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Urdesh : The Serpent and the Saint – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Damocles
Rhole Cliffs

‘LISTEN!’

His voice slammed against the tiled walls, rolled through the passageways, broke and rolled back, interleaving itself into echoes all around him.

‘I speak of Ithaka, the warriors of Ithaka, the Iron Snakes of Ithaka. The Adeptus Astartes of the Reef Worlds, who proved their valour upon the waters!’

His eyes were closed as he concentrated on sounds and echoes. His great shoulders bunched and released, his arms opened to embrace the air. His fists unknotted and his hands spread wide.

‘Armoured in devotion, armed in purpose, united in service, side by side on the road from the Throne to the stars, march the brothers of Ithaka!’

He opened his eyes. Over these gloomy subterranean chambers his imagination painted the storm-tossed sea of his home world, the deep and endless sky, the rough rock of the ocean cliffs, the watching faces of his brothers. His Chapter. The tunnels were full of the soft lap and chuckle of water in the town cisterns, but in his mind he could almost hear the sigh and boom of the surf against the cliffs below the Phratry’s fortress, taste the clean, sharp sea-scent in the air.

‘Listen and I shall tell you. There came a day when word arrived of war, of desperate need. Word came that the Archenemy walked among the stars again, tales of worlds burning and then worlds extinguished. The sorrows and prayers of the Sabbat Worlds were poured out like the waters of the oceans.

‘And as the call sounded, the blood of the Phratry stirred to answer it, as its brothers emerged from their stern counsels to declaim over the ocean’s roar the names that would muster to carry the weight of the undertaking.

‘Brother-Captain Cules, who commanded his brothers to glory in the halls of the traitors of the Yandine Drift, undertook this. Brother-Captain Priad, whose lightning-wrapped blades had known the blood of the daemon, the ork and the primul, stood by his side. And to their banner came twelve names, a dozen banners, full sixscore warriors of the Phratry, sworn now to take ship from the Reef Stars, and with the might of their arms lift from the Sabbat Worlds the despair and the oppression of war!’

He had half-consciously taken a step forward and found the modulation of the echoes had changed ever so slightly as he had moved. He began to move in slow half-steps, listening to the way his voice rang through the stone and tile of the tunnels, seeking out the best position.

‘And so soon the Archenemy was to feel the coils of the snake, the iron of its armour, the speed of its strike! At Ambold the Snakes of Ithaka fell upon the foe as they laid siege to brave soldiers of the Throne, to break their grip and their back, so that Ambold might again call itself free. Upon Fornax Aleph the foe birthed the warp-dreamed form of the daemon, the enemy beyond, but the jaws of the snake closed upon it and its malevolent breath was dissipated like the foam on the swell of the wave.’

His voice had sped up, the echoes piling into each other and mashing together, blurring his words. He compensated, shifted position again, changed his cadence.

‘And then to Presarius, poor forsaken Presarius, whose darkened forges teemed with the misshapen enemy, spite-ridden, machine-merged, moving beneath their cities like the turbid tide. Like a spear of lightning before the storm, Brother-Captain Cules led the Snakes of Ithaka among the hives of Presarius, and in the darkness beneath the cities the hordes of the enemy closed about them.’

Then, in among the echoes, directly behind him, there was a gap.

‘And so began the Nine Days of Presarius, spent in the deep shadows of the forges and labyrinths, every brother of the Phratry with bolter-breech ringing empty, flamer and plasma all thirsting in vain for fuel, missile and grenade long since dispatched into darkness. And in the darkness before the breaking of the last doors to the Tetradine Stairs the Iron Snakes slew with fist and cleaving blade, chainsword and sea-lance, with their hearts never veering from the fight and the victory, as steadfast as the mariner’s compass.’

Something was directly behind him, out of his field of vision, motionless. Soaking up just enough of the sound that his exquisitely fine-honed hearing could spot the change in the echo layers. Someone was in here with him, silently watching.

‘It came about that while the brothers of Ithaka paid honour to their dead among the stones of wretched and ill-starred Presarius, a new banner was brought among their assembly. In amongst the heart of the foe’s ruin the steely snake and the golden aquila stood together, as Captain Cules and Macaroth the Warmaster bowed their heads together in sober conference.

‘“I bring you the Warmaster’s salute,” Cules’ words went, when the talk among the commanders was done and he had come back to his brothers, “for he has seen our prowess and resolve, and the ruin that we make of any enemy who stands against us, united in our undertaking. But the tides of war ebb and rise, and so we must chart a new course among its changing currents. The Warmaster is spreading his armies, to drive at the divided Archenemy and find the foe’s weaknesses as a storm surge will race through all the low places of the rocky coast.” And so, the undertaking to the Sabbat Worlds became many undertakings, and the voyage became many voyages, and the Iron Snakes strode onward through the war amid the smoke and the ruin of the Archenemy’s retreat.’

He still had not turned around, but his picture of his observer was rapidly building. Human proportioned, on the small side, unarmoured. His scent was clean: harsh laundry soap and ablutory scrub. Imperial Guard. Trooper level. His nostrils twitched. A quick under-scent of oiled wood and boot leather. A whiff of islumbine.

‘And so now I must speak of Urdesh, great Urdesh draped this way and that in her necklaces of volcanoes among her surging and teeming seas, honoured Urdesh whose bright Mechanicus spires raised their golden peaks above the ashen plains, Urdesh the mighty forge around which the tide of fortune had ceaselessly churned. Urdesh who would witness the reunion of brothers long separated by the twisting currents of war.

‘Five banners the Phratry planted on Urdesh’s ashen soil, five hands poured out the water so that Urdesh’s seas and Ithaka’s might be forever joined. Five names were spoken to its smoke-laden winds.

