looked curiously peaceful. Only Bror Tyrfingr was restless, pacing the deck like a rutting stag in mating season.

Loken spent the time alone, trying to ignore the shadowed suggestion of a hooded figure in the corner of his bunk-alcove. He knew it wasn’t there, that it was just a memory given form, but that didn’t make it go away.

It spoke to him, though he knew the words were all in his mind.

Kill me. When you see me, kill me.

‘She’s been hurt,’ said Qruze, as the wallowing form of the Vengeful Spirit hovered over the table. He pointed to blackened portions of the hull, impact craters along the spinal fortresses and sagging buttresses made molten by concentrated laser fire. ‘Someone made her pay for victory.’

‘It was a scrappy fight,’ said Varren, pointing out the drifting wrecks of numerous light cruisers and orbital platforms. ‘They got up close and bloody.’

The image of the Warmaster’s flagship was being projected by the device Tubal Cayne had brought. A compact logic engine of some kind, around the size of a small ammo crate. Loken had watched the former Iron Warrior run a portion of the device over the Scyllan shipwrights’ plans in Yasu Nagasena’s villa.

Those schemata were now displayed in three-dimensional holographic form, every structural member and compartment rendered in the finest detail. The image flickered as inloads from Tarnhelm’s forward surveyors updated the ship’s appearance from what had been built to what was approaching.

Tubal Cayne made adjustments to the device, zooming in on various parts of the ship with an architect’s precision. Too quick for the rest of them to follow his working, the former Iron Warrior hunted out weaknesses in the structure, gaps in the defences for them to exploit.

‘Anything?’ asked Tyrfingr, tapping his fingers on the table.

‘Ventral spine on the portside looks good,’ said Severian.

‘If you want to die,’ replied Cayne.

‘What?’ said Severian, his voice low and threatening.

‘Look at the internal structure beyond,’ said Cayne, highlighting a section of transverse bracing. ‘The Vengeful Spirit is Gloriana-class, not Circe. We’d pass too close to a main transit arterial. There will be automated defences here, here and here, with warden-sentinels at these junctions.’

‘I could get past them.’

‘But you’re not doing this alone, are you?’

Severian shrugged and sat back. ‘Where would you suggest?’

‘As I told Loken, the lower decks are always the weakest point in most ships’ defences. Just as I suspected, it’s not presented to the planet below.’

‘So?’ asked Varren.

‘You people,’ said Cayne with a shake of his head. ‘So fixated with putting an axe in someone’s head.’

‘I’ll put one in your head soon,’ said Varren.

‘Why? I am simply telling you of a better way to infiltrate our target.’

‘Explain how,’ said Loken.

Cayne zoomed in on the lower decks, to a portion of the hull ravaged by torpedo impacts and broadsides. From what Loken remembered of those sections, Cayne was showing them dormitory spaces and magazine chambers.

‘These areas on a Scylla-pattern Gloriana were designed for menials, gun-crews and whatever lagan has sunk to the ship’s bowels,’ said Cayne. ‘They are not Legion spaces, so it is highly unlikely any repair work has been undertaken.’

‘That one,’ said Rama Karayan, pointing to an impact crater in the shadow of a collapsed deflector array. Almost invisible, even to Cayne’s device, it was a deep gouge in the Vengeful Spirit’s flank. ‘A wound easily large enough allow Tarnhelm entry.’

‘A good choice, Master Karayan,’ said Cayne.

‘Exload that to Rassuah,’ said Loken.

‘I already have,’ replied Cayne.

Rassuah let Cayne’s device and the motion of Tarnhelm guide her, allowing the ship to feel its way through the maze of destroyers, frigates, system monitors and orbital patrol boats. Cayne’s device was plugged into the ship’s avionics panel and was plotting a constantly-updating route.

The traitor fleet was enormous, many hundreds of vessels moored at high anchor. The bigger ships kept themselves geostationary, but didn’t otherwise move. The light cruisers and destroyers were the ones Rassuah needed to worry about. They patrolled the void above Molech, vigilant hunters and guard dogs all in one. Threat auspex lashed orbital space in search of prey. Even if a search sweep passed right over the Tarnhelm, Rassuah didn’t think they’d sniff out the stealthy infiltrator.

But in case they enemy got lucky, she ghosted the Tarnhelm between scads of orbital junk, keeping as many drifting wrecks between her and the hunters as possible.

Just the kind of delicate, hyper-intricate flying only one schooled and augmented by the surgeons of the clade masters could achieve. Even so, a fine sheen of perspiration beaded her brow.

‘You let me know the instant any of those destroyers so much as changes a micron of its course,’ she said.

Cayne nodded, but gave her a look of patronising indulgence.

She didn’t know exactly what his device was, but Cayne asserted it could pick a path through even the most densely layered defences, and so far it hadn’t let them down. Retroactively-emplaced mines, electromagnetic pulsars and passive auspex had been seeded through high orbit, but the device had sniffed every one of them out and provided course corrections to avoid them.

When she’d asked him where it had come from, all he had said was that it was a confection designed by the Lord of Iron in one of his more introspective moments. She’d laughed at that, telling him she hadn’t figured his primarch being one prone to introspection.

He had looked at her strangely and said, ‘The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards solitude.’

Leaving her with an assurance that the device would function perfectly well without him, Cayne returned to the crew spaces and Ares Voitek had taken his place. While Rassuah would pilot the ship, Voitek would crew its weapons. Any significant weapons’ fire would likely announce their presence as surely as a vox-hail, but better to be prepared. Voitek had plugged into the console, his senses meshed with the passive auspex.

‘Servitor-crewed one-shot,’ he said picking up the active surveyors of a torpedo with an implanted servitor to fire it upon detection of a target. ‘Nine hundred kilometres high on your ten.’

‘I see it,’ said Rassuah, angling their course to avoid its arc of coverage.

‘Overlapping sentinel array dead ahead,’ said Voitek.

‘Can you burn out its auspex with a tight-focus volkite beam?’

‘I can. Generating micro-burst solution.’

‘Ares, wait,’ said Rubio, appearing at the hatch behind them, his face lined with effort. ‘Don’t shoot it.’

‘Why not?’ asked Voitek. ‘I have a perfect firing solution.’

‘Destroy it and you will alert our enemies.’

‘I don’t intend to destroy it, simply blind its main auspex.’

‘It’s not the auspex you need to worry about.’

‘We take this one down and we open the largest gap,’ explained Voitek. ‘The only time these things register with the command ship is when they detect something. Its going dark won’t be noticed.’

‘Open fire and you’ll find out just how wrong it’s possible to be,’ said Rubio. ‘There is a corrupt Mechanicum sentience onboard, something analogous to a Thallax, but tasked only with maintaining a link in an auspex chain. Break that chain and the enemy will know of our presence.’

‘We need that gap,’ said Rassuah. ‘Cayne’s toy can only find a way to the Vengeful Spirit if there’s a gap.’

Rubio nodded and closed his eyes. ‘I will give you your gap, Rassuah. Be ready, Ares. Shoot when I give the word.’

Witchlight hazed Rubio’s eyelids, and his crystalline hood pulsed with corposant. Rassuah felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Rubio’s eyes darted back and forth, as though following a tortuous maze where one wrong turn meant disaster. His lips parted and a breath of frozen mist sighed out.

‘Shoot,’ he said. ‘Now.’

Rassuah didn’t see anything happen. Voitek’s control of the weapons was via an implanted servo-arm and the volkite beam was too quick and too precise. Even so, she held her breath.

Rubio opened his eyes, but his hood still glowed. His skin was pale and he looked like he’d just eaten something unpleasant.

‘What did you do?’ asked Rassuah.

‘I implanted an image of dead space within its polluted mind,’ said Rubio. ‘Voitek destroyed its eyes, but it is seeing what I want it to see. It believes it is still part of the auspex chain.’

‘How long will it believe that?’

‘As long as I keep the image strong in its consciousness,’ said Rubio, holding firm to the door stanchions. The strain of holding false thoughts in a deviant cyborg’s mind was taking its toll.

Cayne’s logister chimed as it registered a newly opened gap and offered up a path. Rassuah was already easing Tarnhelm through with a twitch of manoeuvring jets.

‘Fly steady, and fly smooth,’ cautioned Rubio.

‘It’s the only way I fly,’ Rassuah assured him.

The Vengeful Spirit loomed ahead of Tarnhelm, a vast edifice of black metal, two hundred kilometres and closing. Rassuah shivered at the sight of the Warmaster’s flagship, as though it were a voracious oceanic predator and they a bleeding morsel swimming heedlessly towards it.

Everything about the Vengeful Spirit was threatening.

Each gun port was a snarling maw, every cloistered broadside array a serrated cluster of gargoyles and daemons. The huge amber eyes on its flanks, none smaller than a hundred metres across, were actively staring at her. The blade of its prow was an assassin’s dagger whose sole purpose was to cut her throat.

Rassuah tried to shake off the creeping horror of the vessel. Throne, it was just a starship! Steel and stone, an engine and a crew. She whispered clade mantras to clear her thoughts. She fixed on Tarnhelm’s displays and controls, but always found her gaze dawn back to the Vengeful Spirit’s hellforged eyes.

The impact crater yawned before Tarnhelm like a gateway to the abyss, a black hole into the unknown.

‘Starships have machine-spirits, yes?’ asked Rassuah.

Voitek looked up from the console, his half-machine face showing puzzlement at the timing of her question.

‘A gift of the Omnissiah, yes,’ he said at last. ‘Every complex machine has one bestowed upon it at the moment of its activation. The larger the machine, the greater the spirit.’

‘So what kind of spirit does this ship have?’

‘You know its name, what do you think?’

‘I think that any ship built to rule over a world of toxins and murder has a spirit best avoided.’

‘And yet we must fly into the heart of this one,’ said Voitek as the Vengeful Spirit swallowed the Tarnhelm whole.

They met on an island at the centre of an artificial lake. Reflected moonlight wavered on its gently rippling surface. The location spoke of earlier times in the Legion’s history, before ritual had replaced tradition. When things had been simpler.

Now it seemed that even that simplicity had been a lie.

A flaming spear rammed into the ground at the centre of the island burned with orange light, bathing the features of those assembled in a ruddy glow of health that belied their true condition.

Abaddon’s skin was waxy with regenerative balms and fresh-grafted skin. Noctua now boasted a clicking augmetic for a right hand, while Aximand was supported by a spinal armature while his shattered vertebrae regrew. Only Falkus Kibre had fought the angel of fire and emerged unscathed.

Maloghurst stood with the Mournival, for once looking like the least wounded among them. Ger Gerradon and his growing band of Luperci also gathered to hear of the invasion’s next phase.

‘We have achieved great things, my sons, but the hardest fight is yet to come,’ began Horus, circling the burning spear and placing a hand over the amber eye at his chest. ‘The enemy mass before us, an unbroken host of men and armour stretching all the way to Iron Fist Mountain. Armies from all across Molech are gathering, but they will not stop us from reaching Lupercalia.’

Aximand stepped from the circle.

Of course it would be Aximand. He would have fought the coming battle a hundred times already in his head. Of all his sons, Little Horus Aximand was the most fastidious, the most conscientious. The one whose thoughts came closest to his own.

‘The numbers do not favour us, my lord,’ said Aximand.

‘Numbers aren’t all that decide a battle,’ pointed out Kibre.

‘I know that, Falkus, but even so, we’re outnumbered nearly fifty to one. Perhaps if the Death Guard fought with us…’

‘Our brothers of the Fourteenth Legion are poised to be the anvil upon which the hammer of the Sons of Horus will break the Imperials,’ said Horus.

‘They’ll be with us for the coming fight?’ said Aximand. ‘We can count on that?’

‘Have you ever known Mortarion’s sloggers to fail?’ said Horus.

Aximand nodded, conceding the point. ‘What are your orders?’

‘Simple. We fight for the living and kill for the dead. Isn’t that what you say?’

‘Something like that,’ grinned Aximand.

‘What’s at Lupercalia?’ asked Abaddon, his voice forever burned down to a scorched rasp. ‘What did you learn from the thing in the cave’s death?’

Horus nodded and said, ‘I remembered why the Emperor came here, what He found and why He didn’t want anyone else to know about it. Lupercalia is where I’ll find what we need to win this long war.’

‘So what did it show you?’ asked Aximand.

‘All in good time,’ said Horus. ‘But, first, I have a question for you, my sons. Do any of you know how life began on Old Earth?’

No one answered, but he hadn’t expected them to; the question too far beyond their usual sphere of interaction.

‘Sir?’ said Maloghurst. ‘What does that have to do with Molech?’

‘Everything,’ said Horus, enjoying this rare moment to be a teacher instead of a warrior. ‘Some of Earth’s scientists believed life began as an accidental chemical reaction deep in the oceans around hydrothermal vents. A chance energy gradient that facilitated the transformation of carbon dioxide and hydrogen into simple amino acids and proto-cells. Others believed life came to Earth by exogenesis, microorganisms entombed deep in the hearts of comets travelling the void.’

Horus walked to the edge of the lake, his warriors parting before him. He knelt and scooped a handful of water in his palm. He turned to face his sons and let it spill between his fingers.

‘But that’s not where you and I came from,’ said Horus. ‘As it turns out, our dream didn’t begin on Earth at all.’

This was a part of the ship Loken had never visited. But even if he had, he doubted he would have recognised it. The Tarnhelm sat canted at a shallow angle on a buckled plate exposed to the void. Landing claws held it tight to the deck, and Rassuah kept the engines at their lowest pitch.

Loken led the pathfinders from the ship and into the cratered section of the Vengeful Spirit, his armour gusting puffs of exhaled breath. Feathers of vapour bled from the heat of his armour’s backpack. The sound of his breathing filled his helmet as he crossed the ruptured chamber.

‘Rassuah, once we’re inside, take Tarnhelm out and follow our progress via the armour locators as best you can,’ said Loken. ‘And keep close to the hull. If this goes bad, we’ll need a quick evacuation.’

‘You want me to keep my hunter’s eye in?’ asked the pilot.

‘As best you can.’

‘Count on it,’ said Rassuah, signing off.

Infinite space stretched behind him, an unending black tapestry of emptiness and points of aeons-old light. Before him was the vessel where he’d known his greatest joys and deepest woes.

