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Fear to Tread – Extract

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The war that came to Melchior was fought by gods and angels; it cracked sky and earth, burned mountains and turned oceans to ash, but in the end it was all about a single objective. On the white salt plains of the Silver Desert, where millions of conscripts and faithful had toiled to build the praise-towers and empath-chapels, the nephilim gathered for the last fight.

Over the months of the war, they had fallen back, leaving each battleground behind no matter if they had been the victors or the vanquished. It was almost as if the towns, the plainslands and the canyons had been tainted to them by the shedding of blood. The nephilim turned their backs and threaded away, and slowly it became clear where they were heading. From orbit – once their egg-like starcraft had been killed and void superiority lost to them – the lines of displacement were wide enough to be seen with the naked eye. Streams of figures, black ribbons of refugees being herded from each point of the compass, plain against the landscape like the dark plumes of smoke from the burned cities.

The war of the gods and angels could have been ended from that high vantage point. It would have required only the time and patience needed to drive the enemy into their last stronghold and then bombard it into oblivion.

But this was not that kind of battle, nor were those who fought it inclined to stand and wait. There were affronts of great scale that needed to be answered in kind, lessons to be learned and demonstrations to be made to the galaxy at large. The nephilim had offended, and they had to be seen to be punished for their crime.

And then there were the people. Not all of them sang the hymnals, their faces streaked with joyful tears as they looked up at the giants that walked among their number. Not all of them gave everything they had, from chattel to first-born, at the word of the nephilim. Many were among the multitude without choice, shackled and made slaves. They deserved to be freed; to suggest they be sacrificed on the altar of war was unconscionable.

Some said all the worshippers were slaves, if one were to widen the definition. In the end, the point was moot. To free the people of Melchior, the nephilim had to be exterminated, down to the very last of them. On that point, there was no disagreement.

In the heart of the Silver Desert, on the sparkling white gypsum wreathed in waves of radiated solar heat, the nephilim gathered with their great entourage among the broken rocks and escarpments, and there they sang their peculiar ululating songs and toiled at the copper frames of their constructions. Waiting for the enemy to come.

Knights in moon-pale armour trimmed with black formed a massive phalanx of ceramite, shields and guns. There were eight thousand of them, the marching of their booted feet crunching the top layer of salted soil into powder, which swirled into the air as fine as paper-smoke. White upon white, wreathed in haze, they seemed to float towards the edges of the great nephilim encampment on a rumble of sound, a peal of thunder that had no ending to it. At the edge of their battalions were war machines – battle tanks, hovering skimmers supported by invisible columns of contra-gravity, low and blocky things that resembled armour-plated trilobites, fighting vehicles that bristled with gun barrels. Peering out above the mist there were hundreds of battle standards and pennants; they carried variant designs of the sigil on the shoulders of the warriors, the black face of a sly canine with a crescent moon beneath its snout, along with unit citations and squadron marks.

The tallest flag, the one that rode at the very tip of the formation, had a unique design – an eye rendered in a manner that resembled sigils of Terra’s antiquity, open and daring, watchful like that of a predator. The pennant was carried by a champion among champions, and he stood resplendent in artificer-wrought armour, marching at the right arm of a demigod. A master of war.

Horus Lupercal, primarch of the Luna Wolves and lord of the XVI Legion Astartes, halted in his tracks and raised a heavy, gauntleted hand, pointing into the lines of barricades and revetments marking the edge of the nephilim host. A ripple broke back across the ranks of his warriors as they too came to a stop and awaited his commands.

The hard, severe light of Melchior’s sun cast a fathomless black shadow at his feet. ‘You see them, captain?’ Horus asked softly, without turning to his subordinate.

Captain Hastur Sejanus, praetor of the Fourth Company of the Luna Wolves, nodded grimly. The near-hit of a nephilim shriekpulse earlier in the campaign had damaged the bones of his skull, and they were knitting together well but the healing process had the side-effect of giving him a constant, low-level headache. The gnawing pain made him irritable and robbed Sejanus of his good humour.

The giants were on the move, surging forwards from their encampment. The captain of the Fourth heard the whistling, tremulous noise of their sing-song voices as they came, and the cries of the men and women who rushed to get out of their way. Massive footfalls drummed across the taut surface of the desert sands.

Horus tipped back his head, looking away, up and up, into the near-cloudless sky. For a moment, the commander seemed uninterested in the enemy approach.

Sejanus glanced around at his lieutenants and made quick gestures in battle-sign, ordering the heavy support and Dreadnought units arranged along the edges of the Luna Wolves formation to make ready. Lascannons, heavy Drako-pattern bolters and magazine-fed missile launchers were prepared. Behind him, the captain heard the sound of eight thousand weapons being armed.

‘Here they are,’ he said, compelled to say something as the first of the alien giants rose up and stepped over the inner, human-scaled barriers of their bulwark. The nephilim had a kind of unhurried, careful agility that reminded Sejanus of sea-going creatures seen through the walls of a glass tank. They moved through air as if they were swimming in water, deceptively slow. But he had seen first-hand how fast they could go if they wished, darting and spinning, becoming difficult to hit.

Sejanus was ready to give the order there and then, but Horus sensed his intent and shook his head. ‘One final chance,’ he said. ‘We’ve come this far. We may still be able to save lives.’

And before Sejanus could answer, his liege lord was walking forwards, out of the lines of the ranks towards the closest of the colossal xenos.

It was a grey; Sejanus had absorbed the surveillance data on the aliens via a hypnogogic transfer and he knew what little the intelligence officers of the Imperial Army had gleaned about the command structure of the nephilim. The colours of their bloated, oblate bodies seemed to designate general rank and position. The blue were rank-and-file types, often at the front lines. The green seemed to perform a role similar to that of an Apothecary or perhaps a squad sergeant. The grey were apparently commanders, thought of as ‘captains’ by the analysts for want of a better word. Attempts to translate the screeching native speech of the aliens had proven fruitless; the upper registers of the sounds existed in hypersonic ranges that were beyond even the reach of a Space Marine’s genhanced hearing. That, coupled with the strange light-patterns that flashed over the lines of photophors in their skin, made breaking their tongue a fool’s effort.

The nephilim had no trouble doing the reverse, however. They had come to Melchior speaking Imperial Gothic as if they had been born to it. And what they said had denied a whole star system to the rule of distant Terra, and the Emperor of Mankind.

