Contents

Cover

The Path of Heaven – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

One

A thousand years might pass and it would never lose its fascination.

He ran his eyes down the edge of the blade, watching the light glint from the metal. This sword had drunk deeply of blood, both xenos and human, yet now it was pristine, unmarked, as clear as when it had left the forge-fire. For two hundred years he had tended it as a mother tends a child, restoring it, respecting it, returning it to the ebony-ringed scabbard with a benediction to the weapon’s soul that had never failed him.

Now he turned it again, watching the lumen-glow run down the pressed steel. The shallow curve held no flaw, not even so much as a notch to mark the years of service.

He held it loosely, relying on its weight to keep it balanced in his hands. He had once fought the eldar xenos on a world where the stones sang and the sky screamed, and he had remembered ever afterwards how those warriors had fought. The creatures’ speed and precision had outmatched that of his brothers, and that had rankled ever since, for his Legion was one that valued such things. So he had learned, and studied, and honed the craft, and every hour in the practice cages brought a scintilla of improvement, though he knew it would never be enough.

In any case, the days of fighting xenos were gone. The war had changed, and he was expected to test his sword’s edge against those he had once called kin. In the beginning that had been difficult; now it was second nature. The blade still cut as deeply and as well, and he had learned to find the hard beauty in killing his own.

His thoughts were interrupted as the lumen above his metal bunk pulsed softly, and he lifted his head from study. He knew without having to check the ident-rune where the communication came from – only the ship’s commander would dare make contact during designated meditation hours.

‘Yes?’ he asked, sliding the blade back into its scabbard.

‘Lord, your pardon,’ came the voice of Harkian, shipmaster of the Suzerain. ‘The scryer has detected incoming warp-wakes. Your activation is requested.’

Before the man had finished speaking, Ravasch Cario, prefector of the III Legion’s Palatine Blades, had reached for his helm. His ceramite faceguard was lacquered violet and blue, streaked with inlaid gold and blazoned with platinum, but not defiled in the way many of his brothers had defiled theirs. The time for that would come, perhaps, but not yet – not while he was yet to become the fastest he could be, the most precise he could be.

‘What does he predict?’ Cario asked, making for the meditation chamber’s door.

‘Unknown,’ replied Harkian. ‘Though in all probability–’

‘The Warhawk,’ said Cario, striding out into the corridor even as he twisted his helm’s atmosphere-seal into place. ‘Good. Then let it begin anew.’

Battle-group Jewel Shard re-entered real space, carving a trail of glittering molecular interference across the void. The fleet formation’s escorts shot ahead like thrown spears, twisting as their plasma drives keyed into full power. The core of the battle-line slipped into the physical realm behind them, void shields sliding across flanks lined with heavy ordnance.

Every ship in that flotilla was in a state of transition: some war vessels looked much as they had done at the outset of the Great Crusade; others were unrecognisable. On the most affected, gunwales were crested with writhing golden gargoyles, vent housings were engraved with a filigree of platinum shaped into unsettling formations, and collated effigies of carnal excruciation had been scored across the panels of the ploughshare prows. The command spires had seen the greatest augmentation, with crystal bridges spanning the pinnacles and arcane energies snaking amongst the comms vanes.

On the bridge of the lead cruiser, an Avenger-class veteran named the Ravisher, Legion consul and orchestrator Azael Konenos adjusted his position in the command throne and studied the incoming position runes. Around him, the clamour of the bridge-space passed in a fog of muffled murmurs. His auditory organs were fused and melted and warped together, bulging out from his neck and swelling across his upper back, capable of appreciating a far greater range of sound than ever before – but the price of accessing this enhanced spectrum was impoverishment within normal frequencies.

‘Confirm this,’ Konenos said. His voice was metal-edged, filtered through the coiled tubes that had punctured his throat since Isstvan III.

‘Rich hunting,’ came the reply of his vexillary Galian Erato, standing a few feet from the throne and gazing intently at banks of bronze-rimmed data screens.

Erato was beautiful, even amongst a Legion that had ever been beautiful. He was tall and slender, with golden skin and bone-white hair. Since the scouring of the Halliadh Togaht he had taken to stitching patterns into his exposed flesh with black agony-wire. Sutures now criss-crossed his cheeks and forehead, every so often flaring dull red as random pain-pulses fired.

Every other soul on the bridge, whether of the Legion or one of the hundreds of mortal serfs and servitors who attended to it, had been improved. Skin was puckered and ruptured, pulled tight or pinned back, rouged, roughened, plucked clean and studded with blood-washed jewels. The low thrum of the main drives was punctuated by ritual screams from the decks below, marking the ship’s ascent from the empyrean.

Erato threw a hololith array up into the fore bridge-space, collating it with the astropathic screeds burbling from the shackled star-dreamers.

‘Word from the Suzerain,’ he reported. ‘They have their targets and are moving to engage. I warned them to hold, but still they are moving.’

‘Of course,’ murmured Konenos. ‘What else?’

Erato’s lips twitched, snagging the stitches at the corner of his mouth. ‘Three incoming formations, moving fast on the Memnos convoy.’

Konenos leaned back. The III Legion’s warfront had become vast beyond all reason, stretching out in a huge arc across the galactic plane from Taras to Morox. Resupply had become erratic, plagued by warp-loss and counter-strikes from the fragments of Loyalist Legions that remained to contest the shrinking borders of their Imperium. Bulk carrier convoys had been hit repeatedly, the vessels either plundered or destroyed, slowing the relentless grind towards the Throneworld and drawing combat units away from the cutting edge.

It could have been any number of raiders. It could have been the dregs of the Legions they had broken at Isstvan. It could have been elements of the Imperial Army, still so vast that trillions remained alive despite more than four years of relentless culling. It could have been xenos, though precious few of those degenerates remained to draw breath.

‘Him, then,’ Konenos said.

‘Yes,’ agreed Erato.

Jaghatai. For years uncounted the White Scars had been an irrelevance, something to be reminded about in-between greater endeavours. Now, though, with the might of Ultramar contained behind the galactic fracture of the Ruinstorm and Dorn’s praetorians leashed to their master’s fortifications, only the unregarded V Legion still remained in sufficient numbers to trouble the Warmaster’s main onslaught.

‘You have analysed the attack?’ asked Konenos.

Erato nodded. ‘Yes, but–’

‘The convoy is not the target.’

Erato inclined his head in agreement, and Konenos found himself distracted by the patterns of wire across golden flesh. Konenos had seen Erato shred enemies using the power of sonics alone, and death amid such a vortex of divinely honed sound was a fine thing to witness.

‘They will strike there first,’ said Erato, his soft eyes locked on the hololiths. ‘They will hit the convoy, but that will be to draw us out. They are trying to pull the fleet together, away from where they truly desire to hurt us.’

‘And where would that be?’

Erato smiled. ‘There are a hundred targets, orchestrator. Would you like me to select one at random?’

‘It will become apparent. The hawk’s tricks are growing old. Signal the Suzerain that we will send three destroyers to their position. If they wish to preserve the Memnos convoy that is their choice, but I will not commit a greater force until we have seen the true hand of the enemy.’

Erato bowed. ‘And then we inform… him?’

Konenos rose from the throne, feeling the tug of the barbed nails that had been inserted under each rib of his fused organ-cage.

‘We do it now,’ he said. ‘It was never a good idea to keep the Soul-Severed waiting.’

The ship was the Proudheart, and the name had once been deserved. Its commander had never truly relinquished the reputation it proclaimed, not even in death, which was less of an impediment to continued service than it had once been.

The battleship’s flanks had been as deeply changed as any other war vessel of the III Legion, and now swam with colour like spilled oil. Its hull was enormous – a Dictatus-class carcass, studded with silver-mawed weaponry, powered through the abyss by ancient engine-furnaces. The scars of a hundred campaigns still lingered on its gilt-edged flanks: Jhoviana, Apt var Aption, the Dalinite Nebula, Laeran, Murder, Isstvan III, Isstvan V. Once, those old plasma-burns and solid-round impacts would have been scoured from the adamantium plates post-action by whole armies of void drones; now they were left in place, picked out, made into decoration by gangs of indentured artisan-slaves – years of warfare recalled in a vast metal tapestry.

Deep inside the Proudheart’s outer shell, the corridors echoed to new sounds. Frenzied cries came from the bowels of the ship endlessly, filtered and directed through transit shafts all the way to the exalted heights, every shriek resampled and reworked by banks of auditory processors until the walls shook from the overlapping layers of curated anguish. The mirrored panels of the interior were streaked with blood, left in place to turn darker, lit up by floating lamps of paper, wire and pearl. Nothing was erased, everything was savoured, all was illuminated.