He was back on the Vengeful Spirit and didn’t know how to feel.

The best and worst of his memories had been shaped in its arming chambers and companionways. He’d known his greatest friends and seen them become his most terrible enemies. Loken felt like a murderer at the scene of his crime, or a tortured shade revisiting the place of his death.

He’d known that returning here would be difficult, but actually being here was something else entirely.

A hand pressed against his left shoulder guard. He’d proudly borne the heraldic icon of the Sons of Horus there. Now it was a blank space, burnished grey.

‘I know, lad,’ said Iacton Qruze. ‘Strange to return, eh?’

‘We called this ship home for the longest time,’ said Loken. ‘The memories I have…’

Qruze tapped a finger to his temple.

‘Remember her as she was, not the beast they’ve turned her into. Everything began on this vessel and everything will end on it. Mark my words, lad.’

‘It’s just a ship,’ said Severian, moving over the crumpled deck. ‘Steel and stone, an engine and a crew.’

Qruze shook his head and followed Severian.

Loken felt old eyes upon him. He told himself it was just his imagination and set off after Qruze. He followed the rest of the team deeper into the cavern blown in the side of the ship.

By the look of its walls it had once been a dormitory space. Now it was an empty void. Every loose piece of apparatus had been explosively vented into space by whatever weapon had torn through the ship’s hull.

‘Transverse impact,’ said Ares Voitek, pointing out tear lines and direction of blast shear. ‘This was a lucky hit, a torpedo brought down by point-defence guns and spiralling away.’

‘I wonder if it felt lucky to the people inside,’ said Altan Nohai. ‘Lucky or not, they still died.’

‘They were traitors,’ said Varren, pushing past. ‘How does it matter how they died? They died, that’s enough.’

‘They died screaming,’ said Rubio, a hand pressed to the side of his helmet. ‘And they’d been screaming for a very long time.’

The pathfinders spread out, moving to where the nearest interior bulkhead was still intact. Voitek moved across the wall, his servo-arms tapping and clicking along the bulkhead as though searching for something.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘There is atmosphere on the other side. Cayne?’

‘Setting up now,’ said Cayne.

He placed the same device he’d used to thread the maze of seeded defences surrounding the Vengeful Spirit at Voitek’s feet. A detachable wand connected via a coiled cable snapped out and he panned the wand up and down.

‘You are correct, Master Voitek,’ he said, consulting a softly glowing slate on his device. ‘A passageway, sealed at one end by debris. The shipwright’s plans indicate there is a way through in the other direction, a sub-transit that leads up to an ammunition runnel-path for a lower gun deck.’

‘Will it get us deeper into the ship?’ asked Loken.

‘I already said it would,’ said Cayne. ‘Aren’t you familiar with the layout of sub-decks on the gunnery levels?’

‘No, not particularly.’

Cayne shook his head as he packed up his device and slotted the wand back home. ‘You Luna Wolves, it’s a wonder you were able to find your way around at all.’

Severian drew his combat blade. ‘I can kill him if you want,’ he offered.

‘Maybe later,’ said Loken.

Severian shrugged and leaned forward to scratch a symbol onto the wall, an angular rune of vertical and crosswise lines.

‘You know futharc?’ said Bror Tyrfingr, looking over Severian’s shoulder. ‘How do you know futharc?’

‘What’s futharc?’ asked Loken.

‘Battle sigils,’ said Severian. ‘Scouts of the Space Wolves – sorry, the Vlka Fenryka – use them to guide follow-on forces through void-hulks and the like. Each symbol gives the main host information about what’s ahead, the best routes to take. That sort of thing.’

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ said Bror Tyrfingr.

‘The Twenty-Fifth Company served with your lot more than once,’ said Severian, finishing his script. ‘A wolf named Svessl taught it to me.’

‘Something he’ll regret if I ever see him,’ grunted Bror.

Qruze and Rama Karayan moved past Bror and Severian. They began unfolding a blocky series of struts and portable generators from a series of narrow crates that might once have contained rockets for a missile launcher.

This was Karayan’s area of expertise, and he quickly set up what looked like a framed template of a door. With Voitek’s assistance, Karayan hooked his construction to a generator and wound a crank until a gem-light on its side turned green.

Karayan pressed a snap-covered activation switch. A shimmer of liquid energy bloomed around the frame’s inner edges, spreading until it filled the enclosed space like the surface of a soap bubble. It rippled, filmy with rainbow colours.

‘Integrity field established,’ said Karayan. ‘Safe to breach.’

Voitek nodded and his servo-arms reached through the field to grip projections on the bulkhead.

‘Breaching now,’ said Karayan as precision melta-cutters on the back of the frame burned with short-lived, but ferocious intensity. They sliced through the bulkhead instantaneously, and Ares Voitek yanked the cut slab of metal back through the integrity field.

‘We’re in,’ said Varren.

Shock greeted the Warmaster’s pronouncement. Disbelief and confusion. Aximand felt the ground beneath him turn to shifting sand at the truth of the Warmaster’s words.

‘Don’t you feel it, my sons?’ continued Horus. ‘Don’t you feel how special Molech is? How singular among all the worlds we have won it is?’

Aximand found himself nodding, and saw he wasn’t the only one.

Lupercal walked in a circle, jabbing a fist into his palm with every sentence.

‘At the dawn of the great diaspora, the Emperor travelled here in humble guise and found the gateway to a realm of immortal gods. He offered them things only a god-in-waiting could offer, and they trusted Him. They gave Him a measure of their power, and with that power He wrought the science to unlock the mysteries of creation.’

Horus was radiant as he spoke, as though he had already ascended to a divine plane of reality.

‘But the Emperor had no intention of honouring His debt to the gods. He turned on them, taking their gifts and blending them with His genecraft to give birth to demigods. The Emperor condemns the warp as unnatural, but only so no other dares wield it. The blood of the immaterial realm flows in my veins. It flows in all our veins, for as I am the Emperor’s son, you are the Sons of Horus, and the secret of our genesis was unlocked upon Molech. The gateway to that power is in Lupercalia, far beneath the mountain rock. Sealed away from the light by a jealous god who knew that someday one of His sons would seek to surpass His deeds.’

And finally Aximand understood why they had come here, why they had expended such resources and defied all military logic to follow in the footsteps of a god.

This would be the moment they rose to challenge the Emperor with the very weapons He had kept for Himself.

This was to be the apotheosis of them all.

Karayan and Severian led the way, moving into the tangled mess of the corridor beyond the integrity field. Loken and Qruze went next, followed by the others in quick succession. The corridor was dark and cluttered with smashed metal. Only the faint glow of helmet lenses and the occasional spark from fusing machinery lit the way. Debris littered the deck. Ruptured pipes drizzled the air with moisture and vapour.

Loken’s auto-senses tasted it as the stagnant water in a bleak mountain tarn. He heard static like a rasp drawn over stone. Whispers lingered.

The Seven Neverborn. The Whisperheads. Samus. Samus is here…

Loken shook his head to clear the unbidden thought, but it was lodged like a splinter worming its way deeper into his flesh. He saw Rubio reach out a steadying hand to the wall, then flinch as though it were red hot.

Loken focused on Callion Zaven’s back, imagining how it would look blown open with a mass-reactive or chewed up by a chainsword. He wondered if Zaven’s death scream would echo with perfect pitch as he died.

‘Loken?’ said Altan Nohai. ‘Is something wrong? Your heart-rate is elevated.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Loken, the image of murder lingering like the taste of blood. ‘This place, it’s hard being back.’

If the Apothecary heard the lie, he gave no sign. Loken pressed on, hearing the soft breath at his shoulder that he couldn’t possibly be hearing.

They moved down the corridor, reaching a junction of dripping echoes and tangled cabling hanging from the ceiling spaces. Blue sparks spat from a crumpled junction box. An Eye of Horus had been crudely painted on the wall in white. Drip lines made it look as though it was weeping milky tears.

‘Cayne, which way?’

‘As I said, straight on and up the stairs at the end.’

Severian was already moving, bolter pulled in tight. It looked as though his body was utterly still from the waist up. The barrel of his weapon never wavered, never so much as drifted a millimetre from his eyeline.

Moving silently in power armour was a trick only a few could manage, but Severian and Karayan elevated it to an art form. If anything, Rama Karayan moved with even less apparent effort than Severian, mirroring his path as they pushed ahead.

Loken felt clumsy in comparison, every echo of his footfalls sounding like the stomping tread of a Dreadnought. He could see that the others felt the same way.

The scrape of a blade behind him set Loken’s teeth on edge, like an Apothecary’s saw grinding through bone. In deference to Bror Tyrfingr’s displeasure, Severian left the marking of their path to the warrior of the Rout. It would be his gene-sire making this future assault, and the symmetry was pleasing.

Iron stairs were just where Cayne had said they would be, and the pathfinders climbed to one of the ventral gun decks. The top opened into a high-ceilinged chamber of acoustic baffles that sagged from the walls in wadded lumps and filled the air with drifting particulates. Another Eye of Horus on the wall. Loken reached out to touch it. The paint was still wet.

Shielded from the guns’ pressurised venting of superheated propellant by heavy mantlet shutters, the ammunition runnel-path was a sunken roadway ten metres wide behind the ranked-up guns. In battle, a constant stream of flatbed gurneys would ride the rails, distributing shells to the macro-cannon batteries and hauling discarded casings to the smelters.

The guns were silent, but chains rattled in enormous windlasses and the rumble of magazine elevators set the air vibrating. The sour smell Loken had tasted earlier returned, stronger this time. The voices scratching at the edge of hearing like animals left out in the rain became clearer.

‘What is that?’ said Zaven.

‘You hear it?’ asked Loken.

‘Of course, it’s like a part-tuned vox in another room,’ said Zaven. ‘It keeps saying the same thing over and over.’

‘What are you hearing?’ asked Rubio urgently.

‘I don’t know exactly,’ said Zaven. ‘It’s gibberish. Maelsha’eil Atherakhia, whatever that means.’

‘No, it’s not words at all,’ said Varren. ‘It’s screaming. Or maybe someone’s trying to chop a chainaxe through adamantium.’

‘That’s what you hear?’ said Tubal Cayne. ‘Getting hit on the head all those times must have damaged the aural comprehension centres of your brain.’

Rubio put himself between Cayne and Varren. His psychic hood flickered with light, though none of it was of his doing.

‘What do you hear?’ demanded Rubio.

‘The noise of a gun deck,’ said Cayne. ‘What else would I hear?’

Rubio nodded and said, ‘Be thankful you are a man of pure reason, Tubal Cayne.’

‘What’s going on, Rubio?’ said Loken.

The psyker turned around, addressing them all. ‘Whatever you think you’re hearing, it’s not real. Low-level psychic energy is simmering beneath the surface. It’s like background radiation, but within the mind.’

‘Is it dangerous?’ said Nohai. ‘I’m showing elevated adrenal levels and combat responses in every single one of you.’

‘Because he just told us we’re under the effect of maleficarum!’ hissed Bror Tyrfingr, baring his canines.

Macer Varren unhooked his axe, finger hovering over the activation stud. The noise of its chained teeth would be heard for hundreds of metres in all directions.

Rubio’s fists clenched and ghostlights danced in the crystalline matrix of his hood. The whispering in Loken’s helmet drifted away, as if carried on a stiff breeze. Soon it was gone, leaving only the percussive hammering of the gun deck. He let out a breath.

‘What are you doing?’ Tyrfingr asked Rubio.

‘Shielding you all from the psychic bleed-off that permeates this ship,’ said the psyker, and Loken heard the strain in his voice. ‘Everything you hear from now on will be the truth.’

The thought gave Loken no comfort.

SEVENTEEN Beasts of Molech / Mission-critical / No perfection without imperfection

The horizon had been burning for days. Jungle fires were nothing new, but in all his life, Lord Balmorn Donar hadn’t seen anything to match the scale of this conflagration. Worse, the leading edge of the blazing jungle was no more than a day away at best.

‘Is it the Death Guard?’ asked Robard, marching his Knight onto the wall to join his father. The leg of Robard’s Knight had been repaired, but it was a patch-job by second-rate apprentices. With the main axis of enemy advance coming from the north, the Preceptor Line had been stripped of its Mechanicum adepts and most of its Sacristans. Every one of them had been seconded to Iron Fist Mountain to service the God-Machines of Legio Crucius.

‘It can’t be the Death Guard,’ he said. ‘It can’t be anyone. Even the most potent fire-throwers, chem-flayers or rad-bombs would take months or years to cut a viable path without destroying your own army.’

‘Then what is it?’

Lord Donar took his time before answering. His sensorium rendered the sky as a flat black smudge, but sometimes – just for a fraction of a second – it broke apart into buzzing static, like an unimaginably vast swarm of flies.

‘I don’t know, boy,’ he said at last, ‘but I’m damn sure it isn’t a fire.’

‘My thermal auspex says otherwise,’ said Robard. ‘So do the wall guns.’

‘Aye, but the readings are spiking hard then dying away almost to nothing before repeating the cycle,’ pointed out Lord Donar. ‘I’m not a bloody expert, but even I know fires don’t behave like that. I don’t know anything that behaves like that.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘What we always do, boy,’ said Lord Donar. ‘We hold the Line.’

The beast packs hit the wall an hour later.

The azhdarchid came first. The fleetest of the great beasts, they raced ahead of the black tide engulfing the jungle. Their long necks were scaled and feathered, their crocodilian beaks stretched and snapping in animal panic.

The wall guns opened up when they came within a thousand metres of the Preceptor Line. The noise was tremendous, even encased within the armour of a Knight. Lord Donar filtered out their cries and watched the flocks charge through a streaming hurricane of rotor cannon fire. Heedless of the carnage, the loping, flightless birds screamed as the shells cut them down without mercy.

At six hundred metres, the seven Knights of House Donar opened fire. Battle cannon shells left five metre craters and flying, disassembled bodies in their wake. Stubber cannons carved bloody trenches through the horde. Scores fell, trampled to pulp by those behind them. The killing ground was a quagmire of blood-soaked earth and unrecognisable meat. The air misted red, tasted of metal shavings.

