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I

They came before the old sun had risen, flying low across the plains: three Storm Eagle gunships in slate-grey, marked with Harek Ironhelm’s Great Company sigil, the Wolf that Stalks the Stars. The force contained within them, twenty-one battle-brothers, was overkill for such a mission, but then it had been Rune Priest Odain Sturmhjart who had given them this target, and they had learned to treat his warnings with respect.

The city they sped towards had not existed for more than a few months. It rose up from the caked dustpan like a hunched pyramid, a lopsided ziggurat heaped on top of itself, clambering awkwardly in crumbling ranks above the horizon with a lattice of scaffolding still covering its upper levels.

Some purpose had stirred on its forgotten world, rousing an indolent people from their torpor, making them suddenly march and build. That was what the Rune Priest Sturmhjart had sensed in his unquiet dreams – the turning of men’s minds, the inspiration of toxic thoughts. Back on Fenris, Ironhelm had listened intently, ever alert to echoes of his own visions.

‘It is him, then?’ the Great Wolf had asked.

‘It is corruption,’ Sturmhjart had confirmed, glancing at his master uncertainly, knowing that the word would be enough to order the assault.

Now Ironhelm crouched in the Storm Eagle’s crew bay, straining at his restraints, willing the slaughter to start. He could smell the foulness himself now, detectible to his heightened senses over the fuel-burn stink of the gunship. Fires burned on the walls of the city, and the coiling smoke of them barred the sky. Wood was being burned, intermingled with other, more mortal, matter.

‘By your will,’ Ironhelm growled to himself, invoking the primarch. He had donned his heavy Terminator plate, as had the other four warriors of his Wolf Guard. They tensed for the drop, already pushing against their harnesses like leashed hounds.

Ironhelm’s Storm Eagle shot over the city’s half-finished perimeter wall, air-braking hard and dropping sharply. The rear embarkation ramp hissed down on its pistons with the gunship still ten metres up.

‘Fenrys!’ thundered Ironhelm, his voice swelling as he hurled himself from the open bay.

He plummeted, crunching to earth in a bloom of kicked-up dust. A heartbeat later and his frostblade was drawn and snarling, throwing cold blue light across the pre-dawn gloom of the city.

His entourage came down after him and unfurled tools of murder – energy-coiled axes, assault cannons and glittering power swords. Ironhelm ran, ploughing up the soft dust in plumes, heading for a gaping wound in the city’s upper terraces where the walls had not yet been fully raised. He barely noticed the other two gunships disgorge their contents further down – two squads of Grey Hunters, each eight strong, fleeter of foot than the Terminators but scarcely less lethal – and hardly heard the mortal screaming break out once they got to work. It was desperate, horrified and incontinent screaming, the kind of noise an animal makes when shown the slaughterhouse. If he heard the sounds at all, it only meant that killing had started again and that he could lose himself in it – roaring out his strength, breaking the bones and tearing the flesh from them.

The first resistance came at the edge of the gaping chasm where half-built mud walls were still propped by a skeleton of wooden supports. Between their jaws was a void, drenched in shadows that were deeper than they should have been. Guards belatedly swarmed out of it, spilling from the ragged edges like insects from a kicked nest. They wore dirty, cheap robes, dyed red and stained from the dust. Their bare foreheads bore the mark of a single eye, crudely daubed in ochre. These ones did not scream, but ran at the invaders with blades whirling.

Ironhelm crashed into them, taking out four on the charge and laying into four more. He cracked their spines, throwing the broken remnants aside. The scything arc of his brothers’ assault cannon blasted more bodies apart, layering the mud with thrown blood, and in its wake came the snarling blades.

