Contents

Cover

Saturnine – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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After the gate fell
Begin
Oath maker

There’s a bond stronger than steel to be found in the calamity of combat.

Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) and Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army) had found that out in the span of about a hundred days. They had met on the sixth of Secundus, in the crowds swarming off the Excertus Imperialis troop ships at the Lion’s Gate. Everyone tired and confused, lugging kit, gaping at the monumental vista of the Palace, which most had never seen before, except in picts. Officers shouting, frustrated, trying to wrangle troops into line; assembly squares outlined in chalk on the concourse deck, marked with abbreviated unit numbers; adjutants hurrying along the lines, punch-tagging paper labels to collars – code marker, serial, dispersal point – as if they were processing freight.

‘I swear I have never seen so many people in one place,’ Joseph had remarked.

‘Nor me,’ Willem had replied, because he’d been standing next to him.

Just that simple. A hand offered, shaken. Names exchanged. Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) and Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army). The brackets were always there, with everybody. Your name became a sentence, an extension of identity.

‘Ennie Carnet (Fourth Australis Mechanised).’

‘Seezar Filipay (Hiveguard Ischia).’

‘Willem Kordy (Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mobile). This is Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army).’

No one stopped doing it. It was too confusing otherwise. No one came from here, no one knew the place, or anybody except the rest of their unit. They brought their birthplaces, regions and affiliations with them, in brackets, like baggage trains after their names. Like comforting mementos. It became second nature. On the eleventh, Kordy found himself saying, as he reported to his own brigade commander, ‘Willem Kordy (Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mobile), sir.’

‘Colonel Bastian Carlo, Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mo– What the shit is wrong with you, soldier?’

They lugged their brackets into the war with them, along with their packs and munition bags and their service weapons, like a little extra load. Then they had to cling to them, because once the fighting started, everything quickly lost definition and the brackets were all they had. Faces and hands got covered in mud and blood, unit badges got caked in dirt. By the twenty-fifth, the long red coats of the 77th Europa Max (Ceremonial) were as thick with filth as the green mail of the Planalto Dracos 6-18 and the silver breastplates of the Nord-Am First Lancers. Everyone became indistinguishable, alive or dead.

Especially after the gate fell.

Lion’s Gate space port fell to the enemy on the eleventh of Quintus. It was a long way from where they were, hundreds of kilometres west. Everything was a long way from everything else, because the Imperial Palace was so immense. But the effects were felt everywhere, like a convulsion, like the Palace had taken a headshot.

They were on the 14th Line by then, out in the north reach of the Greater Palace. The 14th Line was an arbitrary designation, a tactical formation of twenty thousand mixed Excertus and Auxilia units holding positions to guard the western approaches to the Eternity Wall space port. When the Lion’s Gate fell, cohesion just went, right across the 14th Line, right across everywhere. A series of heavy voids had failed, soiling the air in the surrounding zone with a lingering sting of raw static and overpressure. The aegis protecting the Palace had ruptured in a cascade, spreading east from the Lion’s Gate, and the electro-mag blink of that collapse took down vox and noospheric links with it. No one knew what to do.

Commands from Bhab and the Palatine Tower were not updating. There was a mad scramble, a fall-back, evacuating dugouts and leaving the dead behind. Parts of the Lion’s Gate space port were on fire, visible from leagues away. Traitor armies were shoving in from the south-east, emboldened by the news that the port had fallen. They were driving up the Gangetic Way unchecked, piling in across Xigaze Earthworks and the Haldwani Traverse bastions, swarming the enclosures at the Saratine and Karnali Hubs and the agrarian districts west of the Dawn Road. The units of the 14th Line could hear the rumble of approaching armour as they ran, like a metal tide rolling up a beach. The sky was a mass of low smoke, scored through by the ground-attack aircraft making runs on the port-side habitations.

No one could believe that the gate had fallen. It was where they had all arrived, almost a hundred days before, and it had felt so huge and permanent. Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army) had never seen a structure so magnificent. A vertical city that soared into the clouds, even on a clear day. Lion’s Gate. One of the principal space ports serving the Imperial Palace.

And the enemy had taken it.

