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THE PROPHECY OF THE ONE-EYED KING

A mountain looms above you, wreathed in mourning cloud. Crags claw upwards, grasping towards a blood-red light at its summit. The sky is ablaze and reflects the mountain’s anger as it casts down flame from above. It is troubled, wounded by those who tried to put it asunder. It rages, and its wrath is terrible to behold.

A bleak mood is upon you, a hollow mantle that bears more weight than a curse. Your bare feet are blistered and bloody, for you have walked many leagues across the cutting rock of your death world.

It has not been forgiving.

But your journey is slowly reaching its end, its conclusion closer with every crimson impression you leave behind you.

Scarred peaks rise to blot out the sun, though the heat of that glowering orb is still merciless, stealing breath, drying out life until nothing remains but a dusty carcass.

At the hell-stoked foothills, you begin your ascent. Cinder and hot ash sear your feet, but you barely feel it.

Hand over hand, the climb is tough, but you are driven beyond the concerns of fatigue. Your mind is a dense, dark pool from which you know you will not resurface. Your body will obey, despite the screaming agony in your limbs, to which you are blind, deaf and dumb.

You rise with the numbness and monotony of a corpse given life after death, for are you not merely flesh-wrapped despair, your weary bones responding to the last vestiges of your will?

From the summit you hear a rumble to eclipse the crash of oceans at full swell, a thunderous bellow from the deep earth that echoes across peak and crag. And as your eye is drawn to the burgeoning fire glow above, you see a fissure in the flank of the mountain.

Heat and earth-blood issue from within this crack. The trailing wisps of smoke entice your enfeebled mind, so blighted by a son’s incomparable sorrow.

Above you, the rumble of the mountain’s displeasure grows into a roar. Does its anguish resonate with your own, an empathic frequency that has somehow aligned rock and flesh in grief-stricken sympathy?

Fire rises, soaring upwards in a burning pillar that taints sky, sun and cloud with its fury.

Desperation seizing your dead man’s limbs, you struggle for the fissure, discovering a cleft wide enough to admit your body.

And as the heavens weep tears of flame, you enter the mountain to find your sanctuary and your doom. The last image of your existence is obscured by pyroclastic cloud until eventually nothing remains but a shadow and a memory.

One

Burnt offerings

Traoris, the lightning fields

A body lay in the grey ash.

Transhuman, male. His skin was the colour of coal, and his battered armour had scalloped edges, as though it had been fashioned from green scales. A Salamander. A sword lay a finger length from his grasp. A warrior. He had met the fate of most who walked that violent road, another corpse amongst many. The wound in his chest the size of a fist had killed him, but his left eye was also badly damaged.

He hadn’t been reaching for the sword when he died, though. His still fingers grasped for something else. A hammer.

A flash lit up the sky overhead in veins of pearlescent light.

An eyelid quivered in response, nothing more than a nerve tremor, the last firing of neural synapses before brain death.

Another flash. A bolt of lightning struck the earth. Close.

A finger trembled. Another nerve tremor?

A third flash, thunder resounded.

He blinked, the corpse who was not a corpse, trapping a freeze-frame of what was coming for him across the ash. His other eyelid had been cauterised and stayed shut, a ball of throbbing agony harboured behind it.

Sentience returned, time and place reasserted themselves. Conscious thought resumed. Pain. Much pain…

Lightning arced from the dry and cloudless sky of Traoris.

Numeon blinked again as the bolt jerked wildly, splitting into separate arteries and igniting the darkness with violent flashes. Forks of light hit the ground like thrown spears, almost striking his body this time.

Death would be a mercy. Not because of the pain of his wounds, but the agony of his failure.

‘Vulkan…’ Numeon’s voice came out as a dry-throated rasp.

No, not Vulkan. It had been Erebus, and now his agent had fled with the fulgurite. Grammaticus, the spy. Liar. Traitor.

Another bolt earthed nearby, and Numeon grimaced. That made five since he had come round. Each belligerent strike brought the storm closer. He had no desire to see what would happen if he remained where he was when a sixth or seventh fork hit the surface.

Moving was proving difficult. A patch of spilled blood encircled his body, slowly spreading in a dark morass his enhanced physiology was impotent to staunch.

When the Emperor had created His Space Marines, He had made them hardy, but they were not indestructible. Nor were their primarchs, as some poor sons had come to know.

Numeon would refute the claims of his father’s death, though.

If he lived long enough.

His chest was a mess of broken bone carapace and damaged internal organs. He drank and breathed blood, not air. Erebus’s bolt pistol had seen to that. Even being blind in one eye and unable to see it at that moment, he knew his armour was more arterial-red than drake-green. Numeon’s injuries, his near-paralysis, left a stark conclusion.

I am dying.

Even transhumans had limits, and Artellus Numeon had reached his. Though his mind rebelled against the prospect of his death, his physical body could not support the lie.

Another crack of lightning struck close, scorching the earth – just like the bombs and cannons that had rained death upon Isstvan V. Weakly, Numeon turned his head to track the bolt’s trajectory. The flash echoed across his retina, multiplying repeatedly then fading into sharp relief before ultimately dissolving into a memory of sight. In its wake, he saw vortices of harsh grey sand scudding across the wastes of Traoris, like insubstantial djinn of old Abyssinii, carrying the reek of death and the stench of burnt earth.

Only when the vortices grew larger and became more uniform did Numeon realise it wasn’t just the wind rolling off some distant and unseen sea.

It was a ship, which meant the Fire Ark could still be aloft, and so he dared to hope.

During the events that followed, Numeon would learn there was precious little hope left in a galaxy at war.

A desert stretched away into the distance, endless and black. Crested with high dunes and formidable iron bulwarks, it had become a vista of devastation, thronged with the dead and dying. Some of the fallen lay half buried in blood-soaked sand. Others baked in their armour, slowly burning in the sun. The stink of putrefaction was so ripe it had attained form, a rank and physical mass that weighed heavy on the shoulders.

It was chaos on the black sand. True chaos.

Brothers slain.

Betrayal most foul.

Details of the massacre fled, as if fearful of being recalled, though they would be forever lodged in Numeon’s eidetic memory. The black of the desert was usurped by the darkness of a cell, the dying screams of his brothers replaced by maddening quietude in which a thought was louder than a shell blast.

Iron shackles linked his wrists, and snaked to his ankles too. It was hardly necessary. The river of Numeon’s strength had ebbed to little more than vapour.

He was naked apart from the lower half of his armour’s undermesh sub-layer, the many old wounds and branding scars starkly visible. His battleplate was destroyed anyway, damaged beyond repair. The cold of his cell, the chill of the void bleeding through the bare metal, was as adverse to him as shadow was to the sun. He shivered.

Rudimentary medical work had been done to reknit his body. It healed, but would be badly scarred. At least the hole in his chest had been stitched back up. His captors had the craft for more effective surgeries; they just wanted Numeon to suffer.

He suspected it was also why they had left him the hammer.

It was a relatively simple thing. Short haft, square head, a single jewel stud set into the pommel. Crafted as a piece of ornamentation, it more accurately resembled a fuller, the preferred tool of a black-smiter.

Humble appearances often belied more esoteric significance. It was more than just a hammer. It was also a symbol.

For Numeon, now the last warden of the Pyre, it represented hope.