Ironhelm passed the threshold. The hair on his arms spiked. The dark around him was oily, fleeing like spilled liquid from the dull light cast by primitive brands. A high chamber opened up, carved into the heart of the city’s edge and echoing from the dull sounds of combat outside. At the far end of it stood an altar carved from what looked like bone, over ten metres tall with a crowning canopy of interlinked ribs. Pools of fatty oils burned in ceramic bowls, though the flames rippled uneasily, guttered by a wind that had no obvious source. A wooden eye-device hung from lengths of twine, twisting gently over the altar top.

More guards ran to fight him, just as uselessly as those outside the precincts, lasting mere seconds before bolter fire or energy fields tore them apart. Ironhelm was killing absently now, his attention fixed on the altar. There were fifteen figures kneeling before it, holding daggers two-handed in front of them with their backs to the carnage. Before he could get close to them, they moved. Twisting awkwardly, they plunged the blade-tips into their own faces, digging hard, each prising out an eye. None of them so much as whimpered, but held the excised flesh in clenched fists, like trophies. Then they rose and turned, smiling as their faces streamed with blood.

Ironhelm lumbered towards them. He could feel the shake of the air, the wrongness, the twisting of reality. Slivers of luminous energy wormed across the altar’s face and the chamber’s walls seemed to contract, like lungs pulling in before a breath.

The fifteen supplicants dropped their weapons. They broke into a run, heading towards Ironhelm as if greeting a lord of their own. They flung their arms open.

Ironhelm swung his frostblade, severing one at the waist and another at the neck. The others pressed closer, pawing at him, their streaked faces alive with an unsettling fervour.

Ironhelm kept killing them. They died easily, just as all mortals did before a frostblade, slumping down to the mud floor in a widening slick of blood. Not one of them flinched, nor tried to protect themselves, but they did stretch out to touch him, to run withered fingers down his armour. The last one standing even managed to speak before the blade’s edge found his neck.

‘Thank you,’ he whispered hoarsely, tears mingling with the blood on his face. ‘Thank you.’

Ironhelm grunted as he hauled the frostblade across, decapitating his victim and sending the head rolling wetly across the chamber’s floor. Then he stood, surrounded by butchery, his armour spattered and caked with blood. The kills gave him no pleasure. It wasn’t just the weakness of his prey, but the way in which they had died.

‘What did that mean?’ he muttered, looking down at the still-grinning face of his victim as it rocked gently to a halt.

By then the last of the chamber’s guards were dead, cut down without so much as scratching the armour of their sanctuary’s invaders. From outside the chamber came the continuing sounds of one-sided warfare, though even those were falling away now as the city began to burn in earnest.

Ironhelm’s huscarl, the Wolf Guard Trask, lumbered to his side, powering down his energy-blade. ‘Torch it?’ he asked, nodding over towards the bone altar.

Ironhelm was unable to concentrate. ‘What did that mean?’ he asked again.

Trask hesitated, his face hidden behind the heavy faceplate of his Terminator suit. ‘What, lord?’

Ironhelm shook himself, and let the disruptor-halo around his frostblade ripple out. ‘Aye, torch it. Torch it all.’

He strode away from the altar, his boots sucking on the gore underfoot. He’d accomplished the task, and should have been enjoying the rush of completion, shaking the blood from his blade and opening his throat in triumph.

He emerged back into the open. All around him the mud-brick terraces of the ziggurat were burning, making the air bitter with drifting ash. On the far horizon, the sun was rising, throwing long shadows across an empty land beyond the walls.

He drew in a long breath. The infection had been cut out, just as they had done on a thousand other worlds. On other occasions, that had given him satisfaction, but this time, all he could see were the eyeless faces, the smiles, the outstretched hands.

Thank you.

They had been speaking Gothic, on a world that had been sundered from the Imperium for millennia. Why was that?

Thank you.

An hour later, more landers came down from the strike cruiser in orbit. They brought mortal troops to conduct mop-up operations, secure the site, make records and scan for further anomalies. The city was rendered down into a heap of drifting ashes, and the flames sheeted up, metres high, fanned by the dry winds that raced across the plains.