That meant the enemy had surface access inside the Eternity Wall, inside the Anterior Barbican. It had the critical operational capacity to start landing principal assault forces from the orbital fleet: heavy units, mass units, to reinforce the Terran traitor hosts that had begun the outer assaults.

‘No,’ Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) told his friend. ‘Not reinforce. Supplant. The first door of the Palace has opened.’ An orbital artery had begun to pump. Until then, they’d faced men and machines. Through the yawning hole of the Lion’s Gate, other things could now arrive, the way cleared for their advance.

Traitor Astartes. Titan engines. And worse, perhaps.

‘How could there be worse?’ asked Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army).

They tried to make their way from Southern Freight Quadrant to Angevin Bastion, approaching the top end of the Gangetic Way where it crossed Tancred and the Pons Montagne, in the hope of skirting the traitor armour that was reducing Gold Fane Bastion to rubble. Captain Mads Tantane (16th Arctic Hort) had nominal command, but they didn’t need a leader. It was move as one, in support of each other, or die.

Some fled, discipline lost. They were cut down inside two hundred metres, or overtaken by the viral clouds. Others gave up. That was the worst thing to see. Anonymous troopers, their identities lost under a film of grease and mud, no longer able to say their brackets, sitting in doorways, beside broken walls, in the stinking shadows of underpass revetments. A few put pistols in their mouths, or tugged the pins of their last grenades. But most just sat, ruined by despair and sleep deprivation, and refused to get up. They had to be left behind. They sat until death found them, and it never took long.

The rest, the still living, they tried to move. Vox and noospheric links remained dead. The constant flow of updating directives and deployment instructions had been choked off. They had to switch to Emergency and Contingency Orders, which had been issued on paper flimsies to all field officers. They were basic, spartan. For them, the units of the 14th Line, a curt general order written on a curl of paper, like a motto from a fortune cracker: ‘In the event of breach or failure at 14th, withdraw to Angevin.’

Angevin Bastion and its six-kilometre line of casemates. Get behind that. That was the hope. A new line. Captain Mads Tantane (16th Arctic Hort) had about seven hundred infantry with him in a long, straggling column that kept breaking into clumps. His seven hundred was just a small part of the eighty-six thousand loyalist Army personnel in retreat from Line 14, Line 15 and Line 18. Packs kept stumbling into each other as they struggled through the ruins, yelling names and brackets frantically to prevent mistaken engagement. Enemy fire was at least only coming from one direction: behind them.

Then it began to come from the flank too. From the north. Close by and heavy, pricking through the colonnades and the gutted buildings, stippling rockcrete, raising puffs of powder-dust from rubble slopes.

And killing people.

Their line, their ragged column, began to crumple. Some scattered and broke for cover, others turned, bewildered. Some fell, as though they were tired of standing up. They dropped heavily, like sacks of meal, and tilted at ungainly angles, their legs bent under them, poses only death could accomplish. Captain Mads Tantane (16th Arctic Hort) started yelling above the chatter of weapons fire, urging them on to Angevin, and a few of the troopers obeyed.

‘He’s a fool,’ said Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army). ‘My friend Willem, don’t go that way! Look, would you? Look!’

The enemy had emerged. A wide, rolling line of traitor ground troops surged through the ruined fringes of Gold Fane, spilling through broken archways, and across streets, and down spoil heaps, flowing like water through every gap they could find. They were chanting. Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) couldn’t make out what. There was too much noise. But it was all one thing, voices lifted as one, a sound as ugly as the icons on the banners that wobbled and flapped over their ranks.

The kill-rate increased. Friends were dropping all around them. Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) couldn’t tell who. A body twisted. Was that Jurgan Thoroff (77th Kanzeer Light) or Uzman Finch (Slovak 14th)? Just a figure caked in mud, identity lost, no longer able to utter its brackets, no face left to wipe clean so that features could be discerned.

Smoke everywhere. Dust. Vaporised blood. Filthy rain. The chanting. The constant crack and rasp of weapons firing. The slap and scorch of impacts on stone and rubble. The hollow thump of impacts on meat. You knew when a body had been hit. A muffled punch came with an exhaled gasp as air was squeezed out of lungs. It came with the sharp stink of burned cloth and exit steam, the burned and atomised innards splitting skin to escape.