So grievously wounded, Numeon clung to the sigil of Vulkan as if it were his mortal thread, in the fear that if even one finger slipped then he too would be lost.

His eye stung with the potency of helfyre, reminding him of that mortality and wrenching him from fanciful notions. Feeling his consciousness slipping, he chose to supplant poetry with fact, using the focus of his thoughts as an anchor.

Fenrisians had numerous words to describe snow and ice, but those who came from Nocturne, or believed in the Promethean creed, had many ways to define fire, and these terms varied across the seven realms or Sanctuary Cities.

In Hesiod, known as the Seat of Kings, it was helfyre. In Themis, City of Warlords, they used urgrek. Both were old, lyrical words for the deep magma flows at the nadir of Mount Deathfire, the bubbling heartblood of Nocturne. It was hot, promising crippling agony to any who touched it or even strayed within its stifling aura. Only the deep drakes craved its radiating warmth and the natural solitude it offered, on account of it being anathema to most other forms of life. Protean fire, as described by inhabitants of the Jewel City of Epithemus, was claimed to be the vital spark that took the souls of the dead, and the husks they had become, and restored them to the world, albeit changed and renewed. Such beliefs persisted in Skarokk, called the Dragonspine, and Aethonion, the Fire Spike, but each realm used a different word, protan and morphean respectively.

Fabrikarr, as it was referred to in the Merchant’s Sprawl of Clymene, was the forgesmith’s flame, the heart heat that tempers metal, the mundane creator. In the Beacon City of Heliosa it was ferrun.

Immolus was the world-ender, and all seven cities uttered it the same and often in hushed whispers. For it was the unbound flame, and had been a part of Nocturnean creation myth since before the fabled days of the first Igniax and the metal-shapers of old.

Numeon knew all their names and every variation across every city, just as he knew the names of countless others and he clung to them as he clung to the fuller’s haft, separating purpose from agony so that he might rise and live.

Live…

Not for himself, but for an errant father whom Numeon believed in above all else. His faith – not the tawdry ephemeral faith associated with religion, but the true and honest conviction that something was real in spite of empirical evidence – was the vital force flowing through his veins and the eternal fire igniting his mind. His belief manifested as a simple fact. Two words.

Vulkan lives.

The dull grinding of gears brought Numeon out of his deepening torpor. His cell door opened, admitting a thin shaft of light into the darkness that widened as the door climbed and slowly disappeared into an aperture in the ceiling.

A figure stood silhouetted in the light. His form was power-armoured, further bulking out his broad and formidable transhuman frame. Oath papers bedecked his torso and shoulders like a contagion, but Numeon took care to lower his eyes from what was scrawled upon each strip of flesh-parchment. They were damning words, borne by those who had turned from the Emperor’s enlightenment and embraced old gods. Such things used to be mocked as stories of overactive imaginations.

No one did so any more.

Numeon gripped the sigil tighter and tried to stand. He got as far as one knee before his defiance was overruled by his fatigue.

Shaking his head, the figure outlined in silhouette tutted.

‘Still weak.’ It was less a question, more an observation. ‘Where is that fabled endurance, son of Nocturne?’ asked Xenut Sul. His voice was sibilant but possessed a richness at odds with his rasping cadence.

Xenut Sul had introduced himself soon after Numeon was taken and had awoken aboard the Word Bearers ship. He had seemed a peculiarly ordinary legionary at first, with close-cropped fair hair, and an oddly symmetrical face with Colchisian runes etched down both right and left aspect. It was as if he wore the face of every man and no man at the same time. His eyes were youthful, yet captured a sense of fathomless experience only seen in veterans. In the six weeks since he had been taken captive, Numeon had failed to divine Xenut Sul’s origin, a fact that amused his captor greatly.

‘Why has your father’s strength deserted you when you need it the most, hmm?’ Xenut Sul taunted.

Numeon replied by gritting his teeth, glowering through his one good eye.

The light stretched further into the cell, bathing Numeon in an ugly yellow glow that gave his skin a sickly pallor.

‘Your wounds look improved,’ muttered Xenut Sul. He crouched down onto his haunches, seizing Numeon’s chin. A pained grimace twisted the Salamander’s face as the Word Bearer’s armoured fingers bit into flesh.

‘I wonder, son of Nocturne,’ he said, ‘are you ready to speak?’

Xenut Sul’s warm smile but cold eyes confronted Numeon. It was an expression he had come to know well, along with the traitor’s inherent lack of mercy and predilection for inflicting pain.

‘I hurt you because you ask me to, son of Nocturne.’

It was as if he had cored out Numeon’s mind as well as his badly stitched flesh.

‘Do you remember the question?’ Xenut Sul asked, incrementally increasing the pressure on Numeon’s chin. ‘The fulgurite… where is it?’

Numeon made no sound beyond the wheezing of breath sawing in and out of his lungs.

‘Tell me,’ said Xenut Sul, ‘what do you know of Barthusa Narek?’

Still the Salamander gave no answer.

Xenut Sul smiled a second time, his expression pitying.

‘Are you really asking me to do it again?’

He lowered his head, resigned. When he faced Numeon once more, his eyes were dark, abyssal pits. The richness in his tone became a resonance, as if one voice overlapped another and they were speaking fractionally out of synch.

‘I serve…’ he said, and inclined his head, ‘…you serve.’ He nodded at Numeon. ‘One of us is going to disappoint his master. It won’t be me, son of Nocturne.’

Now Numeon grinned, exposing red-rimed teeth.

‘Something amuses you?’ Xenut Sul asked.

Numeon kept grinning. To a casual observer, it would have looked insane.

‘You wish to speak?’

Numeon nodded slowly.

‘Then give me your words and all of this can end.’

Letting go of the prisoner’s chin, Xenut Sul stood up and stepped back.

It took Numeon a few precious moments to marshal his strength. He wanted this utterance to have import. He wanted his gaoler to remember.

This time he rose to his feet, and though he shook and trembled with the effort, he did not fall.

Eyes wide, glaring with defiance, Numeon roared.

‘Vulkan lives!’

Xenut Sul lashed out savagely, driving the air from Numeon’s lungs with a heavy punch and flooring him. The gaoler crouched back down.

‘You are weak because your father is dead. You just don’t have the wit to see it.’ Something barbed and metallic flashed in Xenut Sul’s hand. ‘I will show you…’

Two

‘Red-marked’

Gladius-class cruiser, Dark Sacrament

The cruiser Dark Sacrament was burning.

It listed painfully in the void, gas and particulate spewing from its vast arteries like blood.

Maritime sailors, those of the deep oceans of Old Earth, from the age when Terra still had natural seas, had often likened their great seafaring vessels to beasts. They invested them with spirit to imbue the wood and steel of their construction with will and presence. In times of dire need, during a storm or when imperilled by some leviathan of the depths, these mariners would call upon that spirit to rescue them, beseech it to deliver their crews from death one last time.

To those able to observe its demise, the Dark Sacrament appeared very much like a beast, but in its death throes it was impotent to save those aboard, no matter how desperately they pleaded.

Scars riddled the ancient carapace of its armoured flanks, and entire plates of adamantium flaked away like shed scales. Exposed beneath it, a vulnerable layer of ‘flesh’ flared with ephemeral fires that died almost as soon as they were born, hungrily devouring the scant oxygen that remained inside the ruptured ship.

