Contents

Cover

Mortis – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Last light
Script
Overload

The Imperial Palace, Terra

As the sun rose on the twenty-seventh of Quintus, the last of its light broke through the smoke and chem-fog to touch the highest towers of the western edge of the Ultimate Wall. In its shadow the light of sporadic gunfire flared. Shells and energy bursts streaked up to punch the void-shrouded wall and burst on the ethereal canopy of the aegis above the Inner Palace. Across the six hundred-kilometre arc from Western Hemispheric to Indomitor, exhausted soldiers blinked at the golden light from gun embrasures and firing steps. Most had not seen the clean light of the sun since a time that seemed now a dream. A few smiled. A few wept. To many, the fading light felt like a promise. To a few it felt like a farewell. As the sun slid further down the sky, some of the millions watching it muttered prayers to a man who denied He was a god.

The new day’s light slid across the bowl of the Inner Palace and its precincts. In past ages, each part would have been large enough to be the greatest city on Terra; now they were just segments of the last circle of defiance against the Warmaster. In the enclaves of the Viridarim Nobles, the light only touched the highest towers, and few saw that bright moment; the millions that sheltered there shunned the high places. Most had fled to deeper parts of their domains. Some had used every coin and favour they could turn to put themselves as close to the core of the Inner Palace as they could. A few – old or defiant or deluded – walked through shuttered halls and pretended that they could not see the cracks growing on their painted walls as the shells fell.

The light caught the rain that fell inside the shield. Oily rainbows streaked the tower tops. Ugly gun batteries clung to the stone next to the gargoyles and grotesques. If the aegis failed their fire would provide a short-lived resistance to the next stage of catastrophe.

On the top of the innermost precinct, the gilded pyramids and statues gleamed briefly. Beneath them, far below the layers of stone and bedrock, the Emperor sat unmoving, eyes closed, locked into a throne of gold and holding the nightmare back from an ever-shrinking circle.

To the south the stone fist of Bhab Bastion punched up into the light, and for a few moments the rainwater streaming down its walls shimmered silver. Within those walls the mechanisms of command turned without cease. Regiments of command staff slept in blocks of time, the norms of day and night, of sleep and waking broken down into slots, to rotation between the light of pict screens and dreams of wide blue skies and cool water. At the heart of the bastion, Rogal Dorn stood in the Grand Borealis Strategium. The cold light of holo-projections caught the marks of recent battle on his armour. Around him the layers of command radiated outwards, invisible, harnessed to his will. He watched, as he had for the hours since his return from the Saturnine Wall. Then, with the smallest nod, he turned away, and made for the chamber doors and the stairs that would carry him up to the bastion’s parapet and a brief sight of the rising sun.

Out through the districts to the walls of Indomitor, Mercury, Saturnine and Europa, the light deepened the shadows in the zigzag highways cut through the buildings. Close to the walls, whole road and street systems had been filled in, blocked by demolished buildings and sealed by rivers of poured ferrocrete. Gun nests and fire points lodged in the flanks of hab-blocks. If – when – the walls were breached, the traitors would enter a kill maze inside them that would make them bleed for every step they took. In their firing nests, troops looked up from their autocannons and rocket mounts and saw a distant ghost of brilliance, high above.

On the eastern arc of the defences, shell bursts sent plumes of dust into the air as though trying to veil the sun’s face. This was Anterior, once the gateway from the Outer Palace to the Inner. Hundreds of kilometres of plazas, avenues and buildings cast in marble, glass and polished metal, now a chewed pit of ruins, the lines of the defences stacked on and cut into the bones of the Palace. Here were Marmax, Gorgon Bar and Colossi, hundreds of kilometres of front marked with blast craters, wreckage and corpses, like the tideline on a sea of slaughter. From here, the sun would rise above the wasteland that had been the Outer Palace. The last of the night pooled in the shells of buildings and ran down streets that held only silence.