You learned the sound fast if you didn’t already know it, because it repeated a dozen times a minute.

Willem Kordy grabbed his friend’s sleeve and they ran together. Others ran too. There was no cover. They scrambled up a bank of rubble, rounds slapping the tangled debris around them. Joseph Baako Monday made the mistake of looking back. He saw–

He saw that Captain Tantane had definitely gone the wrong way, and taken two hundred or more people with him. The traitor multitude had boxed them. He saw–

He saw taller figures pushing through the marching traitor files. Beast-giants armoured in black. He knew they were Astartes. War-horns bellowed through the smoke-fog. More now, more giants. He saw–

He saw these Astartes wore armour of dirty white, like spoiled cream. Their pauldrons were black. Some had great horns. Some had cloth tied around their armour like smocks or aprons. He saw–

He saw the dirt was caked blood. He saw the aprons were human hides. The Astartes in black slowed their advance. They let the Astartes in white rush ahead. They surged like dogs, charged like bulls. They weren’t men, or even like men. The Astartes in black were upright, like handlers. The Astartes in white galloped, almost on all fours. They shrieked in berserk pain. They swung chainblades and war-axes that Joseph Baako Monday knew he could not have lifted. He saw–

He saw them reach Captain Tantane’s group. He saw Tantane and those around him screaming and firing to hold them at bay. And failing. The Astartes in white ploughed into the mass of them, through them, running them down like trains hitting livestock. Slaughter. Butchery. A huge cloud of blood-vapour billowed up the slope, coating stones like tar. The Astartes in black stood and watched, as if entertained. He saw–

A hand on his arm.

‘Come on!’ Willem yelled into his face. ‘Just come on!’

Up the slope, sixty, seventy of them, scrabbling up the rubble incline, sixty or seventy that had not made the mistake of following Captain Tantane. Up the slope, dragging each other when feet slipped, up the slope and onto what had once been the roofs of habitats. The horror below them. The war-horns booming. The grinding squeal of chainblades. Billowing clouds of clotting fog.

The roofs ran out. A huge structure had collapsed, leaving nothing but its frame of girders and spars rising from a sea of shattered masonry. A twenty-metre drop. They started to clamber out along the girders, the sixty or seventy of them, single file, walking or crawling along girders half a metre wide. Men slipped and fell, or were knocked off by shots from below. Some took others with them as they clawed to stay on. They had all passed through fear. Fear was redundant and forgotten. So was humanity. They were deaf from the noise and numb from the constant shock. They had entered a state of feral humiliation, of degradation, mobbing like animals, wide-eyed and mindless, trying to escape a forest fire.

Willem nearly fell, but Joseph clung to him and got him to the far side, the roof of an artisan hall. They were among the first to make it. They looked back at their friends, men and women clinging like swarming ants to the narrow girders. They reached out, grabbed hands, brought a few to safety. Jen Koder (22nd Kantium Hort), Bailee Grosser (Third Helvet), Pasha Cavaner (11th Heavy Janissar)…

War-horns boomed. Bigger horns. Deeper, howling sounds that shook the breastbone. Two dozen streets away, true giants loomed out of the haze. Titan engines, glimpsed between the soaring towers as they strode along, demolishing walls and whole buildings, black, gold, copper, crimson, infernal banners displayed on the masts of their backs. Each was like a walking city, too big to properly comprehend. Their vast limb-weapons pulsed and fired: flashes that scorched the retina, static shock that lifted the hair, heat-wash that seared the skin like sunburn even from two dozen streets away.

And the noise. The noise so loud, each shot so loud, it felt as though the noise alone could kill. At each discharge, everything shivered.

We will die now, thought Joseph, and then laughed out loud at his own arrogance. The giant engines weren’t coming for him. They didn’t know he even existed. They were striding west, parallel to him, driving through the harrowed streets to find something they could kill or destroy that was worth their titanic effort.

The sixty or seventy of them had become thirty or forty. They slithered down slopes of scree and broken glass. No one had a clue where they were going. No one knew if there was anywhere left that could be gone to. Buildings around them were burning or blown out, the streets buried in a blanket of debris.