Xenosmilus packs came next, hundreds of the monstrous quadrupeds charging for the wall in snarling desperation. The guns pulped them. Flesh and bone shredded in thousands of bloody explosions. Basilisks and Medusa of the Kapikulu Iron Brigade lobbed shells over the wall with their gun barrels at maximum elevation.

Seismic shock waves and pulverising overpressure from close-range detonations shook the wall and the facing stonework split with sharp cracks. Entire swathes of the Preceptor Line visibly sagged.

Massacre wasn’t a big enough word to encompass the slaughter, but the rampaging flocks soon found gaps where the Preceptor Line’s wall guns were non-functional. Too close for the artillery to engage, streams of the predator beasts surged towards the wall.

‘With me!’ shouted Lord Donar, striding to cover the gaps. He rolled his shoulders, and the Knight responded. Weapons charged, ammo-hoppers engaged. Solid slugs rammed into breeches. Targeting icons snapped into focus. Too many to choose from. Too many targets to miss. Lord Donar felt the Knight’s spirit and all its previous pilots’ thrill at the nearness of death.

Other nobles gave names to their Knights, but to House Donar it was the man inside that counted. A machine might have glorious history, but pair it with a below-par warrior and no amount of glory would matter.

Lord Donar counted at least two hundred azhdarchid, twice that many xenosmilus. More beasts than he’d seen in his life. The snapping, hooting, cawing packs were actually trying to claw and bite their way through the wall. What was behind them that could be so bad as to drive them to annihilate themselves like this?

A black miasma oozed from the tree line, a bank of questing smoke. All the world’s insect life come to watch the killing.

No time to ponder, there was fighting to be done.

The azhdarchid were trapped at the base of the wall, screeching and battering themselves to destruction at its corpse-heaped base. The xenosmilus packs were climbing the wall like besiegers, iron-hard claws digging into the crumbling, cracking stonework and hauling their enormous bodies up its angled facade.

Lord Donar picked out a milling pack at the base of the wall and unleashed a one-two punch from his battle cannon mount. Twin explosions mushroomed. Mangled bodies tumbled through the air, burned unrecognisable. His stub-cannon raked side to side, snatching roaring beasts from the wall. Corpses slithered downward to join the ever-growing heap of dead animals at its base.

A turret to his right blew out as a pair of imperfect shells exploded prematurely. The shattered oblong of blackened metal tumbled down the wall in flames. More turrets were falling silent as their ammo reserves ran dry.

‘Cover the gaps!’ ordered Lord Donar. ‘Robard! You take it.’

His son’s Knight strode out to the crumbled portion of the wall where the smoking base of the turret still sat. Bracing one leg on the wall, Robard leaned out and stabbed his thermal lance into the hordes. A screech of magma-hot air exploded among the azhdarchid, vaporising at least nine of them. His stubber flensed the wall.

But for every dozen beasts they killed, twice that came behind them. A never-ending stream of monsters was abandoning the disintegrating jungle. Death at the hands of Imperial guns was preferable to facing what had driven them from their lairs. The black miasma was dissolving the thick-boled trees, reducing them to decayed mulch.

The xenosmilus were on the ramparts. Their heavy paws were bloody, their claws all but torn out by the climb. Lord Donar decapitated a beast with a single shot.

‘Too close for battle cannon!’ shouted Robard.

‘Perfect for reaper work!’ answered Lord Donar, striding his machine over to the thickest concentration of beasts surging onto the battlements.

His reaper blade roared to life, six metres of razor-toothed chainsaw. The first beasts over the wall were cut in half with a single sweep. Dismembered corpses were hurled twenty metres by the blade’s spinning teeth. A return stroke tore broken merlons from the wall. Lord Donar could fight like this all day. Let every beast of the jungle come. He would kill them all.

The Knights roved the wallhead. Stubbers fired dry or until their barrels grew too hot to shoot. Reaper blades cut down anything that reached the wall. The killing was mechanical. Death delivered by machine to animal like robot slaughtermen in an abattoir.

Robard’s reaper blade was clogged with bone and annealed flesh, so he used his thermal lance as a club. His mass was a weapon too, crushing foes beneath clawed feet. He was alone. And surrounded.

But the beasts pushing past him didn’t turn and attack his vulnerable rear. They dropped to the esplanade, running pell-mell to put as much distance between them and the wall. Squads of Devsirmes opened fire on them, but only a handful of beasts were brought down.

Lord Donar turned his Knight around in time to see the blackened, rotting edges of the jungle smashed apart as the mallahgra arrived. The simian giants bounded towards the wall in long, fist-dragging leaps. Their beetle-like heads were lowered like battering rams.

‘Luthias, Urbano, the gate! Now!’ ordered Lord Donar. ‘Robard, the wall is yours, don’t lose it, boy!’

The two named Knights turned from the hewing at the ramparts and followed their lord.

A pair of xenosmilus vaulted onto Urbano’s back and fouled the workings of his reaper blade long enough for another six to gain the walls and drag him down. Weapons sill firing, Urbano was pulled over the rampart. Lord Donar and Luthias strode through the fighting towards the gate.

The Kapikulu’s few remaining Malcadors assumed dug-in firing positions either side of the gateway. Weapon teams of Belgar Devsirmes occupied elevated sangars and sandbagged pillboxes.

Small-arms fire stabbed at the walls. Las-rounds, missiles and heavy bolters. Inconsequential compared to the Knights’ weapons.

Lord Donar and Luthias reached the gate just as the first mallahgra hit. The metal deformed, then deformed again and again. One after another, the mallahgra combined their superior mass to smash the gate from its mounting though it must surely have shattered the bones in their shoulders and necks. Hinges the size of Earthshaker cannon barrels tore from their mountings as the gate finally gave in to the pressure.

A tide of grey-furred giants rammed through the gate, all muscle, fangs and fury. Lord Donar shot the skulls from the first two with a burst of stubber shells. Luthias vaporised the three behind them with his thermal lance. The Malcadors shredded flesh and turned the gateway into a solid volume of gore.

Lord Donar fired until his stubber burned through his reserve ammo-hoppers. He’d seen Tyrae’s icon go dark. His death went unwitnessed and with another Knight’s loss, more and more of the beasts were gaining the ramparts.

The battlements were lost. A tide of rampaging monsters was spilling over the wall.

Luthias died as a pair of rearing mallahgra smashed open his carapace and cut him in half with razored stumps of claws. Lord Donar waited for them to turn on him, but the gigantic creatures simply kept on going, pounding away from the wall.

Only then did Lord Donar notice what he should have seen from the beginning of this assault. The beasts were not the danger. They weren’t attacking the Preceptor Line as a military force, they were attacking because it was in their way. He should have opened the damn gate long ago.

‘All forces, stand down,’ ordered Lord Donar. ‘Get out of their way. House Donar, to me!’

It went against the grain to allow beasts to go unmolested, but to fight here was to die. Something worse was coming, something they had to have numbers to fight. The last four Knights stepped aside, taking what cover they could as an avalanche of jungle creatures swarmed the wall and fled the battlefield.

Soldiers of the Kapikulu and Devsirmes were still dying, crushed in the stampede, but Lord Donar could do nothing for them. He kept his Knight pressed tight to the inner face of the wall. It shamed him that the Preceptor Line had been breached, but there had been no chance of holding it. The beasts would likely take refuge in the mountains caves at the edge of the Tazkhar Steppe. Those that didn’t would be eliminated by Abdi Kheda’s Kushite Eastings if they travelled farther west or north.

It took another hour before the tide of jungle creatures was ended. The last beasts were poor specimens indeed, crippled, aged and diseased things. The Devsirmes shot them as they passed, and those shots were mercy kills.

The Preceptor Line was in ruins – the gateway was choked with dead animals and entire sections of the wall were breached from close-range artillery blasts.

Only one scaffold ramp still offered access to the wall, and Lord Donar climbed it warily, hearing every creak of timber and groan of over-stressed metal. The top of the wall was a shattered ruin of broken stumps where protective merlons had once offered protection. Its entire complement of turrets had been destroyed, or were without ammunition.

Straight away, Lord Donar saw none of that would matter.

The Kushite jungle was gone, wiped out entirely.

Six hundred million hectares of lush vegetation were now an unending morass of necrotic black ooze. Lord Donar knew only one weapon that could comprehensively destroy life with such speed.

The black miasma at the edge of what had once been a jungle of incomparable depth and fecundity began dissipating like night before the dawn. His sensorium broke up into buzzing static as what looked like a trillion flies lifted from the ocean of decay beyond the walls.

Lord Donar punched the canopy release and let the segmented hood of his Knight fold back into its carapace. The stench hit him first, a paralysing reek of spoiled meat, dung and polluted earth.

As the miasma continued to lift, Lord Donar saw an army of invasion grinding its way through the decaying remains of the jungle. Enormous fuel tankers bearing the golden heraldry of the Ophir promethium guilds stretched to the horizon where striding Titans moved with ponderous steps.

Led by a virtually wrecked Rhino, a host of fighting vehicles and giant artillery pieces threw up great clods of black mud from their tracks as they advanced on the wall. Marching grimly alongside them were thousands of Legion warriors in plate that had once been a pale ivory, but which was now plastered with filth and decaying matter.

At the head of the army was an armoured giant in a matted cloak of scraps and iron. His face was a leering skull gagged by a bronze mouthpiece and he bore a reaper blade of such scale that it seemed possible he had hacked the jungle down single-handedly.

Lord Donar saw scores of monstrous culverins and wide-mawed artillery pieces fed enormous breacher shells. His heart hardened as he turned his Knight about and made his way from the wall.

‘Father?’ said Robard, as Lord Donar reached the ground.

‘Knights of House Donar,’ he said. ‘March with me.’

Lord Balmorn Donar strode through the gate, his Knights quick to follow him through the corpse-choked gateway.

The Knights stood before the impossible army of the Death Guard. Grumbling superheavies took aim at them with Titan-killing weaponry; volcano cannons, plasma blastguns and accelerator cannons. The overkill was ridiculous. Target locks appeared on Lord Donar’s auspex, too many to count.

Enough weaponry to kill a dozen Knight Houses were trained upon them and the wall they had spent their lives defending. Lord Donar’s guns were empty and useless. Only his reaper blade was still viable, and he would match it against the whoreson master of the Death Guard.

‘Only one order left to give,’ said Robard.

‘Charge!’ shouted Lord Donar.

With the lower gun deck marked, the pathfinders moved deeper into the Vengeful Spirit. They kept to the runnel-path, hugging the walls when baying servitors stalked past above. They moved when distant rumbles obscured the sounds of their passing.

From the gun deck they followed Cayne’s directions, moving out into dimly-lit arterials. They threaded a path towards structural hubs where a torpedo or macro-cannon impact would do the most damage and areas where practicable boardings into wide staging areas could be effected. Bror Tyrfingr marked such places in futharc, and Ares Voitek planted hidden locator beacons with encrypted Imperial triggers to guide assault boats and torpedoes.

Loken was ostensibly the leader of the mission, but he moved in a daze, still struck by the incongruity of being aboard the Vengeful Spirit. The lower decks were unfamiliar to him and yet curiously welcoming. Oft-times he would hear a whisper at his shoulder that would direct him without recourse to confirmation from Cayne’s surveyor machine.

He saw more of the graffiti Eye of Horus, and each time Loken saw the paint was still sticky, as though there was someone just ahead of Severian marking their onward route. Like portraits in a gallery, each Eye seemed to follow him, as though the ship itself were silently watching foreign organisms moving within its body.

I see you. I know you…

He wondered if anyone else saw them.

Qruze looked at him strangely, as though aware something wasn’t right. Loken heard the soft sigh of breath, real breath, not the hiss of exhalations through a helmet grille. The breath of an old friend. Rubio was shielding them from the psychic emanations permeating the ship. What then did that make this?

Auditory hallucinations caused by the trauma of Isstvan or a dead friend aiding him? Latent psychosis or wishful thinking?

Garvi…

Loken saw a drifting figure at the junction ahead.

Mechanicum, black robed and hooded with augmetics. Cables trailed from the tech-priest’s spine, and a host of blue-eyed servo-skulls orbited his transparent skull. A retinue of hunched, dwarf servitors followed him, chattering in binaric spurts and burps. The skulls spun to face them. Their eyes flared cherry red.

Rama Karayan dropped and pulled his bolter to his shoulder. Its sight was linked to his visor. The weapon coughed a three-round burst, far softer than any bolter had a right to sound. The lone tech-priest dropped silently, crumpling in on himself like a building undergoing controlled demolition.

Two of his accompanying retinue died in the same burst.

Before the other servitors could react, Severian was on them.

His combat blade stabbed. Once, twice, three times.

The servo-skulls floated above the corpses, held fast by a web of cables and copper wires. The light in their eyes stuttered. Severian sawed through something under the tech-priest’s hood. Oily fluid sprayed and the floating skulls fell to the deck.

He waved the rest of the pathfinders forward.

‘Clear the junction,’ he ordered.

They hauled the bodies out of sight and packed them into a darkened alcove farther down the corridor. Voitek’s servo-arms stripped a panel and loose debris from the roof spaces to conceal them.

‘Gunnery overseer,’ said Varren, pulling back the hood.

Loken didn’t see how he could know that. The corpse’s skull was little more than a gruel-filled bowl of detonated brain matter and machine fragments. A gold vox-grille hung from the flapping lower jaw, and iron teeth fell out as Varren let go.

‘Not like any I’ve seen,’ said Severian.

‘We had ones like this on the Conqueror,’ said Varren, tapping a crude, electrode-spiked implant still attached to a scrap of skull and trailing numerous bare cables into the detritus of its brain.

‘Hardwired with motivational barbs. Deck guns don’t reload as quickly as they ought to? The pain centres of the brain get a jolt. A battery misses its target? Double jolt. Miss again and the brain’s flash-burned to vapour. Gets a warship’s gun-crews highly motivated.’

‘The Luna Wolves never needed such things,’ said Qruze, disgusted.

‘This isn’t a Luna Wolves vessel anymore.’

‘Did those servo-skulls send an alarm signal?’ asked Rubio.

‘That depends on whether Karayan’s shot broke the noospheric link before they could exload a warning,’ said Voitek.

‘Is there any way to know for certain?’ asked Loken, looking up into the silent stare of another painted Eye of Horus.