Over the desolation, fallen walls rose like the broken fingers of dead hands, and then spearing into the sky was the Eternity Wall space port. In its lee, slave crews worked on the parapet of the Daylight Wall, hauling down the guns and munition stores from the positions where they had fired on the port. The guns were needed elsewhere. Most of the slaves had been soldiers who had defended the walls they stood on. Now their lives were measured in the labour they could do before they expired. Most of them did not look up as the sun poured its new light across the world. They knew that there was no point in looking, no point in hope, or truth in dreams, or salvation in prayers to false gods. There was just the release of brief sleep and the hope that they would not wake to another day.

Marmax South, Anterior Barbican

There was not much left of the lines. Ascending layers of trenches, walls, ditches and breaches had become a chewed maze of blast craters, debris slides and slumped blockhouses. Rain no longer fell here. The layered void shields, which had bred the false storms that had filled the craters and scars, were gone. Now there were just dry clouds that reached down from the bruised sky. Heat was pulling the moisture from the ground, cracking it, and distilling the pools of rainwater to black slime.

All the way from the Gorgon intersection to the remains of the zonal block complex in the north it was the same. As far as the eye could see. And you could see a long way. From up on the parapet of Hold Point 78 you could gaze all the way across to where the black-orange clouds clung to the shadow of the Anterior Wall’s eastern circuit. A long way, and all of it a desolation where a city had stood. The broken teeth of great buildings jutted into the air. Heaps of debris smothered roads. Slumped structures formed lines of hills. Flashes of light pinpricked the dawn gloom: lightning, detonations, gunfire. Above it, high in the distance, a dirty orange glow was brightening the jagged horizon.

Katsuhiro paused to watch the light spread.

‘Get moving!’

A shove at his back.

He dropped his gaze and started to climb the steps again.

Behind him, the sergeant – Katsuhiro could not remember being told the man’s name – was pushing the others up and on. There were twenty of them. Where they had come from, Katsuhiro had no idea. Most of them had the washed-out skin and dead eyes of people who had been on the line since the start. Their kit was a patchwork of colours, patterns and states of repair. Stains marked every inch of them, and since coming onto Marmax all had begun to acquire a layer of grey dust, like a gritty second skin. Behind him, one of the others spat down the inside of the walls.

‘Don’t do that,’ he said, half glancing back.

‘Delicate manners, script?’ came the whining reply. Steena, of course, her acid drawl rising loud above the sound of trudging feet. ‘What the hell else are we supposed to do, swallow the damned dust?’

‘Spit and you’ll need to drink,’ replied Katsuhiro, ‘and there hasn’t been a water ration since we got on the line. You haven’t got spit to spare.’

‘Well, isn’t that me told and educated? What the hell made you so all-knowing and wise, script?’

‘Script’, short for conscript, short for anyone who had been scooped up by the mass induction protocols, short for someone who wasn’t a real soldier. It had started a while back when the population repurposing had begun, before the enemy had actually come to Terra. It was a way for the real soldiers, the volunteers, the members of some regiment or formation raised before the draft order came, to say that they were on a different level to the millions of men and women who had been diverted from their old lives to become soldiers. The reality of the war had killed the distinction. Old and new soldiers died and were dying by the hundreds of thousands on each front of the battle. Steena, though, had hung on to the term and used it alternately like a slur and an accusation. Katsuhiro didn’t care. People held on to what they could. That was another thing the battle had done – planed down the terrain of life to a few basic points: breathing, shooting and, of course, the other thing, the thing that actually mattered.

Katsuhiro kept climbing the steps. Every now and again he caught another glimpse of the land beyond the parapet. Tiers of walls dropped down to the ground-level trenches a kilometre distant. All of it was damaged: chewed rockcrete, split and holed armour panels, demolished blockhouses. In places whole sections had vanished, the walls and buttresses slumping into craters. In places the damage had been repaired, filled with poured cements and fast-welded webs of girders. They looked like scabs over badly healing wounds. There was not time to do better.

Artillery struck in an irregular but consistent rhythm along the line, even when there was no direct assault – long-range rockets fired from hundreds of kilometres distant. Orbital dead-fall munitions dropped without sound or warning. Clouds of cluster munitions scattered from high-altitude bombers. There were snipers, too, out there in the wasteland, watching soldiers come and go and then reaching out with a hotshot blast or hyper-kinetic round to murder a sapper as they worked to repair damage.