‘We should fight,’ said Joseph.

‘What?’ asked Willem.

‘Fight,’ Joseph repeated. ‘Turn around, and fight.’

‘We’ll die.’

‘Isn’t this already death?’ asked Joseph. ‘What else are we going to do? There’s nowhere to go.’

Willem Kordy wiped his mouth and spat out dirt and bone dust.

‘But what good can we do?’ asked Bailee Grosser. ‘We saw what–’

‘We did see,’ said Joseph. ‘I saw.’

‘We won’t measure it,’ said Willem.

‘Measure what?’ asked Jen Koder. Her helmet was so badly dented, she couldn’t take it off. Under the crumpled rim, blood ran down her neck.

‘Whatever we are able to do,’ said Willem. ‘We’ll die. We won’t know. Whatever we do, however little, we won’t know. That doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes,’ said Joseph. He looked at their faces. ‘It doesn’t matter. We came here to fight. Fight for Him, in His name. Fight for this place. You saw how many people came. At the space port, when we arrived. So many people. Did anyone actually think they would do something significant? In person?’

Willem nodded. ‘Collective effort. That’s the point. If I break, or you break, then everyone will break, one by one. If I stand, and you stand, we die, but we are standing. We don’t have to know what we do, or how little it is. That’s why we came here. That’s what He needs from us.’

No one said anything. One by one they got up, picked up their weapons, and followed Joseph and Willem down the street, picking their way over rubble, heading back the way they had come.

The Space Marine was in their path, hazed by a draw of thick smoke. Scarred siege shield propped in one hand, longsword resting across a huge shoulder guard. Plate dented and scored, even the ornate laurels on the breast. Eyes, slits of amber throbbing in the mauled visor.

Their weapons came up.

‘Where are you going?’ it asked.

‘Back. To fight,’ said Joseph.

‘Correct,’ it said. ‘That’s what He needs from us.’

‘You… heard me?’

‘Of course. I can hear a heart beating at a thousand metres. Follow me.’

The legionary turned. Its armour and siege shield were yellow.

‘I am Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army),’ Joseph called out.

‘I don’t need to know,’ the legionary replied, without glancing back. ‘And show some damn noise discipline.’

‘I need you to know,’ said Joseph.

The legionary halted, and looked back. ‘That doesn’t matter–’

‘It matters to me,’ said Joseph. ‘It’s all we have. I am Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army).’

‘I am Willem Kordy (Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mobile),’ said Willem.

‘Adele Gercault (Fifty-Fifth Midlantik).’

‘Jen Koder (Twenty-Second Kantium Hort).’

The Space Marine let them all speak. Then it nodded.

‘I am Camba Diaz (Imperial Fists). Follow me.’

‘Wait,’ said Archamus, seeing them approach, but not looking up, one finger raised for patience.

Niborran, Brohn and Icaro waited. They watched the master of Dorn’s Huscarls work at his station, carefully reviewing the data-feed. His eyes didn’t blink. They waited. The constant motion and noise of the Grand Borealis encircled them. It was the first time any of them had not spoken in over a day. Waiting seemed wrong. High Primary Solar General Saul Niborran, Militant Colonel Auxilia Clement Brohn, Second Mistress Tacticae Terrestria Sandrine Icaro of the War Courts… They were people you did not keep waiting, not at this time, not in this extremity.

Unless you were in command of the warzone, running it from Bhab Bastion in the Sanctum Imperialis, the chosen proxy of the Lord Praetorian, and thus carrying, temporarily, the ultimate authority of Dorn.

Archamus, Imperial Fists, Master of the Huscarls, Second Of That Name, finished his review and sat back slightly. He looked at them. They were the senior duty officers of the Day Hundred rotation.

‘Begin,’ he invited.

‘Where is Dorn?’ asked Niborran immediately.

Archamus’ eyes narrowed very slightly. At a nearby station, Captain Vorst looked up with a frown. Archamus saw the look, dismissed it with a small gesture. Keep your seat.

Niborran breathed deeply. He was tired.

‘Your forgiveness, sir,’ he said. ‘Let me amend. Where is the Lord Praetorian?’