Every guard inside the temple had been slain, for the Wolves had learned from bitter experience that corruption of such a nature ran deep, seeping into every pore of a world, and the only cure, such as it was, was excision.

But there were many settlements on that world, scattered widely across the continental plate. Some were scarce more than cave-swelling in the rocky bluffs; others had the rudimentary shape of towns. Orbital scans had revealed further settlements straggling out along the grimy courses of sediment-heavy river courses. Humanity had scratched out a living across a wide swath of the world, crawling out across its sun-baked flatlands, and most of them would have had no idea what was taking place in the unnatural city that had sprung up so quickly. Many would be entirely innocent. Perhaps all of them would be.

Imperial cartographers had recorded the rock as Rivel 67-4-3456t on an ancient data-scroll dating back to the earliest days of the Crusade, though the taxonomic system they had used had long since passed into obscurity and the numbers meant nothing.

The place had never been visited by the conquering fleets or taken by the forces of the Arch-Heretic. During the long years of the Scouring it had never even been used as a forward base or colonised by Mechanicus re-seeding cartels.

No one knew why humans were even there, though there were countless such backwaters dating from the forbidden eras of stellar exploration. For millennia they had endured, forgotten, degenerate, unremarked.

Only in the year 690 of the 31st millennium had the eyes of outsiders turned towards that world at last, hungrily and with the slow-burn fury of the wronged.

Alone, Ironhelm trudged across the dirt-strand leading back from the city’s broken gates. His limbs felt heavy inside his armour, as if the servos had given out and the full weight of the ceramite now bore down on his genhanced frame.

There had been killing after the temple chamber – a cleansing murder, running down from the city’s height to its foetid base. None of it had made him feel better. Every time he blinked he saw the eyeless face grinning up at him, thanking him for the death that he’d delivered with such casual expertise.

Harek Eireik Eireiksson had been Great Wolf of the Chapter for three centuries, and the number of warriors in the entire Imperium more powerful or more accomplished could probably be measured in low double figures. His battle-name, Ironhelm, was breathed across a hundred worlds with the kind of awe otherwise reserved for names from the Age of Wonder – primarchs, lord commanders, lords of Terra. Of those who dwelt in the halls of the Fang, only the Fell-Handed could claim a greater share of glory, and he slumbered now, awakened only when the need was greatest. Ironhelm had been created for greater conflict than this.

He paused in his march, looking back over his shoulder at the vast pyre his actions had created. The taste of the burning wafted across his face, now freed of his helm’s confines. Under the rising sun, it looked almost beautiful – a red-golden glow under the rush of morning.

‘This was wasted effort, lord,’ came a voice from close by.

Ironhelm whirled around. He had been alone out on the plains without a living creature within a hundred metres.

Before him, curled up on the dry mud, huddled a man, almost as much a part of landscape as the rocks and rubble around him. His robes blended in, as did his skin, which was the sunbaked colour of stained wood. He was old, his face deeply wrinkled in cracked valleys, his hands like claws. His eyes, shrouded under a thin, low hood, were pits of shadow. He looked up at the Space Wolf, fully four times his height, with a kind of amused defiance.

‘Do not think I fear you,’ the man said, and his parched lips spread into a dry smile. ‘I am too old to fear anything now, unless it be a little more life, which has always been hateful here, and so an end to it from you would be a blessing.’

Ironhelm narrowed his eyes, studying the man warily. He should have smelled him – the stench was readily apparent now, a sour mix of sweat and mouldering fabric.

‘Is that why he thanked me?’ he asked, almost without realising.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

Ironhelm wouldn’t even need his fists to finish this one – a stamp from his armoured boots, little more than his usual tread, and the man’s spine would snap like porcelain.

Perhaps that was why he didn’t do it. The toll of severed souls lay heavily on him that day. Now, under the sun, with the age-withered face looking up at him and the rush of combat over, it seemed suddenly and deadeningly futile.