‘Priad of Damocles Squad we shall account first into the fray, for it was noble Damocles who broke the teeth of the fortresses upon the Peshelid Sea. Shoulder to shoulder with them in the fury of the landings came the venerated Sergeant Symeon, bearer of bright Akanthe, leading the brothers of Erasmos Squad who had torn open the Styger Gate at Presarius. Hard behind in their steps, across the basalt-black teeth of the Ghentethi islands, came Platonos Squad, merciless as the rieve-shark, guided by the far-piercing visions of Hamiskora the seer and the hunter’s cunning of their Sergeant Iapetos. Kalliopi Squad, the tip of the Phratry’s lance behind their Sergeant Kreios, blood burning as hot as the flames of their jump packs. Andreos Squad, the hammer-handed, the breakers of armour, who marched beneath the banner of Sergeant Londas and left the corpses of enemy tanks burning behind them on the Eotine Walk.’

His feet were firmly planted now: he had found the acoustic sweet spot, and just the right pitch and projection of his voice. He was almost smiling.

‘Five names, and five banners carried to the soil of Urdesh when the Iron Snakes fell upon the enemy among the white light of their starship’s wrath, breaking open the crowns of the atoll citadels and crumbling their walls into the waters.’ His voice rose from declamation to a triumphant shout. ‘The Iron Snake is swift of strike and keen of guile. It coils around the staff of the Saint and its hide shines with the light of the Throne, the light that the Archenemy has learned to fear! And so you must listen, listen as the deeds unfold, the deeds of the liberation of Urdesh!’

He let the echoes die away and looked down, lowered his arms, relaxed his fingers. He was not out of breath. Three lungs and inhumanly high blood oxygenation would not permit it.

No sound from behind him. There was a certain cheek to that. Brother Xander, sergeant of Damocles Squad and warrior of the Phratry of the Iron Snakes, turned around.

‘Well?’

‘Sir?’ the boy asked. He was leaning back against the grey-tiled cistern wall by the same entrance Xander had come in by, slender white hands folded.

‘We’re not under attack. You’re too calm.’

The boy considered that, and nodded. ‘You are correct, sir.’

‘We’re not launching an attack. I’d have been told.’

‘I am not aware of any such, sir.’

‘Well then?’ He walked forward, covering the distance in four unhurried steps, watching his visitor carefully. Not tall and burly like the Volpone troops, not compact and blocky like the Pragar. He was wiry, lean and pale, dressed in black fatigues almost devoid of markings. A cameleoline cape was draped at his shoulder and fastened back with a regimental pin Xander didn’t recognise.

But he did recognise its owner, now that he was bothering to make connections. One of the Beati’s retinue, one of her closest, so constant and quiet he might as well have been her shadow. The one you forgot was there until you almost stepped on him. Xander must have been told his name at some point, but as far as he knew every Space Marine in Damocles Squad just thought of him as ‘the boy’.

They’d been wrong to, though. Xander’s initial impression had been of a youth barely older than he could dimly remember being when the Iron Snakes recruiters had taken him away, but he realised he had been way off. The trooper was nearly middle-aged, his face lined and a little brush of grey starting to show at his temples. Still, Xander towered over him.

‘Enough with the wasting of both our time. What’s the message?’

The trooper shook his head. Despite his annoyance Xander was rather taken with his calm. Most people began shifting and stammering with a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes looming right over them. It was a useful thing.

‘No message. I apologise if I misled you.’

‘If there’s no emergency, and no message,’ Xander said, bending forward to stare into the human’s eyes, ‘then why did you seek me out?’

‘I see the misunderstanding now, sir. It was this place I sought out, not you. I was waiting for you to finish.’

To the Space Marine’s annoyed surprise, the trooper pushed off from the wall and walked around him, still with that same odd calm. He took position – in exactly the spot Xander had stood in, he noticed – and brought something out from where it had hung beneath his cape. A set of musical pipes, made from soft hide and elegant dark wood, much worn but kept in beautiful repair. Looking around him as his arm began to work the bellows, the man caught Xander’s stare.

‘I like the acoustics in here too,’ he said, and turned away, tucking the pipes under his arm.

As Xander walked out of the cistern chamber towards the stairs, he could hear the man from Tanith begin to play.

Priad
Rhole Cliffs

There hadn’t been much of a fight for the Rhole Cliffs the last time this stretch of coast had changed hands. The place had never been fought over very hard at all. It had no strategic role on the transport lines from the ocean farms, and it was not part of the web of Adeptus Mechanicus forge-shrines or vast manufactory hubs that stippled Urdesh’s seamed and smoky surface. It was just there, one of those odd corners in the interstices of the landscape’s greater workings where people and homes gradually accreted, and a village grew into a town without anyone really intending it, coasting onward on peaceful inertia.

There was no particular reason to fight over it, and so thus far nobody had. If one side or the other ever managed to conquer this world for long enough then Rhole Cliffs would be somewhere down the list for places to march through and pacify. But Urdesh had changed hands three times during the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, five times in living memory, seven times in a millennium of history. In all that time this had been the little coast-city’s remarkably effective defence: that it was an afterthought.

This did Brother-Captain Priad’s humour no good at all.

He prowled along the cobbled promenade that edged the clifftop, looking out over the rampart. The spacious streets and dignified buildings of the uptown were at his back; before and below him the dense jumble of the lowdown buildings packed the bay between the cliffs and the waterfront. His ceramite boots crunched and grated on the stone, covering two metres at a stride. He was dressed in the armour of his Chapter, a gunmetal grey that matched the overcast sky. On his left shoulder pad, a steel-blue snake coiled across a white field. His head was bare, his thick black hair bound back with selachid skin and pinned with sea-snake bone. Despite his resolve to master his resentment and concentrate on the task at hand, he was glowering like a storm front over open ocean.