‘Occupied elsewhere,’ said Archamus. ‘Begin.’

Niborran winced. He rubbed his augmetic eyes quickly with a knuckle. The silver socket frames gleamed against his dark skin, but the eyes within seemed dull. He took out his slate.

‘We have run analysis of–’

‘How is he occupied?’ asked Brohn.

‘What?’ asked Archamus.

‘Leave it, Clem,’ Niborran murmured.

‘I won’t. How is he occupied? Right now? One hundred and more days of this, and the deepest shit yet, drowning in our own blood, and he’s occupied?’

Archamus’ face was expressionless. ‘Consider your tone please, colonel,’ he suggested.

‘Screw my bastard tone, lord.’

Archamus rose. Vorst had risen too, heaving his yellow-plated bulk out of his seat. Again, Archamus signalled him to return to work with a brief gesture.

‘We are all very tired,’ said Niborran quickly. ‘Very tired. Tempers fray and–’

‘You don’t look tired,’ Brohn said to Archamus. ‘Not at all.’

‘Bred that way,’ said Archamus. In the first hundred days he’d stood three tours on the lines. The grazes and dents on his yellow plate hadn’t been finished out and were there for all to see. But no, he didn’t look tired. He looked Astartes, the way he always did. Unmoving, as solid as a statue. He didn’t look tired the way these three humans did, with their hollow eyes and drawn cheeks and shaking hands.

‘I will allow you some latitude, colonel,’ he said. ‘The circumstances–’

‘The circumstances are shit, and getting shittier by the second, and Dorn is absent. He is supposed to be running this. He’s supposed to be the bastard genius–’

‘That is now enough,’ said Archamus.

‘The Praetorian’s absence is concerning,’ said Niborran. ‘Brohn is out of line, but his sentiment is–’

‘We’re screwed,’ snapped Brohn. ‘His plan is splitting at the seams. Lion’s Gate is done. They’re in. Inside Anterior. The aegis is blown in eight places. They’ve got engines on the ground and they’re walking. Our plan is on fire. It’s gone to shit–’

‘Get out.’

The words were a whisper, a hiss, but they cut like acid through metal. Everyone in the Bhab strategium fell silent. No voices, just the chatter and babble of cogitators and the crackle of vox monitor stations. Eyes averted.

Jaghatai Khan stepped up onto the central platform. How anyone or anything so big could have entered the Grand Borealis without being heard, or could have walked silently from the chamber arch across the plasteel deck, in full, fur-draped armour plate…

He towered over them. There was blood on his cheek, beard, gorget, left pauldron, breastplate. It matted his cinched-back mane, freckled his ermyet furs, and ran down his left thigh-guard. It wasn’t his. His left hip was scorched back to bare metal from a melta burn.

‘Get out,’ he repeated, looking down at Brohn.

‘Colonel Brohn is tired, lord, and spoke poorly,’ Niborran began.

‘I don’t give a shit,’ said the Great Khan.

‘My lord,’ Niborran pressed. ‘Colonel Brohn is a senior and decorated Army officer, and an essential part of the–’

‘Not a single shit,’ said the Great Khan.

Niborran glanced at the deck. He sighed.

‘His question was insolently framed,’ said Niborran flatly, ‘but his point was valid.’

He looked the primarch in the eyes. He did not waver.

‘My lord,’ he added.

‘You too,’ said the Great Khan. ‘Get out.’

Brohn glanced at Niborran. Niborran shook his head. He tossed his slate onto the desk, turned and walked out. Brohn followed.

The Great Khan didn’t even watch them leave.

‘Which seniors are on the next rotation?’ he called out to the chamber. ‘Find them. Wake them. Get them here.’

Several adjutants jumped up and hurried out. The Great Khan turned to Archamus.

‘Where’s Dorn?’ he asked.

‘In council with the Sigillite and the Council.’

‘Get him here,’ he said. He glanced at Icaro. ‘You. Icaro. Begin.’

Icaro cleared her throat. ‘Aegis failure in eight sectors,’ she said. She swept her hand across the face of her dataslate like a sower scattering seed, and threw the data up onto the display. Ugly blobs blossomed across the northern and central areas of the vast Palace map.