In its past, the Proudheart had been like other Imperial battleships. It had employed a day-night cycle based on the patterns of its Legion’s home world, bringing a rhythm of light and dark to the vastness of the city in space. Now the lumens were never doused, and the clamour of an eternal day was never stilled. Menials had their eyelids sewn shut and their ears excised to keep them from going insane amid the eternal brilliance of it all, though many still succumbed; those who did were replaced by vat-enhanced analogues, built from the embryo to withstand the cacophony, the flamboyance, the terror.

Striding among that misshapen horde were the vestiges of the Emperor’s own – once the most unsullied of Legions, but which had flown closest to the sun. They had purged their ranks of waverers on the bloodied fields of Isstvan III and now numbered only the devoted among their number, the brothers who embraced the new path, who revelled in it, who strove for sensation with all the zealotry they had once reserved for martial exactitude.

What they had lost in dignity, they had gained in pain-wracked power. Gifts came with mutilation, changes that once they would have shrunk from but which now made them conduits for a greater deadliness. Their armour had warped, cracking and blistering as the flesh and iron within twisted into new shapes. They toyed with their sacred gene architecture, willingly submitting to the knives of their Apothecaries, who in turn had become the most exalted of their number – a priest-caste of flesh-artisans commanding power over life, death and the various charted states between and beyond.

For Von Kalda, one of that cadre in addition to being equerry to the Lord Commander Primus, the elevation had been a mixed blessing. He strode from the Proudheart’s under-bridge antechambers and up the winding glass-stone stairways. His fingers still glistened from the medicae-slabs, sticky under the inner film of his battle-gauntlets. The armour he wore bore the ivory sheen of his old order, though lined now with purple lacquer. His strangely childlike face remained creased in concentration as he went, locked in the one task – the sacred task – he had set himself while elbow-deep in the entrails of his subjects.

And yet, when the Soul-Severed demanded attention, the summons could not be ignored. Von Kalda crested the stair’s summit and moved across a crystal courtyard overlooked by burnished images of dead-eyed serpents and eagles. Ahead of him, the gates to the lord commander’s sanctum slid open soundlessly.

The chamber inside was cloaked in shifting shadows, lit by vein-blue lamps that hovered soundlessly on cushions of anti-grav. Metal bulkheads above creaked and flexed as if caught in a strong wind, though none stirred in that filtered atmosphere. The Proudheart was a home to more than mortal souls now, and in every crevice and fall-shaft the echoes of empyrical denizens hushed and slithered.

The Soul-Severed, like all of them, had endured a long period of flux. He sat on a throne of fluid bronze that melded to his armour-clad bulk. The Lord Commander Primus had eschewed a gorget and helm, exposing the long scar on his neck that he seemed to take as a sign of strength. To be killed – by the primarch, no less – and then reconstituted by the command of the same executioner struck many in the Legion as a symbol of the new gifts they had won with so much labour. Eidolon was the first of the immortals, the first of those to show that death and life were mere facets of a deeper existence.

At first he had been known as ‘the Risen’. That moniker had quickly begun to feel insufficient in its description of him.

He gazed down from the throne with the dull-eyed, listless mien of the Chemosian aristocracy. Every look, every gesture, implied ownership, the kind of acquisitive superiority that brooked no argument or dissension. In what remained of the III Legion’s military hierarchy, that still counted for much, although there were many, Lucius perhaps foremost, who had treated it with a contempt that came from equal ambition.

Von Kalda had no idea why Eidolon had been brought back. Perhaps it was a whim born of a newborn god’s boredom. Whatever the reason, the Lord Commander Primus had not remained long by Fulgrim’s side, and had taken nigh a third of the entire Legion’s strength under his own direction, giving no indication that he was following anyone’s orders but his own. Such was the way of things now – a galaxy of confused and overlapping loyalties, obfuscated by the clamour in the warp and the impossibility of long-range communications. They were all fighting in the murk, clawing their way towards Terra like blind men scattered by the wind.

‘Konenos makes contact,’ Eidolon said, gazing languidly at Von Kalda from his high seat. His voice was a rasp, still tight from where his throat had been cut.

‘What has he found?’ asked Von Kalda, bowing formally.

‘The Memnos convoy has attracted warp-wakes. It will be hit.’

‘He asks for ships?’

‘No.’ Eidolon’s irises had been replaced by iridescent jewels, and they glinted now with a tactician’s enthusiasm. ‘He reads it aright. This has the stink of barbarism.’

As he spoke, a silver dream-font slid up from the marbled deck. Von Kalda stepped back, allowing a five-metre-wide column of bone and lattice-inlay to rise to its full height. The water’s surface began to ripple, and a faint hiss echoed around the throne-chamber.

‘Too long since we were given a chance to take him by the throat,’ Eidolon drawled, watching the water’s surface slide.

The dream-font was a recent addition to his arsenal of arcane devices. Astropaths and daemon-bound psykers had been drowned in the machine, locking their visions into the water. Now it only reflected the dreams of the souls quenched within it, vomiting out their desperate nightmares when the waters boiled.

‘This thing cannot be trusted, lord,’ warned Von Kalda.

‘True. But what can?’

Water spilled over the edges, frothing as the torrent cascaded through twists of bone. Reflective light angled up into the chamber’s heights, dancing like marsh-gas. The hissing grew in volume, joined by the dying echoes of old chokes.

Soon enough, the images came. Von Kalda witnessed the ghostly orbs of worlds they had burned, the armies they had ground into the dust. Sigils snapped into focus briefly – the spidery motif of the forge world Ghorentes, the chevrons of the Knight House Praster, the endless imagery of Imperial Army regiments, now all destroyed. Cities drifted into view, planetary systems, deep-void installations, fleet-docks – all ruins, scoured down to ash by the remorseless advance of the Warmaster and his brothers.

‘Tell me, what do you feel when you see this?’ Eidolon asked. His withered, rust-edged voice made him sound more than half machine.

‘Only pride,’ said Von Kalda. ‘There will be more to burn before the end.’

Eidolon looked down sourly. ‘And Terra is the crucible. Fabius has already drawn up the experiments for it. I have seen them.’

Von Kalda did not ask how Eidolon could have done so, nor what the Legion’s Apothecary-general had planned. For the time being, Fabius remained with the primarch, who was far off, silent and sundered by the wrath of the warp. Instead, Von Kalda, who had plans of his own, concentrated on the dream-font’s imagery, knowing that Eidolon placed faith in it even if he himself did not. So many bound souls of so many seers – it would tell them something, even if it did not deserve the name of anything like truth.

‘An infinite universe to twist,’ the Apothecary murmured, ‘and still we cleave to this goal? Terra, the Throneworld, and nothing else matters.’

The shifting light of the dream-font played across Eidolon’s scarred, haughty face. ‘But that is all there is, my brother,’ he said. ‘We came from Terra, we return to Terra.’ Eidolon’s cheek twitched, exposing the tight skein of sinew that Fabius had painstakingly re-knitted. ‘And besides, we are changing. Our pleasures will soon be our masters. While we remember how to order a Legion, we must make the most of it.’

The dream-font’s visions intensified. More planets swam up out of the aether, many wreathed in cold silver flames. Von Kalda saw the worlds they had most recently subdued for the Warmaster – Lermia, Erwa Nha, Goball, Herevail, Mhoreb X. The orbs traced a scattered line across the physical void, a necklace of embers strung out in a trail unto the spinward curve of the galaxy. The bulk of the fighting was in the galactic west now, the most extreme edge of Horus’ long warfront. Greater forces drove hard up the centre, grinding onwards under the leadership of the Warmaster himself.

‘The Memnos convoy,’ said Eidolon, his eyes narrowing. ‘Where does it supply?’

‘The Gheist Narrows. Materiel, troops, provisions. The Narrows are unsecured, only fallen for two months, Terran standard. If the supplies do not arrive–’

‘Then nothing of importance will be lost,’ said Eidolon. ‘The fodder-carriers will be hit, that will draw a response, and then the real target will be chosen. But what? Where do they wish us to weaken ourselves?’

There were over a dozen garrison worlds within range, a hundred armed strongholds, twenty exposed battlefronts, all of which had their own strategic value.

Von Kalda saw no pattern. A loosening of the hold on the Narrows could be countered and draw little strength from the surrounding regions. It could be a token move – the telltale of an enemy that was running out of resources.

‘Consider our enemy,’ said Eidolon. ‘Consider his strengths, his weaknesses.’

‘The Warhawk,’ said Von Kalda.

‘None other remains. What is his position?’

‘Dispersed. Strategos record nineteen strikes in three months, thirteen of which were repulsed. The tally of losses will be hurting them. He musters, surely now, for a final assault.’

‘That would be against four Legions, and he has not the numbers to take on more than one. If I were the Khan, I would be looking for a way out.’

‘But he will not run.’

‘He will have to. He wishes to see Terra before the end, just as we all do.’ Eidolon pressed his fingers together. Von Kalda could see the old mind was still active, undimmed by the physical changes that Fabius had wrought. ‘He knows the truth, even if you do not – this thing will be decided at the Palace, and he will not risk being cast adrift while we break the walls down. He needs to turn now, to get out of our pincer. See the void through his eyes, Apothecary. See what he sees.’