The grey saw Horus and moved towards him, light-flashes on its epidermis sending a silent command to the lines of greens and blues forming up behind it. They halted, and around their thick, pillar-like legs, Sejanus saw humans clustering to the aliens in the same way that children would cling to a mother. The converts were all armed with weapons looted from Melchior’s planetary defence forces. Their faces were faintly visible behind the thick, translucent masks that they wore. The masks blurred their aspects, making their features seem uniform and unfinished; the intelligence corps believed that the conscript masks were made from the epidermal layers of nephilim flesh. Greens had been observed cutting out patches of their own skin for this ritualistic process, and it was theorised that somehow the wearing of the alien flesh bonded the conscripts to their xenos slave-masters. Sejanus had personally observed a post-battle autopsy on a dead nephilim and seen the profusion of wiry innards and gelatinous organs that made up the forms of these things. Hulking entities of roughly humanoid outline, they were smooth like carvings of soapstone, with abstract shapes approximating arms and legs. Their dome heads emerged from their shoulders without a neck, and an array of olfactory slits and eye-spots ringed the surface of their skulls. In this light, the nephilim looked like things of blown glass, their semi-transparent flesh glowing in the bright day.

Horus halted, the grey bending slightly to look down at him. Each of the xenos stood over twice the height of the tallest legionary.

‘I will make the offer one last time,’ Horus told the creature. ‘Release your thralls and leave this place. Do this now, in the Emperor’s name.’

The nephilim’s photophors glistened and it spread its stubby, three-fingered hands in a gesture of false openness that it must have copied from a human. The air in front of the alien vibrated as an invisible pane of force rippled into being. Strange harmonics whistled and hummed; this was how the xenos spoke, creating an external, ethereal tympanic membrane, manipulating the passage of air molecules through some as-yet-undetermined means. It wasn’t psychic in nature – that had been ascertained already – but technological. Some kind of instrumentality bonded into their organic forms.

‘Why do you oppose us?’ it asked. ‘The need does not exist. We want peace.’

Horus placed one hand on the pommel of the sword at his waist. ‘That is a falsehood. You came here unbidden, and you took a name from the ancient mythology – that of Terra, Caliban and Barac.’

‘Nephilim,’ it sang, its voice high and peculiar, sounding out each syllable of the word. ‘The fallen seraphs.’ The grey took a heavy step closer to the primarch, and Sejanus’s hand reflexively tightened around the grip of his storm bolter. ‘Worship them. Praise us. Find peace.’

‘Find peace.’ The humans huddling at the feet of the aliens echoed the words as if they were a benediction.

Horus’s attention never once strayed from the alien. ‘You are parasites,’ he said, his words carrying on the wind across the plains, breaking the silence that followed. ‘We know how you draw your sustenance. You feed on the emanations of life. Our Imperial psykers have seen it. You need to be adored… to be worshipped like gods.’

‘That…’ it said, the sound-voice humming, ‘that is a kind of peace.’

‘And with your technology you control minds and cage spirit. Human minds. Human spirits.’ Horus shook his head. ‘That cannot stand.’

‘You cannot stop us.’ The grey gestured towards the acres of copper towers and strange antennae behind it. There were thousands of the nephilim now, a sea of giants moving forwards in slow, loping steps. ‘We have fought you, we know your way. And you can only win if you kill those you profess to protect.’ It pointed at a group of converts. The alien made the hand-gesture again, trains of white light moving under its skin. ‘Join us. We will show you, you will understand how beautiful it is to be… in communion. To be at once a god and a mortal.’

For a moment, Sejanus thought he saw something dark pass over Horus’s face; then the instant was gone. ‘We have dethroned all the gods,’ said the primarch, ‘and you are only pale shadows of those false things.’

The grey let off a hooting cry in its own language and the legion of nephilim advanced, each of them phosphorescing an angry yellow. ‘We will destroy you,’ it said. ‘We outnumber you.’

Horus gave a rueful nod and drew his sword, a massive blade of oiled steel and adamantium. ‘You will try,’ he said. ‘But today you face the Emperor’s sons and his warriors. We are the Luna Wolves, and this Legion is the anvil upon which you will be broken.’

From high overhead there was a low crackle and a sound like distant thunder as sonic booms from the upper atmosphere reached the desert floor. Sejanus looked up, his acute eyesight picking out lines of white contrails, hundreds in number, flaring out behind great crimson tears and scarlet-hued hawks as they fell at supersonic speeds towards the silver sands.

‘We are the anvil,’ Horus repeated, pointing with his sword. ‘Now behold the hammer.’

The heavens screamed.

Ejected from the launch tubes of a dozen capital ships and battle-barges in low orbit, a rain of ceramite capsules tore through the outer atmosphere of Melchior and fell like flaming meteors towards the Silver Desert. Falling with them were diving hawks: Stormbirds and assault gunships turning and wheeling through the air towards the gargantuan nephilim encampment.

They were red as blood, red as fury, and they carried company upon company of the warriors of the IX Legion Astartes. The speed of their assault was the key to victory; the alien invaders and their zealots had successfully been drawn out to confront the massed forces of the Luna Wolves, leaving the defences on their flanks thinned and permeable. But the xenos giants were not slow in their thinking, and the moment they understood that they had been duped, they would attempt to regroup and fortify.

The Blood Angels would not allow that to happen. The nephilim would be broken and cut down, their cohesion shattered by the brutal deep strike that even now was moments from point of impact.

The first skirling impulse of sonic power shot up past the descending assault force, energetic beams of oscillating air sparking spontaneous flashes of heat-lightning. Down in the desert, the quickest of the aliens were reaching their thick arms upwards as if groping for the high clouds, using the resonance of their glassy skeletons as waveguides for the shriek-attacks.

Drop-pods clipped by the sound beams went off course, spiralling out of the landing quadrant towards the white salt erg; others not so fortunate ripped open or slammed into brutal collision with their fellows. The lead Stormbird, crimson like its cohorts but adorned with wings of gold, wove a course through the sonic barrage, guiding the flock into a blazing power-dive.

Heavy lasers and missile pods about its nose and wings spat fire back towards the nephilim defenders, blasting black craters in the hard-packed sand. They were closing with each passing second, but were still too high for accurate targeting; instead, the Stormbird’s gunnery crews were suppressing the enemy far below, forcing them to open up the space where the warriors would make planetfall.

And when the point of no return was crossed, the red and gold aircraft turned into a tight, descending spiral. Across the ventral hull, plates of metal unlocked and slid back along hydraulic piston-rails, allowing the howling air into the open compartment revealed behind them. Other aircraft in the formation did the same, hatches releasing to bare their interiors to the sky.

From the lead Stormbird came a figure clad in armour the shade of the sun. A primarch, another demigod.

An angel.

He threw himself into the pale sky, embracing the pull of gravity like a lover, letting it speed him towards terminal velocity. Unmasked, his gallant face set in determination, a mane of flashing tresses snapping in the wind, he cried out his defiance.