Kill units, some of them up to brigade strength, also hit the lines with sporadic ferocity. Slithering forwards under cover of night to breach, kill and lay traps before withdrawing. It was worse when they were Legiones Astartes. A strike by enemy in midnight-blue armour draped in flayed skin had apparently hit the line just below the Cordus Tower the night before last. They got all the way into the third line before pulling back. What was left were not just conventional casualties; most of them were still alive when the line section was retaken.

The terror assaults, just like the bombs lobbed from distant batteries, were to a purpose. Hours passed between strikes sometimes, and then the world would be thunder and fire and then silence again. It seemed random, but it wasn’t. It was a very precise kind of irregular rhythm that took you to the edge of thinking that you could breathe out and then crushed that respite. Genius, cruel genius, the gift of the Lord of Iron and his zone commanders. It was working, too. As much as the large-scale assaults had broken lines and pushed back the defenders to the Ultimate Wall and Anterior lines, the arrhythmic violence ate at the defences and the spirits of those that stood behind them.

Katsuhiro reached the top of the steps. A long walkway ran along the wall’s parapet, eight strides wide, open to the inner side, lined by eight-foot-high crenellations. Through the firing slits you could see clear to the next wall down, and then beyond to where the walls met the ground and gave way to trench lines and ditch-works.

An angel waited for them on the parapet. Dust covered it just like everything on the line. Grey ceramite showed through the red armour lacquer in places. It looked battered and worn, but the sight of it was still enough to make Katsuhiro and the rest of the scratch platoon stop in their tracks. Even after all he had seen – especially after all he had seen – there was a presence to a Space Marine, a hammer blow to your awareness that could not be ignored. More and more the Legiones Astartes had been seeded through the mortal forces defending the Palace. To boost morale or to increase discipline, Katsuhiro could not be sure.

The angel turned towards them. A black stripe ran down the faceplate of his helm between glowing green eyes. He passed a dataslate to one of a pair of ragged-looking officers. The gun clamped to the angel’s thigh was as big as Katsuhiro’s torso.

‘I am Baeron,’ said the angel, and somehow the voice held a note of music even through the growl of the speaker grille. ‘Ninth Legion, line adjutant for this section. You are assigned under my command.’ Baeron’s glowing gaze moved over them, swift but precise, assessing. Katsuhiro felt pinned in place as the glowing eyes touched him. ‘Integrate into the line units of this section. Captain Ulkov and Lieutenant Sabine are unit command under me. Find your firing points. Check weapons. Be ready.’ Baeron looked them over again, then turned away, moving down the walkway, eyes now on the world beyond the battlements.

‘Alright, you heard the adjutant,’ called one of the officers, a squat woman, face half covered by grey bandages. ‘Reassigns, pair with someone who has been on the section more than a night. Get on it!’

Katsuhiro blinked, only now looking around and seeing the other human soldiers on the walkway. There were men and women of at least half a dozen units, and some with the marks of more than one mixed into their kit and colours. That was the new normal. Fronts like Marmax, Gorgon Bar, Artiala and the Kanazawa Fold ate soldiers and chewed up the old divisions and order. What was left were those that were still standing, scraped together, and dumped into the next kill-zone. Katsuhiro had been shifted down the Anterior battle zones three times in as many weeks. The lines had changed in that time too, fortresses broken, old hard lines rubbed out and new ones drawn. He wondered if there was something or someone who actually knew where each soldier was, which tank had been abandoned in retreat and which one had been ridden by a different unit as they moved from one zone to another.

In each of the places he had been, there had been a different rhyme and reason to how new troops on the line were handled. On the Dacia turnpike, new arrivals had been divided by block, herded together and then sliced into portions by the shouts and gestures of a major in the tattered greens of the Albia Fifth Rifles. There had been scribes on Marmax North, Line Section Two, twenty of them in fact, going down the crowds of redeploys, pinning numbers on uniforms with plasteel staples, each one marked on pink pulp paper. Here, well, no one had asked or told him anything, just ordered him and a block of others from the cargo haulers up onto the lines. He had acquired a sergeant whose name he didn’t know and a new unit in the half hour it had taken to reach the parapet. Some with him, like Steena, he knew from the ride down from Marmax North. Most he did not. That was the new norm, too: to be anonymous, to be unknown to those you stood beside, to become a unit strength increment, a body on the line, a number on tattered pink parchment.