Upon the beast’s back, the immense cathedrals along its spine had collapsed and fragmented, releasing chunks of iconoclastic statuary into the starless depths of space, where they drifted without anchor.

The deep wound that scored the ventral hull had been the decisive blow, destroying most of its enginarium in a single, precise strike. The ship’s open belly had bled flash-frozen corpses into the void moments after it was sundered. Some of the dead wore the crimson battleplate of traitors. Their bodies were riddled with las-burns too. They drifted still, forgotten amongst the other debris.

Its shields had failed next, another surgically executed strike intended to weaken and cripple, not kill.

Along the lateral aspect, starboard side, a cluster of deep impacts had cored through the flaking armour plate. A Caestus assault ram had reached a terminus at the end of each one, clinging doggedly to the Dark Sacrament’s brutalised flank.

Despite the destruction wrought against it, the vital cuts debilitating the cruiser, it was here in the comparatively diminutive boarding craft that the mortal blow fell. Deadly cargo, Ultramarines of the ‘Red-marked’, had been harboured within and their minds were bent on vengeance.

Inviglio ran the length of the ventral access corridor, keeping one eye on the rad-counter glowing on his left helmet lens. He was headed towards the ship’s aft, lower decks, where the warp engines were situated.

‘Naevius.’

Breathing hard, Inviglio reached the first transverse junction of the corridor. They needed to push ahead, advance quickly and violently before reinforcements could be mustered. But beyond the junction, the ship’s illumination and vital support systems had failed. Gravity lingered tenuously, negating the need for mag-lock to the deck underfoot, but visibility was poor.

Inviglio had already lost Drusus to one of Angron’s butchers lurking in the shadows. He had no desire to lose another, and would even risk his commander’s ire at this abrupt lack of urgency.

Naevius arrived seconds after being summoned, a bio-scanner in hand, seeking potential threats. Like the rest of the legionaries in his squad, he wore a stripe of red paint down his faceplate, perpendicular to his armoured shoulders.

‘Reading four hostile contacts,’ muttered Naevius in the deep baritone of Iax.

Inviglio hailed from Konor but adopted no airs or graces with his Iaxian brother. War and the pragmatic tutelage of the commander had seen to that.

The brutal assault on Ultramar had levelled all hierarchies and preconceptions of nobility. Solidarity had come in its wake, a desire in all Ultramarians, transhuman and otherwise, to stand together and take back what had once been theirs.

Officially, the war was won in Ultramar, after the Five Hundred Worlds had suffered at the hands of the XVII and XII Legions before Guilliman and the XIII had managed to turn back the tide, but these legionaries knew different. They knew that beyond the immediate auspices of Macragge and the aegis the presence of the primus worlds provided, Imperium Secundus still suffered.

Nodding to Naevius, Inviglio tapped the comm-bead embedded in his gorget.

‘Leargus, take vanguard position. Naevius and I will flank. Bracheus, hold rearguard.’

A string of rapid affirmatives flashed as icons across Inviglio’s retinal feed and they were ready to proceed.

Leargus came up from behind, hefting a snub-nosed grav-gun, which he kept at waist height.

‘Easy does it, brother,’ whispered Inviglio, earning a curt nod of acknowledgement from Leargus as he led the three Ultramarines forwards. ‘We don’t know precisely what’s out there.’

More than once during the recent patrols, they had raided vessels crewed by Unburdened. Daemon hunting had become close to second nature to the XIII now, but that didn’t make these creatures any less dangerous. The rules of engagement had changed, and either the sons of Guilliman would adapt or they would die.

Inviglio was determined it would be the former rather than the latter. In this instance, caution was less a luxury and more an imperative.

Their first warning came a quarter of the way down the corridor in a broad maintenance section, articulated in the flash of arterial-red against Leargus’s armour. The legionary reacted fast, swivelling to trigger a burst of hyper-dense gravity from his weapon. Part of the corridor’s superstructure bent and split as if being crushed. One of the murderous XII caught in the gravity field took the hit too, and his plastron and left pauldron buckled inwards. It didn’t stop him hurling his chainaxe, which spun end over end before embedding itself in Leargus’s upper right torso.

The other renegades lying in wait echoed the roar spat through Leargus’s vox-grille, only their cries were murderous, not agonised.

Three warriors clad in legionary plate came at the Ultramarines strike team. Two wore the grubby, battle-tarnished white and blue of the World Eaters. The other hailed from the XVII, but was no ordinary Word Bearer.

Hunchbacked, its grotesque musculature throbbed inside battleplate straining to contain it. A helm alloyed with a daemonic visage to the point at which determining where one ended and the other began was impossible. It needed no bolter or blade, the unnatural attributes of claw and fang more than adequate to its needs.

Leargus summed up the damned creature succinctly, declaring, ‘Abomination!’

Despite the chainaxe lodged in his chest, the legionary had enough cogency remaining to aim his second shot at the Unburdened, but it shrugged off the graviton burst as though it were a mere irritation and sprang off its cloven hooves at the Ultramarine.

Inviglio had only fought an Unburdened once before. During that encounter, the Sergeant had been leading them and he had taken the beast apart with the blade of an energised longsword.

Old foes, old weapons. Inviglio remembered the lesson, as he watched poor Leargus split from crown to groin, his armour parting sinister and dexter like parchment. Bracheus was coming to reinforce him, but with the rest of his brothers engaging their own targets, Inviglio was alone when he faced the monster that had just carved up Leargus.

He drew his gladius. With one press of the activation stud in the hilt, he ignited the power field that crackled along its edge and faced down the Unburdened.

Via the retinal display in his helmet, Inviglio saw Bracheus split the skull of the XII Legion warrior wounded by the grav-gun. Naevius fired off snap shots with his bolt pistol at the second World Eaters legionary, but drew his power sword once at close quarters.

Inviglio’s sight then shrank myopically as the Unburdened shouldered Leargus’s steaming corpse aside and found the Ultramarine standing defiantly.

No words would do justice, so Inviglio cried out wrathfully as he thrust his blade at the beast. It was like striking the adamantium hull plates of a Stormbird, and the blow resonated painfully back down the blade, jarring his shoulder.

The Unburdened’s riposte was savage, a backhand that lifted Inviglio off his feet and had him hurrying to roll away as a second overhand blow cleaved into the deck where he had been lying.

He had barely got to his feet when the beast swung again, a slicing transverse like a sword-cut that Inviglio had to parry with the flat of his gladius or be bisected. Metal shrieked against metal as his booted feet skidded against the deck, throwing up friction sparks.

It was tough to get moving. He needed to be faster, but the slowly diminishing gravity from the vessel’s dying life-support systems dragged on his limbs with the growing presence of inertia.

A blur of motion flashed on Inviglio’s right, and through a hazing visual feed he saw Bracheus slam an axe-head into the Unburdened’s flank. It bellowed, so loud it stunned Inviglio’s audio feed and briefly overloaded the dampeners built into his helm.

Recognising this chance to claim a much-needed advantage, Inviglio aimed a thrust up at the beast’s neck. As he wrenched the blade free, a fount of dark fluid spurted out with it. Even through his rebreather the stench was vile, but the howl of agony from the Unburdened was even more disconcerting.

It wasn’t the deep and guttural bellow of a wounded beast; it was the shrill shouts of tortured innocents, the dying cries of infants and their mothers. It was the death scream of Ultramarians, butchered in the thousands during the invasion.