From his back there was an explosion of white as snowy pinions unfurled, great wings extending out in wide arcs to catch the flow of the air and effortlessly harness it. Gold trinkets, teardrops of precious red jade and ruby, silk tabards and chainmail of platinum ratt-led against a suit of ceramite and plasteel so ornate, so glorious that its artistry seemed better suited to a gallery of the highest reckoning. Against the drag of the airflow, he unsheathed a wicked red sword with a curved, barbed hilt; it was the cousin to the blade held by his brother Horus far below.

With him were warriors no less determined, no less fierce in countenance. Assault legionaries of a dozen companies bore down with the snarling jets of jump-packs upon their backs, guns in their hands and retribution hard in their eyes. Leading them were the Sanguinary Guard, whose golden armour and white wings echoed those of their liege lord; but the wings that held the Guard aloft were made of enamelled metal, and like the assault squads their flight was powered by spears of orange flames from blazing fusion motors.

The primarch landed with an impact greater than a point-blank barrage from a Vindicator, a perfectly circular ripple of shock resonating out from the crash of his boots upon the desert sands. Nephilim blues rushing to attack were blasted off their feet and they struggled to right themselves, only to be gunned down by the ornate wrist-bolters of the falling Sanguinary Guard and the fusillade of the assault squads.

The angel Sanguinius drew up from the crater his arrival had shaped and met his first foe. A bellowing nephilim green came hurtling at him, shouting pulses of sonic disruption powerful enough to shatter bone and break rock; the alien towered over the primarch, and its lucent flesh was alight with violent, flickering speech-colour. There was a crackling cadence as it ran, the outer dermal layer of skin hardening into a natural sheath of misted, glassy armour.

His sword-tip rose up in a bright arc of glittering metal and met the nephilim in the centre of its torso mass. The blade bit into the glass-skin and shattered it effortlessly, fragments pealing with tinny bell-tones as they ricocheted off the primarch’s battle plate. The weapon went on, deep and true, the monomolecular edge slicing through into gelatinous internals, breaking silicon bones and opening up the alien to the air. Bifurcated, the green-skinned creature came apart with a death-howl that ripped into the dust as it collapsed.

Sanguinius shook silvery, metallic blood off his blade and threw a nod to his honour host. Each of them looked back at him with the mirror of the primarch’s own aspect, their helmets sculpted into a noble ideal of his face. ‘First blood, Azkaellon,’ he said, addressing his words to the Commander of the Guard.

‘It is fitting, my lord,’ said the warrior, tense with the rush of imminent war.

Sanguinius nodded once. ‘My sons know their mission. Strike hard and strike fast.’

Azkaellon saluted, removing his helm to present the hard lines of his face to his master. ‘Your will.’ As he spoke, the rumble of the remainder of the landing Stormbirds was joined by the crashing impacts of the drop-pods. The ground quaking beneath them, the ceramite teardrops slammed into the sand and split open like the blossoming of lethal flowers. Line warriors emerged from each pod in combat-ready formations, alongside Librarians, black-armoured Wardens and battle Apothecaries. Azkaellon saw them all look to Sanguinius for their lead; like them, he was proud to be here, in the company of his progenitor and primarch. ‘No xenos will be spared,’ he promised.

Sanguinius raised his sword in a return salute. ‘The others…’ The angel didn’t say the words, but the Guard Commander knew who he meant. The slaves. ‘Liberate as many as you can. They’ll fight with us now they know they have not been forsaken.’

‘And the conscripts?’ Azkaellon pointed towards a rough skirmish line of the masked human worshippers as they advanced warily towards the red-armoured legionaries. ‘If they oppose us?’

A moment of sorrow passed over the great angel’s aspect, dimming his radiance for an instant. ‘Then they too will be set free.’ Sanguinius held up his blade and the gesture brought a roar from his assembled sons that beat at the sky.

A cohort of lumbering blues crested a low ridge and the battle began in earnest for the Blood Angels.

At the start, it had been Horus who called the tune of the battle plans. In the strategium of his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, the master of the Luna Wolves faced his brother across a wide hololithic display and showed him the plan he had conceived to break the will of the nephilim. It was shock and awe, an implacable and showy display of combat might, the kind that Sanguinius’s sibling had made his own time and again throughout the wars of the Great Crusade. In a sea of red and white, Horus wanted the Blood Angels to march shoulder-to-shoulder with their cousins, cowing the aliens with the sight of an army of thousands rolling without pause to the gates of their last bastion. And then through those gates, over the battlements, not stopping, not pausing to parley or hesitate. Like the ocean these things sprang from, Horus had said, we will roll over the aliens, drag them down and drown them.

The sheer bombast of the plan was its greatest strength, but Sanguinius had not been easily swayed to it. Across the hololith, the two brothers had argued and countered, to and fro, one presenting obstacles and challenges to the other. To an outside observer, it might have seemed aloof, almost callous to see these two mighty genhanced soldiers talking over a monumental confrontation as if it were little more than a game of regicide.

But nothing could be further from the truth. The Blood Angel looked into the panes of the holograph and saw the countless icons representing civilian concentrations, the play of the geography, the deceptive desert landscape full of hidden chokepoints and kill-boxes. In his mind, Horus had already weighed the tactics of the engagement and made a regrettable, but necessary choice. He had made the difficult decision and then moved past it, ridden on. Not from heartlessness, but from expedience.

Sanguinius could not do so as easily. The blunt, brute-force approach was better suited to their more intemperate kinsmen, to Russ or to Angron, and neither Sanguinius nor his brother Horus were so artless, so focused upon the target to the detriment of all else.

But it was difficult not to allow the cold rage instilled by the actions of the nephilim to be given its rein. The alien giants, mocking humanity’s great dream with their talk of peace and unity, had left a trail of destruction behind them that had claimed a hundred worlds before they had come to rest upon Melchior.

Sagan, the DeCora Spine, Orpheo Minoris, Beta Rigel II. These planets had been denuded of all human life, populations herded into empath-chapels as big as mountains and then slowly consumed. The true horror of it was that the nephilim used those they preyed upon to do their soldiering for them, snaring the pliant, the lonely, the sorrowful with their ideal of an attainable godhood. They plied them with stories of eternal existence for the faithful, of endless sorrow for the agnostic; and they were very good at it.

Perhaps the xenos really believed that what they were doing was somehow taking them closer to a form beyond flesh, to an afterlife in an eternal heaven-state; it did not matter. With their technologies they implanted bits of themselves into their thralls to further their communion, they cut their own flesh and made the masks to mark their devotees. The nephilim controlled minds, either through the transmitted power of their will or through the weak character of those they chose.