Von Kalda returned to the dream-font. He saw the channels of the warp, the paths embedded in the stolen minds of drowned Navigators. He saw the distribution of the Warmaster’s forces, encircling, cutting off, stifling lines of retreat. Eidolon’s battalions had not been the only hunters trying to run down the White Scars – a thousand salients jutted into the void, smothering all ways through the turbulent aether. They all had standing orders – eliminate the threat of the flanks, clear the way to the Solar System and hasten the coming of the End.

‘Kalium,’ said Von Kalda at last. ‘He will attempt the Kalium Gate.’

Eidolon raised a stitched eyebrow. ‘Tell me why.’

‘The Memnos convoy remains deep in conquered space. Its loss will draw forces from three sectors of the advance-lines. If he provokes them fully, that will weaken the Garmartes Sector, but he will not assault that region, for it is laid waste now and has no value for either him or us. He may, though, use the Garmartes margin to force passage under the galactic plane. The Kalium System can be taken if they move in numbers, placing the Gate in range, which remains clear of the aether-storm. If he can seize the subsector before a reply is made, he will have his passage home.’

Eidolon nodded slowly. The dream-font seethed, as if in congratulation. ‘Good. And yet this is false hope, for the Gate cannot be forced – its foundations were broken by Perturabo and the storms now rage as wildly there as they do in every other sector.’ Eidolon drew in a long, wheezing breath, making the sutures along his throat flex. ‘But the Khan cannot know this. He makes the feint, and hopes to send us chasing after him into Memnos, freeing his path to Kalium.’

The Lord Commander Primus rose from the throne and drew himself up to his full, crooked height. Eidolon’s movements had once been fluid, but were now those of an old man, made halting by the life-sustaining poisons that coursed through his ravaged frame. Only his voice still made him deadly – the swollen auditory augmetics and bloated throat-sacs that could unleash his flesh-ripping hurricanes of sound.

Von Kalda looked up at him with a kind of fascinated loathing. He would have loved nothing more than to put his master under the knives, to delve into the scars left by resurrection and uncover the secrets that had created such a glorious monster. The vision he had already endured would be augmented by such a subject, though that was impossible. Perhaps one day, when the war was done and there would be leisure to do so… But for now he merely bowed in supplication.

‘Assemble the fleet and send word to Konenos,’ Eidolon ordered, limping down the throne-dais steps to the chamber’s floor. ‘Send a token force to aid the Suzerain, then order rendezvous with all other elements in the sensor-shadow of the Gate. We will make passage to Kalium as soon as our brothers join us.’

‘By your will.’ Von Kalda followed Eidolon down the polished processional. ‘And, if I may – the primarch?’

Eidolon shot Von Kalda a dry smile. ‘If you can locate our beloved Father, then by all means inform him. Pinning the Khan down might drag him from his indulgences, though I doubt it.’ He limped on, clearly still wracked by the pain of his transformation. ‘There will come a day when we are not bound by the wills of those child-gods. For now, we must do as we have learned to – prosecute their wars, pretend we are the masters of our own fate.’

His gold-edged boots scraped against the marble as his feet dragged.

‘But what dark jests this universe plays on us all,’ Eidolon rasped. ‘And what fools it chooses to tell them.’

On the bulk carrier Terce Falion, lead vessel of the III Legion’s deep-void Memnos convoy, Shipmaster Eleanora Kulba pushed her way up to the observation bridge. A lifter-servitor blundered out of her path, snorting stupidly through iron mandible-guards. She reached the doors and thumped the access panel. The electronics clicked twice before the pistons finally released and the rust-pocked metal shunted open.

Fael Alobus, her second in command, was waiting for her on the far side, as was the sable-robed Navigator Cavelli. Beyond them, the low curved roof of the Terce Falion’s bridge extended down towards rows of armourglass viewports.

‘Gentlemen,’ she said, crisply. ‘With me.’

The three of them proceeded down the main gantry. A thin line of pressed metal hanging over pits crawling with indentured bridge crew. The space stank of corrosion, human sweat and machine lubricant. Ahead, the void peered down at them through the lead lining of real-viewers.

Kulba hated the sight of it. She spent most of her time lodged down in the inner cortex-hull of the bulk carrier, avoiding staring out into the infinity of nothingness that it was her curse to ply. She had never wanted to sail the void, but as the Great Crusade had sucked resources from every world in the burgeoning Imperium and stripped planets dry of those with any degree of capability or nous, eventually the summons had come her way and the agents of the Administratum had made it clear to her where her destiny lay.

To make it worse, she had discovered that she was good at it. Piloting a bulk carrier was a peculiar skill, a cross between spire administration and freebooting. She was tough, she had a healthy covering of fat, she was perpetually angry – all qualities that had served her well in the auxiliary fleets of the Imperial Army in its spread across the stars.

The old Army and its command structures were now gone, of course. Kulba’s loyalty, for what it was worth, was to the Memnos Combine, which had long been in fealty to the sectoral command at Loeb, which had once been under the authority of the Terran prefecture of Phoedes but for two standard years now had been subsumed into the growing hinterland of tribute worlds harvested by the III Legion. Through them, she supposed, her fealty now belonged to the supreme authority of the Warmaster, but in truth it made little difference where the orders came from. She made a living, the food-cylinders kept coming, the ships were repaired and kept in order. There was danger, but there always had been. Her masters had always been distant, her goals obscure. She did what she did, the days passed and other minds plotted the greater progress of the Imperial dream.

The void remained hateful, though. Nothing would ever change that.

‘Signals, you say,’ Kulba said, pulling a data-slate from her grease-spotted tunic.

‘Not from us,’ said Alobus, scratching one of his chins. ‘Second-hand, out of the fleet.’

‘Who in the fleet?’

‘The Suzerain. A Legion ship.’

‘Recognise it?’

‘No. It’s still incoming.’

They reached the main viewing platform. Above them a crystalflex dome opened up, webbed with metal and streaked with aeons-old void-grime. Kulba took a deep breath and looked up.

Half her convoy was visible out there, hanging above the Terce Falion in a procession of immensity. Angle-sided and heavy-jowled, the big haulers stretched off into darkness, their thrusters burning low orange. Each ship was over fifty kilometres long, though almost all that bulk was given over to colossal series modules, packed with ranks of shackled container units. No human crew member went into those cavernous spaces, for the only populated sections of the ships were the tiny blisters on the forward hull-ridge, where the cortex-bridges were lodged. Everything else was silent, enclosed, locked down, sealed in.

Kulba saw the underside of the Revo Satisa slide above them, and watched the rows upon rows upon rows of stowage modules pass in stately sluggishness. Beyond that ship was the Daughter of Loeb, and beyond that was the Cold as Stars.

‘How soon until we break the veil?’ Kulba asked.

‘Three hours,’ replied Cavelli softly.

Kulba didn’t look at him. She didn’t like Navigators either. They made her spine creep, with their third swathed eye and their parchment skin and their shuffling. Cavelli smelt bad, too; always had. The stench was something faint, undefinable, a pheromone or some other spoor of mutation.

‘We could make the jump now,’ she said.

‘Then we would lose a third of the convoy,’ said Cavelli, smiling apologetically. ‘I do not have the manifolds for nine of the haulers.’

‘And we have orders,’ Alobus reminded her. ‘Legion orders.’

Kulba hawked up spittle and sent it sailing over the gantry edge. Void-nausea pulled at her innards. The stars glinted back at her from beyond the crystalflex bubble, malicious, eternal.

‘How close are they?’ she asked, resigned to more waiting in real space. The sooner the convoy pulled into the turbulent hell of the warp, the sooner they would know how many of them would make it to the Narrows in one piece.

Alobus consulted the snaked-head chrono-augur embedded in the back of his hair-flecked hand. ‘Less than… Well, I am mistaken. Getting something now. They must be early.’

That was when Kulba knew. They were never early: the III Legion were degenerating fast but they were still sticklers for detail, and if they had given a chrono-mark, they meant to keep it.

‘Dispatch all pickets,’ she ordered, narrowing her eyes, peering out into the dark. ‘Tell them if they see anything on intercept, open fire.’

She pressed the alert bead on the inside of her palm and felt sweat there.

Alobus looked at her, uncertain. ‘Ma’am, do you–’

‘Say nothing.’ Kulba saw the plasma bursts of thrusters firing as the convoy’s escorts spiralled out to the margins, taking up fire-lattice positions. The bridge’s lumens sunk down to combat-red, and flare-marks appears on cogitator consoles. ‘If you wish to do anything now, double-check this Legion communication and hope it proves accurate.’

The void-behemoths made no course correction. It took hours just to calibrate them for a change of trajectory, and unless that was done they would keep ploughing along the same vector until the last supernova in the galaxy blew itself out. Their picket fleet, around fifty lance-bearing sub-warp corvettes, reached the perimeter of the defensive envelope and took up station.