‘There will be camps,’ Ironhelm told him. ‘Tribunals, run by inquisitors. If you have no taint within you, you have nothing to fear.’

‘That is gracious,’ said the man, with little trace of sarcasm. ‘You will not scrape this world of life entirely. Perhaps you have learned your lesson in that – to breed an enemy so perfectly. Tell me, does it haunt you?’

No one spoke to Ironhelm like that, not one of his warriors, certainly not a mortal. The thought of cutting the man down again flickered across his mind, but he pulled back again.

The sun beat down on the Great Wolf’s bared face. The wind moaned around the two of them. The air tasted oddly thick on his fangs, as it had done in the temple.

‘Haunt me?’

The man squinted up at him. ‘I know you dream of him. You don’t even know what he looks like, but you hear him in the deep of the night. The voice is enough.’

‘Guard your words, mortal,’ growled Ironhelm, though the sluggishness didn’t leave.

‘He lives, Son of Russ. He lives. You know it. Everywhere you go, every battle you fight – the eye is there, carved on wood, cut from iron. It will never leave you.’

‘Cease.’

‘Even now he is moving. He has compassed the world Delavia and cast it into flames. Is that place precious to you? It is warded by your Wolves? Well then, no more. It is a broken shell. It is a corpse. It is a–’

Ironhelm’s fist shot out, grabbing the man by his chicken-thin throat. The withered mortal gasped for air between the vice of ceramite fingers.

‘His Legion is dead,’ Ironhelm snarled. ‘He is dead.’

The man struggled to stay conscious. Blood vessels burst across his desiccated skin, trickling across the grey armour-plate in thin lines.

‘You know… that to be a lie,’ he rasped. ‘You know that… he is beyond death.’

Ironhelm felt flesh part under his grasp. Just a fraction more and the neck would be severed. He watched the man choke, and then relaxed.

The man collapsed, sucking in air greedily. Ironhelm watched him suffer. Much as he had fought against them, the words struck at him deeply. The dreams had been going on too long, the imagery was too resonant, for it to be coincidence. There were never coincidences. It was no accident that the man spoke standard Imperial Gothic, just as those in the temple had, or that he had evaded detection, or that he had known of Ironhelm’s dreams.

The man’s hood had fallen, revealing an almost hairless head, mottled with liver-spots across paper-dry skin. On closer inspection, Ironhelm saw his robes were stitched from many cuts of cloth, each one a slightly different shade, a subtly different weave, overlapping in a jumble. With a twinge of disgust, Ironhelm saw that the man only had one eye, a lone bloodshot orb. The other socket was empty, gouged out, by the look of it, long ago.

‘You wish for death, but it will not come by my hand,’ Ironhelm told him, keeping his voice steady. ‘The interrogators will keep you alive for longer than you desire. Speak your poison to them, I will have no part of it.’

The man looked up at him, his eye bloodshot. ‘These are words for you, lord. They have always been for you.’

Ironhelm shot him a mirthless smile. ‘Yes, that is how you would like it.’

He punched down, hard enough to crack the skull, and the man’s body went limp. He righted himself, just as the vox-bead in his gorget blinked into life.

‘Hunt complete, jarl,’ came Trask’s voice over the comm. ‘The city is secure. Lord Marillus has entered orbit. You wish to speak to him?’

Ironhelm had no desire to meet Marillus, no more so than the many other lords of the ordos he had come across during the centuries, but that was the price paid for engaging the scraps and remnants of Heresy – the agents of Terra would never be far behind.

‘I’ll see him on the surface,’ said Ironhelm, grabbing the unconscious man by his collar, turning back towards the burning city and dragging him in tow. ‘Tell him to expect a gift.’

Two days later, Ironhelm held his final meeting with the inquisitor before his strike force was due to break for the void. They stood under the shade of a Chapter lander, its stubby wings casting a long shadow across the blasted plain.