They were an affront to the Emperor’s secular galaxy, not only an offence to the purity of a human ideal but in their insidious cuckoo-nest displacement of those who foolishly gave them fealty.

For what the aliens fed upon, what the scouts of the Blood Angels and Luna Wolves had seen and reported back, were the very lives of those who cherished them. The empty chapels were piled high with stacks of desiccated corpses, bodies aged years in hours as all living essence was siphoned from them. It had sickened the primarchs as the true understanding of the enemy they faced was, at last, revealed.

The nephilim fed on adulation.

Thus, Sanguinius would deny these repellent xenos their sustenance and defeat their arrogance in the same blow. The invaders believed that the Emperor’s sons would never starve them by resorting to the murder of the humans they took as their cattle, and that was so. Yet what the nephilim considered a weakness, the Angel made a strength. So confident were they of their unassailable position, they had met Horus’s arrival with almost the full might of their forces, daring the Luna Wolves to strike at them.

And with the aliens turning their backs, their belief in their victory already blinding them to the unbreakable strength of intent within the warriors they now faced, the true angels fell in fire on Melchior and became the hammer of the Emperor’s wrath.

Running at a charge, the primarch was a hurricane, racing into the thick of the nephilim lines and taking to the air in deft, agile moves. With his sword and the shorter blades of a glaive built into his vambrace he made kill after kill, shouting down those who tried to deafen him with their dirge-waves. Flanking him, Azkaellon and Zuriel, first and second of his personal guard, used their wrist-mounted Angelus bolters to pour cascades of fire into the enemy line. With each hit, the warheads of the mass-reactive bloodshard rounds exploded into hundreds of magno-charged monofilaments; every concussive impact upon the skin of a nephilim caused bloody detonations inside the torsos of the alien creatures. Lakes of bluish, shimmering internal fluids littered the battleground, shrinking slowly as the silver sand absorbed them.

At the heels of the Guard came the captains leading their assault companies. Raldoron, the Blooded of the First, hurled bolter fire from the weapon in his steady hand, his elite veterans emblazoned with ebon fetishes carved in the fashion of the hunter tribes on the Blood Angels home world of Baal. The First Captain was joined by elements of Furio’s Ninth Company shield-bearers, Galan’s men of the 16th with their favoured blade-staves, and Amit with the Fifth, every one of them bearing boltgun and flaying knife.

Heavy weapon barrages concentrated on the copper towers and the walls of the empath-chapels, denying the nephilim the infrastructure of their haven, forcing them to engage head-on. To the south, where Horus had drawn his feint, the great tide of battle was shifting and breaking. The Luna Wolves had first dug in, block-ading any progress or escape by the xenos, and now they advanced. Extending into a wide arc, the line of Horus’s soldiery forced the varicoloured giants back, pressing them on to the blades and the guns of the Blood Angels. With brutal inevitability, the trap the Emperor’s sons had devised aboard the Vengeful Spirit closed like a vice. With each passing minute, they left the aliens less and less room to manoeuvre. Many of the nephilim’s converts began to surrender, droves of them crying out in pain as they tried to peel off the bonded masks; while those too far along the road to worship spent their lives for their masters in a vain and fruitless attempt to slow the pace of the Space Marines.

Sanguinius had no pity for these dupes. They had allowed themselves to be drawn in by pretty words, let themselves be ruled by their fears instead of by their hopes. And in much greater measure, he had only anger for the nephilim themselves.

Over the bodies of the alien dead, the crimson legionaries and their golden warlord turned fury upon the giants. The whickering music of the aliens’ strange songs became an atonal scale of panicked noises punctuated by chugging snarls of aggression. Horus’s landspeeder squadrons raced overhead, bracketing a phalanx of blue-skins with salvoes from their graviton guns and multi-meltas, punching through curls of smoke as the outer rings of the encampment burned.

Galan’s war-cry drew the primarch’s attention and he spared the captain a glance. There was such ferocity, such resolve in the face of the warrior, and Sanguinius felt a surge of pride to be fighting alongside his sons. Legionaries born of Baal and Terra alike, united many years earlier by the Angel himself under a banner of incarnadine, these were his sharpest blades, his brightest minds. In battle they were unparalleled, and for a moment the primarch allowed himself to feel the pure, wild joy of the fight. They were going to win; that had never been in doubt.

The enemy was in disarray, and their villainy was unquestioned. This was a righteous battle, the victory of the Imperium as inevitable as the rising of Melchior’s sun. Sanguinius and Horus would win this day, and a lost world would be brought back into the fold once more. This would be done, by battle-brothers and brothers in blood, by primarch and legionary alike. He could taste the victory on his lips, sweet and dark like good wine.

And so there, on Melchior’s shining sands, the nephilim were put to the sword.

In the aftermath, the freed slaves were isolated from the converts who still remained alive for fear that revenge killings would explode from a mob mentality. Horus took on this deed, in no uncertain terms drilling those who claimed to lead the liberated that justice would be delivered to all turncoats – but it would be Imperial justice, right and true and conducted to the letter of the law.

In the meantime, the convert prisoners were given back-breaking menial work, overseen by troopers from the Imperial Army brigades that had come to support the Legions. The converts carried the dead nephilim to great pyres set about the desert and were made to burn the corpses of the aliens they had worshipped; others were formed into work gangs whose task was to dismantle the copper devotional towers they had forced their fellows to build only days earlier.

Sanguinius stood atop a shallow hill of pale rock and watched the sun dropping towards the distant horizon. His wings were pulled close, and the xenos blood shed upon him as he fought was gone, cleansed from his armour. He nodded to himself. Melchior was safe, the victory secure. Already his thoughts were moving towards the next battle, the next world in need of illumination.

A smile grew on his lips as he sensed his brother’s approach, but he did not turn to look at Horus. ‘There is a question that concerns me greatly,’ said Sanguinius, with false gravity.

‘Oh?’ The lord of the Luna Wolves halted at his side. ‘That sounds troubling.’

Neither of them paid heed to it, but directly below in the shallow canyon beneath the rise, many of the common soldiers, prisoners, even their own legionaries, paused to watch. It was a sight to see a single primarch in the flesh; to behold a pair of these gene-forged transhumans at once was something that many of those watching would remember for as long as they lived. For many different reasons.

‘How can I ease your disquiet, brother?’ Horus went on, affecting a serious mien.

The Angel eyed him. ‘If the grey had done as you asked, if it had set the thralls free… Tell me, would you really have let the aliens go?’

Horus nodded, as if the answer were obvious. ‘I am a man of my word. I would have let them leave the planet’s surface, make for orbit…’ He cocked his head. ‘But when they met your ships up there, well…’ He gave a small shrug, the huge shoulders of his battle plate exaggerating the motion. ‘You’ve never been as agreeable as I.’