Cavelli drew in a breath and closed his natural eyes. Kulba turned on him. ‘You sense something?’

He gave her another one of those damnable half-smiles, but kept his eyes closed. ‘I am an old man. In truth, I feel lucky to have made it this far with you.’

As he spoke, every cogitator console across the bridge suddenly went dark. Void-navigation sigils flickered out, and the lumens overhead began to fizz.

‘Get them back on!’ shouted Kulba, rounding on the hubbub of her crew down in the pits. As they struggled to restore command, the silent flash of las-fire burst out from the void.

The consoles cleared. Initially, three lines of text in standard Gothic scrolled down the screens, clear enough for Kulba to read even at distance.

OATH-BREAKERS.

YOU ARE NOW JUDGED.

WE ARE THE PUNISHMENT.

Kulba knew that every officer on every bulk carrier would be reading the same thing. ‘Stay at your stations!’ she bellowed, turning back from the real-view portals and striding down the gantry. ‘Pull in manifolds! Prepare warp-cycle for ignition!’

That last order was a nonsense – even if Cavelli had initiated his preparatory studies, it would still have taken too long to key in the warp drives – but she had to say something. For the first time in her long and mostly hateful career, she was entirely at a loss.

Kulba made it five metres down the gantry before the first physical impact came in. She heard a hard smash somewhere high up in the cortex-bridge’s anterior shield cluster, followed by the shriek of metal being torn.

The text on the consoles snapped out, to be replaced by an image: a stylised lightning strike across a horizontal bar.

‘What is that?’ demanded Kulba, reaching the nearest viewer screen and grabbing it with both hands.

More crashes from up above followed, and the oculus was riven with flashes of silver. Alobus was frozen with indecision, but Cavelli started chuckling.

Kulba pulled the screen from its housing and whirled to face the Navigator. She thrust the image at him. ‘What is that? You know, don’t you?’

Cavelli nodded. ‘And if you had studied the livery of mankind’s Legions, sister, you would know it too. But what does this matter? Any one of the Cartomancer’s Twenty Visions would be more than enough for us.’

Kulba threw the screen down and grabbed Cavelli by his robes. The Navigator’s old body felt like a sack of bones under the rich velvet. ‘What does it mean?’ she hissed.

Cavelli opened his mortal eyes, and gave her a steady look free of either fear or hope.

‘Nothing made by the hand of man moves faster,’ he murmured, lost in something like awe. ‘They are magnificent. But let me tell you one more thing of them, for it is the last you will ever learn.’

He leaned closer to her, and his breath, scented with cloves, brushed against her face.

‘They are still laughing.’

Two

Sixty Shu’urga-pattern Xiphon interceptors screamed out from the hangars of the Kaljian and the Amujin, fell sharply to clear the wake of their motherships’ main thrusters, then kicked into full speed. Behind them boomed twenty Storm Eagle gunships, slower but more heavily armed. The raiders spread wide, fanning out into hunting packs and boosting into pre-arranged attack paths.

The convoy lay ahead of them, wallowing, sluggish, surrounded by its protective shell of escorts. The Kaljian moved to a high-plane observation position, opening up with broadside volleys to hit the flanks of the distant leviathans. The Amujin, the smaller of the two White Scars attack frigates, fell away to take up guard position further back towards the local-space Mandeville point.

Shiban Khan glanced down at the spread of ships under his command, took in the velocities and the angles and the cohesion, and made his choices.

‘Like sleeping cattle,’ he voxed, pushing his interceptor into a corkscrewing climb.

Jochi, hurtling less than thirty metres from his starboard wing, laughed. ‘Then we will wake them.’

The arrow-head formation of V Legion void fighters burst through the outer perimeter of guard-ships, far too fast to be tracked by the basic defence-nets of the picket vessels. Lance-beams scythed harmlessly above and below the diving interceptors, lighting up their bone-white chassis, the lightning strikes, the gold and crimson.

The underhull of the lead hauler loomed ahead, rust-red, lit with half-moon plasma thrusters. Its long series of armoured cargo-units stretched off into the dark like the shell of some immense creeping insectoid.

Shiban’s squadron shot under the approaching lip of the rear engine-housing, swerving to avoid the blur of las-fire pumping from servitor track cannons. Targeting wireframes rotated and shifted across the cockpit’s forward viewscreen, latching on to a thousand targets a second before isolating the most effective locus.

Shiban ignored the cogitated results and aimed the lascannons manually. Driving the thrusters to within a micrometre of their redlines, he strafed along the void-shield-warded flanks, watching fissures form at his weapons’ impact sites.

‘Bridge sighted,’ Shiban voxed.

His fighter swung out from under the hull’s shadow, then tore up the leading edge of the hull-plates, sending multicoloured static from the bulk carrier’s void shields blowing outwards like spray from an ocean-speeder. The rest of the squadron came with him, staying tight on his wing.

‘On my mark,’ ordered Shiban, switching to his fighter’s missile control system.

The Xiphon interceptors rolled into position, swerving around incoming las-fire, each one a blurred-edge smear of speed. Jochi went high, pulling a whole gamut of projectiles with him and leaving the attack run ahead thinned of flak.

The attackers cleared the last bulkhead, exposing the bridge complex perched atop the hunched spine of the bulk carrier.

‘Mark.’

Rotary missile launchers sent streaks of neon-white tearing towards the metal-line horizon. Silent explosions rippled out, smashing through the vessel’s shield generators. The interceptors ripped through a spray of burst armour-plates, tumbling away from the kaleidoscope of debris.

‘Hai Chogoris!’ whooped Jochi, pushing his fighter’s angle steeply back towards the hunting pack.

All across the lumbering convoy, similar explosions lit up the void, each one taking out a bulk carrier’s void shield coverage and leaving its heavy adamantium hull exposed. Pinpoint lines of las-fire and heavy-round cannons kept driving out from weaponised flanks, but none of it was close to hitting the mark.

Shiban wheeled away, choking his speed for just long enough to arrest the overshoot, then nudged the muzzle of his fighter towards the gaping maw of the hangar mouths.

For a moment, he thought he recognised the profile – the blinking marker lights, the chevroned warning livery, the vast cliff-faces of steel. He had hit a hundred such targets over past months, and they merged into one another. That had become life for them all now – hit-and-run scavengers, taking out the weak and the slow, hampering the mammoth warfront and pulling free before its enormous pincers could close on them. Every raid hurt the enemy, depriving him of the communication lines, materiel, supplies and troops that he needed, but it hurt them too, for the Warmaster had teeth of his own.

‘Follow me in,’ Shiban ordered, piling back into full velocity.

The approach was thick with glowing lines of las-fire. The bulk carrier’s crew were attempting to lower blast-doors across the hangar entrance, and Shiban opened up with his lascannons. The piston-arms shattered, leaving the blast-doors half lowered. That left a gap of less than eight metres to thread through at near full tilt. The test made Shiban smile for the first time on that mission, and his fingers clenched a little tighter around his control columns.

We would do this for sport, in another age.

He pushed down on the throttle, and screamed low across the remaining ground. The hangar entrance swam up before him, and he slewed across its face before powering through the narrow aperture.

Inside, a cavernous void opened up, easily capable of housing ships a hundred times the size of his own. Enormous hauler claws hung from roof-mounted tracks, illuminated by the red fog of combat lighting. Ranks of landing platforms stretched away into the gloom.

Shiban compensated for the shift into the bulk carrier’s gravity well, switched to atmospheric drives and applied his newly cycling airbrakes hard. The Xiphon spun around over its centre and came down heavily onto the nearest platform, shrouded in vapour and ribbons of atomising plasma.

The fighter’s cockpit locks blew, and Shiban pulled himself from his seat, taking up his favoured guan dao as he leapt down to the rockcrete. Defence servitors were already shambling towards him, levelling autoguns and limb-mounted carbines. Shiban burst into a sprint, smashing the heel of his blade into the steel-ringed throat of the closest attacker, pushing away and punching his blade through the stomach of another, whirling around to smash the legs out from under a third, before pushing out and beheading the fourth.

All across the hangar his brothers were doing the same – powering from their fighters and racing out across the echoing chamber. None of them moved like Shiban, though. Where their weapon-strikes were fluid, his were jabbing; where they danced and feinted, he smashed and careened. Their armour was the same as the Brotherhood of the Storm had worn since the first days of its inauguration on Chogoris: ivory plates, rimmed with red and gold and marked with three lightning bolts – the sign of the minghan. Only Shiban’s right pauldron still bore those old marks, those old colours. The rest of his armour was a steely grey, pocked with shell craters and marred by the patina of combat. His plates were thicker than the others’, knitted together with cables and clamps and fusion-locks. He called those things the Shackles – the damned Mechanicum devices that kept him alive, kept him moving, kept him fighting. Within them, his body was now a mongrel thing, part-superhuman, part-ruined.