Someone knew, though. Someone knew each and every one of the men and women on the lines and knew what they did. He knew, and He watched them, and where He could He protected them. That truth was all that mattered; all the rest was just the churn of the chaos.

‘The Emperor knows,’ Katsuhiro had said to himself, in the rattling, cramped dark of the cargo hauler that had shifted him down the line. ‘The Emperor protects.’

He must have said it louder than he meant to because someone had echoed the words.

‘He protects…’

And then a few more before the phrase had faded.

He said it again, now, in the dawn light on Marmax South, and knew it was true.

He moved towards a section of parapet, checking his lasgun as he did. A trooper was leaning on the chipped ferrocrete merlon. He looked young, but it was difficult to tell under the grime. Katsuhiro opened his mouth to greet him. The trooper’s head jerked up, eyes flicking from horizon to sky.

‘You hear that?’ he asked.

Grand Borealis Strategium, Bhab Bastion,
Sanctum Imperialis Palatine

‘Full assault incoming, my lord, right across Marmax South from the Flavian sub-bar lines to Gorgon Intersection,’ called Icaro.

‘Strength?’ asked Archamus, glancing up from the glow of the main tactical feed.

‘Main force,’ said Icaro.

‘Titans?’

‘None sighted,’ called Vorst from the console beside Icaro. ‘Knights, armour and a full air-support element. Indications of Legion elements, too. Intel is from the craft we still have in the air, visibility to ground is limited.’

‘Distance to lines?’ asked Archamus.

‘Uncertain – three kilometres, maybe,’ replied Icaro.

‘How in Sol’s light did they get that close?’ snapped Vorst.

‘Signal the line commanders on Marmax South,’ said Archamus, his voice level. ‘If we’ve only just seen it, they might not have.’

Archamus, second of that name, master of the Imperial Fists’ Huscarls and current watch commander for the greatest battle humanity had seen, allowed himself a moment to find stillness in a slow breath. It was all he could afford. The human command officers like Icaro and Vorst would have to rotate out soon. Exhaustion was already degrading their effectiveness.

Vox-connection indicators flashed on the tactical displays. The hum and growl of voices in the strategium rose. Holo-displays suspended in the centre of the hemispherical room re-spun to show the lines of Marmax. Uncertain amber runes and data jostled across maps drawn in cold blue light. Even as Archamus watched, half of the tactical data dissolved and rearranged itself. Communications to the front lines were becoming unreliable. Scrap code was seeping into the signal system. Comms discipline was breaking down in the mortal troops. Beyond the wall they were reduced to the eyes of those on the line and the systems built into the defences themselves. On a front like Marmax, which weeks of war had crushed but not broken, those eyes and systems were far from infallible. With every watch that Archamus stood on the strategium’s command dais, their ability to see the war they were fighting was shrinking, clarity fading like the world seen through a clouding eye. The Saturnine breach had held yesterday, so had Colossi and Gorgon Bar and Marmax. They had held. The fight had been carried at cost. Where all could have failed, the defenders and defences had proved the equal of their enemies.

That victory was yesterday. The reality of ongoing war was what the Palace woke to.

‘Line command on Marmax acknowledged,’ said Icaro.

The doors to the chamber opened. Rogal Dorn entered. His amour still bore the stains and marks of battle, his face set in the hard expression that had carved ever deeper into his flesh in the past months. As per his standing command, none of the hundreds of officers in the strategium paused to salute him. His presence was enough to dim the tide of noise. Two Huscarls followed the Praetorian and with him the willow-thin figure of Armina Fel, the primarch’s senior astropath. Rogal Dorn met Archamus’ gaze and tilted his head, the gesture as clear and direct an order as a shouted command. Archamus bowed his head in brief assent.

‘You have theatre command,’ said Archamus to Icaro. ‘Apprise me of any change.’ The Praetorian moved towards one of the secure antechambers.

What ill has come on us now? wondered Archamus as he followed.