The smile became a moment of laughter. Sanguinius gave a slight, mocking bow. ‘So true. I must content myself with merely being the better warrior.’

‘Don’t make me pluck those wings,’ Horus retorted.

‘Perish the thought!’ said Sanguinius. ‘Without them I’d only be as handsome as you are.’

‘That would be tragic,’ Horus agreed.

The moment of levity passed and in the next exchange they had gone from the easy humour of a pair of siblings to the manner of two allied generals. ‘What ships have you chosen to remain to administrate the compliance?’

Horus rubbed his chin. ‘The Sword Argus and the Crimson Spectre, I think. Their Army platoons can garrison here, make sure the nephilim cult is dead and buried. If all goes well, they will disengage and reconnect with my expeditionary fleet in a few months.’

The winged primarch glanced up into the sky. ‘I fear we have not seen the last of these creatures.’

‘The Khan hunts their birth world even as we speak. He will finish what we started here today.’

‘I hope so. The technology the aliens used, the ease with which they infiltrated the minds of these civilians... It’s troubling. We can’t allow it to go unchecked.’ Sanguinius looked back at his sibling. ‘So, where next for you?’

‘The Ullanor Sector. A dozen systems have gone silent, from New Mitama all the way out to Nalkari. I suspect another xenos incursion.’

‘Orks?’

‘Likely. I could use your support, brother.’

Sanguinius smiled again. ‘I doubt that. And I could not oblige even if I wished it. My astropaths have been agitated for days, divining messages from our scouts in the Perseus Null. Compliance is sorely needed there, I have been told.’

‘Father’s great plan… It does not often allow us the chance to cross paths,’ noted Horus. His brother thought he sensed a thread of regret beneath the words. ‘How much glory did we share this day? Not enough.’

‘Agreed.’ There had been a moment when the primarchs had met during the engagement, when a horde of nephilim grey-skins had rushed at them with ear-splitting barrages of noise radiating from the glass spines growing out of their limbs. The brothers stood back to back and weathered every blow, cut down each attacker. The moment had been the fulcrum around which their victory had turned. ‘I confess I would relish the opportunity to share the battleground with you again,’ Sanguinius went on. ‘And not just that. I miss our conversations.’

Horus’s frown deepened. ‘One day we will be done with all this.’ He gestured at the desert sands and the debris of the battle. ‘Then we can talk and play regicide to our hearts’ content. At least until the next crusade.’

Something in his brother’s tone gave Sanguinius pause. There was a meaning buried in there, a moment that he could sense but not grasp; something that perhaps even Horus himself was unaware of.

The chance to examine the thought was lost when a figure in crimson armour came running up the low hill. ‘My lords. Forgive the interruption.’ Raldoron bowed and shot Horus a wary look before turning to his primarch. ‘The Angel’s presence is required… elsewhere.’

‘Is there a problem, First Captain?’ Horus asked the Blood Angels officer.

Raldoron’s expression was unreadable. The warrior had a gaunt, solid face beneath a high queue of grey-white hair, and he betrayed nothing. ‘A Legion matter, sir,’ he said. ‘It requires my lord’s personal attention.’

Sanguinius fixed his captain with a hard stare. He was one of his most trusted men and carried many honours alongside his stewardship of the elite veteran company, hard-won through decades of war in the Emperor’s name. Raldoron was equerry to the primarch and held the new honorific ‘Chapter Master’, serving in a similar role to the warriors of Horus’s advisory cadre, the Mournival. He was not a man given to impulsive and ill-considered actions, so his intrusion here was cause for concern. ‘Speak, Ral.’

There was momentary pause, so tiny, so fractional that only someone who knew Captain Raldoron as well as his liege lord did would pick up on it. But it was enough to signal that something was amiss.

‘One of our brothers has been… lost, sir.’

Sanguinius felt his face become a mask, as cold seeped into his veins. ‘My brother, please excuse me.’

He never registered Horus’s reply; he was already moving, following Raldoron out through the mist of battle-smoke wreathing the darkening desert.

They did not speak, not as they walked, not as they boarded the land speeder that Raldoron had secured for the transit across the warzone. Sanguinius retreated inside his own thoughts and prepared himself for the worst as the First Captain piloted the flyer out across the eastern flank of the conflict area. They moved in the nap of the earth, rolling up and down shallow inclines, skirting the remains of blasted praise-towers and fallen battlements. As the grav motors slowed and they neared their destination, the primarch saw that the matter had been contained exactly as he had wished it to be. Raldoron, ever the planner, had made sure that a wide circular area was secure, a barrier of Blood Angels legionaries standing face-outwards in a wide combat wheel hundreds of metres across. None of them looked up as the speeder passed over their heads and dropped down to settle in the courtyard of a bombed-out empath-chapel.

‘In there.’ Raldoron’s grim words carried over the low hum of the idling engines as he jutted his chin towards the ruin. ‘I isolated him the moment I was certain.’

Sanguinius felt the cold in his blood spread to his hands as they walked towards the slumped shape of the building. The walls had listed to the right and the ceiling had come down, forcing the oval church to sink into the sands beneath. A second, smaller group of legionaries stood around the black maw of the entrance; they were from Raldoron’s honour guard, and they also did not face the site they were guarding nor react to the presence of their primarch.

‘His name?’

‘Alotros,’ said Raldoron. ‘A battle-brother of solid, if unremarkable service. From Captain Tagas’s command, the 111th Company.’

‘What does Tagas know?’ asked Sanguinius.

‘That Brother Alotros is dead, my lord.’ A figure in gold armour emerged from the dark doorway and saluted. Azkaellon’s severe expression spoke volumes as to what had gone on. ‘Killed by the xenos, atomised in an explosion. A noble end.’ The Sanguinary Guard deliberately stepped into the path of his commander and halted, glaring at Raldoron. ‘You should not have brought him here.’

Raldoron opened his mouth to speak, but his primarch talked over him. ‘That is not your place to decide, Guard Commander.’ Azkaellon paled slightly at the force behind Sanguinius’s hard, even tone. ‘Now step aside.’

Azkaellon did as he was told, but he could not remain silent. ‘This should be dealt with by us, sir. Quietly.’

‘Quietly?’ echoed the primarch, his voice suddenly distant. ‘No, my son. No Blood Angel will ever die in silence.’

Inside the fallen alien temple, the stink of fresh blood hung in the air, powerful and metallic. Sanguinius licked his lips; he couldn’t stop the reflex reaction. His omophageaic membrane tasted several different varieties of human vitae, analysing them as instinctively as a vintner would know the ages and textures of a wine’s bouquet. There was alien blood spilled here too, the acrid tang of the nephilim among it all.