Voitek tapped the tech-priest’s ruined skull. ‘Not any more.’

‘His absence will soon be noted,’ said Tubal Cayne. ‘Regardless of whether the tech-priest or his skulls sent an alarm or not.’

Qruze shook his head. ‘By the time it’s noticed we’ll be long gone.’

‘Then let’s not waste the time in between,’ said Loken.

The deeper the pathfinders penetrated the Vengeful Spirit, the stronger the sensation of an invisible member of their team grew in Loken’s mind. He paused often, using the guise of checking corners and their back trail to see if he could see their phantom accomplice. He felt no threat from the presence, even as he understood it indicated a deeper malaise within his psyche.

Dark service stairwells brought them onto metal gantries and vaulted chambers hung with distant, flapping things that might have been banners but probably weren’t. Some bore stitched Eyes, and Loken tried not to look at them.

They avoided contact where possible, killing only when necessary. Severian’s combat blade and Karayan’s silenced bolter did most of the work, but Callion Zaven’s hewclaw blade was wetted, and Voitek’s servo-arms permanently closed the throats of many a laggardly deckhand. Those they killed were uniformly human or cyborgised menials. The deep regions of the ship were rarely visited by Legion warriors and the pathfinders made full use of that small advantage.

Time passed slowly, the diurnal cycle that provided the illusion of day and night aboard a starship no longer in place. Hours became days in Vengeful Spirit’s deep spaces. They measured time by the sourceless chants of unseen choirs and the machine noises of pipework and ducts. To Loken, it sounded like the distant parts of the ship whispering to one another, passing messages and exchanging frightful secrets.

Scattered lumen strips, furnace lights and isolated chambers where skeletal inhabitants of the lower decks gathered in islands of flare-light were all that illuminated the lower decks. Bells tolled constantly, klaxons blared, and screeching Mechanicum adepts in tattered black robes set the pace of work for their wretched charges with whips and crackling prods.

‘It’s time we breached the upper decks,’ said Bror Tyrfingr, as Tubal Cayne halted their progress to update his plotter with fresh measurements. ‘We’ve roamed below the waterline long enough.’

‘The higher we go, the more we risk exposure,’ said Qruze.

‘And encountering Legion forces,’ added Karayan.

‘Bring them on,’ said Varren. ‘It’s about time my axe split some traitor skulls.’

‘That axe of yours will be heard all the way to the strategium,’ said Altan Nohai. ‘As soon as the Sons of Horus are aware of our presence, this mission is over.’

‘We’re not here to fight,’ Loken reminded Varren. ‘We’re here to mark the way for the Sixth Legion to assault.’

‘Then it’s time to mark mission-critical targets,’ insisted Bror. ‘Main gun batteries, Legion arming chambers, reactor spaces, command and control nodes. And once we mark them, we move forward. The Wolf King isn’t above a bit of subtlety and misdirection, but he won’t come at the Warmaster from the shadows. He’ll come at him head on, fangs bared.’

After facing Leman Russ across the hnefatafl board, Loken was inclined to agree, but the thought of heading into more familiar spaces within the ship was an unappealing prospect.

‘You’re right, Bror,’ he said. ‘It’s time to show why we were chosen for this mission. We need to mark this vessel’s jugular, ready for the Wolf King to tear out. We’re going higher into the Vengeful Spirit.’

Another vox-interrupt tried to cut across Banelash’s sensorium, but the echoes of its former pilots dissipated it before it could reach him. Just like him, they did not care to hear Tyana Kourion’s demands for him to return to the battle-line.

The Grand Army of Molech was assembling in the hills north of Lupercalia, stretching eastwards from the rugged haunches of the Untar Mesas to Iron Fist Mountain. With thousands of armoured fighting vehicles, hundreds of thousands (if not more) soldiers, battery after battery of artillery and two Titan Legions mobilising to fight, the Lord General could surely manage without one Knight.

He’d searched the upland forests for days now, climbing through rugged crags and mossy valleys to find the White Naga. His initial thrill of being on the verge of something miraculous had faded almost as soon as he’d left camp. The divine avatar of the Serpent Cult had singularly failed to manifest before him, and his patience was wearing thin.

He’d chosen a direction at random, marching his Knight from camp with purposeful strides. The damage the Warmaster had inflicted was still there, a bone-deep hurt that would never go away, a permanent reminder to rival that of the loss of his sons. Being connected to Banelash via his spinal implants made their loss seem remote, disconnected, as though it had happened to someone else.

Tragic, yes, but ultimately bearable.

That remoteness would end as soon as he disconnected, and he entertained the wild idea of never removing himself from Banelash. Ludicrous, of course. Prolonged connection with the machine-spirit of a Knight filled a pilot’s brain with foreign memories, unrelated data junk and sensory phantoms.

To remain within a Knight for too long was to embrace madness.

As crazed as it was, the idea had taken root and could not be dislodged.

Raeven’s mouth was parched and his stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten before leaving camp, and wine soured in his belly. Recyc-systems filtering his waste were allowing him to continue without food and water, but he could already feel toxins, both physical and mental, building throughout his body.

If the White Naga didn’t reveal itself soon, he wouldn’t survive to return with any divine boon. The thought of dying alone in the deep forest amused him momentarily. How ludicrous an end it would be for a Knight of Molech. He would become a statue of iron and desiccated flesh, standing alone and forgotten for thousands of years. He imagined debased savages of a future epoch discovering him and coming to worship at his corpse as though Banelash were an ancient pagan altar.

He blinked as the sensorium flickered and stretched like poured syrup. The images it displayed were not externally rendered by machines, rather they were mental projections, controlled stimulations of his synapses to trigger a visual representation of the auspex returns.

Then Raeven saw it wasn’t the sensorium that was faulty.

It was the landscape that was twisting.

Normally the display was a monochromatic thing, stripped bare for clarity in battle, but now it erupted with sensation. The trees blossomed with new life and incredible growth. Flowers sprouted where he walked and their perfume was intoxicating and almost unbearably sweet. Colours with no name and sounds hitherto unheard assailed him. Raeven saw circulatory systems in every blade of grass, unblinking eyes on every leaf, a history of the world in every rock.

Every colour, every surface became unbearably sharp, excruciatingly real and swollen with vital potential. It was too much, a sensory overload that threatened to burn out the delicate connections within his mind. Raeven gasped, nausea stabbing his gut. If it hadn’t already been empty, he would have puked himself inside out.

Banelash staggered in response, an iron giant lumbering like a drunk. The Knight’s bulk smashed writhing branches apart and dislodged rippling boulders. Its energy whip lashed out, felling centuries old trees that shrieked as they fell. The rain-slick ground offered no purchase, as though it wanted him to fall, and Raeven fought to keep the Knight upright.

To fall so far from help would be death, but the thought no longer amused him. He wrestled with the controls as the overwhelming ferocity of the world’s hyper-reality cut him open and pared him back to the bone.

‘Too much,’ he screamed. ‘It’s too much!’

‘There is no such thing as too much!’

The power of the voice stripped the blinking leaves from the trees for a hundred metres and set Raeven’s mind afire like an aneurysm. The armourglass canopy of his Knight cracked and he screamed as blood filled his right eye.

He finally righted his staggering Knight.

And saw the divine.

‘The White Naga,’ he gasped.

‘One of my many names. I am the Illuminator, the beginning and the end, the ontological ideal of perfection.’

Without conscious thought, Banelash knelt before the godly being. The White Naga shimmered with light, a sun come to Molech in corporeal form with a heat so savage it would burn him from existence in the blink of an eye.

‘Here,’ wept Raeven. ‘Throne, you’re here…’

Amorphous clouds of scented musk attended it, together with the sound of mirrors shattering in their unworthiness to reflect such beauty. Its manifestation was wondrous and inconstant, a tapestry of writhing, winged serpentine imagery.

‘Your blood sacrifice brings me to Molech, Raeven Devine.’

Its many arms reached for him, beckoning him. Raeven wanted nothing more than to bring his Knight to its feet and lose himself in its embrace. To surrender to beauty was no surrender at all.

A last shred of human instinct restrained him, screaming that to submit to the White Naga would bind him to its service forever.

And would that be so bad…?

Its every incarnation was burned and reborn, as though it ever sought to reach a pinnacle of perfection. A starburst of ice-white hair haloed eyes the colour of indulgence.

Raeven wanted to speak, but what could he say to a god that would not be trite?

‘Speak and do as you wish, Raeven Devine. That is the whole of the law. You are free to throw off the shackles of those who chain your will and confine your desires. All must be free to indulge in every excess! Wring every moment of sensation and you draw closer to perfection.’

Raeven struggled to follow its words, each one a hammer blow against the inside of his skull.

‘Mankind was once free, Raeven, well-born and living with honour. That freedom intrinsically lead to virtuous action, but the Imperium has shackled your species. And so constrained, your noble natures fight to remove that servitude, because men will always desire what they are denied.’

The message was so simple, so pure and clear that it amazed him he hadn’t grasped it on his own. The barbed anger he’d felt before the Ritual of Becoming twisted in his gut, a powerful knot of painful disgust that misted his eyes with tears.

And as though filtering lenses had dropped over his eyes, Raeven saw through his tears to what lay beyond the White Naga’s veil.

Bloated and serpentine, it was no creature of the divine, but a hideous monster straight from the ancient bestiaries. A loathsome snake of iridescent scales and draconic wings, grasping arms and a grotesque face at once beautiful and repugnant.

‘What are you?’ cried Raeven.

It heard his horror and its glamours dug their claws deeper in his mind. The image of a godlike avatar warred with the bestial thing he knew it to be.

‘I am your god, your deliverer. I will lead you to glory!’

‘No,’ said Raeven, feeling the White Naga’s powerful will wrapping around his own like a constrictor. He held to the barbed hatred in his heart, and the White Naga cried out as they tore at its presence.

‘You don’t offer freedom,’ said Raeven, forcing each word out through the narcotic musk surrounding the creature. ‘You offer enslavement. It’s a lie, a damned, filthy lie!’

The musk surged with intoxicating power, and Raeven felt the monster’s rage like a physical force. It battered him towards submission. Whatever the White Naga truly was, it reared up on its coiled serpent body to face him through Banelash’s canopy.

‘What is more foolish than denying the perfection of an all-embracing being? There can be no creed, no leader, no faith that is as harmonious, perfect and finished in every respect as I. What madness would cause you to reject me?’

Raeven felt the walls of his resistance crumbling and fought to hold onto the heart of his sense of self. The image of the monster was slowly overlaid with the beauty of a god. Desperate survival instincts threw up a fragment of the tedious classes on aesthetics he’d been forced to endure in his youth.

‘There is no such thing in the world as perfection!’ he screamed, dredging his memories for the teachings of his boyhood tutors. ‘If a thing were perfect, it could never improve and so would lack true perfection, which depends on progress. Perfection depends on incompleteness!’

The White Naga’s hold on him slipped. Just for a second, a fraction of a second. It was enough for him to look into its eyes and see the yawning abyss of madness and ego that thought nothing for a single other living being, and cared only that they fall to their knees and adore it.

Raevan clenched his fist and Banelash coiled its energy whip.

With a cry of rage, horror and anguish he swung.

The whip cracked, its photonic length slashing down through the White Naga’s powerfully muscled shoulders. Milky light spurted from the wound, as though the creature was formed from hyper-dense liquid under intense pressure.

A wing crumpled, torn like tissue, and its upper arm spun away like a broken tree branch. The whip tore through the creature’s torso and its anguished screams were those of a god whose most fervent believer has turned against it.

The White Naga – or whatever damned thing it truly was – lurched away from Banelash. Shock twisted its once beautiful features and made it ugly. Worse than ugly, the furthest extreme of loathsomeness wrought into being. Its repellent form fuelled Raeven’s towering sense of injustice.

Raeven shucked his other arm and felt the heat of his thermal lance engage. He rarely employed the lance, its killing power too swift and sure for his liking. But that was exactly what he needed right now. The White Naga surged in anger, its ruined body bleeding radiance from the galaxy of stars in its chest.

One wing hung from its muscular back, and its right side was a crumpled, molten mass of lightning-edged flesh where its arms hung limply at its side.

Raeven burned the thermal lance through its chest.

And ran.

EIGHTEEN Eventyr / Torments / Deaths overdue

Every bump in the road was exquisitely transferred up through the suspension of the Galenus to send jolts of pain into Alivia’s side. Her chest hurt abominably, and the fresh grafts in her chest pulled painfully every time she shifted position on the gurney.

Still, she knew she was lucky to be alive.

Or at least lucky it hadn’t been worse.

‘You need more pain balms?’ asked Noama Calver, the surgeon-captain, seeing her pursed lips.

‘No,’ said Alivia. ‘I’ve slept for altogether too long.’

‘Sure, just let me know if you need any though,’ she said, missing Alivia’s meaning. ‘No need to suffer when there’s a remedy right here.’

‘Trust me, if it gets too bad, you’ll be the first to know.’

‘Promise?’

‘Hope to die,’ said Alivia, crossing her heart with her hand.

Noama smiled with matronly concern. She squeezed Alivia’s arm as though she were her own daughter, which was exactly the emotion Alivia had planted in her mind. Noama Calver had a son serving in an off-world Army regiment and her concern for his wellbeing ranked only slightly higher than the wounded men under her care.

Alivia didn’t like using people this way, especially good people who might have helped her if only she’d asked. Getting to Lupercalia was too important for her – for them – to take any chances that Calver might not have helped.

Kjell had been even easier. A good man, he’d joined the Medicae out of a desire to stay away from the front lines – little realising that medics were often in the thickest fighting without a weapon. The Grand Army of Molech was preparing to meet the Warmaster’s army in open battle, so it had been child’s play to ease his thoughts towards heading south to Lupercalia.

Noama moved down the Galenus, checking on the other wounded they carried. Every one of them ought to be back with their units, but they’d kept quiet when Noama ordered her driver, an impressionable boy named Anson who just wanted to get back to Lupercalia to see a girl called Fiaa, to drive away from the fighting.

Too easy.