Marmax South, Anterior Barbican

‘Can you hear it?’ said the trooper beside the wall. Katsuhiro could hear it. A high and distant note, like the call of a dying bird. All along the line, faces were turning to the clouded horizon. Down on the lower lines, he could see red figures moving, huge, their amour skimmed with dust, movements curt and fluid. Legion warriors, sons of Sanguinius, just like Baeron. They were moving to the parapets, guns up.

‘Stand ready! Stand ready!’ The shouts came down the line. Bodies hurried and shuffled to firing points. Hands grasped guns, clutching, fumbling, holding on.

‘What the hell is that?’ called Steena. She was next to him, looking up and around.

‘Stand ready!’

The high note was rising, splitting, becoming more than one note, shifting direction.

‘Attack incoming!’

A battery of aerial defence guns started firing from one of the higher lines, rounds pumping high and far at targets out of sight. Katsuhiro saw Steena flinch. The high note was still clear over the sound of the guns, buffeting now, splitting, growing strands of sound. Was it… was it a voice? A voice singing?

‘Rose and rain, and petal on the bough,’ his sister sang. ‘Oh, where will my heart find true home?’

He laughs.

She smiles, the notes of the next line of the song fading.

‘It’s supposed to be a sad song, silly,’ she says, giggling, still smiling down at him. She is ten years old. She is so very real. She picks up one of the faded blocks that he has scattered on the floor around them in a game of making as much mess as they can.

‘Again!’ he calls.

‘Again,’ she says. ‘Really?’

‘Again!’

‘Alright,’ she says, ‘again, but just one more time.’ He laughs. She is smiling. ‘Rose and rain and petal on the bough–’

A column of light burned through the air above him. Katsuhiro ducked, eyes flooded with brilliance. His head hit the barrel of someone behind him. His jaw smashed shut. Blood in his mouth. Ringing in his ears. Shouting and the clatter of gunfire, and more shouts saying to stop firing. The high sound was still there too, still audible, sliding under the roar. Sharp. Oscillating. Aching in his bloody teeth. He wanted to stay down, to go back to whatever moment the memory of song had promised. His eyes were shut, he realised.

‘Rise!’ the voice boomed along the wall. ‘Rise! Weapons ready! Rise!’

He pushed himself up. Eyes open.

The sky above was burning. Energy beams, hard rounds, missiles loosing into the sky in a tattered sheet of flame. The other troopers on the parapet were milling, guns in hand, some looking up at the sky, some down at the wasteland beyond the outer line of trenches. Baeron was pushing his way down the walkway, dragging troopers to their feet, his voice punching from his helm’s speaker grille.

‘Rise! Weapons ready!’

There were more human troops on the line, grey-dusted, swarming out from whatever places they took as shelter.

The orbital strike hit the edge of the outer defence works five kilometres away. A column of light punched down from the clouds, fifty metres wide, neon white, screaming. Rockcrete and steel vanished into gas and ash. Thunder rolled out. Katsuhiro was already ducking back, half-blinded, weeping. Then the blasts punched down again and again, a drumbeat of wrathful gods shredding the broken world of mortals. The deluge of anti-aircraft fire stuttered.

‘Air cover!’ someone was shouting. ‘We need air cover!’

‘Rise! Stand ready!’

‘Where’s the enemy?’ Steena was beside him, shouting. ‘There’s no enemy. Why are we–’

‘There,’ said Katsuhiro, his eyes suddenly steady.

Something in his tone must have caught Steena’s attention, even over the din. She stared in the same direction as him, shaking her head as though she was about to say that she couldn’t see anything. Then she did see and went still.

Gold.

Gold glittering against the hazed light of the new day. Flecks of gold in the far distance, bright against the sky.

Katsuhiro watched. The sound had faded from his ears. It was still there, but now it was just a vibration working its way in from his skin to his bones. It felt good. Like half-waking in warmth with the sweetness of a dream still wrapping you…

Gold. Hundreds of flecks of gold, dancing against the drab sky, spiralling, flitting between explosions and lines of tracer fire. He knew they were aircraft… Part of him knew they were aircraft, hundreds of them, fuselages gilded and polished to shine like the faces of the sun. Aircraft with colours rioting across their wings. Warplanes. Gunships. Strike fighters. He knew what they were but…

Flak was pouring out into the sky…

Golden birds falling…

Broken wings…

Black threads of smoke…

Serenity, tiny slices of perfect time. The colour of the explosion as an aircraft hit the ground two kilometres out from the outermost line: first yellow, the light pure, then orange curdling to black, the cloud drawing colour together as it rose like the head of a burning flower. He could watch it forever, just the sight of this, amid the pulse sound of the world’s heart racing to beat its last.