He found the golden boots of his warplate casting ripples out across a pool of dark fluid that had formed a small lake in the gloomy interior of the chapel. There were many, many dead in here with him, arranged around the edges of the chamber as if they were an audience watching the stage of a theatre in the round. Smashed fragments of nephilim neuro-tech – synapse sinks, empathic matrices and the like – littered the ruin. But none of the violence wrought here had come from the battle fought through this day. No, the scene here was not one of war, but of madness.

He saw Alotros the moment he entered the temple, the thermal form of him clear to the primarch’s bio-augmented vision against the cold bodies of the dead. The Space Marine was crouched down on one knee as if in a gesture of fealty. With careful, steady actions, Alotros sat in the middle of the lake and mechanically cupped handfuls of the dark fluid, one after another, to his lips. He drank silently, unhurried.

‘Look at me,’ ordered Sanguinius. His heart tightened in his chest and a very specific kind of sorrow gripped him as Alotros slowly obeyed.

The Blood Angel’s armour was badly damaged; fibre-bundle musculature ripped, ceramite cracked. It appeared that the chestplate had been torn open across the sternum and a brutal wound opened beneath it. The primarch recognised the hit pattern of a nephilim shriekpulse, and looking closer he saw the trails of dried blood visible from Alotros’s nostrils, his ears, the corners of his reddened eyes. Such a hit would have boiled the brain matter of an ordinary human, and even for a legionary the impact should have crippled flesh and torn at neural pathways. Alotros was pallid and in obvious pain, but he seemed detached from it. The warrior had taken a point-blank strike from one of the alien weapons and survived, a rare happenstance; but, Sanguinius corrected himself, he had not survived. Not really. At this very moment, somewhere else on the battlefield, Captain Tagas and the men who had been Alotros’s squadmates were making their peace with his death.

His lips, his chin, the exposed flesh of his neck, all were wet with the blood he had been patiently drinking, mouthful by mouthful. Alotros looked at his primarch with bleak, animal eyes. Sanguinius saw a hunger there, the same hunger he had seen before in other eyes, in other places. At first only rarely, but now with a grim regularity.

Alotros released a deep, rumbling growl and slowly came to his feet. His hands tightened into talons and he showed his teeth. Fangs flashed in the gloom. In another time it would have been said that his soul had been usurped by some hellish phantom, that his blood was poisoned, that he was possessed. But such ideas were fantasies. The warping of this good warrior came from something within him, not from a mythical, otherworldly external force.

Sanguinius knew that it was already too late, but he could not go on without trying. He offered his hand. ‘My son,’ he began. ‘Step back, if you can. Step back from the abyss and return to us. I will save you.’

Alotros blinked, as if the words were foreign to him and their meaning difficult to grasp.

‘This is my fault,’ said the primarch. ‘I am to blame. But I will amend this, if you help me.’ He took a step forwards. ‘Will you help me, Alotros?’

It was with a father’s hollow regret that Sanguinius saw his words fall upon stony ground. A feral intent, an impulse drawn up from the very deepest bestial core of the warrior, emerged on the Blood Angel’s face, and finally whatever was left of Brother Alotros of the 111th Company simply went away.

In a berserk, furious rage that exploded out of nothing, the legionary tore across the empath-chapel in great splashing bounds. The primarch hesitated; with power sword, glaive-blade or infernus pistol, it would have been no matter for him to draw a weapon and end the battle-brother’s life before he came within arm’s reach. But something stopped him.

Perhaps it was hope, hope that Alotros would be the one to break the cycle and not do the same as those before; or perhaps it was guilt that stayed his hand, some measure of punishment inflicted on the self to see this horror up close, to know the dying moment of it.

Against all reason, against all possibility of survival, Alotros attacked his gene-father. He was screaming, babbling in fragments of the technomad dialect of Baal’s Low Mesa clans. The warrior wanted only one thing: to bite deep into living flesh and drink his fill of the rich crimson fluid within. He was truly lost.

Sanguinius held Alotros at bay, the warrior’s maddened blows ringing harmlessly off his battle armour, the fires of his rage not fading but burning brighter with every passing moment. The cocktail of blood-fumes on his breath clogged the primarch’s senses, and Sanguinius understood.

He knew where this crimson fury, this red thirst sprang from. He could sense it, coiled like a poisonous thread inside his own genetic helix. A dark bequest that he had passed on to his kin. A recessive death-mark.

‘I am sorry, my son,’ he told Alotros, in the last heartbeat before he broke the legionary’s neck.

Alotros’s snarls ended with a guttural hiss, and at the end there was some brief measure of peace in his eyes. His body fell into the shallow pool; the Blood Angel’s pain was at an end, a final mercy granted to him. But now the darkness in the gloomy alien church seemed shades deeper, heavy with the weight of what had been done there.

For the second time that day, Sanguinius sensed the presence of his brother.

He wheeled, turning to glare into the dimness as a massive shadow broke away from a slumped support column and stood stock-still before him. ‘Horus...?’

‘What did you do?’ His brother’s face caught the light and the ghost of shock was etched upon it. ‘What did you do?’ The sound of his own voice seemed to jolt the other primarch out of his stasis and he rushed towards the fallen warrior. ‘You… killed him.’

In a strangely protective gesture, Sanguinius stepped in front of the corpse, bringing Horus up short. ‘You followed me?’ His tone betrayed anger and surprise, shame and regret and a hundred other emotions. ‘Spied on me?’

It was taking all of Horus’s monumental self-control to stay where he stood, the confusion on his face shifting, changing. He was grasping to comprehend what he had just witnessed, and failing. A primarch executing one of his own sons… The thought of such a thing was terrible to contemplate.

‘You should not be here,’ Sanguinius told him, echoing Azkaellon’s reproach. ‘This was not for the eyes of outsiders.’ His words were dead, bled dry.

‘That seems so.’ Horus gave a glum nod. ‘But I am your brother. I am not an outsider.’ He raised his head and met the Angel’s gaze, challenging him. ‘And I do not understand why you have committed such a hateful deed.’

Sanguinius did not bother to ask how Horus had made it past Raldoron’s guards without raising any alarm; he was a primarch, after all, and the Emperor’s sons had always been adept at going where their will took them.

When Horus looked at him, it was not with anger and disappointment, but with a terrible kind of empathy. ‘I should not have come here, but your reaction when the First Captain spoke… Brother, what I saw in your eyes at that moment gave me cause for concern.’ He stepped around and knelt over Alotros’s body. ‘And now I see I was right to think so.’ Horus studied the dead legionary with a clinical eye, and raised his gauntlet to tap a finger upon his temple. ‘Tell me there was cause. What was wrong with him? Did the nephilim do this, did they cause some great damage to his mind?’