Szu-Ilya had spoken truly to him, what seemed like a lifetime ago.

‘In another Legion,’ she had said, ‘they tell me you might have been placed in a Dreadnought.’

A half-tracked servitor with iron pincers for hands rumbled towards him, and he leapt, using metal muscle-stimms lodged amid the sinews of his body. The guan dao whirled, tracing a perfect arc through the smog-laced atmosphere, slicing the man-machine’s upper feed-cables. Shiban’s momentum carried him into its embrace, and a crunch down from his clenched fist cracked its skull open, terminating the commands to its rudimentary impulse units. It was a move impelled by the embers of fury. It had never been that way before.

He shoved the twitching corpse aside and kept moving. Two hundred metres away lay the first of many doors leading into the vast ship’s interior. The nine battle-brothers of his arban were close on his heels, only pausing to despatch the last of the hangar’s defence force. They converged on the doors to a lifter shaft, their armour spattered with thin blood and viscous engine oils. All his warriors were helmed against the void, and their armour was covered with unique battle-marks – skulls, skins, signs of the vanquished – binding defeated souls to the armour of the one who had killed them.

Jochi was carrying the severed head of a mortal trooper in one hand, and let it thud to the deck.

‘I do not think they saw us coming,’ he said.

‘They saw plenty,’ said Shiban, mag-locking his blade and pulling up a schematic from the wall-mounted cogitator unit. ‘They are weak, not blind.’

He inserted a control wafer into the cogitator unit and the lifter access codes cycled down his helm display. He took control of the access shafts, the ship’s shield subsystems, six other critical lattice-nets and the base level navigation grid.

‘Anything, then, Tachseer?’ Jochi asked, his enthusiasm reduced, shaking the blood from his blade.

Tachseer. They insisted on calling him that – all of them, now – and it was long past the time for resisting.

Shiban interrogated the augur-node implanted in his cranial interface. It caused him significant pain to use, just as every action – moving, breathing, killing – caused him significant pain. For a moment all he saw was the local-space tactical sphere, clogged with the burning shells of convoy pickets. The Kaljian remained in close, the Amujin further off. He was about to respond in the negative, to order the ascent to the bridge, when he sensed the first signal closing.

‘Not far behind,’ he murmured, as if that were something that had ever been different. He looked up, reaching for his locked glaive. ‘They remain quick.’

‘You have a ship-mark?’ Jochi asked.

‘What does it matter?’ said Shiban, calling up the lifter platform and activating his glaive’s disruptor. ‘They will come, and we will end them.’

He paused before passing over the threshold. There weren’t as many incoming signals as he had expected. That boded poorly for the opposite flank of the move. All the games were getting old, and perhaps even the Khan’s mind could now be read by the enemy, just as they seemed to read all else.

A lifter platform shuddered into view on steam-wreathed metal columns, and the blast-doors ground open in a trail of sparks. A ship-ident flashed across his helm display, picked out in the Imperial Gothic runes that had once been a symbol of the dominance of humanity and now felt like the emblem of its folly.

Suzerain.

‘Come,’ he said, moving into the lifter shaft, his glaive glowing electric-blue against the dark. ‘The debauched are on our heels.’

No ship was suffered to break the veil ahead of the flagship. The Proudheart shattered the barrier between realms first, and in its wake came the outriders, pulling wide once the transition to the materium had been fixed and taking up pinpoint assault positions.

Eidolon, standing in the observation tower of his private hull-citadel, watched his fleet deploy, ship by ship. The capital vessels fell into the Chemos-authorised formations they had used since the earliest days of the Crusade, covering one another’s trajectories, mapping broadside solutions to each other, sliding into the abyss like sharks through the ocean’s swell.

They had lost nothing in precision. The purple-and-gold tide spread across the emptiness, hitting cruising velocity well within Legion expectations. Crystal spires glittered like frozen tears. Jewels reflected the light of the stars. It was beautiful, impressively beautiful.

The Proudheart’s main line deployment was joined, seconds later, by the arrival of Jewel Shard, Lepidan and three other battle-groups tied to the lord commander’s will – four full line warships, many more support vessels, from hunter-destroyers to gun frigates, the kind of flotilla that would have once subjugated whole sectors, now running down those of the species who had refused the call to evolution.

Eidolon felt his new glands twitch. He raised a finger and traced the line of his swollen throat, the skin as tight as a drum. He felt the veins pulse rhythmically, tracing out the irregular pattern of two hearts.

Menials brought new armour-pieces to be drilled and turbo-hammered into place. A six-legged augmetic drone clattered across the marble, bearing Eidolon’s swollen gorget in three iron pincer-claws. The armour-piece had been chased with silver, picked out with bestiary from Old Terra and Chemos, fluted finely, polished to the high sheen that had always been demanded. As the drone approached, Eidolon raised his chin, suffering its mechanical attentions like some old coiffured monarch. The gorget was clamped into place, and Eidolon felt filament-needles slide into his distorted black carapace, locking fast and pulling ceramite hard onto flesh.

As the sonic multipliers made their interface, an echoing snap spun out across the arming chamber. It was only a feedback glitch, but it still blasted open the cranial shells of the servitors, leaving several twitching helplessly on the flags.

Eidolon turned to the tech-priests, raising an eyebrow. The closest of them, a hunched nightmare of cabling and wire-mesh cowls, bowed in apology. ‘Refinements are still being made,’ it muttered.

Eidolon raised his arms to the horizontal, and the surviving menials shuffled forwards to clamp the plates into position. Every addition brought a surge of fresh pain – a toxic blend of his gene-template being twisted into new and unsanctioned forms. Some of it he had learned to enjoy. Other sensations were less welcome, but in time he would no doubt find a way to turn the experience to his advantage.

We are not the finished article yet, he thought. There are still steps of sensation left to take.

A rune flickered into life over his helm display, indicating the arrival of Azael Konenos and his ships. Eidolon remembered the same marker lighting up before Isstvan, when Konenos was not yet an orchestrator of the Kakophoni and he himself had only experienced one lifetime. Azael’s loyalty had been complete and perfect then, just as it was now.

‘Be welcome, my brother,’ Eidolon voxed. All around him, the drills whined as the bolts were dragged tight.

‘Lord commander,’ acknowledged Konenos, his voice also distorted by the augmetics of his own ruined throat. ‘The barbarians?’

‘They will come. My equerry doubts it, but they will come.’ Out of the corner of his eye, through the crystalflex real-viewers, Eidolon caught sight of the Ravisher at the head of the newly translated formation. The hunters were gathering. ‘Take up position beyond the Gate’s leeward rim. Run silent, and wait for the charge. Have you witnessed Kalium before, my brother?’

‘I have not.’

Tech-priests limped towards Eidolon, carrying his helm aloft on a salver of gold. It was twice the size it had once been, chocked and studded with auditory dampeners and channellers, inlaid with the filaments that would slide into his inner ear and wrap around his sinus cavities. They lifted it high, and Eidolon looked up into its miraculous interior.

‘Then you are fortunate,’ he said, just as the rim of the helm came down, sealing him within the carapace of ceramite. Fresh shards of pain burned as more wires slithered into bone-sockets. ‘As we destroy what we once built, there are fewer wonders than there were. Feast on this one, and as we slaughter in its shadow, remember what we, the children of Terra, once dreamed to accomplish.’

No one knew who had made it. All records were gone, lost in the long strife that had engulfed the galaxy before the Emperor’s coming. It was ancient – that at least was certain – raised in a time when the technology of humanity had run amok, designed by those who had no fear of the blasphemous union of mind and metal. Perhaps that had been its undoing – those who had placed it into the gulf of the void succumbing to the machine-spirits sacrilegiously burned into its arcane core.

The date of its abandonment would never be known. The Gate had lain dormant and charred for at least a thousand years before the explorator fleet of Rogue Trader Josiah Halliard had come across it while roving far ahead of the First Legion’s obsidian war fleets. Halliard had searched it with his own forces, believing the structure to contain treasure worth plundering, but found only echoes and rust amid the dark. Frustrated, he had later sent missives to the Lion’s command, which in turn had brought the Dark Angels to Kalium. They had claimed the entire subsector for Terra, sealing it off and sending in reclamator squads of their own. What they discovered was never made known, though records of transits from Kalium to Caliban were logged deep in the Navis Nobilite’s archives on Terra, none of which carried official authorisation and all of which were buried.

In time, the Lion himself had arrived, fresh from conquest on a dozen worlds. It was said that when his grey-eyed gaze alighted on the Gate for the first time, he did not speak. It had been as if he could peer beyond its bulk, past the great curve of its inner mouth, and see into the maw beyond. When he had eventually stirred, the words had been typically few.

‘Make this place fast. It guards many paths.’