‘Repairs?’ asked the Great Khan.

‘Pending. Voids sixty-one and sixty-two are beyond salvation. Lion’s Gate Port remains wide open. Bulk landers are setting down along the northern upper platforms at a rate of sixty an hour. Vox and noospherics are interrupted in those sectors and adjacent zones.’

She cast more blobs onto the holofield.

‘Multi-point auspex confirms engines walking here, here and here. Legio Tempestus. Legio Vulpa. Perhaps Legio Ursa too. Progressing to Ultimate Wall, Anterior Wall, and into Magnifican.’

‘They have one, they want another,’ said the Great Khan. Archamus nodded.

‘I believe so, lord,’ he said.

‘Army lines are fracturing across the northern reaches,’ said Icaro. ‘Assault is a primary factor, traitor hosts driving up from the south. They have Astartes support.’

‘On the ground?’ asked the Great Khan.

‘On the ground, in force,’ she confirmed. ‘World Eaters, Iron Warriors, Thousand Sons, Luna Wolves–’

‘They’re not called that any more,’ said the Khan.

‘My apologies, lord. But I won’t use his name,’ she replied.

‘Just use numbers,’ said Archamus gently.

‘Yes, lord. Fifteenth, Seventeenth, Fourth, Sixteenth, Third. Perhaps others. Assault pressure is the primary factor, but Army cohesion is disrupted by the loss of vox and comm-channels. We can’t issue orders to the places where orders are most needed.’

She looked at the primarch.

‘The merits or demerits of the Praetorian’s defence plan are moot all the while said plan cannot be implemented,’ she said.

The Great Khan nodded, and tried to comb dried blood out of his moustache with his fingers. ‘And daemons?’ he asked.

‘Probably very many,’ she said. There was a tiny wobble in her voice. ‘Probably the most significant threat to the Sanctum Imperialis Palatine. But they are not detectable by our systems.’

‘That assessment is confirmed,’ said Archamus.

‘We are relying on sighting reports,’ she said, ‘which are… unreliable and confused. And dependent on vox. We must trust, I suppose, in our lord the Emperor’s will to keep them at bay.’

‘That trust is never unfounded,’ said the Great Khan. He looked at the shimmering, updating chart. ‘They’re coming to our doors. Right to our doors. Lion’s Gate, Ultimate Wall. But they want that too.’

He pointed to the icon that represented the Eternity Wall space port.

‘Agreed,’ said Archamus.

‘If they take that, they have both principal space ports in the northern reaches. Double the landing capacity.’

‘Surely they’ll concentrate on the Sanctum now?’ Icaro asked. ‘The added capacity is useful, but Lion’s Gate is closer, its landing volume is immense, and they’re at our throats already.’

‘No, they want it,’ said the Great Khan. ‘Get as much on the ground as they can to knock us down. It’s what I’d do.’

‘And it’s what I’d do,’ said Dorn. He stood at the foot of the platform steps looking up at them. ‘And it’s what I know our brother Perturabo would do. Maximise landing capacity. Deprive us of orbital access. I am sure this is as Horus has instructed.’

‘They want them both,’ said Jaghatai Khan.

‘They want them both. They want everything,’ said Dorn.

The Great Khan nodded. He looked at Dorn.

‘So, there you are,’ he said.

‘Here I am,’ said Dorn. ‘I had business elsewhere. Ironic… it’s usually you who slips away and can’t be found.’

Jaghatai Khan did not soften. The Lord Khagan would clearly not be mollified with gentle good humour.

‘What now, brother?’ asked the Great Khan.

‘I have been examining the latest variables,’ Dorn said, joining them on the platform. ‘Each move our opponent makes reveals more of his intention. I’m beginning to see the Lord of Iron’s strategy in some depth, which means I can predict where–’

‘We do not need to predict,’ said the Khan simply.

‘This is a complex, multi-aspect battle sphere, brother,’ Dorn began, then cursed himself inwardly. Jaghatai Khan’s martial doctrines were very different from his own, but the Great Khan was a peerless, precise and subtle warrior. He did not deserve condescension. He did not need to have complexity explained to him the way humans did.