He was tracking the little grey speck that had come swinging in from the bay, looping in over the eastern tip of Rhole Cliffs and then arcing back past him, following the line of the water’s edge. It was hard to pick out from the grey sky behind it, even though he knew its trajectory. The wind whipped in from among the islands, breaking up sounds, but as the speck made another pass, close enough for Priad to see its outline, he could just start to hear its engines.

The sound was a welcome one, a touch of familiarity, with associations built up over decades of campaigning. The keening of turbofans meant extraction, reinforcement, bombardment. It meant support and comrades, the sign that his battle-brothers were nearby.

The previous morning it had been a less comforting sign. There had been a burr in the running of the port fan, barely audible even to Adeptus Astartes hearing but clear once Pyrakmon had pointed the sound out to them, and even fed it from his Techmarine’s instrumentation into their audio pickups so they could hear it more clearly. Pyrakmon had spent ten hours working on the engine, and then another one in rituals designed to make peace with the machine for the insult of dismantling it. He was up there in the craft now as Crethon put it through the most punishing manoeuvres their enhanced physiologies would take, making sure nothing might induce the fan to begin misbehaving again.

Abruptly the engines cut out. All of them. Priad’s expression didn’t change, not when the Thunderhawk tumbled in the air and not when the engines blasted back into life and shot the blocky craft up in a parabolic curve over the lowtown rooftops. The shout of the turbofans was clear now, echoing up and down off the angular black cliffs. Priad felt a prickle of uncharitable amusement as he pictured people below flinching from the noise. There should have been few people left at the Cliffs who were unprepared for the noise of war machines by now. As far as Priad understood, any townsfolk the war hadn’t driven away were long since evacuated. With as little obvious fuss as possible the place had been turned into a guardhouse, just in case anyone remembered it was here.

The thought brought the scowl back to Priad’s face again. That was exactly why this was the wrong place. Wrong for him, wrong for his Iron Snakes, wrong for… her. That was as plain to him as his own hand in front of his face, but not to the people he had spent days arguing with, around in circles, trying to push his case through the endless briarpatch of their objections.

He growled and shook his head. He had come up to watch the Thunderhawk’s air tests precisely to give him something practical to think about, get his head clear of all that for a while, and here he was dragging it with him. He looked up again.

Crethon was hanging the craft in the air, letting it tilt this way and that, keeping position by feel in the choppy air coming up off the water. Priad focused his long-vision and watched it, reassured by the steady note of the engines, proud of the skill his pilot was showing. The Iron Snakes required every member of their Phratry to train on every weapon and machine they fielded. Every member of Damocles Squad could fly the gunship if they had to, but none with Crethon’s artistry.

The Thunderhawk skated sideways through the air and pushed through the headwinds until it was over the seawall. Priad walked to the promenade’s rampart and leaned over to watch what it would do next.

It arrowed down towards the central wharves, combat wings unlocked, still twisting in the air to orient itself as it vanished behind the stately domes of the seafront buildings. Priad heard the echoing crunch as it crashed down.

A moment after that, he was over the rampart and dropping like a stone through the air.

Priad
Rhole Cliffs

They could have simply gunned the enemy convoy to pieces as it rolled down the ferry ramp onto the dock, but the Iron Snakes had been on campaign away from Ithaka for a long time now, and supply lines had never been sure. Finding ways to spare power and ammunition were second nature by now.

So Crethon had brought the gunship down in a barely powered drop onto the convoy’s lead vehicle for an impact that would have stunned any normal human crew, and wrecked any lesser craft than an Adeptus Astartes Thunderhawk. After the gunship’s hull bounced off its roof the Salamander command tank juddered on for a few more metres, its top bowed in and its sides bowed out like a stomped-on ration-can, before it simply stalled. It had barely made it off the wharf and into the feeder road that would have taken it towards the uptown. The rest of the motley little convoy, four more pieces of military armour and two civilian haulage trucks, were left jammed nose to tail all the way back to the ferry ramp. Easy prey.

Crethon pulsed the engines and took the gunship aloft again. As the Thunderhawk accelerated towards the cliffs, the hot shockwave of its exhausts swamped the SteG-4 light tank second in line, leaving the burning hulk sinking onto the melted remains of its tyres. The rest of the convoy became dim shapes in a cloud of smoke, grit and dust. A couple of dull red snaps of las-fire came from somewhere inside it. Emperor alone knew what they thought they were shooting at.

The Thunderhawk wrenched itself out of its collision course with the cliff by sheer brute force of its vectored engines, screaming up into a half-loop and flipping to come back down at the convoy. It passed over Priad’s head as he picked himself out of the rooftop he had landed on. The drop had not hurt him at all, but had driven him up to his ankles into the brickwork. He sprinted around the roof’s central dome to the far side, took a second to look over the lip of the roof and then stepped up, turned and dropped, arms out, the wall blurring upward less than half a metre from the tip of his nose. He had one short moment to pray that no one came out of the building’s front entrance, and then he was kneeling in a crater of chipped cobbles in front of the tall double doors. As he looked up they parted and half a wide-eyed face looked out at him.

‘Stay where you are,’ Priad told it. ‘Put out word to lock down all the buildings and checkpoints.’ And then he was sprinting over the pedestrian footbridge and along the zigzagging paths towards the wharf. The lowtown substreets were narrow and Priad was sacrificing care for speed, leaving a trail of gouged walls and knocked-out corners in his wake.