‘Watch forever…’ said a voice that he realised was his own. Why couldn’t he think? What was going on? He felt… He felt like he wanted to stop. Just to stop and watch and listen to the song that was coming out of the distance.

‘For the Emperor! For our oaths!’ Baeron was bellowing down the parapet line.

Katsuhiro blinked, breathing hard, trying to see, trying to focus. Sound was beating around him, gunfire, shouts, his own breath, all of it. Half of the troopers were standing staring out at the distance, eyes wide, mouths slack.

‘Protect me,’ he said to himself, and then louder, snarling, ‘Please protect me as I protect You.’

He was steady, gun in hand, face forward.

Flocks of golden aircraft were dropping lower and lower, skimming the ground. The scream of their engines boiled dust into the air. Closing fast. Flak and missiles raked the sky as they tried to trace their targets to the edge of their declination. Fire struck one from the sky a kilometre north. Another south. The golden craft were almost on the ground, weaving from side to side. Fire began to flick from the lines. The shriek of the jet engines syncopated, merged, like a screaming voice. Like laughter.

‘What is this?’ Steena was shouting into his ear. ‘What is happening?’

The aircraft were almost on them now. The fire from the walls was a ragged torrent. Las-beams cut wings. Missiles struck.

Red… Great banners of red unfurling behind some of the aircraft. For an impossible instant Katsuhiro thought they were bleeding. Then he realised it was dust, red dust. Plumes of orange and cyan vented from the rest of the aircraft, spilling behind them like a brightly coloured cloak dragged across the ground. They were almost at the outer lines, plunging towards the earthworks. They flicked upwards, spiralling and weaving, engines howling. As they rose, fire followed them from the parapets and tiered lines. The aircraft climbed, near vertical, spearing away. The gunfire chased them for a moment before falling silent.

Above, the blanket of blue, orange and red dust began to drift down.

‘Masks!’ shouted an officer.

Katsuhiro was already pulling his on as the calls rose. Everything was suddenly quiet, just the sounds of people scrabbling to pull on breath-masks and hoods. His breath was loud as he dragged air through the plug filter. The visor was pitted and scratched. He looked around. Baeron was a statue of red, his helmed head cocked as though listening. Katsuhiro realised that the shrill whine had stopped too. The coloured smog drifted lower, unhurried, gaudy and vivid. It reminded him of chalk dust on a scholam board. He was sweating inside his gas hood and mask. He could feel heat building under the fabric of his uniform. His gloves felt heavy on his fingers. The coloured cloud was just a few metres above them now.

‘Full hazard condition,’ called Baeron. ‘No exposed skin. Weapons ready.’

Troopers along the line fumbled for gloves and uniform fastenings.

Beside him Steena pulled up her hood, gasping, coughing.

‘Can’t breathe!’

‘Trooper, replace your mask!’

The dust was just above head height. Katsuhiro could taste sugar and burning plastek.

Along the line, the coloured dust was draping the troopers. Some froze. A trooper who had not covered his hands with gloves turned and fired, pouring las-bolts into those beside him until a round blew the back of his head out. Explosions flashed out. The smog was a rainbow kaleidoscope of light and colour.

‘Enemy in front of the lower lines,’ called Baeron. ‘Thirty-degree down angle, continual fire.’

Katsuhiro got his gun onto the parapet angled down and sighted along the barrel, and froze.