Jeph lay stretched out on a gurney farther down the Galenus, snoring like an engine with a busted gear. She smiled at the softening of his features, hating herself for making him care for her so much. She’d had enough of time alone, and there were only so many years a girl could spend on her own before company, any company, was infinitely preferable. She knew she should have left him back in Larsa the minute the starship crashed, but he wouldn’t have lasted another hour without her.

Honestly, back in the day, would you have looked twice at him?

An easy enough question to answer, but it wasn’t that simple.

There’d been complications. Two complications to be exact.

Miska and Vivyen sat playing a board game called mahbusa with a number of ebony and ivory counters. She’d taught it to them a few months back. An old game, one she’d learned in the counting houses of the Hegemon, though she suspected it was older even than that compact city of scribes.

The girls had been suspicious of Alivia at first, and rightly so. She was an intruder in their world. A rival for their father’s affections. But she’d won them over with her games, her kindness and her fantastical stories of Old Earth’s mightiest heroes and its magical ancient myths.

No one told a story quite like Alivia, and the girls had been captivated from the beginning. She hadn’t even needed to manipulate their psyches. And quite without realising it, Alivia found herself cast in the role of a mother. It wasn’t something she’d expected to relish, but there it was. They were good girls; cheeky, but with the charisma and wide eyes to get away with it.

Alivia knew Jeph wasn’t the reason she’d gone back to the hab, it had been for Miska and Vivyen. She’d never even considered being a mother, wasn’t even sure it was possible for someone like her. She’d been told she had greater concerns than individual lives, but when the first impacts hit Larsa, Alivia had understood how foolish she’d been to blindly accept that.

Every part of her mission was compromised by having attachments. She’d broken every rule she’d set herself when she first came to Molech, but didn’t regret the decision to become part of their family. If John could see her now, he’d laugh in her face, calling her a hypocrite and a fraud. He’d be fully justified, but she’d still kick him in the balls for it and call him a coward.

Vivyen looked over at her and smiled.

Yes, definitely worth it.

The girl got up from her box seat and came over to Alivia with a hopeful look in her eye.

‘Who’s winning?’ asked Alivia.

‘Miska, but she’s older, so it’s okay.’

Alivia smiled. Okay. One of Oll’s words. Another thing she’d taught them. They said it in the scholam, where the other children looked strangely at its unusual sound.

‘I can teach you a few moves if you like,’ said Alivia. ‘I was taught by the best. Could give you an edge.’

‘No, it’s okay,’ said Vivyen, with all the earnestness of a twelve-year-old. ‘I do lots of things better than her, so it’s good she has this.’

Alivia hid a smile as she saw Miska make a face behind Vivyen’s back and make a gesture her father wouldn’t approve of.

‘Are you all right?’ said Alivia, as Vivyen climbed onto the gurney. ‘It’s been pretty hard since we left Larsa, eh?’

Vivyen nodded. ‘I’m fine. I didn’t like it when the tanks were shooting at us, but I knew you’d get us out in one piece.’

‘You did?’

‘Yes.’

Alivia smiled. A child’s certainty. Was there anything surer?

‘Will you read me a story?’ asked Vivyen, tapping the gun-case tucked in tight next to Alivia. Even wounded, she hadn’t let herself be parted from it.

‘Of course,’ said Alivia, pressing her thumb to the lock plate and moving it in a way she kept hidden from the girl. She opened the case, feeling over her Ferlach serpenta to the battered storybook she’d taken from the Odense Domkirke library. Some people might say stolen, but Alivia liked to think she’d rescued it. Stories were to be told, not for sitting in an old museum.

The longer she owned the book, the more she wondered about that.

A dog-eared thing, its pages were yellowed and looked to be hundreds of years old. The stories inside were much older, but Alivia had made sure the book would never fall apart, never fade and never lose the old, fusty smell of the library.

Alivia opened the book. She knew every story off by heart and didn’t need to read from the page. The translation wasn’t great, and what she read often didn’t match the words written down. Sometimes it felt like the words changed every time she read it. Not by much, but just enough for her to notice, as though the stories liked to stretch and try new things every once in a while.

But the pictures – woodcuts, she thought – were pretty and the girls liked to ask questions about the strange looking people in them as she read aloud.

Vivyen pulled in close, and Alivia hissed as the synth-skin bandage pulled taut again.

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s okay,’ said Alivia. ‘I’ve had worse.’

Much worse. Like when the guardian angel died, and Noama thought she’d lost me when my heart stopped…

She ran a finger down the list of stories. ‘Which one do you want to hear?’

‘That one,’ said Vivyen, pointing.

‘Good choice,’ said Alivia. ‘Especially now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing, never mind. Now do you want me to read it or do you have any more questions?’

Vivyen shook her head and Alivia began.

‘Once there was a very wicked daemon, and he made a looking-glass which made everything good or beautiful reflected in it seem vile and horrible, while everything worthless and bad looked ten times worse. People who saw their reflections ran screaming from their distorted faces, and the daemon said this was very amusing.

‘And when a pious thought passed through the mind of anyone looking in the mirror it was twisted around in the glass, and the daemon declared that people could now, for the first time, see what the world and mankind were really like. The daemon bore the looking-glass everywhere, till at last there was not a land nor a people who had not been seen through this dark mirror.’

‘Then what did he do?’ asked Vivyen, though she’d heard this story a dozen times or more.

‘The daemon wanted to fly with it up to heaven to trick the angels into looking at his evil mirror.’

‘What’s an angel?’

Alivia hesitated. ‘It’s like a daemon, only it’s good instead of evil. Well, most of the time.’

Vivyen nodded, indicating that Alivia should continue.

‘But the higher the daemon flew the more slippery the glass became. Eventually he could scarcely hold it, and it slipped from his hands. The mirror fell to Earth, where it was broken into millions of pieces.’

Alivia lowered her voice, leaning fractionally closer to Vivyen and giving her words a husky, cold edge.

‘But now the looking-glass caused more unhappiness than ever, for some of the fragments were no larger than a grain of sand and they blew all around the world. When one of these tiny shards flew into a person’s eye, it stuck there unknown to them. From that moment onward they could see only the worst of what they looked upon, for even the smallest fragment retained the same power as the whole mirror. A few people even got a fragment of the looking-glass in their hearts, and this was very terrible, for their hearts became cold like a lump of ice. At the thought of this the wicked daemon laughed till his sides shook. It tickled him so to see the mischief he had done.’

Miska had come over by now, drawn by the rhythmic cadences of Alivia’s voice and the skill of the ancient storyteller. With both girls tucked in next to her, Alivia told the rest of the story, of a young boy named Kai whose eye and heart were pierced by a sliver of the daemon’s looking-glass. And from that moment, he became cruel and heartless, turning on his friends and doing the worst things he could think of to hurt them. Ensnared by a wicked queen of winter, Kai was doomed to an eternity imprisoned upon a throne of ice that slowly drained him of his life.

But the parts they loved the most were the adventures of Kai’s friend, a young girl named Gerda who always seemed to be just about the same age as Miska and Vivyen. Overcoming robbers, witches and traps, she found her way at last to the lair of the winter queen.

‘And Gerda freed Kai with the power of her love and innocence,’ said Alivia. ‘Her tears melted the ice in Kai’s heart and when he saw the terrible things he had done, he wept and washed the sliver of the daemon’s mirror from his eye.’

‘You forgot the bit about the word Kai had to spell,’ said Miska.

‘Ah, yes, mustn’t forget that bit,’ said Alivia. ‘The ice queen had given her oath that if Kai could solve a fiendishly difficult puzzle to spell a special word, then she’d let him leave.’

‘What word was it?’ asked Vivyen.

‘A very important word,’ said Alivia with mock gravitas. ‘A word that still echoes around the world today. All the way from Old Earth to Molech and back again.’

‘Yes, but what is it?’

Alivia flipped to the end of the story and was about to speak the word she’d read a hundred times. In the original language it was Evigheden, but that wasn’t what was on the page now.

‘Liv?’ asked Miska, when she didn’t answer.

‘No, that can’t be right,’ said Alivia.

‘What is it?’ said Vivyen. ‘What’s the word?’

‘Mord,’ said Alivia. ‘It’s Murder.’

The main war tent of the Sons of Horus was hot and humid, like a desert after the rains. Thick rugs of animal fur were spread across the ground, weapon racks lined the billowing fabric walls and a smouldering fire burned low in a central hearth. Like the halls of a plains barbarian chief or one of the Khan’s infrequent audiences, it was bare of the comforts that might be expected of a primarch.

Horus stood at the occidental segment of the firepit, reading from a book bound in human skin. Lorgar claimed that corpses from Isstvan III provided its binding and pages, and, for once, Horus had no reason to doubt him.

Symbolism, that was the word his brother had used when he’d asked why a book already bleeding with horror needed to be bound so unwholesomely. That was something Horus understood, and he had arranged the others sharing the taut angles of his war tent accordingly.

Grael Noctua stood to attention across from him in the oriental aspect of the soul and breath of life. Tall and proud despite the injuries he had suffered on Molech, his augmetic hand was almost fully meshed with his nervous system, but a void still existed where his heart once beat.

Ger Gerradon stood in the septentrional aspect of earth, his porcelain-white doll’s eyes reflecting none of the firelight. Birth, life, death and rebirth were his aspect. Facing the leader of the Luperci in the meridonal position of fire was the floating figure of the Red Angel. Both stared at one another with crackling intensity, immaterial monsters bound to mortal flesh.

One a willing host, the other a willing sacrifice.

The book had enabled Horus to learn much of the Red Angel’s origins on blood-soaked Signus Prime. Just as it had allowed him to pass the rites of summoning to Maloghurst.

The words Horus spoke were not words as such, but harmonics resonating in an alternate plane of existence like musical notes or a key in a lock. Their use reeked of black magic, a term at which Lorgar sneered, but the term fit better than his Colchisian brother knew.

With each couplet, the chains encircling the Red Angel pulled tighter. All but one. Its armour creaked and split still further. Hissing white flame licked at the cracks. The chain encircling its skull melted away, dribbling from its mouth in white-hot rivulets.

‘Is that wise?’ asked Noctua as the Red Angel spat out the last of its binding.

‘Probably not, Grael, but needs must.’

The Red Angel turned its burning eye-sockets upon Horus.

‘I am a weapon, Horus Lupercal, the agonies of a thousand damned souls distilled into a being of purest rage,’ it said. ‘And you keep me bound with chains of cold iron and ancient wards? I hunger to slay, to maim, to wreak havoc on those that once called this shell brother!’

Its words were like hooked barbs drawn through the ear. Anger bled from the daemon, and Horus felt himself touched by its power.

‘You will have your share of blood,’ said Horus.

‘Yes,’ said the Red Angel, sniffing the air and licking its lipless face with a blackened tongue. ‘The enemy host musters before you in numbers uncounted. Millions of hearts to devour, an age of suffering to be wrought upon bones of the dead. A wasteland of corpses shall be the playthings of the letters of blood.’

Noctua turned to Ger Gerradon and said. ‘Are all warp things so ridiculously overwrought?’

Gerradon grinned. ‘Those that serve the lord of murder do enjoy some bloody hyperbole, certainly.’

‘And who do you serve?’ asked Horus.

‘You, my lord,’ said Gerradon. ‘Only you.’

Horus doubted that, but this wasn’t the time for questions of loyalty. He required information, the kind that could only be harvested from beings not of this world.

‘The death of my father’s sentinel in the mountain has revealed many things to me, but there are still things I want to know.’

‘All you need know is that there are enemies whose blood has yet to be shed,’ said the Red Angel. ‘Unleash me! I will bathe in an ocean of blood as deep as the stars.’

‘No,’ said Horus, unsheathing the claws within his talon and turning to stab them through the chest of the Red Angel. ‘I need to know quite a bit more than that, actually.’

The Red Angel screamed, a blast of superheated air that billowed the roof of the war tent. The chains creaked and spat motes of flickering warp energy. Cracks spread over the daemon’s face, as though the flames enveloping it now had license to consume it.

‘I will extinguish you,’ said Horus. ‘Unless you tell me what I want to know. What will I find beneath Lupercalia?’

‘A gateway to the realm beyond dreams and nightmares,’ hissed the unravelling daemon, cracks spreading down its neck and over the plates of its armour. ‘A ruinous realm of madness and death for mortals, the uttermost domain of misrule wherein dwell the gods of the True Pantheon!’

Horus pushed his claws deeper into the Red Angel’s chest.

‘Something a little less vague would be better,’ said Horus.

Despite its agony, the Red Angel laughed, the sound dousing the last flames in the firepit. ‘You seek clarity where none exists, Warmaster. The Empyreal Realm offers no easy definitions, no comprehension and no solidity for mortals. It is an ever-shifting maelstrom of power and vitality. What you seek I cannot give you.’

‘You’re lying,’ said Horus. ‘Tell me how I can follow my father. Tell me of the Obsidian Way that leads to the House of Eyes, the Brass Citadel, the Eternal City and the Arbours of Entropy.’

The Red Angel bared its teeth at Ger Gerradon in a blast of fury. The chains binding its arms creaked. The links stretched.

‘You betray your own kind, Tormaggedon! You name what should not be named!’

Gerradon shrugged. ‘Horus Lupercal is and always was my master, I serve him now. But even I don’t know the things you know.’

‘The Obsidian Way is forbidden to mortals,’ said the Red Angel.

‘Forbidden doesn’t mean impossible,’ said Horus.

‘Just because the faithless Forethinker walked the road of bones does not mean you can follow Him,’ hissed the Red Angel. ‘You are not Him, you can never be Him. You are His bastard son, the aborted get of what He was and will one day be.’

Horus twisted his talons deeper, feeling only a hollow space of scorched organs and ashen flesh within.

‘You cannot end me, mortal!’ cried the daemon. ‘I am a thing of Chaos Eternal, a reaper of blood and souls. I will endure any torments you can devise.’

‘Perhaps you can, but I didn’t devise these torments,’ said Horus, nodding towards the flayed-skin book. ‘Your kind did.’

Horus spoke words of power and the Red Angel screamed as the spreading black veins thickened and stretched. Smoke streamed from its limbs, coming not from its fires, but the dissolution of its very essence.

‘I have your attention now?’ asked Horus, clenching a taloned fist within the Red Angel’s body. ‘I can tear your flames apart and consign every scrap of you to oblivion. Think on that when you next speak.’