Bracheus lashed out again, severing wrist from arm. About to turn, the Unburdened jerked spasmodically before the crackling point of Naevius’s sword emerged through its chest from its back. The corridor stank of sudden putrefaction as old blood burnt and cauterised.

Inviglio knew that they could not relent. Already, the Unburdened’s wounds were knitting together as the daemonic passenger wearing the skin of its willing legionary host drew on the power of the warp. As the beast fell to one knee, Inviglio cleaved down with his blade, piercing armour and striking clavicle bone before he began to carve.

Bracheus hacked, wrenched his axe-head loose then hacked again as if felling an Iaxian harrowing tree. Ichorous blood flecked his armour, hissing as the mild acid scorched paint and pitted the battleplate.

Holding his sword two-handed, in a downward grip, Naevius emerged from the other side of the Unburdened, stabbing unceasingly with metronomic regularity.

In a few more seconds it was over, and the dismembered remains of the Unburdened lay sloughed at the Ultramarines’ feet. As the entity bled back into the hell realm that had spawned it, the host shrank and withered until nothing but a miasma of gore and chunks of sundered plate and bone was left of it.

Inviglio gestured to Naevius. ‘Tell me we’re clear, brother.’

Sheathing his sword, Naevius checked the hand-held scanner and nodded.

‘Clear.’

Once through the ventral corridor, they would reach the warp engines.

Even without Drusus and Leargus, they would have enough charges between them to inflict critical damage on the ship. A catastrophic explosion would result. Nonetheless, Inviglio instructed Bracheus to gather their fallen brother’s incendiaries. He wished there was enough time to speak some appropriate words over Leargus’s corpse. They had survived the first battle of Calth together, bled in the subterranean arcologies that were, even now, being contested. To die in the confines of some thrice-cursed starship did not seem fitting, nor did the fact Leargus’s gene-seed would remain unharvested.

‘Is that the last of them, do you think?’ asked Naevius, even though his auspex threw up only negative returns with every fresh scan.

Inviglio slammed his gauntlet against the side of his helm, encouraging the comms to come back online. It worked, and he was about to answer Naevius when the vox-link crackled loudly in his ear.

‘Status, brother.’

It was the Sergeant. It never failed to surprise Inviglio, the versatility in that voice, which could so easily be turned to command or good-natured bonhomie. Not unlike the warrior himself, who was as adaptable an Ultramarine as Inviglio had ever known or had the privilege to serve with. It was part of the reason why he had left Calth, and how he had come to be amongst the Red-marked.

‘Closing on objective now.’

‘Casualties?’

‘Two, Drusus and Leargus.’

The Sergeant swore under his breath. There was a momentary pause before he replied. ‘Munitions deck is cleansed and secured. Charges set. We await your word, brother. Give it quickly, though. Another ship has appeared on augury.’

‘We go to intercept?’

‘With all haste.’ He cut the link.

Bracheus returned with Leargus’s charges and held them out to the others.

‘Enough to take down three cruisers,’ he remarked.

Inviglio nodded, silently applauding Bracheus’s aggression. ‘No need for overkill. We only need to take down one.’

Three

Vigil

Magna Macragge Civitas, Vault of the Unbound Flame

Funerary rites varied greatly across even the largely homogenised Imperium of the Great Crusade. Despite a growing galactic zeitgeist towards enlightenment, many human cultures still ritualised the passing of the dead.

During the days of Old Earth, the Terra that existed before Unity, the Romanii practised inhumation, whilst most Nordafrikans preferred cremation. The old customs of the Aegyptos demanded embalming as a way for their departed to enter the underworld, whilst the peoples of ancient Himalazia embraced the ostensibly barbaric rite of jhator, or ritual dissection.

Nocturnean belief held that all things which come from earth must then return to it. Only then could the circle of rebirth be forged. It referred to immolation by flame – flesh, bone and ash.

For the XVIII, fire was both baptismal and funerary; thus the Promethean creed as taught by Vulkan could be preserved. This, and so much more besides, was a part of his legacy now and must be protected.

So it was with bitter regret that Barek Zytos knelt before the casket in which the Lord of Drakes was now entombed.

‘He belongs with the earth,’ uttered a solemn voice from the shadows of the deep vault. ‘Not in this cold and gilded barrow.’

A single memorial flame alleviated the darkness, fluttering mournfully. Its lambent light caught the edges of Vulkan’s golden tomb, whilst limning the grieving features of Zytos.

‘A primarch held in state beneath the Fortress of Hera…’ Zytos murmured to the newcomer, his grief making him pause. ‘It is almost beyond countenance.’

He had declared to Lord Guilliman his belief in Vulkan’s survival, defiant against any who would dare gainsay it. The bitter irony was their father had survived the Dropsite Massacre, only to be murdered by an assassin whilst purportedly on friendly soil.

Loyalty was air and sustenance to Zytos – he could not eschew it any more than he could willingly stop breathing or eating – but the fate of Vulkan, and what he saw as the deception of Macragge, had wounded him deeply.

‘Let us hope he is the only one,’ said the other figure in the vault as he knelt beside Zytos.

‘Why are we still here, Var’kir?’ Zytos asked.

Phaestus Var’kir did not answer immediately. He took a moment to bow respectfully to his primarch in state, and muttered a few words of Promethean ritual.

‘How do you propose we leave, Zytos?’ he asked, his cadence reminiscent of cracking parchment. ‘The Lord of Macragge forbids it whilst the Ruinstorm remains.’

‘I find that an overly lyrical and unnecessarily calamitous word for it.’

‘What? Ruin?’ Var’kir replied.

Unlike Zytos, who wore the drake-green of the Salamanders, Var’kir was entirely clad in black. As a devotee of the Chaplaincy, it was his duty. He had often reminded Zytos, it was not because he was in mourning but on account of his calling, one needed more than ever in such tenebrous days.

A wound not just of the flesh but of the spirit had been inflicted upon the nascent Imperium, provoking a theological war of the soul.

‘It has brought us to our knees,’ Var’kir admitted, ‘for a time, at least.’

Zytos respected the sanctity of the chamber, even with all of its hollow opulence, but still transmitted the futile anger in his words.

‘How can we now rise? Our father came to a Legion approaching self-annihilation. Without his influence, how can we hope to avoid such a fate again?’

The legionary had a stern countenance and the broad shoulders of a Themian. His deep crimson hair was cut short and on both hemispheres of his skull iconic representations of drakes were shaved into the scalp.

Gently, Var’kir laid a gauntleted hand upon Zytos’s shoulder.

‘With his influence are we made protean, brother.’ He smiled warmly, despite their bleak surroundings. ‘We are much changed from the Dragon Warriors we used to be.’

Few in the Legion knew, let alone spoke, the XVIII’s old cognomen. To do so prompted a reminder of the great shame it signified, of the days before Vulkan had taught them pragmatism to temper their self-sacrificial natures and humanity to counter their abyssal anger.

Var’kir was badly scarred. The latter part of his name, kir, meant ‘chosen’. In Var’kir’s case, it was an apt honorific. As one of Lord Rhy’tan’s ‘Voices of Fire’, he had been sent to minister to the legionaries about to bring Horus the Renegade to heel, but scarcely survived the massacre. The stunted, ash-white crest bifurcating his hairless scalp suggested veteran, as did the closeness of his flesh to the skull. His eyes still held their Nocturnean fire, though, embers to the coal-black of his skin.