Marillus was young, a slim man in gold-lined battle armour. He spoke softly, and travelled with a modest entourage. Ironhelm suspected Terran aristocracy by the fine-boned face, clear eyes and contained mannerisms. This also explained the rapid ascension through the ranks.

He was hard to like.

‘I will say it again, lord.’ Marillus at least looked him in the eye when he spoke. ‘The destruction is regrettable. I can learn little from ruins.’

‘They deserved their deaths,’ Ironhelm said.

‘No doubt, but I will leave this world with few testimonies. It is better to speak to witches before they lose their heads.’

Ironhelm felt his weapon-hand itch, and closed the gauntlet tight.

‘The rite was near completion,’ he said. ‘We destroyed it. That is what we are charged with.’

Marillus held his gaze, then, with a slight gesture of regret, let it drop. ‘Then we will do what we can. You have my thanks, lord, for what was accomplished. In any case, you also have my earnest commiserations. No doubt you will visit vengeance swiftly for your loss.’

Was that sarcasm, now? Was he being mocked?

‘I do not–’

‘Ah, perhaps you have not yet heard? Then I am sorry to be the bearer of it. Delavia was one of your protectorates, yes?’

At the mention of the world’s name, Ironhelm immediately saw the one-eyed face again, squinting up at him from the mud.

‘What have you heard?’

‘The signals came in an hour ago, carried from a secure source. No doubt your own people will bear you the tidings soon. It is gone, burning just as this world was burned,’ Marillus replied.

‘That is not possible.’

‘No world is–’

‘It was under our watch.’

Marillus looked at him coolly. ‘And is there nothing in the galaxy that can possibly hurt that which the Wolves of Fenris cherish?’

Ironhelm felt hatred spark in him then – for the smooth face before him, for the backwater world that had offered so little glory, for the constant, nagging dream-voice that had plagued him for decades and had now spilled over into the world of waking.

‘I sent you a subject,’ Ironhelm said. ‘A man, one-eyed, found outside the city. What did you get from him?’

‘You sent me no one. I have already complained of it.’

‘You lie!’ Ironhelm rounded on him. ‘I sent him to you – you know the one. I could have wrung the truth out of him myself, but I–’

‘Then why did you not, lord?’

Ironhelm narrowed his eyes, pulling away. The inquisitor remained calm, secure in his station despite his physical frailty.

Was he a part of this? Were they acting together, cultists and the Emperor’s agent? How had Marillus received news of Delavia ahead of his own star-speakers?

‘Leave now,’ Ironhelm growled, feeling the hairs on his neck prick up. Something was wrong, wrong with everything around him.

Marillus stood his ground, looking concerned. ‘Lord, are you–’

‘Leave now. Leave before I forget the vows that ward you from harm.’

Marillus stiffened. ‘You are just as they said you would be. So be it. Hunt well, Lord of Wolves. Perhaps it is best you do so alone.’

The inquisitor turned without waiting for a reply. Ironhelm watched him go, his mind working furiously. Perhaps he should call him back. He should search for the man. He should return to the temple ruins. He should–

‘Jarl,’ came Trask’s voice over the comm. ‘Tidings you should hear.’

‘From Delavia, I know. Make the strike cruiser ready – we break for the warp within the hour.’

‘How did this happen?’

Trask’s voice was outraged, already thickening with battle-fury. Ironhelm didn’t want to hear it. The fighting would come soon enough, but that would not be the end of it. Another voice now echoed in his mind, one that he should have silenced earlier, before it could have planted the seed that would now plague him.

He lives.

‘This is but the start,’ Ironhelm told him, making for the lander’s open doors. ‘Mark now this name. It is prey for us now, just as it was in the age before.’

He reached the ladder and gripped the iron rail, feeling the metal tremble as the atmospheric drives whined into life.

‘Magnus,’ Ironhelm snarled, spitting out the hated name as if it were poison. ‘All else can perish in the fires, but he I shall strike from eternity.’

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

Cover illustration by Pedro Nunez.

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