Jaghatai Khan shook his head. He looked weary, and that in itself was concerning. For a primarch to look tired…

‘He wants our father,’ said the Khan quietly. ‘He wants unhindered access to the Palace. He has one foothold, he wants another. It is not complex, Rogal, not any more. Eternity Wall Port must be defended and held. Lion’s Gate Port must be retaken. It is an offence they have claimed it at all.’

‘It was unavoidable,’ said Dorn.

‘I’m not blaming you, Rogal,’ said the Khan. He sighed. ‘We must hold the ports. Deny them access. What forces they have already landed can be contained and butchered.’

‘Jaghatai,’ said Rogal Dorn. He cleared his throat, as if considering what to say next. ‘I assure you, I have weighed every option. I applaud your determination, but it’s not quite as simple as you–’

He cut short. Jaghatai Khan was gazing at him. There was a hardness in his look that made Icaro take a nervous step back.

‘I think you misunderstand me, Rogal,’ the Great Khan said. ‘I am going to take Lion’s Gate Port back. I’m not asking you. I came here to tell you what I’m about to do.’

She asked, ‘Why are you kneeling?’

He was renewing his oath of moment in a dingy cubicle a million light years from the place she’d first watched him perform the ceremony. His private arming chamber on the Spirit, that seemed like false memory, something he’d imagined but which had never been true. The metal walls lacquered pale green, the smell of lapping powder, the noise from embarkation decks outside. Those images didn’t belong to him any more. The oaths of moment pinned to the wall under the stencilled eagle, those too. They belonged to someone else. They were deeds another man had done, and he was dead.

‘To show respect,’ he replied.

‘Who are you kneeling to?’ Always so insistent, so curious.

He shrugged. He had laid out two blades. Rubio’s sword looked dull in the candlelight. The force sword’s blade was inactive. It was an old Ultramarines weapon, gladius-pattern, a form he was familiar with. It still had the Ultima mark on the hilt.

The Mk IV long-pattern chainsword beside it had a dent across the cowling and several teeth that needed to be re-set or replaced. A repair unit stood ready, beside the frame supporting his plate. The pale grey of the battered armour segments was the colour of old bone in the gloom, like a moon catching only back-scattered sunlight.

‘Kneeling is an act of respect or fealty,’ she remarked. ‘Or it is an act of reverence and devotion.’

‘It’s not devotion,’ he replied, becoming annoyed at her interruption and her questions. ‘There are no gods. We burned that lie.’

‘Then fealty… but there is no one here to kneel to, so the fealty is worthless.’

‘The Emperor is everywhere.’

‘Is He?’ She looked amused. ‘You kneel to the idea of Him, as an act of faith? So which is it, fealty or devotion? Have you destroyed false gods just to build another?’

‘He is not false,’ he snapped. The floor shook briefly. Dust sifted down from the trembling ceiling. The closest batteries and casemates had resumed firing, and their mass recoil was flexing the fabric of the Palace.

‘Is He a god, then?’ she asked. She brushed away dust that had fallen onto the pauldrons of his racked armour.

‘There are daemons now, so…’ he began.

‘So there must be gods too?’

‘I didn’t say that. What do you want, Mersadie?’

‘To live. Too late for that now.’

The candles guttered.

What oath are you making? Loken imagined her asking. He wondered how he would explain. Oaths of moment were just that – specific, taken before battle. All those he had sworn, almost everything he had ever sworn apart from his devotion to the Emperor, had long been voided. He had decided to make his own, a crude and simple oath, enough to keep him going through whatever part of his life remained.

‘I’ve seen slogans daubed on walls, in the lower parts of the Palace Precinct,’ he said to the empty cubicle. ‘A few to begin with, then more. I think the Imperial Army garrisons and conscripts scrawl them up. A mantra. I adopted it as my oath. Simple. Encompassing, and easy to remember. Just three words.’

He showed the scrap of parchment to the empty air, to the ghost memory of her presence.

To the death.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 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.

Saturnine © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2020. Saturnine, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

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

ISBN: 978-1-78999-370-7

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

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

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

For Terrance Dicks, 1935–2019, who showed us all that there
was nothing humble about the humble tie-in.

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