Another echoing slam of ceramite on metal punctuated the engine-howl as he came out onto the rockcrete apron above the wharves. Crethon had swooped on the convoy again through the smoke of his first run. He had landed more gently this time, hard enough to jolt the second SteG-4 that had brought up the convoy’s rear but not enough to cripple it. That part came next. An armoured figure stepped through the Thunderhawk’s side hatch and dropped onto the SteG, and the gunship rose up over them and pulled away.

The waterfront was deserted. Either his order to get indoors had been passed on much faster, and obeyed better, than he expected, or the Rhole Cliffs docks had fallen into disuse. Either way, there was no other noise to obscure the renewed crackle of las-fire and the banging of the SteG’s little turret-gun as it tried to fend off his brothers’ attack, until the firing was cut off by a grating shriek of parting metal. By the sound of it, Pyrakmon’s servo-claw had just torn the gun bodily from the turret.

The crunched Salamander’s engine tried to start, and sputtered out again. Priad lengthened his stride, jinking left around its weapons’ firing arcs although he doubted they would function. And then he was swarming up the front of the machine, bolt pistol in his hand and covering the autocannon pintle on its back. The Thunderhawk impact had taken care of the gunner: his remains painted the pushed-in wreckage of the gun mount. Priad caught a glimpse of grey puzzle-pattern camo in among the red: Urdeshi Storm Troop uniform. Not that that necessarily meant anything.

The top hatch was deformed by the impact and took a powerful kick to dislodge. Once it was loose Priad yanked it off its hinges, held it over the opening for a split second as two las-shots burned into its underside, then whipped it away and swung his pistol into place like a conjurer making a fast switch. His gun spoke twice and then he was walking across the top of the lifeless tank and leaping onto the next one.

Another fusillade of las-shots went off somewhere in the smoke as Priad strode the length of the burning SteG. One of the haulage drays was pulled up behind it and Priad simply lengthened his stride into a half-leap and propelled himself straight through the front of the cab. As he grabbed the thrashing driver by the throat he was also listening to the almost supersonic hum of a powerblade igniting and then the fizzing screech of it parting metal. It sounded like Pyrakmon was cutting into the Chimera transport that had been second-from-last in line.

Priad pulled the driver close to his face. He was wearing the same puzzle-pattern grey camo, but it was impossible to tell at a glance if it were stolen or his own. Priad squeezed his hand tight around the driver’s neck, drove his skull against the side of the cab for good measure, and then punched and tore the thin metal of the cab’s rear until he could clamber through it and walk down the empty flatbed.

‘For Ithaka,’ came Pyrakmon’s voice up ahead. It was a simple declaration rather than a roaring battle cry. It was followed by the blast of a grenade, then a hoarse human scream that ended in a bolt-pistol shot.

The second dray’s doors were hanging open, and the cab empty. Priad took two long strides and swung up onto its roof, tearing a fistful of chassis half loose and deforming the top of the cab under his armoured weight. The two crew of this one had already swung out and around onto the flatbed and were hurrying back towards the heavy grey shape of the AT-70 battle tank that anchored the convoy’s middle. They were both shouting. Priad couldn’t quite make out what through the tangle of panic and unfamiliar accents.

The AT-70’s hypervelocity main gun moved slightly. It was centring on the two dray drivers. They were waving at it, shouting, until they realised why it was moving and looked over their shoulders to see Priad behind them.

The man’s eyes widened and he tried to break into a run, but just stumbled to his knees, gesticulating to the tank behind them. The woman spun around and started firing wildly from the bullpup lasgun she had slung at her hip. They were both still in the way when the tank fired.

The range was so short that the two humans were slammed by the blast of the shot almost simultaneously with the detonation of the shell. The round ploughed a trench down the flatbed and detonated almost in the back of the cab. It was a good shot. If Priad had stayed where he was, the shell would have burst almost straight under him.

As it was, he was hurtling off the dray and skidding along the roadway when the shell annihilated the truck behind him. The explosion caught him in mid-stride and tumbled him over in an ungainly clattering of armour on rockcrete. His ears were ringing from the blast but his balance and reflexes were still sharp. A moment later he had pushed himself into a fighting crouch, and a moment after that he was racing at the side of the tank.

Its engine roared as he closed with it. Priad saw a flare of light come from its front, then heard the pop of vaporising metal and smelled the scorching ozone stink. The tank’s hull-mounted lascannon was finishing what the main gun had started, carving a way out of the deathtrap the little convoy had turned into. The engine roared again, almost triumphantly, and the AT-70 shouldered the cargo-hauler’s ruins aside and accelerated away.

Priad glanced back along the line, and so was just in time to twist on his feet and hunch his head down as a dozen hard stubber rounds beat against the great curved pauldron of his power armour. The next tank in line, some light carrier model he didn’t recognise, was trying to follow the AT out of the trap, and when its heavier cousin had bolted it had left a clear line of sight to the Space Marine.

Priad spun out of its line of fire and leapt to one side, slightly faster than the turret could follow him. Rounds chewed and whined against the rockcrete at his heels, and then Priad put a bolt-round dead centre into the turret between the two guns. The shell did not penetrate the armour, but its detonation dented in the front of the little cupola and the guns fell silent. When they fired another burst it was a wild zigzag well over Priad’s head. In the time that that took, he had closed with it and half-leapt up its flank. The pintle gunner tried to get his weapon around to point into Priad’s face, but the Space Marine reached out and grabbed the muzzle of the nearest gun in one gauntleted fist, holding it effortlessly still. There was a clack as his boots mag-locked to the tank hull for traction, and then he tore the gun bodily from its mount, swung it back over his shoulder and crushed the gunner’s skull with one blurringly fast stroke.