Perhaps he had sensed what the Navigator Houses only later proved, or maybe he had just been fortunate in his guesswork. Either way, the Lion’s judgement was sound. The Kalium System lay at the juncture of nine major routes through the warp. Great currents of pure aether surged about it, pushed by the vagaries of the Tempest Invisible. A fleet could enter the aperture into those deep streams and be thrown far across the galaxy’s plane at greatly accelerated speeds. A journey of Terran months might take a similar span of weeks, something that was of great interest to the strategos of the Administratum as they planned the ever-expanding warfront of the Great Crusade. In this the Gate was not alone, for other such portals and cut-ways had been found in scattered wastes among the stars, but it was stable and within the Crusade’s core expansion sphere, and thus of principal value.

So it was that the First Legion did not retain ownership of the Kalium Gate, but it passed instead to the direct control of the naval echelons of the Imperial Army. More fleets arrived, first by established warp lanes, then using the arteries under the Gate itself. The old structures were secured and charted, and then built upon. Ancient bulwarks disappeared under new mountains of adamantium and iron. Strange harmonic vanes were replaced with batteries of macrocannons and void-lances. Shafts of unknown provenance were filled in with lead-lined cells, ready to take the thousands of menials who would soon be shipped in from surrounding compliant worlds. Mechanicum crawler-teams turned up and promptly disappeared into the depths of the core, emerging months later laden with locked caskets ready for unscheduled and undocumented return voyages back to Mars.

By the Crusade’s high point, a hundred battleships were passing through the Gate every week, guided by fifty thousand naval staff installed within the new refit yards and fortresses and sensor-towers and docking berths. An artificial world grew like coral over the old foundations, obliterating the signs of an older civilisation, until only a few archivists and sector commanders ever knew that the mighty staging post had once been a creation of humanity’s era of semi-remembered terror and hubris.

And yet, all knew, deep down, that the place could not have been made in any other epoch. Its size defied description – a colossal ellipse running around the neck of the warp inlet, nine hundred kilometres in diameter at its widest extent. From a distance, it resembled a glittering necklace in space, at once fragile and indomitable. Coming closer, an observer would see that the Necklace – as it had become known – was composed of hundreds of node-stations, each one linked to the next by heavy lengths of reinforced chain. Every one of those stations would have been a formidable star fortress in its own right, bristling with defensive weaponry and crowned with assault craft docks. All of them, though, were dwarfed by the pinnacle of the Gate’s mysterious architecture: the Keystone.

The Lion had given it the name. At the apex of the great curve of the Gate’s collar, the Keystone swelled out into the abyss, bulbous, bloated, superabundant. It had taken two years to chart the full extent of its labyrinthine interior, and even after the Army had assumed final command, large sections of it remained effectively mothballed and unknown. The docks were capacious enough to accommodate a star fort and its escort fleet, and the towers that clustered at its crown were the equal of any hive world’s spires. Huge protective arcs surrounded it, enclosing inhabited sections within concentric rings of cannon-laced adamantium. Its shield generators utilised archaeotech far more efficient than standard Imperial void shield capability, giving the entire edifice a permanent cloak of translucent silver.

They had said that the Keystone was unbreakable. They had said that even a Legion fleet would be unable to penetrate that degree of shielding, and that, if supplied and manned and in prime condition, the Kalium Gate could be held indefinitely against any besieging force known to Imperial high command.

Perhaps some rumour of that boast reached the ear of the Lord of Iron, called Perturabo, master of the IV Legion, and perhaps that wore at his ever-fragile pride. When treachery came to the Imperium, right at its apogee, it was his Legion that took command of the Kalium subsector warfront. In those earliest months of confusion, rumour and counter-rumour, little was known, or could be known, of the movements of those primarchs who had cast their lot with the Warmaster, and so the Gate’s defenders might reasonably have believed themselves as secure as any. In advance of firm orders from Terra, preparations were made, drills were run, the resident fleet cordon reinforced.

It was afterwards said that Perturabo took little pleasure in its swift and complete destruction.

‘I desire the fall of only one fortress,’ he was reported to have remarked, even as the outer Necklace still burned from the Iron Blood’s punishing fusillades. ‘Until then, count no victories.’

When the IV Legion took to the void once more, they left the Gate a smouldering tomb, spinning gently on its enormous axis, stripped of life and rendered back almost to the dormant state it had been in when discovered by Halliard.

And yet, in all the tumult of a galaxy in flames, the Kalium Gate’s destruction was just another statistic among a thousand other catastrophes. Amid the riot of intelligence and counter-intelligence, much was missed, and more ignored. Though the supply fleets stopped coming, and access to the great warp lanes was blocked by mines and the wreckage of the inner collar, few in the outer reaches of the galaxy would have known of its fall unless their fight for survival had demanded it.

And so it remained a prize for the unwary, a nexus that now led nowhere, a ruin whose possession gained the victor nothing.

But that had not stopped them coming. Even as the warships of the Emperor’s Children took up guard positions over the summit of the dormant Keystone apex, new warp signatures registered out in the far void – dozens of them, moving fast, just as those of Jaghatai’s Legion always did.

Three

Shiban reached the blast doors to the bridge, crouched low and waved Yiman forwards. His battle-brother sprinted ahead, clamped three krak grenades to the hair-line between the door’s adamantium plates and set them to blow in sequence. Yiman retreated as the rest of the arban fell back, taking cover behind a line of low support frames five metres from the clicking charges.

Explosions kicked out, shattering the doors’ locking mechanism and denting the heavy plates inwards. Shiban moved instantly, clutching his guan dao two-handed, but he was not the fastest – Jochi, Yiman and two others beat him to it, revelling in pure genhanced muscle rather than the hybrid mechanisms their khan now employed.

‘For the Khagan!’ Jochi whooped as he smashed his way through the jagged-edged gap, firing his bolt pistol.

Shards spun and bounced as Shiban followed him in. Beyond the portal, the bridge opened up in a fog of flickering lumen-strips. It ran for a hundred metres, rising slightly towards a crystalflex observation dome at the far end. Deep pits fell away on either side, crammed with terrified mortals and chittering servitors. Projectile fire skipped from the gantries that spanned the drop, aimed poorly by nervous hands. The bulk carrier’s defenders were not even of the calibre of regular Imperial Army troopers – if Shiban had not been encased in his superlative armour he would still have had little to fear from such ill-directed shots.

By now, Jochi was nearing the observation platform. Shiban followed close on his heels, feeling the metal decking flex under his weight.

‘Preserve the shipmaster,’ he voxed.

Bolt-round echoes rang across the arch-roofed interior. Two warriors had leapt down into the pits and were slashing through the hordes with their curved blades. Two more had vaulted up into the heights, defying the weight of their armour to clamber into the metal spars that sheltered the snipers. Cogitator lenses shattered, throwing fizzing sheaves of crystal over the decking. The air rang with the stink of cordite, human fear and burst lubricant cables.

Shiban reached the platform under the dome. Twenty-three corpses greeted him, each one felled by a single precision shot. Jochi stood guard over the slumped cadavers, his armour barely dented, scanning around for anything still living. Others of the arban fanned out, still hunting, thirsting for more blood to wet their blades.

Two crew members had been spared. The mortal shipmaster, a woman, was on her knees, trembling. Her Navigator stood beside her, unafraid.

Shiban stooped, lifting the shipmaster’s fleshy chin with a single finger. ‘Where are you bound?’ he asked.

‘The Narrows,’ she blurted, eyes wide. ‘My lord.’

‘I am not your lord. What is your cargo?’

‘We did not–’

‘What is your cargo?’

The woman looked briefly lost, her pupils flickering from the armoured giant towering over her to the other ones who rampaged across her bridge. ‘I... We do not–’

Shiban let her chin fall, and turned to the Navigator, who bowed floridly.

‘A privilege to witness you fight, khan,’ he said. ‘My name is Cavelli. We carry nutrient supplies, battle-grade rations for nine Army regiments in service of the Third Legion. Some infantry weapons – ground attack craft, heavy assault gear. The remainder from standard supply ledgers, medicae equipment, parts, machine tools. Little of great import. In truth, I am surprised you came for it.’

Shiban studied the old man. The Navigator would be allowed to live, for such rarities were never killed needlessly. It sickened him, for the agents of the Navis Nobilite were employed by both sides of the war, untouchable even in treachery, their lives protected both by ancient precedent and the practical necessity of warp travel. The convoy would have two-score of such mutants on duty, at least one for each bulk carrier, and all would be preserved. Perhaps many of them had already served the Loyalist cause before; perhaps none had.

‘How soon before you power your engines to full?’ Shiban asked.

Cavelli tilted his head in what might have been apology. ‘As I was telling Shipmaster Kulba, it will be some time until all ships are prepared.’

‘You have one hour. Get to work. And I will have additional requirements.’

Cavelli bowed again, then stiffened suddenly. ‘Of course, we may not have that long.’

Even as he spoke, Shiban received the same data over his comm-feed. He switched to the wide-range tactical augurs and picked up idents from all the units fighting in the battlesphere. Every bulk carrier had been boarded and every enemy crew had been immobilised. The last of the defence pickets were being run down, and the two White Scars frigates had pulled in close to the void-wake of the convoy to receive the fighters again.