Dust fogged the view, but he could see the outer trench. A tide of shapes was breaking across the trench lines, things with pale flesh and long limbs, with quills and razor smiles. Beasts or humans or machines, all distinctions failed. Banners of gaudy silk snapped above them. War machines bounded at their sides. They should not have been there. They should not have been able to reach the lines so quickly. It was as though they had congealed from the smog right on top of them. Gunfire chewed at the tide. Flesh blasted to red slime. Metal deformed. But the assault wave was not slowing. It was accelerating. Katsuhiro watched as a thing that must once have been a smaller Knight war machine hit the rise above the outer trench and leapt high. Its armoured shell was ivory white. Troopers in the scoop of earth beneath raised their guns to fire. The Knight landed amongst them, chrome claws and spinning blades extending, and suddenly the length of trench was filled with bloody pulp, and the tide of attackers was spilling over it and up the other side. The ivory Knight arched its back, piston legs pushing it up like a preening bird. Its white carapace split. Inside, something pink and soft and red and slick shivered and whooped a bubbling cry into the air. Katsuhiro could hear it. Somehow from a kilometre distant he could hear it as though it was next to him.

A rocket hit the wall line fifty metres below him and blew out a ten-metre section. Bodies flew up. Debris and smoke scattered. A chunk of rock hit Katsuhiro on the helm. His head snapped back. Pain exploded in his neck, and with it the world was in focus again.

He started to fire. Aiming down, squeezing the trigger, adding his shots to the ragged volleys coming from the layers of walls and parapets. He was one of the few. Most of the human troopers were standing, draped in toxic colours, staring like dumb cattle. A few were lying down as though the ground was a bed. Only the Blood Angels on the lower line responded together, firing and moving with perfect unity, the dust shaking from the red of their armour. They did not pause. Fire speared from the angels. Missiles and bolt fire chewed chunks of the enemy into pools of meat. Lascannon blasts hit in clusters on war machines surging through the tide of flesh and sparked them to burning ruin.

Katsuhiro felt something yank his arm. He looked around, half ready to spin his weapon to fire. Steena was on her knees beside him, bare face painted in pigment dust. She was trembling, eyes wide, lips pulled back from teeth. She looked like she was laughing. Bloody, pink tears were cutting paths through the dust on her cheeks.

‘Get up!’ shouted Katsuhiro, the words lost to his mask and the cacophony.

Her mouth was moving.

He tried to shake her free. There were other troopers on the parapet, some still firing. Some were staggering. One was cuffing their head as though trying to knock something loose. There was blood on their fist and skull. Katsuhiro blinked. His thoughts were slowing again. He looked down at his hand. Where was his gun? Where was his glove? Orange dust covered his hand. Steena was laughing and weeping.

Something hit the other side of the parapet. For a ridiculous second, he thought it was a raindrop. He leaned towards the gun loop, his thoughts the soft kind that came just after waking.

The bomblet that had embedded in the outer parapet exploded. Shards of stone pinged off his helmet. The shockwave vibrated through him. His ears burst. He was tumbling on his back as jet wash boiled the clouds of coloured dust. Gunships plunged down, cannons firing, missiles and rockets loosing. Huge figures in power armour stood on the edges of open hatches. Discordant colours and patterns covered their armour: tiger-striped gold, acid green and violet scales, plumes of fire-orange hair. Tubes and pipes festooned them, coiling around bloated guns of chrome and black graphite. A greasy heat haze hung around them as though the air was cooking as it touched them. They had been Space Marines, once; now they looked like a fever dream. Katsuhiro felt the vomit gush from his mouth before he could stop it. His hands came up and ripped the mask and hood off his head. He gasped. Dust poured into his mouth.

The world snapped into focus.

Into perfect focus.

His nerves lit.

Every pain and ache in his body screamed.

The blood and burnt-sugar flavour on his tongue flooded his mind. He could taste the smoke of the gun discharge and the exhaust of the gunship as it banked low above them.

One of the giants in the gunship dropped down onto the parapet thirty metres from Katsuhiro. Stone cracked where it hit. Some of the troopers near it ran. Others turned towards it with docile confusion. It swung the mouth of its weapon down towards the wall. Katsuhiro could see all the way down its throat, could see that inside the chrome muzzle there was a real throat and tiny, perfect white teeth.

The gun fired. Steena yanked him down. The troopers who had been beside him hung in the air, skin and bones and organs shivering to red mist, wave patterns forming in the gore. The giant moved forwards, the neon colours of its armour flowing like oil on water. The sound of its weapon was beyond hearing, a migraine pain pouring into the brain. Katsuhiro could not think.