‘Brother-captain!’ Pyrakmon stepped into view around the cupola. His armour was scorched and spattered. He held a dripping combat knife in his left fist and above his head the many-jointed cybernetic servo-arm mounted between his shoulders was weaving in the air. Its powerblade talons were still sparking and buzzing. ‘All dead from here on back. Crethon is coming back for us. He says the AT-70 has made it to the road.’

Then all other sounds were lost in that familiar scream of jets, and the Thunderhawk lowered itself onto the road beside them.

Priad
Rhole Cliffs

‘I gave an order for everyone indoors to seal in and be prepared,’ Priad said as they stood at the open ramp. Underneath them the rooftops of Rhole Cliffs swung back and forth as the gunship came around to swoop on the fleeing tank. ‘They seem to be doing what they’re told.’

‘That elevates them in my regard, then,’ Pyrakmon answered, peering over the ramp. His armour was steel-grey like Priad’s, but the collar and the trim of his pauldrons were painted with the rust-red yoke of the Hephaestium and the brow of his helm held a stylised eye of beaten brass, the badge of the Phratry’s Techmarines. ‘Certainly more than this rabble who think they’re invading us. Even if they don’t suspect that this place is anything more than it appears, who would go thinking they could take a town this size with a handful of light armour and a couple of empty trucks?’

‘I don’t think they’re here to try and take the town,’ Priad said. ‘There are other reasons for this that I can think of.’

‘Understood. Prisoners, then?’

‘If we can, but we probably can’t. But evidence, yes, as much as we can safely preserve.’

‘Understood, brother-captain.’

‘Stand ready!’ came Crethon’s voice, right on cue, through the gunship’s internal clarions. The dark green block of the AT-70 was veering back and forth beneath them, Crethon keeping the ramp over it with smooth, intuitive adjustments. They could hear its lascannon firing wildly, randomly, at whatever was in front of it. The sound was sucked in and swallowed by the clamour of the tank’s engine, the rattle of treads and the racket of the gunship’s engines bouncing back off the high grey building facades. Priad leaned over and shouted through the din.

‘I would count it something of an embarrassment, brother, if they were to get as far as the road up to the clifftop.’

‘Well, then,’ Pyrakmon replied, and together the two of them stepped off the ramp and into the Thunderhawk’s roaring slipstream.

Priad
Rhole Cliffs harbour

She wanted to see the scene of the attack in person. Of course she did. Priad had stayed down on the waterfront to wait for her, topping up his pistol load from Pyrakmon’s magazine and then sending the Thunderhawk back to the improvised aerodrome at the other end of the bay. He had spent the rest of the hour until her arrival aboard the ferry that had brought in the botched little invasion while a team of Urdeshi specialists worked to secure it, all of them itchily aware that Rhole Cliffs’ cover had been broken. The next attack could come from any quarter, at any moment, in any form.

She didn’t seem to be troubled by that. She seemed to shrug off so many of the ingrained cautions and habits of a warzone as though they were beneath her, didn’t apply to her. Priad had sometimes wondered if that was part of why the soldiers were in awe of her. He didn’t really understand it himself.

But here she was, standing in the ferry’s forward hatch and peering into the gloom.

The Saint’s hair was cropped to almost nothing, and the stubble made a halo in the ferry’s deck-lights behind her. The same halo effect illuminated the rough, woollen herder-girl’s cloak around her shoulders, but from there the image of the simple mountain-trail pilgrim ended. She wore Urdeshi-made flakcloth armour over grey trooper’s fatigues. A thick, curved combat knife, a gift from the Pragar tunnel-fighters, hung from her belt, back behind the hip the way the Pragar liked to wear them. Seeing Priad, she stepped through the hatch and down into the forward carriage bay.

‘Thank you for your work today,’ she told Priad, who accepted it with a tilt of his head. ‘They brought me word that troops had landed along the wharf, but that was all. From their words I expected some sort of full invasion, not’ – she turned to look behind her, out in the direction the tanks had driven hours ago – ‘this. Whatever it was.’

‘We are fairly sure we know what it was,’ Priad said. ‘What and who.’ He held out a hand. A couple of the printed cloth squares he was holding fell to the floor before she stepped forward and took one of the remaining ones from his fingers. It was blackened in one corner and there was a large bloodstain just off its centre, but the design on it was clear. A blocky, stylised arm reached in from each edge of the square, printed ochre on the grubby white cloth. The hands were open, crossed against one another in the centre. Until Priad had pulled it off the gunner of the torn-open AT-70 it had been tied around the man’s lower face so that the two hands crossed over his mouth. As though they were silencing him.

‘Anakwanar Sek,’ she murmured. Her voice betrayed no detectable emotion.

‘Pyrakmon has made pict-recordings of what we found in the main enemy tank,’ said Priad. ‘We will make them available when we return to your strategium. It seems to have been their command vehicle. The inside panels were covered in illustrations of this town – an aerial map and illustrations of the streets. They were covered in handwritten instructions about where to turn and what the next landmark would be.’

There was a pause. Saint Sabbat, or at least the girl in which her spirit now resided, let the cloth float to the deck.

‘I think we can guess what their objective was,’ she said.

‘Of course we can, madam. It was you.’

Priad
Rhole Cliffs

The Saint’s retinue kept trying to get her off the boat and back to the clifftown compound, but she wouldn’t leave until she had seen the ferry’s crew.