A moment of pensive silence fell before Zytos said, ‘I thought I heard it beat. His heart.’

As one, the eyes of the two Salamanders turned to regard their slain lord.

Vulkan lay in silent repose. His eyes were closed and he looked serene behind the casket glass. He was, as he always had been, their father. Honour scars marked his face, branded into flesh by an iron rod. Hard to discern, except in a certain light, they described the legacy of Vulkan’s deeds.

‘Our minds can sometimes trick us into believing what our hearts desire, Zytos,’ Var’kir replied quietly. ‘It is well, at least, he is here to be mourned by his sons, instead of defiled on some distant battlefield.’

Zytos lowered his gaze, unable to look upon his dead father any longer.

Clenched in Vulkan’s fist was Dawnbringer, an artefact of peerless craftsmanship, wrought by the Lord of Drakes himself, and the very hammer that had spirited him across the empyrean to Macragge.

Aside from his flesh and bone, it was the only thing that had survived atmospheric re-entry intact. In point of fact Vulkan wore not his draconian battleplate, but was instead clad in a suit of armour from Lord Guilliman’s vault. At least it had been crafted with the livery of the XVIII.

Zytos and the other Salamanders who had made it to Macragge knew fragments of the story surrounding Vulkan’s violent arrival. Some aspects of it beggared belief to the sons of Nocturne, incredulous accounts of miraculous resurrection and healing, and a madness that rendered the Lord of Drakes into a frenzied beast.

Rumours, nothing more. The former was cruel, giving hope where none existed, and the latter was an insult to Vulkan’s memory. Both Zytos and Var’kir had refuted them.

‘Has anyone else tried to remove it?’ The sound of Var’kir’s voice lifted Zytos from bleak reverie. The Chaplain’s hand wavered in front of him, held before the glass and hovering, fingers outstretched towards where the ugly spearhead jutted from the primarch’s chest. His gauntleted hand trembled at the horror of it, the abject violation. To see it was a constant reminder of Vulkan’s murder and the crude tool used to end him.

‘Some,’ said Zytos, a tacit admission in the tone of his answer that he could be counted amongst them, ‘but all who have tried, failed.’

‘None can,’ said Var’kir, tracing the words engraved upon the casket’s only ornamentation, a gilded scroll, with his fingers. ‘Unbound Flame…’ he whispered, reading the words aloud. His eyes strayed to the memorial flame.

Var’kir was gifted. Like the Igniax of old, he perceived truth and wisdom in flames.

Zytos had followed his gaze. In spite of his grief, his voice still betrayed a sliver of hope.

‘What do you see?’

After staring for a few minutes, Var’kir shook his head.

‘Nothing,’ he murmured, regretful.

‘I would gladly sacrifice my life,’ declared Zytos, unashamed of the tears streaking down his face.

‘There are none amongst us who would not do so, brother.’

The ancient Promethean creed told that the circle of death and rebirth not only maintained the balance of nature, but also held the belief of life eternal, of resurrection. Within the Legion, this had been accepted as the harvesting of gene-seed passing on from one host into another, so a warrior’s legacy might live on, but Zytos referred to a more literal interpretation. The sacrifice of one could bring about the apotheosis of another. It was foolish and sentimental; pragmatism was needed now. But grief had to be properly observed first.

‘Father,’ said Zytos, a fierce strength inflecting his voice, ‘we have great need of hope. Please…’

He bowed his head, and Var’kir joined him in grave memoriam.

Four

The Preacher

Pain woke Numeon.

His treatment at the hands of Xenut Sul had been severe enough to render him unconscious. His first thought was of the fresh stitches in his side, the crude sutures in his chest and back. His second thought was the realisation he was no longer in his cell.

A smell pervaded, faintly reminiscent of a slaughterhouse, though Numeon had learned to be suspicious of his senses in this place. Old friends, almost certainly dead, had come to him in his barely lucid moments, Leodrakk and Pergellen staring with ghoulish faces, their flesh sunken and putrefying. The stink of their rotting corpses, somehow animate and enslaved to hunger, had been so convincing that Numeon had almost believed they were real.

Awaking in a feverish sweat, only to collapse in exhaustion a moment later, he had been sorely glad they were not.

Dead is dead, and nothing could alter that.

‘Being able to distinguish phantoms from what is real will serve you well here,’ the Preacher said to Numeon, regarding him with the same detached interest a biologis adept might regard an insect.

A cavernous yet claustrophobic chamber surrounded Numeon. Xenut Sul had gone, replaced by his new tormentor. And though it appeared as if they were alone, Numeon’s instincts warned him of the opposite.

He heard… murmurings. Though he knew he could not rely upon anything he saw or heard, the voices sounded pained. They were also reminiscent of warriors he had fought beside before, not specifically but certainly of the same caste.

What is this fell place? he wondered.

About to speak the question aloud, he stopped when he realised he was bound hand and foot to a slab, and that the sigil was gone. Briefly, he glanced around for it but saw nothing save the blackness of the chamber and the Preacher before him.

His interrogator paced a short arc, his eyes constantly scrutinising the prisoner.

‘The hammer…’ Numeon said at last, despising himself for the weakness in his voice. ‘Where is it?’

‘It speaks,’ said the Preacher, ignoring his question, as calmly and conversationally as if they were two strangers just getting acquainted. ‘Xenut Sul said you would not speak to him. Will you speak to me then, Artellus Numeon of Vulkan’s honoured Pyre Guard?’

Numeon bared his teeth but didn’t bother to strain against his bonds. It was a petty act of defiance, but the only one he had left.

The Preacher gave no reaction. He was tall with transhuman physiology and wore long crimson robes, etched in Colchisian. His bald pate and face seemed strangely patterned, as if dark, tanned, until the Preacher drew close and Numeon saw the umber cuneiform marking his skin.

‘You’re a Word Bearer,’ spat Numeon.

‘So you will speak to me. Even if it is to state the obvious.’

The Preacher bowed reverently.

‘You’re a traitor,’ the Salamander accused.

A slight tremor below the right eye betrayed the Preacher’s annoyance.

‘Loyalty is just a matter of perspective, Artellus. Yours is merely different to mine.’

‘Is this your tactic now?’ asked Numeon, his eyes still searching the chamber for the sigil but finding only shadow. He heard the faint susurration of laboured breathing. ‘Am I to sympathise with betrayers and murderers? By seeing from your perspective will I give up what you want to know?’

The Preacher laced his fingers and held his hands just above the abdomen.

‘I know everything you know, Artellus.’

Numeon failed to mask his surprise. The reek of the charnel pit returned, and a sickening suspicion began to form as to both the chamber’s purpose and its inhabitants.

The Preacher frowned. ‘Did you think you were brought here to bargain? To resist another round of torture?’ He laughed curtly. ‘Xenut Sul’s task was not the extraction of information – he merely wished to hurt you. That was my bargain… with him. Do you see?’

Numeon did not, but he was weak and only half conscious. He could not even be certain he was awake and hunted the shadows for the spectres of his lost comrades. None manifested.