The Red Angel sagged against its chains.

‘Speak,’ it hissed. ‘Speak and I will answer.’

‘The Obsidian Way,’ said Horus. ‘How can it be breached?’

‘As with all things,’ snarled the daemon. ‘In blood.’

‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ said Horus.

The Red Angel fell slack in its chains and Horus withdrew the crackling claw from the daemon’s body. Slithering black ichor dripped from the blades and squirmed into the earth around the firepit like burrower worms.

‘Did you get what you needed?’ asked Gerradon.

Horus nodded slowly, flexing his talons. ‘I believe I did, Ger, yes. Though I can’t help thinking I should have got it from you.’

Gerradon shifted uncomfortably, perhaps understanding that being summoned to Lupercal’s war tent was not the honour he might have imagined.

‘I don’t follow, my lord.’

‘Yes you do,’ said Horus. ‘As I understand it, you are brother to the Red Angel. You are both children of Erebus, one birthed on a world of blood, the other on a world of fire.’

‘As in the mortal world, there are hierarchies among the neverborn,’ said Gerradon. ‘To my lasting regret, a being wrought on a daemon world by a dark prince of the warp is more exalted than one raised by a mortal.’

‘Even a mortal as powerful as Erebus?’

‘Erebus is a deluded whelp,’ spat Gerradon. ‘He believes himself anointed, but all he did was open a door.’

‘And that’s the crux of it, isn’t it?’ said Horus, circling Gerradon and letting his talon blades scrape across the Luperci’s armour. ‘You can’t come into our world unless we let you. All the schemes, all the temptations and promises of power, it’s all to get into our world. You need us more than we need you.’

Gerradon squared his shoulders, defiant now.

‘Keep telling yourself that.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me what it knew?’

‘I told you why.’

‘No, you spun a plausible lie,’ said Horus. ‘Now tell me the real answer or I’ll get to the really interesting couplets in that book of horrors.’

Gerradon shrugged. ‘Very well. It was a rival. Now it’s not.’

Horus sheathed his talons, satisfied with Gerradon’s answer. He turned from the daemon-things and approached Noctua, who’d stood as immobile as a statue throughout this process of daemonic interrogation.

‘There’s a lesson for you here in the proper application of power,’ said Horus. ‘But that’s not why I summoned you.’

‘Then why am I here, sir?’ asked Noctua.

‘I have a special task for you, Grael,’ said the Warmaster. ‘You and Ger actually.’

Noctua’s face fell as he understood that his task would keep him from the coming battle. He rallied a moment later.

‘What would you have me do, my lord?’

Horus put a paternal hand on Noctua’s shoulder guard.

‘There are intruders aboard my flagship, Grael.’

‘Intruders?’ said Noctua. ‘Who?’

‘A prodigal son and two faithless cowards who once fought as your brothers,’ said Horus. ‘They lead a rabble of that troublesome Sigillite’s errant fools into the heart of the Vengeful Spirit.’

‘I will find them,’ promised Noctua. ‘And I’ll kill them.’

‘Very good, Grael, but I don’t want them all dead.’

‘You don’t?’

‘Kill the others if they give you trouble,’ said Horus, ‘but I want the prodigal son alive.’

‘Why?’ asked Noctua, forgetting himself for a moment.

‘Because I want him back.’

Iron Fist Mountain dominated the eastern skyline, and farther south, a black smudge on the horizon spoke of distant fires somewhere around the Preceptor Line. A vast assembly of Imperial might – his army – filled the agri-plains north of Lupercalia.

Raeven pushed Banelash forward, staggering as toxins in his blood distorted his perception of the Knight’s sensorium. It swayed and crashed with phantom images of winged serpents, hideous, fanged mouths and eyes that burned with the fury of rejection.

The thought of what he had almost given into made him sick.

Or was it the thought of what he’d given up?

He no longer knew nor cared.

Raeven walked his Knight towards the thousands of armoured vehicles, scores of regiments and entire battalions of artillery below. A thousand shimmering banners guided him in, regimental pennants and company battle flags, muster signs and range-markers.

House banners streamed from the carapaces of assembled nobility: Tazhkar, Kaushik, Indra, Kaska, Mamaragon. Others he didn’t recognise or couldn’t make out. Their Knights dwarfed the Army soldiers, but they were a long way from being the biggest, most destructive killers on the field.

A dozen war engines of Legio Gryphonicus and Legio Crucius strode through designated corridors to take up their battle positions. Mighty. Awe-inspiring.

But all dwarfed by the immovable, man-made mountain at the centre of the line.

An Imperator Titan, Paragon of Terra was a towering fortress of adamantium and granite, a mobile citadel of war raised by long-cherished artifice and forged in blood and prayer. A temple to the Omnissiah and a destroyer god all in one, the Imperator was the central bastion upon which each wing of the army rested.

The black and white of the Legio were the heraldic colours of Princeps Etana Kalonice, whose Mechanicum forebears had piloted the first engines on Ryza.

The heat from its weapons hazed the air, and Raeven blinked away tears of exhaustion.

Connection fatigue made his bones ache, made every part of him ache. Broken glass ground in his joints and the stabbing pain behind his eyes was like something trying to burrow out from the centre of his brain. Fluids recycled around his body many more times than was healthy had kept him alive, but were now poisoning him.

A patrolling squadron of scout Sentinels found Raeven staggering from the tree line overlooking the army. They turned heavy flamers and multi-lasers on him, and he readied his own weapons in response before the proper protocols were issued and returned.

‘Get me to the Sacristans,’ wheezed Raeven.

He lost track of time. Or it slipped away from him.

Either way, he remembered falling from Banelash’s opened carapace, rough hands – metal hands – lifting him down and carrying him to his pavilion.

Lyx was waiting for him, but the hurt look in her eyes only made him smile. He liked hurting her, and couldn’t think why. She asked questions he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. His answers made no sense anyway.

Needles stabbed his flesh. Toxic blood was siphoned from him and fresh litres washed in. Pain balms soothed his ground glass joints, smoothed his rough edges.

Time fractured, moved out of joint. He heard angry voices and chattering machines. He actually felt fluids moving through him, as though he was a great pumping station over the promethium wells at Ophir. Sucking up immense breaths of fuel and spitting it out into the great silos.

The image of himself as a vast pump pleased him.

No, not a pump – an engine. An agent of change that drove the lifeblood of the planet around its myriad systems. Infrastructure as circulatory system.

Yes, that was the metaphor he liked.

Raeven looked down. His arm was dark iron, a pistoning length of machinery thick with grease and hydraulic fluids. Promethium coated his arms and he imagined sitting up as it gushed from his mouth in a flaming geyser. His other arm was a writhing pipe, plunging deep into the ground and gurgling with fluids pumped up from the depths of the planet.

He was connected to Molech’s core…

The enormity of that thought was too much and his stomach rebelled. That one man could be so intimately connected with the inner workings of an entire world was a concept beyond his grasp. His mind plunged into the depths of the planet, streaking faster than light, past its many layers until shattering through the core and emerging, phoenix-like from the other side…

Raeven gasped for air, gulping in swelling lungfuls.

A measure of clarity came with the oxygen.

Lofty metaphors of planetary connection and bodily infrastructure diminished. With every breath, Raeven’s awareness of his surroundings pulled a little more into focus. He mouth tasted of metal and perfume, dry and with a mucus film clinging to the back of his throat.

Raeven was no stranger to mind-expanding narcotics. Shargali-Shi’s venoms had allowed him to travel beyond his skull often enough to recognise the effects of a powerful hallucinogen. He’d had his share of balms too. Hunting the great beasts took a willingness to suffer pain, and Cyprian had beaten an acceptance of pain into him as a child.

The balms he could understand, but hallucinogens?

Why would the Sacristans administer hallucinogens?

‘What did you give me?’ he asked, knowing at least one Sacristan was nearby. Some Medicae staff too most likely from the sound of low voices, shuffling footsteps and the click of machinery.

No one answered.

‘I said, what did you give me?’

‘Naga venom mixed with some potent ergot derivative,’ said a voice that couldn’t possibly be here. Raeven tried to move his head to bring the speaker into his line of sight, but there was something wrong.

‘Can’t move?’

‘No, why is that?’

‘That’ll be the muscle relaxants.’

A hissing, clanking sound came from behind Raeven and he rolled his eyes to see an old man looking down at him. The face he didn’t recognise at first, clean shaven and greasy with healing agents.

But the voice, ah, no mistaking that voice.

Or the hissing, clanking exo-suit encasing his wasted limbs.

‘I’m still hallucinating,’ said Raeven. ‘You can’t be here.’

‘I assure you I am most definitely here,’ said Albard Devine, his one good eye fluttering as though finding it difficult to keep focus. ‘It’s taken forty years, but I’m finally here to take back what’s rightfully mine.’

His stepbrother wore clothes several sizes too large for him. They hung from his bony frame like rags. The laurels of an Imperial commander were pinned to his lapel.

‘You can’t do this, Albard,’ said Raeven. ‘Not now.’

‘If not now, then when?’

‘Listen, you don’t need to do this,’ said Raeven, trying to keep the panic from his voice. ‘We can work something out, yes?’

‘Are you actually trying to bargain for your life?’ laughed Albard; a wheezing, racking cough of a sound. ‘After all you stole from me, all you did to me? Forty years of torture and neglect and you think you’re going to talk your way out of this?’

‘That exo-suit,’ said Raeven, stalling for time. ‘It’s mother’s isn’t it?’

‘Cebella was your mother, not mine.’

‘She’s not going to like that you’re wearing it.’

‘Don’t worry, she doesn’t need it anymore.’

‘You killed her?’ said Raeven, though he’d already come to that conclusion. Death was the only way Cebella Devine would be parted from her exo-suit. But he needed more time; for the Dawn Guard to realise there was a snake in their midst, for Lyx to return.

Someone, anyone.

‘I cut your mother’s throat,’ said Albard, leaning close enough for Raeven to smell his corpse breath. ‘She bled out in my lap. It was almost beautiful in its own way.’

Raeven nodded, and then stopped when he realised what he’d done.

Either Albard didn’t notice or didn’t care that he’d moved, too lost in the reverie of his stepmother’s murder. The muscle relaxants were wearing off. Slowly. Raeven wasn’t going to be wrestling a mallahgra anytime soon, but surely he’d be strong enough to overcome a cripple in an exo-suit?

‘Where’s Lyx?’ asked Raeven. ‘Or did you kill her too?’

‘She’s alive.’

‘Where?’

‘She’s here,’ said Albard, leaning down to adjust the medical table on which Raeven was lying. ‘Trust me, I don’t want her to miss out on what’s going to happen next.’

Someone moved behind Raeven and the table rotated on its central axis, bringing him vertical. A restraint band around his waist kept him from falling flat on his face. A pair of Dawn Guard stood at the entrance to the pavilion, and a gaggle of Sacristans worked at the machines supposedly restoring him to health.

His heart sank at the sight of the armoured soldiers. Their loyalty was enshrined in law to the scion of House Devine, and with Albard abroad from his tower, they were his to command.

The men flanked Lyx, her hands fettered and her eyes wide with incomprehension. A gag filled her mouth and tears streaked her cheeks.

‘What’s the matter, Lyx?’ said Albard, lurching with the unfamiliar gait of the exo-suit. ‘The future not playing out as you planned it? Reality not matching your visions?’

He ripped the gag from her mouth and threw it aside.

She spat in his face. He slapped her, the metal encasing his hand tearing the skin of her cheek. Blood mingled with her tears.

‘Don’t you touch her!’ shouted Raeven.

‘Lyx was my wife before she was yours,’ said Albard. ‘It’s been a long time, but I seem to remember her liking that sort of thing.’

‘Look, you want to be Imperial commander, yes?’ said Raeven. ‘You’re wearing the laurel on your lapel, I see that. Fine, yes, fine, you can be commander, of course you can. You’re the firstborn son of Cyprian Devine. The position’s yours. I give you it, have it.’

‘Shut up, Raeven!’ screamed Lyx. ‘Offer him nothing!’

Raeven ignored her.

‘Be Imperial commander, brother. Lyx and I will leave, you’ll never hear from us. We’ll go south, over the mountains to the Tazkhar steppe, you’ll never see us again.’

Albard listened to the rush of words without expression. Eventually he held up his hand.

‘You’re offering me what’s already mine,’ said Albard. ‘By right of birth and, well, let’s just call it right of arms.’

‘Shut your mouth, Raeven!’ howled Lyx, her face beautiful in her tears and pain. ‘Don’t give him anything! He killed our son!’

‘Ah, yes, didn’t I mention that?’ said Albard.

Every molecule of air left Raeven’s body. As surely as if a pneumatic press had crushed him flat. He couldn’t breathe, his lungs screamed for air. First Egelic and Banan, and now Osgar. Grief warred with anger. Anger crushed grief without mercy.

‘You bastard!’ screamed Raeven. ‘I’ll kill you! I’ll hang your entrails from the Devine Towers. I’ll mount your head on Banelash’s canopy!’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Albard, pressing a hand down on Raeven’s chest. ‘The drugs coursing around your body came from Osgar’s supply. Such a good boy, he always came to visit his poor deranged uncle in his tower. Kept me informed of the comings and goings around Lupercalia, how Shargali-Shi’s devotions to the White Naga were spreading to his cousins in the Knights.’

Seeing Raeven’s horror at the mention of the Serpent Cult’s avatar, Albard grinned. The resemblance to a leering skull was uncanny.

‘He didn’t say that every one of your Knights is a devotee of the Serpent Cult?’ said Albard. ‘Didn’t mention that they were no longer loyal to you, but to the cult? No? Well, you always did see Osgar as the runt of the litter, didn’t you? No taste for fighting, though I’m given to understand he was a hellion in the debauches.’

Raeven tried to struggle against his bindings, but even with the tiny control he’d regained, it wasn’t enough.

‘Osgar even smuggled stimms and the like past Cebella’s Sacristans from time to time. Such a shame I had to kill him. As much as he had a fondness for indulging his insane old uncle, I don’t think he’d forgive me killing both of you. And I think you’ll agree that your deaths are long overdue.’

‘You can’t do this,’ pleaded Lyx. ‘I am the Devine Adoratrice, I saw the future. It can’t end this way! I saw Raeven turn the tide of the war, I saw him!’