The bodies had been piled gracelessly at the far end of the lower cargo hold, behind a partition and a jumble of broken containers. With the lights on that deck all shot out they wouldn’t have been spotted by anyone doing a routine, cursory inspection with a torch. It had worked, too. The boat had made it through two shipping checkpoints. It had only been the tank crews’ panicky overreaction to the sight of the Thunderhawk that had given them away on the wharf.

She had given a brief glance to two of her retainers when they had rounded the partition and seen the heaped corpses, and two of them had immediately gone to work removing each one and laying them out with a little more dignity on the floor. After the first couple had been placed, the Saint had walked over to them and knelt by each one in turn, softly touching their faces and speaking with them. Out of respect, Priad did not try to pick up her words, but it didn’t have the sound of a blessing or a farewell. It sounded conversational, as though she could hear them replying. He gave an inner shrug and then let it go. It was far from the oddest thing he had seen humans do. When she had had her soft words with the last of them, she stood and walked over to him without looking back.

‘Did you have anything to say to them, brother-captain?’

‘No, madam.’ He looked past her at the dead. ‘I don’t know the local customs so I can’t wish them farewell in the way they would want. And by my own customs, I’ve paid my respects by avenging them.’

She nodded at that, and then looked around as yellow torchlight fell on them from the direction of the ferry’s little inner stairwell.

‘Right,’ came a voice over the top of it. ‘Here they all are. Are the lights in here working? No? More torches, then. You, yes, you, at the top of the steps there. More lamps. Find some.’ The yellow light advanced on them over the stomp of hard-soled Urdeshi military boots.

‘I asked your trooper to tell you, ma’am,’ came the voice from behind it, ‘that you really do need to get yourself off this stripcogged death trap and back up the cliffs. Anyone who’s watching us can take a pretty good guess that you’re down here looking the place over. One good fast suicide dive later and I’m the scum-bastard in the history books who lost the Saint. You know, the one the whole damn Sabbat Worlds Crusade is named after.’ The light briefly flashed on Colonel Mazho’s glasses as he fanned the torch over towards Priad for a moment. ‘And her Adeptus Astartes, of course, respect t’you.’

‘I wanted to see where it started, colonel,’ she told him calmly. ‘It’s important. These people died for the war, it’s true, and the Emperor. But they very specifically died because of me. Because the Anarch’s soldiers wanted to get to me. I wanted to see them.’

‘Have you seen what you needed to see, then, ma’am? Yes? Because in which case I’ll ask you to step upstairs with me and we’ll be on our way.’

‘If your suicide pilot is out there,’ Priad put in, ‘then they’ll be equally able to take out her compound. They know the building.’

‘They may know she’s here, but they don’t know the build–’

‘They do.’ Priad didn’t need to raise his voice. ‘They do know the building. I’ve described what we found in the tank to my lady already. That little convoy was headed directly to the cliff road and the compound gates. They had directions. They most certainly know where she has made her headquarters.’

Mazho sighed.

‘Alright. Alright then. We’re having the damned debriefing on the boat, so it seems, so let’s have the damned debriefing on the boat. You and you, set some of those containers out. Not the broken ones, ones that’ll take your colonel’s weight without dumping him on the deck. And you’re seating your Saint, too, so be quick about it. What am I looking at here, exactly?’ He had spotted the rags that Priad had brought from the tank crew, now hanging from the hand of the quiet black-uniformed Militarum trooper from the Saint’s personal staff.

‘Show him, please, Brin.’

The scarves were held out, passed around, inspected. They were made of a sheer cloth that could be crushed up small and hidden away easily in a pocket or a boot. Most were tattered, all were battle-stained. All bore the same crude drawn-on design of overlapping hands.

‘Getting clever, then, the Anarch,’ said Mazho. ‘We all understand the significance, do we?’

‘Mark of the enemy, it seems,’ said Priad.

‘And in need of burning,’ snapped Kassine, the dour little Sister whom Priad had never seen out of the Saint’s company. ‘This minute.’

‘When we’ve finished speaking, Kassine,’ the Saint said softly. ‘Thank you.’ Colonel Mazho caught Priad’s eye and gave a cynical, surreptitious twist of his mouth. The Adepta Sororitas were famous for their love of burning. Priad pretended he hadn’t seen the look.

‘Their voices,’ the Saint went on. ‘Their mouths. When they tie these around their heads the hands meet over their mouths.’ She looked around. ‘This is how they venerate their leader. He Whose Voice Drowns Out All Others.’

‘The Sons,’ Priad said. ‘The Sons of Sek. This particular warlord’s most precious, elite troopers. We killed some of them around the Ash Coast.’

‘Hah,’ said Mazho. ‘I’m sure you did. And you’re right, the design is similar, you see it all through the cult. Their line troops’ helmet straps come across their faces to hold in respirator masks and they’re worked into a pattern of hands blocking their mouths. I’ve read intelligence reports which say they use the gesture all the time, too. Put their hand over their mouths. It’s like their sign of the aquila.’

‘Colonel!’ barked Kassine, sharp enough that Priad saw Mazho actually jump.

‘Rather say, it’s like their salute,’ the Saint said evenly. ‘Let’s not soil the Eagle of Earth by setting it alongside these people’s wretched little mockery of a faith.’ Mazho looked like he was going to retort to that, but he swallowed the words.