‘A mind as untrained as yours, however strong, is no barrier to a Dark Apostle,’ the Preacher said without pride. ‘Yes, I seek Barthusa Narek. He is a true renegade and shall be hunted to the ends of the galaxy for what he’s done.’

Numeon remembered the Word Bearers marksman, but had not known his Legion considered him a betrayer.

‘So,’ said the Preacher, ‘I have given you something and now you must provide something in return.’

Numeon scoffed. ‘You are deluded.’

A thin smile gave the Preacher a sinister aspect.

‘I know you will because it will cost you nothing. Remember, I have reached inside your mind already. I know what you know, just as I am aware of the attachment you have to that scrap of your dead primarch’s armour.’

‘Vulkan li–’

‘Yes,’ the Preacher’s interruption cut Numeon’s declaration short, ‘so you keep saying, all evidence to the contrary.’

He licked his lips in the manner of someone accustomed to speaking at length.

‘I am a believer too, as devoted to my faith as you are to your absent father. We have fallen from grace,’ he said, ‘all of us. For a time, not even a heartbeat in the endless saga of the cosmos, we turned our faces from the true gods and embraced a lie.’ The Preacher nodded to Numeon. ‘Your Emperor…’ then touched a hand to his chest, ‘…my former Emperor. And now we are being punished for it. This war is not about the exhortation of religion, it is not for the dominance and subjugation of our species. Our souls are at stake – this is our penance for the sin of unbelief.’

Numeon scowled, already tired of the Preacher’s rhetoric and willing Xenut Sul to return. ‘What do you want?’

‘To tell me what it was like.’

‘I am still no wiser, traitor.’

The Preacher’s eyes flashed with fervent desire.

‘The fulgurite, the stone spear invested with the Emperor’s power on earth.’

‘It was…’ Numeon cast his mind back to his first meeting with the man who called himself John Grammaticus, how he had described the spear and what it purportedly represented, ‘…unremarkable.’

Truthfully, he had barely seen it, but could gain a small victory in the torment of his interrogator.

‘Amusing,’ said the Preacher, turning his back.

‘It is a piece of cold stone.’

‘It is far more than that, I think.’

Were he able, Numeon would have shrugged, but his bonds were tight. ‘Why do you even care? I thought you said the Emperor’s power was a lie.’

The Preacher faced him. ‘His creed, not His power. I want it because it killed the immortal primarch, and turned one of our own against us. No cold stone can do that.’

Numeon’s eyes widened. ‘Killed?’

The Preacher nodded slowly.

‘You lie,’ Numeon sneered, eyes narrowing. ‘Vulkan lives,’ he declared with fierce anger, ‘and nothing you say will convince me otherwise, so you might as well just kill–’

The chamber trembled. Numeon felt the tremor resonate through the slab.

For a few seconds, the Preacher glanced over his shoulder as if speaking to someone standing just behind him. Numeon tried but failed to discern his exact words. Whatever was said, the Preacher looked perturbed.

‘What’s happening?’ Numeon demanded. ‘Who are you?’

As the Preacher looked back, his form flickered as a second, corporeal figure walked through it and disengaged the hololith. Numeon had been speaking to the simulacrum of the Preacher, but Xenut Sul was very real as he advanced upon him.

In a violent flare of magnesium-white, the lights in the chamber came on. After the hard metal shunt of phosphor strips engaging, Numeon took a few seconds to adjust. What he saw confirmed made him cry out in rage and anguish.

‘My brothers!’

Row upon row of metal slabs, arrayed close together like ranks and files in battle, almost filled the chamber. In another light, it might have resembled an apothecarion but that would have been a lie.

Blood and death drenched this place, far from imagined and very real. Legionaries of the XIX, X and XVIII lay strapped down to the slabs and, like Numeon, they had been beaten grievously.

‘What is this?’ he roared, finding strength in his anger and tearing one of his bonds loose.

Xenut Sul answered curtly. ‘Torture room. Have no fear, Salamander, yours is only just beginning.’

Dagger-sharp pain flared in Numeon’s jaw. Black shadows crept over the edge of his sight. Xenut Sul disappeared behind a cloud of darkness. Before he passed out, Numeon heard the Word Bearer shouting orders.

‘All hands, repel boarders.’ The Word Bearer sounded calm, as if he had expected this. ‘They have found us. Kill any Ultramarine who sets foot aboard this ship.’

The words faded, swallowed by unconsciousness, and as he fell into the blessed abyss, Numeon was left with the drone of klaxons and the thud of booted feet…

Five

Liberators

Hunter-class destroyer Demagogue, Ultramar

The bulkhead slammed hard against the deck, raising a loud clamour. Its burnt edges glowed solar-red before fading to embers then dull black metal. Through the ragged aperture, Inviglio led a strike squad of the Red-marked.

Ahead, the narrow corridor section was dark. During ingress onto the Word Bearers ship, the Ultramarines had neutralised its primary power. Auxiliary did not stretch this far, so they were advancing through the dingy access tunnels as intended.

The Demagogue was a much smaller ship than the Dark Sacrament, a destroyer-class vessel with fewer crew. It could have easily been missed; Inviglio still had no idea how the shipmistress aboard the Defiance of Calth had found it. Despite its size, though, it was still teeming with traitors.

Bracheus saw them first. ‘Contacts!’

The Ultramarine engaged, firing off a short staccato burst from his bolter. Muffled shouts followed, the pair of enemy combatants lit up briefly by Bracheus’s muzzle flare before the flash died and so did they.

‘Two kills,’ he barked, ejecting a spent clip before chanking a swift reload into the empty breech.

‘Advancing,’ stated Inviglio, darting forwards with his body crouched low to present a smaller target.

Naevius had one eye on the auspex and cried out a warning just as the shell storm erupted in front of them.

Bolter rounds struck around the Ultramarines like hot, brass rain. Inviglio took a glancing hit against his shoulder guard and felt his lower leg greave dent with a non-penetrating impact hit before he hugged the wall of the corridor.

The others had done the same: Bracheus, Gordianius and Petronius on the left; he and Naevius on the right.

The two traitors Bracheus had executed were bait, intended to draw the Ultramarines into a narrow bottleneck.

Inwardly, Inviglio cursed his stupidity and briefly considered he might be reaching his physical limits, the point at which his mission efficacy would begin to diminish.

‘Petronius,’ he uttered through the vox, ‘give us some cover.’ Through the shared retinal feed, Inviglio icon-lit Petronius’s strike point.

The burly Ultramarine stepped out from behind the narrow rib-struts where the squad were hunkered down and fed a rapid burst from his meltagun into the cabling and armour plating above. He took a bolt-round in the upper torso for his efforts, and the mass-reactive shell shattered bone and almost tore off his shoulder.

Bracheus and Gordianius dragged the wounded legionary clear. A second later and a chunk of upper deckplate, cabling, pipes and adamantium rebar came crashing down into the corridor section.

Inviglio and the others took up positions behind the improvised barricades, able to adopt a better line of fire and bring their full strength to bear. Even Petronius joined the barrage, hooking the meltagun into a makeshift firing lip and unleashing sustained pulses of focused electromagnetic radiation.

It was over quickly, the three ambushers no match for the expertly trained Ultramarines.

Bracheus kicked through the debris they had used for cover, whilst Inviglio quickly stabilised Petronius so he could fight one-handed.

‘Re-equip,’ ordered the squad leader, prompting Gordianius and Petronius to change weapons.