But that was not all. Warp signatures had registered on the edge of sensor range – a dozen of them, coming in tight, skirting the very edge of safe Mandeville tolerance.

Jochi stomped back across the command platform. ‘They are here?’

Shiban nodded, trying to gauge how long they had, what numbers were incoming, how best to marshal the forces given to him. The margins were getting tighter, the response times faster, the windows for operation slimmer.

‘This is still my ship...’ came Kulba’s tremulous voice.

Shiban turned to see the shipmaster standing defiantly, her chin wobbling a little, a bead of sweat running down her cheek. She had not drawn a weapon, but her fists were balled in her gloves, and she had placed herself between Shiban and the command throne.

There was something noble in that. From the earliest days on Chogoris, when Shiban had been Tamu and the boundary of his existence had been the sky and the earth beneath it, he had always admired defiance.

His bolt-round hit her in the chest before she had even seen him draw the weapon. Kulba hit the back of the throne with a wet thud and sprawled across its arms, by which time Shiban was already moving, sliding his bolter back into its lock-position, ignoring the slick of blood that spread from the throne’s base.

‘Secure the Navigators,’ he ordered, switching to the arban’s channel. ‘And look to the engines, as ordered.’

A crackling comm-burst brought in more information – Emperor’s Children war vessels, as precisely configured as they had ever been, in numbers. So this encounter would be the test Yesugei had promised him it would be.

‘Then make them fight,’ he commanded, knowing that every warrior in the brotherhood was primed and ready. ‘Blood them deep, for they are the oath-breakers, the destroyers of the dream.’

He activated the guan dao’s energy field again and felt it surge within him – the savage, sharp anticipation of killing that now only came from taking on his own kind.

‘For the Khan,’ he breathed. ‘For the Emperor.’

The attackers came in primed for combat. If they had expected to find the Kalium Gate unprotected, its defences denuded to provide cover for the diversionary raids choreographed at Memnos and nine other scattered sites, they gave no sign of it.

The main assault was led by the Dictatus-class battleship Lance of Heaven, one of the Legion’s core war vessels, the veteran of a dozen major engagements since they had learned about Isstvan. Its flanks were no longer spotless ivory, its lines no longer purest blood-red. Old plasma burns now ran along the length of its charred gunwales, patched up by hasty battlefield repairs and marred by repeat impacts. Its thrusters were black from incessant overburning, its bridge disfigured with the brown patina of lance-scorch residue. The only part of it that was kept undefiled was the great icon high up on the ship’s crown that bore the Legion sigil: the lightning strike, the vengeance of heaven. That image was restored after every encounter, picked out in rarest gold and flood-lit across its heavy armour plate, for there would be no deception, no attempt to run silent or defy martial honour.

We are the V Legion. We are the ordu of Jaghatai, the White Scars of Chogoris.

We are the oath-keepers.

A million souls had died under the sigil’s gaze in four long years of vicious fighting, each one dying with the gold and red of heaven reflected in their eyes. It had once been a joyous proclamation, an exotic statement of freedom amid the juggernaut of Imperial conformity. Now its aspect was bloody and furious, the mirror of the forgotten barbarian souls who etched it on stone, steel and hide.

Seven more warships emerged in the Lance of Heaven’s wake: the Namaan, Khamanog, Bloodline, Celestian, Fate’s Arrow, Umaal, Qo Ama – all variants of the Legiones Astartes battlecruiser, each heavily refitted, altered, patched-up, wounded, so much so that their original Martian classifications had ceased to deliver much meaningful information about their capabilities. The Umaal had once been the Tenacious, a Death Guard line-breaker. The Celestian had not changed name, but had belonged to a Word Bearers compliance formation. The white war-paint was thin on both those vessels, scraped over hulls that had once borne the liveries of different masters. The others had always been V Legion.

All seven ships stayed tight to the centrally placed Lance of Heaven, powering towards the Necklace at full tilt, their shields glittering. Escorts radiated out from the attack axis – destroyers, gun frigates, missile boats – eschewing protection for the punch of unleashed speed. Every movement was deliberate, taken at high velocity, mapped to deliver the most intense shock-hit of ordnance before a counter could be organised.

Four years ago, such tactics had reaped ruin on the Warmaster’s advance. Accustomed only to the ragged assaults of Isstvan’s hollowed-out dupes, the traitors had taken time to adjust to the Khan’s more orchestrated counter-offensive. The Death Guard had suffered particularly badly, unable to match the voidmastery of the V Legion, but all of them – Fulgrim’s chem-addicted sensation-seekers, Perturabo’s obsessive engineers, Mortarion’s grim foot-sloggers, even the Sons of Horus themselves – had taken their share of pain.

But that was four years ago. Every Legion was a living thing, gifted with commanders of infinite subtlety and tactical understanding. The Death Guard refined their fleet strategy, bringing to bear greater firepower against the Khan’s wild riders. The Iron Warriors gave their fleet enough heavy physical anti-ship protection to turn their attackers into great lumps of plasma-laced slag. The Sons of Horus did what they always did, responding with such concentrated brutality and directed discipline that the two Legions, once close in understanding and sympathy, became blood-sworn in antipathy through accumulated atrocity.

The Emperor’s Children had learned just as fast, and from their positions at Kalium they recognised the Chogorian deployment of the False Spear. They knew that the Lance of Heaven and its escorts were not as all-powerful as they appeared, and that the more ephemeral wings of destroyers and frigates had been loaded beyond design capacity. They knew that to meet the main charge with equal force would invite disaster, and that they had to respond to the full spectrum of the incoming flotilla – just as spread out, just as fast.

And so they did. The Proudheart, the battle-group’s flagship, equal in displacement and heritage to the Lance of Heaven, emerged from the shadow of the Keystone with its cruiser-class escorts, the Mortal Splendour, Excessive, Infinite Variety and Aquiline. These heavy warships were outnumbered by the V Legion formation bearing down on them, but bolstered by the defensive emplacements on the Keystone and Necklace. Fixed cannon batteries opened up, spiralling glowing lines of armour-rending shells into the battlesphere. Threading through the spider’s web of coruscation came the Emperor’s Children escorts, each one prepared and engine-keyed for rapid-attack manoeuvres.

For the space of a human breath, the void between the two fleets remained intact – scored by projectile trails, as silent as the grave, bounded by movement, but pristine. Long-range guns opened fire, shield generator crews placed their last power feeds into immense promethium coils, bridge pilots made their final calculations of distance, heft, mass and velocity.

Then the gap closed.

Shells slammed into armour-plate, las-fire raked across the void, assault boats slammed into hull-lines, lance-beams fizzed home. Bulkheads smashed, plasma-conduits exploded, armourglass shattered, spine-ridges shook with impacts, transverse bracing dented. Vast blooms of fire lit up the void, punched through by more spears of iridescence. The flanks of the Keystone turned red, banishing the void’s eternal shadow as the power of suns was kindled and let fly.

The ships became cauldrons of fire, ringed about by focal webs of destruction. Smaller vessels screamed around those nodes, hammering out their payloads. Mortal cries rang out, thousands-strong, unheard over the claustrophobic tumult within each vessel but relished in the deeper geometry of the immaterium beyond.

And so again the abyss witnessed the raging death of aeon-machines, as the finest of humanity set about, with the perfect efficiency they had ever been gifted with, destroying themselves in the fires of choler, ambition and vengeance.

Cario entered the restraint cage of the boarding torpedo, placed his sword in its steel casing and felt shackles descend to press against his armour. The other four warriors of his unit were already in their places ahead of him, each one a dark profile against the subdued lumen-strips. Before the coffin-lid of the torpedo hissed closed, he noted the deployment of the Suzerain’s menials, their eyelids sewn shut and their movements governed by spatial cogitator stimuli. He watched the other torpedoes along the rack take on their payloads, and counted every one of his brothers as they took their places.

Most were like he was – still arrayed in the old armour of Chemos, their outlines much as they had been from the very start, sigils unaltered, blades straight, gold polished. Even among his brothers, though, the changes were beginning. A ceramite panel here, a helm-lens there, a frozen scream imprinted onto a vox-communication, a sheen of never-dry blood glossing a breastplate.

It would come. Their gene-father’s mutation would spread like poison in a wound, and they would all become half-breeds, caught between the physical and the daemonic.

But not yet. Not while mortal perfection had yet to be achieved – the cleanest kill, the most perfect agony.

The coffin lid clamped shut, and Cario closed his eyes.

‘For the beloved primarch,’ he said softly, speaking by closed vox to the shadowy outlines within the boarding torpedo’s chassis, as well as those in the other tubes. ‘That we remain worthy of his immortal trust.’