‘These weren’t Sons, though,’ he said instead. ‘Apologies, brother-captain, but cast your mind back to the wargear on the Sons you killed. Captain Auerben, did you notice it too?’ He pointed. ‘The Sons of Sek aren’t a mass mobilisation like the Blood Pact. They’re something special. Their selection seems to be very picky, and very brutal. Their training must be intense – look at any after-action report about how they perform under fire. And they’re huge bastards, all of them. Monsters. They must recruit for it.’ He glowered at a new thought. ‘Unless they farm them in some gut-twisting way we haven’t heard about yet.’ He scowled at the scarves again. ‘Point is, the Sons don’t just settle for the hand design on their wargear. They use the real thing. Every Son wears the skin of a human hand over his mouth. I didn’t see any human leather on the ones who came ashore today.’ He shook his head. ‘Sek has a broader military base. He hasn’t just got his Sons. He’s got spies, and infiltrators.’ He patted his hand over his mouth in imitation of the pattern on the scarves. ‘Specialists.’

‘I understand your point, colonel,’ the Beati said. ‘Thank you. We must be sure and pass on everything we have learned here to Warmaster Macaroth’s staff at Eltath. I am sure we will be speaking to them soon.’ There was a trace of bitterness in her gentle voice at that. ‘Brey, do you think you will have anything to add to what we have discussed?’

‘The colonel has a point,’ said Brey Auerben, stepping towards Mazho’s torch to make herself a little more visible. She was a poised little woman with raked-back, glossy black hair and an angular face, the brown skin gnarled from collar to cheekbone by a pyrochemical blast that had nearly killed her on Morlond. A captain in Warmaster Macaroth’s Collegia Tactica, she had been seconded to the Saint’s retinue when both commands had converged on Urdesh to begin the reclamation assault. Like the others on staff, she was dressed down in an attempt to be nondescript, wearing a shapeless grey duster and tunic that merged with the gloom.

‘We are continuing to model the structures of Sek’s army groups,’ she went on, in the tired-sounding croak that was all the flames had left of her voice. ‘We had inferred that the man’s loyalists would still be mobilised en masse, as support, or for line operations working around the actions of the Sons. Our working position is that Sek does not have enough Sons to be able to use them for tasks that are not critical, or for suicide missions such as this one.’ She paused to take a puff from an inhaler bulb. ‘This attack used up a great deal of simple luck to get as far as it did. I do not think they were expecting to get a second team in to extract them.’

‘Luck?’ Mazho asked with distaste. ‘A strike team decided to slip through our lines and attack a town, which happens to hold the Saint and her command, and they got lucky?’

‘I have people working back along their trail,’ Auerben said. ‘But there’ll be a hard limit on how much we’re going to be able to get. Our worst case is trained and motivated behind-the-lines specialists working to prepared strategies.’

‘Specialist infiltrators carrying out suicidal surgical strikes,’ Mazho growled. ‘Here’s where I remind you all that we are sitting out in the harbour on a bloody unarmoured ferryboat.’

‘Worst case,’ Auerben repeated. ‘But there’s plenty about this attack that falls well short of worst case. We’re surrounded by evidence to suggest that the fight for the boat was desperate and messy. Not the work of highly skilled commandos. They took enough casualties to leave them under-crewed when they tried to drive their vehicles ashore, in a convoy that was badly thought out and easily trapped. They seem not to have made any attempt at getting papers off the people they killed, nor to try to find the ferry’s codes to make use of them. They panicked when they saw the Thunderhawk, but their response was utterly incoherent and they ended up an almost stationary target.’

‘I see what you’re saying,’ Mazho conceded. ‘Doesn’t exactly point to a deep insurgent capability. Maybe just a bunch of desperate, cut-off regulars who saw a chance and ran at it.’

‘Then again, they knew the Beati’s location,’ said Auerben.

Mazho glowered at her.

‘Make up your damn mind,’ he snapped. The captain just shrugged, and took another puff from her vapour bulb.

‘Who doesn’t know the Living Saint is on Urdesh?’ asked Milo, from his place at the Beati’s side. ‘The enemy learned that fact the first day she landed. They’ve had the lesson again how many times now?’

‘Not enough,’ Sister Kassine snapped. ‘Never enough.’

Even Mazho joined in the general murmur of agreement.

‘But it’s been two months and three relocations since she was last seen to be here,’ Auerben said. ‘And the last location that we allowed to be known was the shrine at Xhuten.’ She coughed a little as her damaged throat tried to mimic the throaty Urdeshi pronunciation.

‘And because it was known that she was there, she was well protected,’ Mazho said. ‘Please, Captain Priad, I’m the last man to cheap-talk your warriors and their work today, but, but this is… this is she. Herself. This is the Beati. It’s unthinkable that an attack could get close enough to need what you did out there.’

‘I wasn’t needed at Xhuten,’ the Saint said.

‘Ma’am.’ Mazho cleared his throat and looked around for support, but saw only polite blankness on the faces about him. ‘You’ll remember the soldiers you saw, ma’am. Do you remember the way they responded to you when you walked through them? Do you remember the way they sang to you when you stood in the aisle of the temple there? They told me that when they found out you were on your way there, those troops skipped meals and starved themselves of sleep clearing away battle damage and making those pennants that you walked under the whole length of the commercia. You remember them.’ He looked around again and his voice carried a hint of accusation. ‘You were all there. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.’ He looked at Sabbat again, directly now.

‘Nobody told them to,’ he said. ‘They’d been through eight weeks of street-to-street fighting driving the Blood Pact out of the city and still this is what they put themselves through. They did that for you, ma’am. I saw their faces. They needed you like they needed food and sleep and lasgun cells. That badly. And even so they’d have leapt right up and straight back out into battle without any of those things, if you had so much as pointed–’

He caught himself.

‘My lady,’ he said, calm again, ‘I dispute the idea that you were not needed in Xhuten.’

‘There was work I could do there,’ she said. ‘And I did it. Of course I did. I did it gladly, the same as at Oershin and on the Echeppan Road and all the places before that.’ She shook her head. ‘But I’m sorry, colonel. Xhuten is not where He needs me.’