Baeron came down the walkway from behind them, rockcrete shattering under his strides. Bolt shells exploded across the multihued warrior. Iridescent shreds of armour blew from the impacts. It turned, pulling its weapon around. The shriek of the silver gun rose as the warrior swept it towards the Blood Angel. Sections of the wall burst into dust. Shells exploded in mid-air as they plunged into a wall of sonic energy. The Blood Angel did not slow. He accelerated, drew a knife and leapt. The edge of the shriek-cone caught Baeron’s leg as he leapt. Red armour deformed and shredded from knee to foot. Baeron landed, stumbled. The chrome gun came around towards the fallen Space Marine. Baeron sliced his blade across the cables linking the enemy warrior to his gun. Blood sprayed out from the severed tubes. The shriek of the gun was now a gurgle of pain. Baeron struck again and again, under arm, pistoning the short blade up and into the warrior’s gut. The abomination was staggering, shedding blood and shards of ceramite, but it was not dead. A pearl-and-silver fist lashed into Baeron’s faceplate, once, twice, three times, buckling ceramite, shattering eye-lenses. The angel kept stabbing, shunting the enemy warrior backwards. They hit the parapet. Rockcrete shattered. A section of crenellation broke, and the enemy warrior was falling over the edge, down the face of the wall to the spikes and wire at its base. Baeron straightened on the parapet’s broken edge. There was blood on his armour, darker than the dusted lacquer, clotting as it ran through dust.

‘Up! Up!’ roared Baeron.

There were more figures dropping from gunships up and down the line. Shrieking weapons fired. Armour became shards. Flesh became jelly. Waves formed in powered air, overlapping. Katsuhiro could not move. Everything was colour and sound and vibration and the taste of sugar and bitter lemons and vomit. He could not…

He protects.

A memory of golden light. Heat pouring into him and running down his spine.

He is our shield. He is our light. He is our truth…

And he was screaming, screaming as the kaleidoscope world around him became real, became raw.

He could move. He was standing. Somehow, he was standing and moving to a firing loop, picking up a fallen gun.

‘He protects, He protects, He protects…’ he gasped, hands reloading, blood running from his ears. He looked down the barrel of his rifle, felt himself weep as he focused on something that shook and wobbled and sliced along the lower lines. There was a roar of more gunships coming in.

He was going to die here. The moment was coming, a promise delivered at last. He would die and no one would remember him, but he would die in defiance, not in fear. ‘He protects,’ he said, and squeezed the trigger. The shot hit the thing at the end of his gunsight. Blood and scorched fat splashed out. It swayed and slid down, deflating, thrashing. He looked up, searching for the next target, and stopped.

Something was happening. All along the wall and lines that he could see, the enemy was pulling back, bladed bodies and war machines draining away into the multihued pall. Gunships cut in, hovering as giant warriors leapt through hatches, cradling wide-mouthed chrome guns. Gunfire blew craft from the sky. Volley fire, scattered at first and then increasing in cohesion, reached into the fog to rip chunks from the vanishing assault. Katsuhiro fired with the rest, reloading and firing and firing… And then, just as suddenly as the enemy had come, it was gone.

Quiet. Ringing quiet all around. The low crack of las-shots dull behind the pulse of tinnitus in his ears. He stared. Then felt something tug at his arm. Steena had crawled to the wall next to him. Her eyes were bloodshot in her dust-painted face.

‘Water…’ she gasped. He was taking his canteen from a pouch with shaking hands when a shadow fell over him. He looked up.

Baeron had removed his helm. The face beneath was bloody, the meat and bone of the right cheek mashed and torn, the left eye closed in a clotted mass. The Blood Angel was looking out beyond the parapet.

‘What…’ asked Katsuhiro, the sound of his voice a surprise to him. ‘They… they left… What happened?’

Baeron made no sign of having heard. Then he looked down at Katsuhiro. His open eye was bright green. He stared for a long moment and then back to beyond the parapet.

‘I do not know,’ he said.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.
Internal artwork by Mikhail Savier

Mortis © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. Mortis, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Siege of Terra, 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.
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ISBN: 978-1-80026-595-0

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For Carl Tuttle, Ead Brown and Aaron Dembski-Bowden.

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