‘You’re wrong, Lyx,’ said Albard, ‘Osgar told me you never actually saw Raeven in your visions. You saw Banelash.’

Albard nodded to the Dawn Guard holding Lyx.

The soldier forced her to her knees and placed the barrel of his bolt pistol against her head.

‘I saw–’ Lyx began, but a gunshot abruptly ended her words.

‘No!’ bellowed Raeven as Lyx fell forward with a smoking crater in the back of her skull. ‘Throne damn you, Albard! You didn’t have to do that… no, no, no… you didn’t… please no!’

Albard turned from Lyx’s body, and drew a hunting knife from a leather sheath at his waist.

‘Now it’s your turn, Raeven,’ he said. ‘This won’t be quick, and I promise it will be agonising.’

NINETEEN Casualties of war / The order is given / The Stormlord rides

The transit was thick with bolter shells. They spanked from projecting stanchions and blasted portions of the walls away. Across from Loken, Qruze ducked back into cover and ejected the magazine from his weapon. The barrel drooled smoke and heat.

Qruze slapped a fresh load into the weapon. He shouted to Loken.

‘Get in the damn fight!’

Loken shook his head. This was all wrong.

More shots filled the corridor leading to the armoury. A security detail of Sons of Horus – together with a number of Mechanicum adepts – were inside, hunkered behind a bulwark designed to prevent an enemy from seizing the stockpile of ammunition, weapons and explosives.

A grenade detonated nearby. Fragments of hot iron pinged from his armour. A few embedded. None penetrated.

‘Loken, for Cthonia’s sake, shoot!’ shouted Qruze.

The bolter in his hands felt like a relic dug up by the Conservatory. Something fascinating to look at, but whose purpose was alien and unknown. He could no more bring the gun to bear than he could understand the mechanisms of the machine that crafted it.

‘Loken!’

The pathfinders had encountered the Sons of Horus en route to mark the armoury for a tertiary torpedo strike. Guiding futharc sigils had been scraped into the wall, warning assault teams away, and they’d paused for Tubal Cayne to divine a path towards a nearby ordnance signum array.

Severian and Karayan were scouting potential routes when the Sons of Horus had marched straight into the radial hub.

The watch sector had been Loken’s, but he’d missed them.

He hadn’t heard them or even been aware of their approach.

Lost in contemplation of a painted Eye of Horus on the opposite bulkhead and trying not to listen to the scratch of voices at the periphery of hearing.

The first he’d known of the enemy was when their sergeant called out, demanding identification. Stupid, he should have shot first.

Mutual surprise was all that saved the pathfinders.

Neither force had expected to encounter the other. The fleeting shock was just enough time for Loken to raise the alarm.

The Sons of Horus regrouped down the radial corridor towards the armoury as Altan Nohai and Bror Tyrfingr had opened fire.

‘Contact!’ reported Cayne.

Qruze leaned out and fired a short burst.

‘Come on, Loken,’ he shouted between bursts. ‘I need you with me to go forward!’

The hard bangs of bolter fire and the chugging beat of an emplaced autocannon filled the transit with a storm of solid rounds. Ricochets bounced madly from the walls. A shell fragment deformed the metal beside Loken’s helmet.

He gripped his bolter, his grip threatening to crush the stock.

This isn’t right.

The Sons of Horus were traitors, the Warmaster the Arch-traitor.

But these are your brothers. You accepted their brotherhood, and swore to return it as a brother.

‘No,’ he hissed, slamming the bolter against the faceplate of his helmet. ‘No, they’re traitors and they deserve to die.’

You are a Son of Horus. So is Iacton. So is Severian. Kill them and kill yourself if you would damn all of Lupercal’s lineage!

Loken fought to keep the voice out.

The vox crackled.

‘Go when you hear us,’ said Severian.

Assaulting an armoury was a sure-fire way to end up facing some extremely potent ordnance, but what choice did they have?

‘Tubal? Only two ways in or out?’ shouted Qruze.

Cayne nodded, sweeping through layers of deck schematics. ‘Yes, according to the extant plans.’

‘Both covered?’

‘Voitek and Rubio are blocking the other one,’ said Varren, not shooting, but ready with his chainaxe.

‘So they’re not getting out,’ said Qruze. ‘But they’ll be voxing for help right now.’

‘Voitek is employing a vox-jammer,’ said Cayne, zooming in on the image of their current location.

‘How long before the adepts burn though it?’ asked Zaven, firing down the transit to the armoury. ‘And is anyone else even slightly concerned that we’re shooting into an armoury?’

‘Eighteen seconds till burn through,’ answered Cayne. ‘So long as you don’t hit anything sensitive in there we should be fine.’

‘Sensitive?’ said Bror. ‘Hjolda! It’s a bloody armoury, everything’s sensitive!’

‘On the contrary, I think you’ll find–’ began Cayne, but Qruze shut him up.

‘Stow it,’ said Qruze, glancing over at Loken. ‘Everyone keep shooting and be ready.’

‘You said the armoury has only two exits?’ said Zaven.

‘Yes,’ confirmed Cayne.

‘So how’s Severian getting in?’

‘Ready?’ said Severian.

Karayan nodded and Severian set the timer for two seconds.

They rolled aside as the graviton grenade detonated with a pulse of energy that made him sick to his stomach. An orb of anomalous gravitational energy swelled to a diameter of exactly a metre and increased the local mass of steel girders and air-circulation units within the reinforced ceiling void a thousand-fold.

A sphere of ultra-dense material compacted in on itself like the heart of a neutron star and fell into the armoury with the force of an Imperator Titan’s footfall.

Karayan was first through the hole, dropping into the armoury like a weighted shadow. Severian followed him an instant later. He landed at the edge of the crater punched in the deck and brought his bolter up.

The enemy reacted to the intruders in their midst quicker than Severian would have liked. They were Sons of Horus, what else could he expect? Severian put a bolt into the nearest, displacing and ripping a burst through another. Return fire chased him.

Karayan favoured knifework. His non-reflective blade found the gap between a sergeant’s helmet and his gorget. He plunged and twisted. Blood sprayed. He moved on, diving, rolling, using the walls and floor. His knife killed the Mechanicum adepts. Chemical fumes misted the air. Floodstreams painted the walls with brackish, oily fluids.

Severian took a knee and pumped another three shots out.

Two legionaries dropped, the third brought an energised buckler around in time to deflect the bolt. Severian’s surprise almost cost him his life. The warrior was too bulky, had too many arms.

Forge lord. Manipulator harness.

He leapt at Severian, a photonic combat blade on a mechanised limb arcing for his neck. Severian threw up his bolter and the blade carved through it. Slowed enough for his armour to take the hit. A second and third arm snapped at his helm and shoulder. Severian barged forward, elbow cracking into the forge lord’s faceplate.

Company colours said Fifth; Little Horus Aximand’s lot.

They rolled on the deck, grappling. Fighting like the murder-gangs of Cthonia in the pits. Knees, elbows, heads; weapons all. The forge lord had more than him and his were harder. Claws tore chunks from Severian’s battleplate. A plasma cutter seared a fire-lined groove in the deck plate a finger breadth from his head.

Severian rammed his helmet into his opponent’s visor. Lenses cracked. Not his. The blade skittered over the armoury floor, its edge fading without a grip.

He rolled. A boot crashed into his helmet. He rolled again.

Ignition flare. A blur of blue-edged light.

Pain and blood. Lung burping itself empty through his plastron.

Severian hooked an elbow around the forge lord’s flesh and blood arm and twisted. Pain shot through to his spine, but the arm snapped with a satisfying crack of tinder.

The forge lord grunted in momentary pain. A manipulator claw slammed into Severian’s face. He ripped the knife from the broken manipulator arm and hacked the claw from the harness. Black oil and lubricant sprayed him. It tasted of malt vinegar.

The forge lord’s spewing binary made the muscles in his armour spasm. Severian shoulder checked his opponent, stabbing the hissing blade into his neck and chest. He cut connector cables and mind impulse unit links. The servo-arms went limp, dead weight now. A bolter shell impacted on the underside of his shoulder guard. Fired from the floor. He spun around and stamped down on a helmet, crushing it like an ice sculpture.

The forge lord came at him again, but without his threshing, clawed arms he was no match for Severian. Too many hours in the armoury, not enough in the arming cages. Severian spun around the clumsy attack and twisted one of the limp servo-arms. He jammed it in the small of the forge lord’s back and manually triggered the plasma cutter. Blue-hot light exploded from the forge lord’s helm lenses. He screamed as superheated air burned its way out of him.

Severian dropped the smoking corpse in time to take a bolt-round in the chest. Thousands of fiery micro-fragments stabbed into his chest through the wound torn by the energised blade. The impact and explosion hurled him back against a rack of bolters. They clattered around him, fresh-oiled and pristine.

He grabbed one. Unloaded, of course. No quartermaster ever stored his weapons fully loaded. Severian tried to stand, but the bolt shell had punched him empty of breath. A traitor legionary swung his bolter to bear while drawing his chainsword.

Efficient, thought Severian as the bolter fired.

Severian was looking down the barrel and even in the moment of seeing the muzzle flare, he knew he should already be dead. Then he saw the spinning round hovering in the air before him. A web of pale lines, like frosted spiderwebs, coated the round.

+Move!+ hissed a voice in his head. Rubio.

Severian dived to the side and the round blew apart the weapon rack behind him. His would-be killer stared in astonishment and took aim again. An explosion lifted him from his feet. Blood misted the air, arcing in a fan from his shattered chest. Gunfire suddenly filled the armoury, multiple sources and directions. The deafening roar of a chainaxe. Severian grabbed a fallen magazine and slammed it hard into his new bolter.

‘Clear!’ shouted a voice. Tyrfingr.

‘Clear!’ Qruze.

‘Grenades, Iacton? Really?’ Tubal Cayne.

Severian grinned. Breath sucked back into his remaining lung and secondary organs. Pain came with it and he pursed his lips.

‘You lot took your bloody time,’ he said as Ares Voitek approached and offered him a hand up. Severian took it and hauled himself to his feet. Gunsmoke fogged the armoury, the stink of bolter propellant. Armoured bodies opened like cracked eggs lent their meaty, metallic, oily odour to the space.

‘Only four seconds from your breach,’ said Ares Voitek.

‘That all?’ said Severian, gratefully putting his arm around the former Iron Hand’s shoulders. ‘Could have sworn it was longer.’

‘That’s combat for you,’ said Voitek. ‘Unless you’re an Iron Hand with internal chrons. Then you know exactly how long has elapsed since the commencement of an engagement.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘Nohai!’ shouted Qruze. ‘Quickly, Zaven and Varren are down!’

They sealed the armoury and carried the wounded from the site of the battle. Nobody would miss the signs of fighting, but at least they could keep the bodies from being discovered for a while. Cayne swiftly navigated forgotten passageways and corridors in search of somewhere isolated and secure.

They tried not to leave a trail of blood.

The chamber Cayne led them to was filled with wrecked tables and chairs, its walls covered in water-damaged murals and obscene graffiti. Some seemed oddly familiar to Loken. The scale of the furnishings and its abandoned nature told him it had once been a retreat for mortals, but he could think of no reason why he might have come to a place like this.

Nohai went to work on Varren and Zaven. Rubio offered his aid, and Nohai gratefully accepted it. Both fallen warriors were badly hurt, but of the two, Zaven’s wounds were the more serious.

‘Will they make it?’ asked Qruze.

‘In the apothecarion, yes. Here, I don’t know,’ said Nohai.

‘Do what you can, Altan.’

Loken sat with his back to a long bar, toying with a set of mildewed cards marked with swords, cups and coins. He’d known someone who’d played an old game of the Franc with such cards, but couldn’t focus on the face. A man? Yes, someone of poetically low character and unexpectedly high morals. The name remained elusive, frustratingly so for a transhuman warrior with a supposedly eidetic memory.

He felt eyes upon him and looked up.

Tubal Cayne stood beneath an obscene mural rendered in anatomically precise detail – thankfully, time and water damage had obscured the offending portions. Cayne sat with one hand on his device, the other resting on the grip of his bolter.

‘What?’ said Loken.

‘You are finding it onerous being here, Loken,’ said Cayne.

‘Is that a question or a statement?’

‘I have not yet decided. Call it a question for now.’

‘It’s strange,’ admitted Loken, slipping the cards into a pouch at his waist. ‘But there’s little left of the ship I knew. This vessel bears the same name, but it’s not the Vengeful Spirit. Not the one I knew. This is a twisted reflection of that proud ship. It’s unpleasant, but no more than I’d expected.’

‘Truly? I had concluded you were experiencing significant psychological difficulties. Why else would you not take part in the fighting at the armoury?’

Loken was immediately on guard, but forced down an outright denial. He stood and brushed water droplets from his armour.

‘This used to be my home,’ he said, walking slowly towards Cayne. ‘Those Sons of Horus used to be my brothers. It shames me that they are now traitors.’

‘It shames us all,’ added Qruze from a booth across the room where he was cleaning his bolter.

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Severian, who sat on the long bar etching kill-notches into his vambrace with his newly-acquired photonic combat blade. The punctured lung made his words breathy.

‘No,’ said Cayne. ‘That is not it. If it were, I would expect to see the same psychological markers in Iacton Qruze and… wait, what is your full name, Severian?’

‘Severian’s all you need to know, and even that’s too much.’

‘You did not fire a single shot, Loken,’ said Cayne. ‘Why not?’

Loken was angry now. He rose to his feet and crossed the chamber to stand in front of Cayne. ‘What are you saying, that I’m not up to the task? That you can’t rely on me?’

‘Yes, that is exactly what I am saying,’ answered Cayne. ‘You are showing all the hallmarks of severe post-traumatic damage. I have been watching you ever since we boarded the Vengeful Spirit. You’re broken inside, Loken. I urge you to return immediately to the Tarnhelm. Your continued presence is endangering the mission and all our lives.’

‘You need to back off,’ said Severian, spinning his combat blade around to aim its glittering tip at Cayne.

‘Why? You of all people know Loken is unfit for this mission.’

Loken slammed Cayne back against the mural.

He pressed a forearm hard against Cayne’s throat.