The lie caught in the Angel’s throat. Yes, he could say –
A terrible tragedy. This is the work of the foul xenos. I was forced to take a regrettable action–

‘No.’ The falsehood crumbled before it was fully formed. He could no more lie to his sibling than he could chain Melchior’s sun and pull it from the sky. Horus and Sanguinius knew each other so well that to lie to one another would be a monumental undertaking, a pretence of ultimate artifice. He could not conscience such a thing. ‘No, Horus. This is my fault. The blame lies with me.’

For a long moment, there was only silence between them, and the Angel could see his brother’s train of thought there in his expression, the questions he was asking himself, the answers he found wanting.

At last, Horus stood and placed a hand on his brother’s shoulder, the stony lines of his face etched in disquiet. ‘If you wish it, I will leave this place now and never speak again of the matter. Your Legion is your concern, Sanguinius, and I would never question that.’ He paused. ‘But I am your brother and your friend, and it cuts me to see the sorrow in your eyes. I know you are a compassionate soul, that you would not do such a thing unless it was your only choice. But you have a great burden, and I would help you carry it, if only you will let me.’

The Blood Angel’s eyes narrowed. ‘You ask much.’

‘I always do,’ admitted Horus. ‘Speak to me. Make me understand.’ He was almost imploring. ‘I swear to you, on the honour of my Legion, any words spoken here will never pass beyond these walls. I will keep your confidence from all.’

Sanguinius met his gaze. ‘Even from our father?’

The other primarch said nothing for a moment; then at last, he nodded.

With great care, Sanguinius gathered up the body of his fallen warrior and carried him from the pool of shimmering dark to a stone pedestal. The platform had been home to a crystalline devotional statue of a nephilim, but now all that remained of it was a shallow drift of broken shards that crunched underfoot. The primarch arranged the body of the dead legionary in repose, restoring the dignity that his madness had stolen.

At length, Sanguinius turned to face Horus. ‘We were made to be perfect,’ he began. ‘Tools of war. The supreme princes of battle.’ He slowly spread his hands and the white wings curled at his back. ‘Do you think that father succeeded in his design?’

‘Perfection is not a state of being,’ Horus replied. ‘It is a state of striving. The journey is all that has meaning, not the goal.’

‘Did the Phoenician tell you that?’

His brother nodded once. ‘Fulgrim may be a peacock, but when he spoke those words he was right.’

Sanguinius laid a hand on Alotros’s stilled chest. ‘We give so much to our sons. Our aspect, our will, our fortitude. They are the best of us. But they carry our flaws as well.’

‘So they should,’ said Horus. ‘So we should. To be human is to be flawed – no matter what we are or where we came from, we are still human. We share the same ancestry as the people we defend.’

‘Indeed. If we lost that connection… If we truly were beyond humanity, then the Emperor’s sons and the Legiones Astartes would have more kinship to xenos like them–’ Sanguinius gestured towards the corpse of a nephilim blue-skin ‘–than to the children of Terra.’ He shook his head. ‘But for all that we are, we cannot escape what is within.’ The Angel pressed his fingers to his chest. ‘I have bequeathed something dark to my sons, brother.’

‘Speak plainly,’ Horus demanded. ‘I am not Russ who would judge you, or Dorn who would not listen. You and I, we have no need for pretence.’

‘I believe that there is a hidden flaw in the genetic matrix of the Blood Angels gene-seed. Something in my own bio-type. I have looked within myself and seen glimpses of it, brother. A murky core, a trait that lies buried and waits to be awakened.’

Horus’s gaze fell on the dead warrior. ‘This is… the fury that I saw in him?’

‘It cries out for blood. And there is never enough.’

The Luna Wolf turned away, thinking. ‘How many times?’

‘Alotros is one of several that I am certain of. There may have been others who perished in battle without note of it.’

‘A handful, in two hundred years, from a Legion of one hundred and twenty thousand?’ Horus folded his armoured gauntlets together. ‘How can you be sure of–’

Sanguinius held up his hand. ‘I am sure,’ he said gravely. ‘And the incidences are coming closer together. I fear that, in time, it will grow to encompass every one of my sons. In my meditation, I have seen such… possibilities.’

His brother waited for him to continue. Each of the primarchs were touched by their father’s preternatural gifts in a different way, and for Sanguinius, part of that legacy was a certain kind of sight. A hazy, indefinite sense of foreknowledge.

‘The story is always the same,’ he went on. ‘A warrior in the throes of battle succumbs to a rage that builds and builds until his reason is lost. His humanity is stripped away until only a feral core remains. He kills and kills, seeks blood and more blood.’ He paled as he spoke. ‘And at the end, at the very worst of it, he loses every last piece of himself.’

‘Until death is a kindness.’ Horus nodded again. ‘Brother… I understand now. How long have you known?’

Strangely, as Sanguinius had given voice to the words he felt the load upon him lighten, as if the act of confiding in Horus had indeed lessened his burden. ‘I have kept this from our father and brothers for several years. I am searching for a solution. Some among my sons have a measure of the truth. They are united with me in finding a way of undoing this flaw.’ His jaw stiffened. ‘My flaw.’

‘Brother…’ Horus began, framing his words.

Sanguinius shook his head. ‘Don’t say it. You think that I blame myself for something I have no control over, but I do not agree. This is my legacy and I must account for it. A primarch…’ He faltered over the words, his voice thick with emotion.

‘A primarch is father to his Legion,’ said Horus, completing the thought for him. ‘I will not disagree or try to convince you otherwise.’ He paused again. ‘Who else is aware of the full dimensions of this?’ Horus glanced towards the entrance of the fallen empath-chapel.

‘Azkaellon, Captain Raldoron, my Master Apothecary on Baal… and a few others.’

When Horus spoke again, his voice was low. ‘Why in Terra’s name did you not ask for help?’

Sanguinius met his gaze. ‘Tell me, Horus. What is it that you are most afraid of?’

The demand took the other primarch off-guard, and for a moment, the Luna Wolf was on the verge of dismissing the question; then his expression shifted and he gave the brutally truthful answer. ‘Falling short. Of failing my Legion, my Imperium… my Emperor.’

‘Something each of his sons shares, even if many of us would never have the courage to admit it.’ Sanguinius walked away, the shadows lengthening around him. ‘I could not speak of this to any of the others. You know as well as I do that it would diminish my Legion. Some of our brothers would see it as weakness and seek to turn this truth against me.’ He grimaced. ‘Alpharius, Lorgar… They would not be generous.’

‘But why have you kept this from father? If any living being could know the key to it, it would be him!’