From outside the torpedo, he heard the clangs of blast doors closing, followed by lifter hooks retracting. A boom and whine of escaping air was replaced by silence from beyond the confines of his armour – just the thud, thud of his hearts and the low pull of his breathing.

‘In this thing, as in all things, be artful.’

The torpedo’s interior went pitch-dark, and its chassis shivered as the rail took it clattering out to the launch mechanisms at the hull’s edge.

‘These are our savage cousins. Bleed them, just as in ages past we bled the dead to preserve the living.’

Cario felt the torpedo shift onto the ignition track, and braced himself for the sudden surge of speed. Just as he did so, he heard the old whisper again, dancing around the inside of his helm. The muscles of his left shoulder twitched, and he saw the flicker of an old image chase across his visual field – a horned creature, immense, seductive, beckoning him onwards, curling a long black tongue across fleshy lips of purest pink.

But not yet.

‘So we remain now what we have ever been,’ he said, banishing the spectres with a mental command. ‘The true and only children of the Emperor.’

The torpedo’s engines ignited, and the chassis exploded into straight-line speed. Cario was thrown back against the restraint cage and relaxed his body, letting his power armour take the strain. He felt the sudden shift in trajectory as the torpedo left the hull and plummeted down towards the battle-plane. It was jerked sideways violently by some huge detonation, then slewed hard back towards the attack run trajectory.

Data cascaded down his inner helm display, recording the progress of the entire brotherhood. He watched dispassionately as the torpedo bearing Brother Ramarda’s squad was taken out by heavy bolter-fire from a V Legion gunship, and equally dispassionately as the same gunship was flayed by a vicious salvo from the Suzerain’s close defence grid. He could trace the progress of the entire engagement through that data – the hulking cargo vessels attempting to pull clear to enter the warp, the two White Scars frigates harrying the incoming fleet, the nine ships of his own Legion closing in inexorably to prevent the convoy’s escape.

Then the torpedo reached its target, and everything smeared into a juddering crash of static.

Cario was shunted forwards, rocking as the torpedo punctured through plates the width of a man’s arm and careened onwards through a fusing mass of melting deck-plates.

Even before it had finished its grinding progress, Cario activated the release rune. Melta-blisters on the torpedo’s outer flank ignited, burning a cocoon clear around it. The internal lumens switched on, and the shackles of the restraint cage snapped free. The coffin lid slammed back, ushering in a howling flood of heat laced with the smell of burning metal, and the Palatine Blades sprang from their transport.

Cario retrieved his sword, mouthed a word of blessing over the long steel edge, and rose from the torpedo’s rocking corpse. His helm display instantly switched from the wide-angle assault range to an interior tactical readout, isolating the positions of his brothers and marking their ingress routes.

He shoved aside a burning spar and hauled his way clear of the torpedo’s wreckage. Behind lay a long gouge in the bulk carrier’s outer hull, terminated by a smouldering ring framing the naked void; ahead was a contorted mass of broken struts and the flame-wreathed discharge of escaping oxygen.

The squad of Palatine Blades strode through it, cutting out with sword-edge where the path was blocked. They reached an intact transit passage with working void hatches, and closed the seals, cutting out the tempest. They met up then with a second five-man squad and started to run, their longswords crackling. The twin kill teams passed into the bulk carrier’s sepulchral interior, watching the feedback energy-snarls from their disruptor fields flare up into the darkness above.

As he sprinted, Cario watched the support columns soar away, towering above container-stacks over five hundred metres high. They reached a lifter shaft that ran into the heights, still operative, but exposed. They ignored the turbo-platforms and clamped on to the inner drive-tracks, climbing them hand over hand. They ascended quickly, gaining the approaches to the bridge without firing a shot or using a blade.

Only towards the end, as they crested the shaft’s summit and blasted through sealed environment barriers, did any sign of the recent carnage show itself. They went watchfully then, going stealthily from bulkhead to bulkhead, swords held ready. Cario remained at the forefront, the hairs on the back of his arms rising with anticipation. A long, wide chamber ran away from them, studded with branching portals every five metres. On either side, bodies lay in piles on the decking, heaped together carelessly under the rows of arches, their limbs bent double and their unseeing eyes gaping up towards the vaulted roof. The narrow lumens flickered, leaving deep shadows to fester in the perma-dark.

The Palatine Blades silently adopted a diamond formation, Cario at the leading tip, followed by the sub-prefector of the second squad, Avanarola. Haiman was next, followed by the rest, with the taciturn Urelias covering the rear. Their helm lenses sent pools of light rippling over the heaped corpses in the vaults, exposing motley expressions of terror, surprise, shock, nausea. The bulk carrier’s crew had been slaughtered far beyond what was necessary to control the ship, then shoved out of the way like slabs of meat.

Cario studied the auspex scans ahead. At the end of the chamber, a stairway rose to meet a braced pair of doors bearing the rusted griffon emblem of the Memnos Combine. Beyond that was hard to gauge, but he detected heat sources and movement, and the trace signal of energy weapons.

Without breaking stride, he issued battle-signals to his brothers, and the diamond gave way to a double line. The first squad would hit the doors, destroying them and laying down penetrating fire. Those five would give way quickly as the return volleys came in, but their screening would allow the second rank to storm the chamber beyond, where they could deploy their true strength – the charnabal sabre, aristocrat of blades.

Cario paused at the foot of the stairway, bolt pistol in one hand, ready to give the command. Just as he was about to act, his eye was caught by a face in the shadows to his right. He turned his head a fraction and saw a mortal woman’s body atop a corpse-pile. She had been killed by a blunt blow, leaving most of her features intact.

A spark of unease suddenly struck him.

‘Fall ba–’ he managed to say, before the chamber exploded in bolter-fire.

Cario threw himself to the deck, feeling the hard thump of rounds against his armour. He scrabbled forwards, staying low, firing blind with his bolt pistol.

His brothers were all doing the same thing, scattering out from the centre of the chamber, trying to find cover, returning fire as best they could. Raffel was not moving, his body riddled with bolter impact craters, and several others registered hits.

Cario broke for the stairway, trying to orientate himself. They needed to get out of the chamber’s open ground and fight their way towards the vaults where the bodies lay in their heaps, but that was impossible – the bolter-fire was coming from the corpses.

He reached the lowest steps, twisted around and wedged himself up against the nearside railing, firing steadily. All around him, stonework smashed and buckled, throwing a screen of dust into the gloom of the chamber.

White Scars were emerging now, pushing aside the corpses they had hidden under, their armour streaked with gore-sheen, their bolters pumping. Another of Cario’s squad went down, pulverised by the weight of incoming fire.

But the shock had faded. Cario’s squad fought back, keeping their discipline. Their armour absorbed the bulk of the hits, just as it had been designed to, giving them precious seconds to fight their way towards cover. He pushed clear of the stairway again, weaving out of the path of more shells, picking out a blood-armoured White Scars legionary amid the wheeling shadows.

There were nine of them in total. Even with two of his own squad down, those were odds he could live with.

You do not know who you are taking on, he thought, closing into blade range.

The warrior he advanced upon fell back, switching to his own curved sword. Cario hit him on the downward sweep, letting the weight of the sabre carry it into contact. The two blades snarled together, dragging a line of sparks down the cutting edge. His enemy responded well, moving quickly, letting the impact subside. They traded more blows, their swords whirling, clanging on the strikes and flexing away.

It took five strikes for Cario to gain the measure of the legionary. He feinted left, just a fraction, playing on his opponent’s marginal pull the other way, waited for the conscious correction, spun out of the contact and lunged point-forward.

The tip of his sabre blazed as it slid under the breastplate, delving into his enemy’s stomach and slicing clean through tissue. The warrior staggered, trying to keep his footing, but by then Cario had already withdrawn the blade, hauled it round and whipped it across, decapitating the warrior and sending his helm bouncing bloodily across the deck.

He was about to launch into the melee further down the chamber when the doors at the top of the stairway juddered open and a figure in steel-grey plate bearing a disruptor-shrouded combat glaive powered through the gap. This one’s movements were different – jerkier, with machine-heavy strength behind them.

Recognising the master of those he fought, Cario saluted in the old fashion, a swift lowering of the blade before guard was taken once more.

‘Brave, to remain in safety while your warriors die,’ he said.

His enemy lumbered into close range, swinging for the strike. All across the long chamber bolt-rounds continued to snap and boom, punctuated by the rasp and ring of blades in contact.

‘You come too late,’ the glaive-wielder said, his voice heavily accented with strange rhythms across the Gothic words. ‘These ships will soon be in the warp.’

Cario made his final assessment, drinking in information from the way his opponent carried himself, the tenor of his speech, the hundred subtle signs that gave away strength and weakness.

‘Then let us not waste the chance,’ he said, grinning under his helm-mask. ‘Show me what I came here to best.’

Click here to buy The Path of Heaven.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2016.
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.
Internal illustrations by Tiernen Trevallion.

The Path of Heaven © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2016. The Path of Heaven, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78572-053-6

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.