‘Say that again and I’ll kill you.’

To his credit, Cayne was unfazed by Loken’s attack.

‘This only further proves my point,’ he said.

Qruze appeared at Loken’s side and put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Put the gun away, lad.’

Loken frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

He looked down and saw he had his bolt pistol pressed against Cayne’s chest. He had no memory of drawing the weapon.

Bror Tyrfingr eased Loken’s arm from Cayne’s throat.

‘Hjolda, Loken,’ said Bror. ‘There’ll be plenty more people trying to kill us soon enough without you doing the job for them.’

‘Do you regret leaving the Sons of Horus?’ asked Cayne. ‘Is that it? Is that why you came on this mission, to return to your former master’s side?’

‘Shut up, Tubal,’ snapped Bror, baring his teeth.

‘I do not understand why you all wilfully ignore Loken’s damage,’ said Cayne. ‘He attacks Qruze at Titan, he fails to fight against his former brothers, potentially costing the lives of two of our team. And now he holds a gun on me. We are at a mission-critical stage of our infiltration, and Loken cannot continue. I am not saying anything the rest of you haven’t thought.’

Loken stepped back from Cayne and holstered his pistol. He looked around at the rest of the pathfinder team.

‘Is he right?’ he demanded. ‘Do you all think I’m unfit to lead this mission.’

Qruze and Severian shared a look, but it was Varren who answered, limping over from where he’d been patched up by Altan Nohai. The former World Eater’s chest was a perforated mass of bolter impacts and bloodstains. Skin packs and sealant grafts were all that kept his innards where they belonged. His skin was oily with sweat as his genhanced body burned hot with healing.

‘We have a leader,’ said Varren. ‘I shed blood with Nathaniel and Tylos to bring Loken back from Isstvan. Any warrior who lived through that slaughter deserves our respect. He deserves your respect, Tubal. Malcador and the Wolf King thought Garviel Loken fit for this mission, and I’ll not gainsay them. Nor should you.’

Cayne said nothing, but gave a curt nod.

‘Is this the will of the group?’

‘It is,’ said Bror Tyrfingr. ‘If any man deserves a chance to strike back at the Warmaster, it’s Loken.’

‘You are making a mistake,’ said Cayne, ‘but I will say no more.’

Altan Nohai appeared at Varren’s side, his arms slathered in blood to the elbows.

‘Zaven?’ asked Qruze.

Nohai shook his head.

The Battle of Lupercalia began, as the industrialised wars heralding the first collapse of Old Earth once had, with a pre-dawn barrage. Fifty-three newly-landed artillery regiments with over twelve hundred guns between them shattered the day with thunderous fire from upraised Basilisks, Griffons and Minotaurs.

Heavier guns waited in artillery depots for the general advance, the Bombards and Colossus, the Medusas and the Bruennhilde. Their guns were unsuited for long range barrages, and would follow the mechanised infantry to pound the Imperial ridge in the moments before the final escalade.

Army regiments sworn to the Warmaster advanced in wide convoys behind a creeping barrage of high explosives and a glittering screen of shroud bombs. Tens of thousands of armoured carriers daubed with the Eye of Horus and bearing icons of unnatural provenance roared towards the enemy. Battle tanks bore hooked trophy racks of corpses, and one glacis in five bore a chained prisoner from Avadon.

Hideous Mechanicum constructs of dark iron, clanking legs, spiked wheels and bulbous, insectile appearance marched with feral packs of skitarii keeping a wary distance.

A tide of armour and flesh roared over the wide expanse of the lowland agri-belts. The continent’s breadbasket of arable land, gold and green from horizon to horizon, was churned to ruin beneath their biting tracks. Totem carriers on flatbed transporters bore beaten iron sigils on swaying poles amidst hundreds of robed brotherhoods.

Self-anointed with bloodthirsting titles, their chants and rhythmic drumbeats were carried on unnatural winds to the waiting Imperial forces.

Perhaps half of the Titan engines of Vulcanum, Mortis and Vulpa followed the dread host. The Interfector engines were nowhere to be seen. The battle with Legio Fortidus had cost the Warmaster dearly. His Legios held the advantage of numbers, but the Imperials had an Imperator Titan and scores of Knights. A Knight was no match for a Titan, but only a fool would ignore their combined strength.

Tyana Kourion watched the advance of the Warmaster’s army from the flattened crescent ridge fifteen kilometres away. She leaned back in the cupola of her Stormhammer superheavy, panning her magnoculars from left to right. Eschewing battle dress, she wore her ceremonial greens. Though they were uncomfortable and hot, her entire regiment had chosen to emulate her defiance to keep her from standing out to enemy snipers.

‘A lot of them, ma’am,’ said Naylor, her executive officer. He sat in the secondary turret at the rear of the vehicle, scrolling through reports coming in from the flanking observation posts.

‘Not enough,’ she said.

‘Ma’am?’ said Naylor. ‘Looks like plenty to me.’

‘Agreed, but where are the Sons of Horus?’

‘Letting the poor bloody mortals take the brunt of it.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Kourion, unconvinced. ‘More than likely getting us to expend munitions on sub-par troops. It galls me to waste quality rounds on turncoat dross.’

‘It’s either that or let them roll over us,’ pointed out Naylor.

Kourion nodded. ‘The Legion forces will show themselves soon enough,’ she said. ‘And until then we’ll make these scum pay for their lack of loyalty.’

‘Is the order given?’

‘The order is given,’ said Kourion. ‘All units, open fire.’

Yade Durso kept the Stormbird low, hugging the mountain rock of the Untar Mesas. Imperial fighters from the mountain aeries of Lupercalia duelled the vulture packs in screaming dogfights at higher altitudes, but nap-of-the-earth fighting was Legion work.

Little Horus Aximand sat alongside Durso in the pilot’s compartment at the head of fifty Sons of Horus. They were oathed to the moment and eager to fight.

Ten Stormbirds held station with Aximand’s craft in a staggered echelon. The drop-ships of Seventh Company flew above, their weapons already in acquisition mode.

‘They’re eager,’ said Aximand.

‘Rightly so,’ answered Durso.

‘Too eager,’ said Aximand. ‘The Seventh Company were mauled at Avadon. They don’t have the numbers to indulge in pointless heroics.’

The threat auspex trilled as it sniffed out the unmistakable emissions of weapons fire. Flickering icons appeared on the slate, too many to process accurately. The Imperial host became a red smear blocking the way onwards to Lupercalia.

‘So many,’ said Durso.

‘We do our job there’ll be a lot less soon,’ said Aximand. ‘Now look for gaps in the line.’

Aximand hooked into the various vox-nets, parsing the hundreds of streams in discreet synaptic pathways, sorting the relevant from the inconsequential. All they needed was for just one enemy commander to let hunger for glory overcome tactical sense.

Company level vox: tank commanders calling in targets, spotters yelling threat warnings and enemy attack vectors.

Command level vox: pained orders to abandon damaged tanks, pick up survivors or overtake laggardly vanguard units.

A screaming wall of encrypted scrapcode howled behind it all. Dark Mechanicum comms screeching between the towering battle-engines. He turned it down, but it kept coming back. The sound was grating on a level Aximand knew was simply wrong.

‘No machine should sound like that,’ he said.

Aximand listened to the streams of vox-traffic long enough to gather the information he needed; unit positionals, vox-strengths and priority enhancements. Taken together it painted a picture as vivid and complete as any sensory simulation. As the Stormbird broke through the clouds, Lupercal’s voice broke through every Legion channel.

‘My captains, my sons,’ he said, ‘Warriors’ discretion. Engage targets of opportunity. Withdraw only on my command.’

‘Take us in, Yade,’ ordered Aximand.

‘Affirmative,’ responded Durso, lifting the golden Eye of Horus he kept wrapped around his wrist and putting it to his lips and eyes. ‘For Horus and the Eye.’

‘Kill for the living and kill for the dead,’ said Aximand.

Durso pushed the Stormbird down.

The pain of his failed Becoming was nothing compared to the agony he suffered now. The neural interface cables implanted in Albard’s scabbed spinal sockets were white-hot lances stabbing into the heart of his brain. They’d never properly healed from the day they’d been cut into him.

Banelash was fighting him. It knew he was an intruder and sought to throw him off like a wild colt. The spirits of its former masters knew that Albard was broken, knew that he had failed once already to bond with a Knight.

The dead riders did not welcome the unworthy into their ranks.

Albard fought them down.

For all their loathing, he had decades of hate on his side. He felt the echo of Raeven’s presence in Banelash’s machine heart, but that only made him more determined. His stepbrother had violated everything that Albard had once held dear.

Now he would return the favour.

The Knight’s systems glitched and continually tried to restart and break his connection. The modifications his Sacristans had made kept them from shutting him out. The heart of the Knight was screaming at him, and Albard screamed right back.

Forty-three years ago, he had sat opposite Raeven and let fear get the better of him. Not this time. Blinded in one eye by a raging mallahgra in his youth, the simian beasts had always held a special terror in Albard’s nightmares. When one had broken free on his day of Becoming, a day that should have been his proudest moment, that terror had consumed him.

His Knight had felt his fear and rejected him as unworthy. Condemned in the eyes of his father, he’d been doomed to a life of torture and mockery at the hands of his stepbrother and sister.

Raeven had killed his father? Good, he’d hated the miserable old bastard. Albard had taken his vengeance with a hunting knife and an intimate knowledge of human anatomy learned on the other side of the blade. His faithless step-siblings were now entwined in an irrigation ditch, bloating with nutrient-rich water and corpse gases. Food for worms.

He winced as a fragment of Raeven’s lingering imprint on the Knight’s core stabbed at him. He felt Raeven’s disgust, but worse, he felt a shred of his pity.

‘Even in death you mock me, brother,’ hissed Albard, guiding the twenty-two Devine Knights through the rear ranks of the Imperial regiments. Hundreds of thousands of men and their armoured vehicles awaited the order to move out. Tyana Kourion wasn’t going to make the same mistakes Edoraki Hakon had made at Avadon.

This would be no passive defence line, but a reactive battle of manoeuvre. Opportunities for advance were to be exploited, gaps plugged. This latter task was the role she had assigned to the Knights of Molech, a glorified reserve force. The indignity of it was galling, the insult a gross stain on the honour of Molech’s knightly Houses.

Knights from House Tazkhar marched past, weapons dipped in respect. Many mocked the sand-dwelling savages, but they knew their place – not like the uppity bastards of House Mamaragon, whose strutting Paladins jostled for position in the vanguard. As if they could ever rise to be First House of Molech. House Indra’s southern Knights bore banners of gold and green, and Albard suspected that they flew fractionally higher than his.

A blatant attempt to eclipse House Molech in glory.

Such temerity would not go unanswered, and Albard felt Banelash’s weapon systems react to his belligerent thoughts. Anger, insecurity and paranoia blended within his psyche, goaded into a towering narcissism by a lingering presence, an infection newly acquired within the sensorium.

Something serpentine and voluptuous, hideous yet seductive, lurked in Banelash’s heart. Albard longed to know it and brushed his mind-touch over it.

The combined fury of the Knight’s former pilots surged in response. A reaction of fear. Albard gasped as the sensorium swam with static, phantom images and violent echoes of past wars. A system purge, but it was too little too late. The infection within the sensorium bled into Banelash’s memories, twisting them with unremembered indignities and delusions of grandeur.

Albard heard sibilant laughter as his damaged mind tried to parse the now from the remembered, but those regions of the brain required for a full interface had been irreparably damaged forty-three years ago. His own memories poured into the sensorium, mingling with long-ended wars and imagined kills. He drew the venomous infection into himself, drinking it down like fine wine.

The sensory rendition of the battlefield around him blurred and twisted like a slowly retuning pict-feed, one image fading and another swimming into focus.

What had once been an ordered Imperial camp of machine fabricated shelters, supply depots, ammunition stockpiles, fuel silos and rally points became something else entirely. Men in boiled leather jerkins and iron sallets marched to and fro. Some wore gleaming hauberks of iron scale. They carried long iron-bladed swords and axes across their shoulders. They marched in dreary lockstep. Hundreds of hunting hounds snapped at their heels, goaded forward by whip-bearing packmasters.

A crash of thunder belched from the vast, dragon-mouthed carronades fringing the hillsides in their thousands. Entrenched in wicker gabions and earthen ramparts, the gunnery academies of Roxcia and Kyrtro had brought their finest culverin and mortars to punish the enemy with shot and shell. Colourful flags snapped in the conflicting thermals above the powder-hungry weapons.

Gunners sweated and heaved, running their iron behemoths back into firing positions. The barrels were swabbed out and fresh powder charges rammed down. Heavy stone spheres were lifted by barrel-chested Tazkhar slaves.

As impressive as the guns were, they were nothing compared to the splendour of the knightly host.

Incredible warriors in all-enclosing plate rode powerful destriers with fantastical caparisons depicting rearing beasts such as had not been seen on Molech for generations.

Albard turned to see the knights riding alongside him.

Cousins, nephews and distant relations, all of the Devine Blood. They rode into battle on wide-chested warsteeds, but not one of their mounts could match the golden stallion upon which he rode, a beast with a mane of fire and wide, powerful shoulders. A king among horsekind.

‘My brothers!’ cried Albard, letting the blissful serpentine venom spread to each of them. ‘See what I see, feel what I feel!’

Some struggled, some almost resisted, but every one of them surrendered in the end. Their secret desires and ambitions were fuel to the infection and it took their every scrap of lust, guilt and bitterness and twisted into something worse.

He turned in the saddle, looking over at the twin lightning bolt emblem streaming from his vexillary’s banner pole. The ancient heraldry of the Stormlord himself blazed in the noonday sun, an icon of such brilliance that it illuminated the battlefield for hundreds of metres in all directions.

This was his banner.

He was the Stormlord, and these knights were the same vajras who had ridden the Fulgurine Path with him all those centuries ago. A towering sense of self-importance filled him, and he raked back his spurs. Banelash ploughed through regiments of infantry as the Stormlord saw a vast and monstrous creature through the billowing clouds of cannon fire.

A titanic beast, a giant of inhuman scale.

Scaled in black and white, it bellowed with the sound of thunder. A world devourer.

This was the foe he had been summoned to slay.