Once he had rearmed Petronius with a bolt pistol, Inviglio clapped the hulking Ultramarine on the shoulder. ‘Ready.’

Petronius nodded and they swiftly moved out.

The Red-marked were picking their way through the three Word Bearers corpses when Inviglio’s vox crackled in his ear. Inside his sealed helm, the return was strangely neutral and bereft of any ambient noise.

‘Sergeant,’ he said, recognising the Sergeant’s ident as it flashed up on his retinal display. Crouched down, Inviglio raised his clenched fist as a signal to the others to stop.

‘Change to mission parameters,’ the Sergeant replied. In the background, Inviglio could hear the sound of bolter fire and the angry growl of chain weapons.

‘Go ahead.’

At Inviglio’s next silent order, the squad assumed a defensive perimeter.

Overhead, klaxons sounded and the crimson light of emergency lamps tainted the gloom the hue of blood.

‘Primary is inloading to your retinal display,’ the Sergeant said as fresh coordinates and vessel schematics resolved on Inviglio’s left lens corner.

‘Interrogative,’ said Inviglio.

‘Go ahead,’ the Sergeant answered calmly despite the fierce firefight he was obviously embroiled in.

‘Apothecarion? Do we have wounded friendlies on board?’

‘Negative. Theoretical is prisoners.’ He paused a beat. ‘The Word Bearers are not patching them up, Vitus.’

‘Understood,’ said Inviglio. He had known the Sergeant for a long time, but still could not get used to his informal habit of occasionally using first names. The implication was obvious, though.

‘Make it quick,’ said the Sergeant just before cutting the link. ‘We’re drawing a lot of fire.’

‘Updated mission parameters,’ Inviglio told the others as they were moving again. ‘Theoretical – high probability of friendlies on board vessel.’

‘Practical, brother?’ asked Bracheus.

Inviglio briefly met his gaze, answering firmly, ‘We get them off this ship then send it screaming back to hell.’

Shouts echoed down from the next turn ahead.

As much as Inviglio wanted to take the fight to the Word Bearers, he had his orders.

‘Junction left,’ he said, leading the others away from the conflict and towards the apothecarion. He looked down to his left at Naevius’s auspex scanner. Dark green bio-readings had just filled the screen with a profusion of contact blips. ‘With all haste, brothers.’

He could not have been out for more than a few minutes, but by the time Numeon came around again Xenut Sul was gone.

Knowing it was unlikely that he could save the other prisoners, Numeon had to think pragmatically instead.

One wrist already freed, Numeon reached over and unclasped the other. They were simple leather straps, easy enough to remove, but his fingers were numb so it took several minutes.

Removing the ankle restraints was harder, and he kept one eye on the entrance to the abattoir throughout, trying not to imagine the horrors perpetrated within its grimy, bone-yellow confines.

Anger would not serve him here; Numeon knew he must keep a cool head. He also needed information. Something had happened on board the ship. A prisoner revolt, perhaps? His might not be the only chamber where they were keeping legionaries still loyal to the Throne.

He dared to hope K’gosi or one of the others, even his Pyre brother Leodrakk, might have survived and be aboard the ship, but quickly crushed the idea. He had seen his brothers already, in his waking nightmares. They were revenants of memory, spectres who would only be banished when Numeon broke free of this dungeon and took revenge on their killers.

The last ankle strap came loose, and Numeon had to drag himself off the slab. He fell hard onto his knees, almost hitting the next table. The dull pain of his recent inactivity and torture had drained his body. Teeth gritted, he found the edge of the adjacent slab and hauled himself up.

Numeon flinched as he felt a cold hand strongly grip his fingers, and looked down to see the bloody face of an Iron Hands legionary. Numeon’s fall must have woken him. The X legionary’s bionics had all been ripped out, so only a red-raw void remained. His legs had effectively been amputated and the dying son of Medusa stared wildly. Below his missing right eye there was the tattoo of a skull.

Overhead, the lights were flickering as auxiliary power was fed to other more essential systems on the ship.

It must be an attack, thought Numeon.

The flickering glow of the phosphor lamps cast ghoulish shadows about the legionary’s ravaged face.

‘Don’t… lose… hope…’ he rasped haltingly, a lingering mote of his bionics lending a mechanistic tone to his voice.

Like a dying machine, thought Numeon, all of us left to bleed like carrion in the sun, as deep-seated grief threatened to surface.

The Iron Hands legionary gripped harder. Two fingers of his right hand were missing. The other wrist was a stump.

‘Kill them… for us,’ he snarled, wide-eyed.

‘I will,’ Numeon murmured grimly. He drew back his fist, voicing a sharp cry of anguish as he punched through the legionary’s abused ribcage to destroy his heart and end his suffering.

Others were deserving of mercy, but Numeon had no time. A faint draught, the acerbic reek of cordite, wafted through a crack in the chamber. Xenut Sul had left it unsealed. Whether out of carelessness or as part of some crueller ploy, it didn’t matter.

Numeon staggered for the door, finding inner strength returning with every step.

Outside, the ship seemed vast and oppressive after such a long time incarcerated, but he adapted quickly. He realised the vessel was small, certainly no cruiser or battleship. Likely, a frigate or a destroyer, judging by the height and width of its corridors. As if to remind him of the potential proximity of his enemies, voices from unseen warriors resounded ahead. They sounded transhuman, and they were shouting, obviously in combat.

Instinctively, he reached for a sidearm that was no longer there. He didn’t even have the sigil, and felt its loss as if it were a missing limb. He had to get it back.

Heading off in the opposite direction to where the voices were emanating from, Numeon went hunting. Xenut Sul had the sigil, and would be made to relinquish it before he died.

Inviglio left the apothecarion and shook his head at the others waiting for him outside.

‘All of them?’ asked Bracheus.

‘Dead, brother. All fifty-three of them. I finished two off myself that could not have lived.’

‘Throne of Earth…’ muttered Petronius, glancing down at his boots.

Gordianius hissed a quiet oath.

Naevius racked the slide on his bolter. ‘At least we can avenge them.’

‘No,’ said Inviglio, his tone severe and brooking no argument. ‘One of the slabs was empty. Bloody marks led to the door. I think someone escaped.’

‘Then we must find him,’ said Bracheus, fiercely.

‘So, where is this errant prisoner going?’ asked Naevius. ‘He could be anywhere on the ship.’

Inviglio met his questioning gaze.

‘What would you do in his place?’

It took two seconds for Naevius’s frown to turn into a scowl.

‘I’d find the one responsible for what happened to my comrades, and I’d kill him.’

‘The master of this vessel,’ Bracheus agreed.

The Red-marked headed for the bridge.

Scavenging weapons in a close-quarters boarding action was easy enough, and Numeon now carried a half-loaded bolt pistol in one hand and a short combat blade in the other. While a far cry from the halberd he had once wielded as one of the Pyre Guard, his purloined armaments would have to suffice.

Xenut Sul was a sadist, but he was also no coward. It was possible he had joined the defenders in trying to repel their boarders, but Numeon thought it more likely he had retreated to the bridge to coordinate the counter-attack from there. In a ship this size, it would be close to the prow. Numeon had enough of his wits about him to know which direction to head in. The bridge would not be far from the apothecarion, and he only needed to go up three decks before finding the right level of the ship.