Sanguinius rounded on Horus, his seraphic features hardening. ‘You know the reason!’ he answered with a snarl. ‘I will not be responsible for the erasure of the Blood Angels from Imperial history. I will not have a third empty plinth beneath the roof of the Hegemon as my Legion’s only memorial!’

Horus’s eyes widened. ‘It would not come to that.’

Sanguinius shook his head once more. ‘I cannot take the risk. The Emperor has concerns that go far beyond the needs of his individual sons. You know that is so.’ He frowned. ‘We all know that is so.’

Silence fell again, broken only by the hollow wind pulling at the ruined walls of the temple and the distant crash of metal as another nephilim praise-tower was cut down.

Then, with grim finality, Horus offered his hand to the Angel. ‘I swore to you I would say nothing of this. I will keep that promise for as long as you wish me to.’

Sanguinius accepted the gesture, their vambraces clanking together as they shook hands in the old pre-Unity fashion, palms grasping each other’s wrists. ‘I trust no one more than you, Horus,’ he said. ‘Your solidarity means more than I can express.’

‘I will do all I can to help you deal with this matter,’ said the Luna Wolf. ‘However long it takes.’

Raldoron barely covered his shock when not one, but two primarchs exited the ruined building. Without a word to any of the assembled warriors, Sanguinius and Horus walked away across the silver sands, each turning from the other to make for the lines of their Legions’ forces.

At his side, Azkaellon was as rigid as a statue, and the First Captain had no doubt that the leader of the Sanguinary Guard was silently furious. Horus’s appearance could only mean one thing. He knew.

Sensing his scrutiny, Azkaellon shot Raldoron a hard look. ‘Your warriors are ineffective.’

‘Watch your damned tone, bodyguard.’ The captain’s answer came back through gritted teeth. He pointed out beyond the ring of his troops. ‘Your second-in-command is slinking around out there, and he didn’t catch the primarch either.’

‘Zuriel will be reprimanded for his error, have no doubt of that.’

Raldoron didn’t. Azkaellon was so severe in his manner that sometimes it seemed he was utterly inflexible on anything. It was a frequent cause of friction between the warriors of the First Company and the Sanguinary Guard. Raldoron’s fluid, adaptable command style was at odds with Azkaellon’s aloof, rigid comportment, and the two of them reflected that down to the bone.

‘I have work to do,’ said the Guard Commander, striding away from the ruins. ‘I hope I can leave the rest of the details to you without fear of further error.’ Before Raldoron could retort, the flight pack on Azkaellon’s back spat flame and his sculpted wings unfurled. In a flash of gold, the warrior was gone.

The First Captain’s grimace deepened and he dismissed his warriors with a sharp gesture. He gave one of them a glare. ‘Where is the Apothecary? I called for a savant an hour ago!’

‘Here, lord,’ said a voice behind him.

Raldoron turned and found a legionary marching towards him across the rubble-strewn square, emerging from the smoke. The warrior’s crimson armour bore the white trim of a sanctioned Legion medicae, and from his battle plate hung narthecium packs, drug flasks and other flesh-cutter’s tools. His left gauntlet was heavily modified from the standard Mark II Crusade-pattern unit, bulky with the protruding barrel of a reductor. He wore the badge of the Prime Helix and there was a skull sigil on the brow of his helmet showing his status as an Apothecae Minoris, the most junior rank. A labour-servitor ambled after him, listing as it clumped over the uneven ground. The captain studied the Apothecary; he would have preferred a veteran to assist in this matter, but to re-task a more seasoned officer from their duties would have drawn undue attention.

The new arrival gave a salute. ‘Reporting as ordered.’ He gave no sign of having witnessed the departure of the two primarchs, which was just as well. Fewer questions for him to dwell upon, thought the captain.

‘You will follow me,’ ordered Raldoron, ‘and say nothing.’

They entered the fallen chapel and the Apothecary activated the illuminator mounted on his backpack. The cold ray of white light searched the chamber, picking out thousands of motes of rock dust suspended in the heavy air, before shimmering off the great liquid pool in the slumped spaces of the nave. Raldoron saw the beam venture towards the shadowed forms of the dead and he called out, dragging the young Apothecary’s attention and the light to the podium where Alotros’s body lay. The captain grimly stripped the dead battle-brother’s armour of all company marks and personal icons, until there was nothing to show who this warrior might have been or where he had served.

‘The progenoid glands,’ said the captain. ‘Remove them.’

There was a moment of hesitation on the part of the other Blood Angel, but the faceless helmet showed no expression, and soon he was at work. The reductor gave a high-pitched buzz as it bit through exposed flesh, the tip digging into the corpse before it splayed open and snipped out the gene-rich knots of meat. Each progenoid was a collection of DNA metadata expressed in organic form, the raw code of the Blood Angels physiognomy rendered as flesh; similar organs were implanted in every legionary, each tailored to the particular traits and quirks of their brotherhood. They were the most precious resource of a Space Marine Legion, for each progenoid recovered from a fallen warrior would find new life in the body of the next generation of recruits. In that way, they would maintain a genetic lineage with those who came before them and those who would come after, as the organs manifested within them.

The Apothecary reverently placed Alotros’s gene-seed in a hermetic capsule, but before he could drop it into a seal-pouch at his hip, Captain Raldoron reached out and took it from him.

‘What is your name, Apothecary?’ asked the officer, forestalling any reaction.

‘Meros, sir. Of the Ninth Company.’

‘Captain Furio’s command.’ He nodded. ‘A fine warrior. A company of regard.’

‘Thank you, sir. But–’

Raldoron went on as if Meros had not spoken. ‘The men of the Ninth know how to follow orders. So I have no doubt you will follow this one.’ He fixed the young warrior with a steady glare. ‘Never speak of this moment. You and I were never here.’ He held up the capsule. ‘This does not exist. Say it.’

Meros hesitated again, then spoke. ‘You and I were never here. That does not exist.’

‘This is our liege lord’s wish.’

The other Blood Angel saluted again. ‘So ordered.’ He backed away a step as Raldoron beckoned the servitor to come forwards, making ready to gather up the corpse.

But before the machine-slave moved in to do his bidding, the First Captain removed an object from his belt pack. It was a slab of inkstone from the night deserts of Baal Primus, and with quick motions, Raldoron passed it over the dead warrior’s armour, blotting out the crimson with a layer of glistening, smoky black. The action had a strange, ritual quality to it, a finality that deadened everything. However this battle-brother had met his end, it was in a manner that would be forever lost to the Legion’s chronicles.

The captain whispered something, and Meros barely heard him.

‘Rest, brother,’ he told the fallen warrior. ‘You are in the company of death. I hope you find peace there.’

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Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Neil Roberts

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* 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.