Numeon had yet to see a single legionary without the dark red battleplate of the XVII, and managed to avoid the Word Bearers. Judging by the distant sounds of fighting, they had greater concerns, but Numeon still needed to convince himself that this was not some deeper plot to further damage his mind and wrench loose whatever secrets they thought he possessed.

Standard tactics during an incursion would be to disperse defenders around the ship, to hold and protect vital bulkheads leading to volatile regions of the ship, where a small insurgent force could cause a disproportionate amount of damage.

It would leave the exterior access corridor to the bridge largely unguarded with only a single Word Bearer at his post outside.

Numeon did not know what strength remained in his body. He only knew he had to endure. If he could find the sigil, somehow get off this ship… Ever since Isstvan, hope had been his guiding principle. He cleaved to it now, readying for the near-suicidal run down the corridor. Three rounds were all that were left in the pistol. It trembled in his grasp, forcing Numeon to admit he could barely raise the weapon, let alone aim it.

Will was everything. Vulkan had taught him that.

It is our will, our determination that lets us fight on when others cannot. It is our will that gives us the strength to self-sacrifice and endure beyond hope…

How Numeon wished his primarch was here to say those words to him now. In spite of the memory, he found he could not recall the sound of Vulkan’s voice. Some said it was the first thing you forgot when someone died and it troubled Numeon greatly that, even with his transhuman abilities, he could not bring its cadence and timbre to mind.

Numeon had no wish to die, to sell his life cheaply in some final, vainglorious act. He hesitated not out of fear but from a desire for his sacrifice to have meaning, for all of this to have some greater purpose.

Vengeance was a petty motive, the province of lesser men. Numeon told himself this was not about revenge. He fooled his head, but not his heart.

Effective kill range for a bolt pistol against an armoured legionary was roughly halfway down the corridor. Given his debilitated condition and paucity of ammunition, Numeon knew he would need to get closer. He turned the combat knife he had clenched in his hand around, so the blade faced down. Quicker to slash, to throw.

His had always been a fool’s hope, he supposed.

‘Vulkan lives,’ he whispered, sighting on his prey…

…when the Word Bearer’s visor erupted in a fount of gore and displaced bone. The traitor gargled blood, clutching at where his face used to be, and fell forwards.

An ally? An insurrection? Numeon could not tarry to consider this sudden stroke of provenance. The resonant clang of the dead Word Bearer’s armoured form hitting the deck had still not faded by the time the Salamander was on his feet and running for the bridge.

‘Did you see that?’ asked Venator, lowering his sniper rifle.

‘A half-naked legionary,’ Finius concurred.

‘Inviglio’s survivor?’ suggested Corvun.

‘Sprinting for the bridge,’ added Laertes.

From the long access conduit leading to the bridge, the Ultramarines and their sergeant watched from the shadows as the onyx-skinned Nocturnean raced from the junction and leapt over the traitor Venator had just executed, before barrelling onto the bridge.

‘He’s going to get himself killed,’ said the sergeant, sourly.

The door to the bridge was neither locked nor barred, and as it parted with a faint hiss of released pressure, Numeon saw his enemy revealed.

Xenut Sul was alone, standing on a command dais with his back to the Salamander.

Cautiously, Numeon stepped inside. He reached halfway up the stepped dais when the Word Bearer spoke.

‘This ship is overrun,’ he said, gesturing to the scenes of carnage described on grainy, incorporeal hololiths surrounding him.

Legionaries emblazoned with the noble sigil of the ultima were marauding throughout the vessel, sons of Guilliman on a rescue mission.

Xenut Sul shut off the hololith array with a clenched fist, extinguishing the circle of jade light around him. In its absence, the bodies of humans wearing the livery of the XVII Legion were revealed at his feet.

‘And I killed the crew.’

‘Where is the sigil?’ Numeon demanded, moving up the dais to where Xenut Sul awaited him unarmed. His hands were by his sides, the fuller held in the left.

‘My honour forbids me from taking my own life,’ Xenut Sul answered, yet to turn, ‘but your interrogators will not force me to betray my Legion.’

Numeon frowned. ‘What?’

It was only when he heard the racking of bolter slides and the sound of booted feet against the deck that he realised Xenut Sul had not been talking to him.

‘Stand down, Salamander,’ uttered a firm, commanding voice.

Numeon turned to find a squad of Ultramarines with their weapons pointed at him and Xenut Sul.

Their sergeant removed his crested helm.

A pair of blades was sheathed at his back, and his bolt pistol was mag-locked to his thigh. Blond, close-cropped hair framed a warrior’s face, youthful but hardened by war. His eyes shone azure, sharp and alert. He was vital, strong and enjoyed his appointed task.

‘I am Pyre Captain Artellus Numeon,’ said Numeon, ‘and I claim this prisoner for Vulkan. And what he carries.’

‘Vulkan? I have not heard that name in a while,’ the sergeant’s face darkened, ‘at least not happily.’

At a silent signal the four Ultramarines in the sergeant’s squad fanned out, two either side of the command dais, to encircle Xenut Sul.

Numeon went to intercede but the sergeant’s voice stopped him.

‘Daresay you have looked better, Captain Numeon, and in your prime you might have even given us a fight.’ He smiled, then shook his head. ‘But not like this, and we are not enemies, the two of us,’ he added, gesturing to the purloined bolt pistol and combat knife Numeon still carried. ‘Put them down.’

‘Not until I have what is mine.’

‘I have known Salamanders to be stubborn, defiant even. That’s a quality I greatly admire, but don’t make me apprehend you. I would prefer not to mark your or my honour that way.’

Numeon was adamant. ‘The sigil.’

Nodding to one of his men, the sergeant took the item after Xenut Sul was relieved of it and gave it back to Numeon.

‘Is in our possession. Now,’ the sergeant said sternly, ‘lower your weapons.’

After gratefully accepting the sigil, Numeon obeyed.

‘You do not know what this means,’ he murmured, cradling the hammer for a moment.

‘I know it led us right to you,’ the sergeant replied, one eye on his men as they pushed Xenut Sul to his knees, and shackled his wrists.

Numeon looked up. Faintly, through the sergeant’s vox, he heard other Ultramarines’ voices.

‘Second squad,’ he explained. ‘They’re securing the ship before we atomise it.’ Looking over Numeon’s shoulder, he nodded up to Xenut Sul, who was now bound and prepared for departure. ‘You’re coming too, traitor. Lord Prayto will have questions.’

Xenut Sul smiled thinly but didn’t rise to the bait beyond that.

The Sergeant returned his gaze to Numeon.

‘Don’t worry, Salamander. Yours will be a warmer greeting.’

‘Where?’ asked Numeon.

‘Where else? Macragge.’

‘The heart of Ultramar?’ asked Numeon.

‘Yes,’ said the sergeant, his face darkening again. ‘There is a lot you don’t know, but for now let’s get you off this ship and into our apothecarion.’

‘Sergeant,’ said Numeon, as they were leaving.

The Sergeant turned.

‘My gratitude,’ Numeon told him. ‘I thought…’ He let the admission fade, deeming it unworthy, and instead asked, ‘What is your name?’

‘Thiel,’ the sergeant replied, as he put his helmet back on, ‘Aeonid Thiel.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Hardback edition published in 2015.
This eBook edition published in Great Britain in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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ISBN 978-1-78251-773-3

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