Mazho lowered his head and looked away. Priad couldn’t read his expression.

‘I dreamed of Ghereppan again last night,’ Saint Sabbat said softly, as if to herself. ‘Or, I think I did.’ Her hands were moving as though she were holding prayer beads, although Priad could see nothing in her fingers.

‘Madam,’ said Mazho, ‘with respect, we are already as close to Ghereppan as the instructions from command let us get.’

‘I know what the instructions from command are.’ Her emphasis on the word command was barely there, but its meaning wasn’t lost on any of her listeners.

‘Just so, my lady,’ Mazho said. ‘If you’ll permit my pointing it out, you know what command has instructed, but you think you dreamed about Ghereppan.’

She had to smile at that.

‘You’re tenacious, colonel,’ she said. ‘I know it isn’t easy for you to speak against me but you don’t flinch from what you need to say. I admire you very much.’

‘Well.’ Mazho shifted from side to side, working on his next words. Finally, he pushed off the crate he’d been sitting on and made the sign of the aquila. It seemed to help him find his voice again.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’ll be getting you moved to the contingency quarters tonight, ma’am, with a town lockdown and second-order perimeter. I’ll clear a relocation with command and we’ll move you out southward–’

‘No.’ The Saint’s voice was as gentle as it had been since she had first walked aboard, but it silenced the deck. She inclined her head to where the crew’s corpses had been laid out. ‘They are dead, whichever way. And more will die in Rhole Cliffs, whichever way. For me.’

‘With respect, ma’am,’ Mazho said, ‘we are at war, here. We have been at war for these stars for longer than two of my children have been alive. We’re at war now for a fiercely contested world. We are close to one of the biggest, fiercest theatres of that war. So I think we all understand that people will die. I am from Urdesh. Ma’am. With respect.’

‘Thank you, colonel,’ she said, and looked up. Somehow, the quality of light in the gloomy sealed deck seemed to change. ‘You are right, of course. It’s beyond denial. Urdesh has suffered so much since this crusade began. It has bled for the worlds around it, and there are many brave men and women who will bleed in turn to see it come back into the light. I will shoulder the weight of seeing it free. As much of it as the Emperor wills to me and allows me. Every gram of it that my strength will take. And still, people will die. Some of them will die for me.’

She stood up, and there was a shuffle through the dark as the soldiers around her came to attention.

‘I won’t have that wasted,’ she said. ‘If people are to die for my name, it will not happen while I sit in state inside rings of fortifications and secrets and send sweetly worded blessings out to a timetable drawn up by some staff officer in Eltath. No. I will not have it. Anakwanar Sek is on Urdesh.’

Those around her kept their composure well, but Priad’s senses picked up the intakes of breath, the sudden sharp tang of sweat.

‘We have no–’ Auerben began, then stopped herself. ‘Ma’am, if that is true, if he is still here, it only underscores how important it is to see the Warmaster’s strategy played out. He understands how important you are to the crusade. If Rhole Cliffs is too compromised we will establish a safer location, but that safety is vital.’

‘You are one of the greatest weapons this crusade has,’ Mazho agreed. ‘Knowing your feet tread Urdeshi soil is one of the things that has given the whole world heart for this war. You have to know this, ma’am, you’ve seen and heard it for yourself along with everyone here. The Astra Militarum is our sword and our shield. You’re our heart and our banner. We have to keep you safe. How can Sek pass up a chance to strike at you, if you are exposed?’

‘I killed one magister. I can kill another.’ There was no bravado or theatre in the words. They were a statement of truth as simple as the herding-girl’s cloak about her shoulders.

There was silence in the dimness for a few moments.

‘What do you think, Brother-Captain Priad?’ asked Milo, and everyone turned about to look up at him.

Damocles
Rhole Cliffs

‘And what did you tell them?’ Xander asked. He and Priad were alone in one of the compound’s outer courtyards, standing side by side, each holding a weighted Ithakan sea-lance in their right hand. Their postures were identical, the lances raised over their shoulders, their eyes on the far courtyard wall. High above them dim points of light came and went in the high atmospheric haze, as fleet elements hanging in low orbit went about business of their own.

‘I told them that I had accepted a charge from the crusade’s highest command to keep the Saint safe. I said where the Saint went, Damocles Squad would go, and we would fulfil our charge to the last breath in our bodies.’

‘And?’ Xander asked as they stepped forward, lances driving forward ahead of them. For the briefest instant they held position at the end of the thrust, then in perfect unison drew their weapons back and dropped, turning the lunge into a low crouch.

‘And then,’ Priad answered, ‘I said that I had given my word to guard her, not control her. Damocles would guard her in Rhole Cliffs if she stayed here, and if she chose to go to the front Damocles would guard her there. And if she chose to walk off the wharf and out to the bottom of the ocean, Damocles would follow as best we could and keep her alive as long as we were able.’

They had come up out of the lunge, pivoting on their rear foot. The lances swung up to a high ready position over their heads and came arcing down again as they finished the turn.

Xander’s laughter drowned out the lethal whoop of the lance-heads carving the air, and Priad found himself grinning too. They fell into position in perfect sync, lance hafts resting against their hips, bladed heads once again extended.

‘How did they take that?’

‘Quite well. The Beati was far too polite to gloat, of course, and most of her people took their cues from her. Sister Kassine said a little blessing, which was kind of her. I think Mazho misheard it and thought she was insulting him.’ As one, they shifted the position of their left hand and lunged again, this time using the right hand to pivot the lance-head as well as driving it forward, turning the feint at the throat into a brutal impaling thrust to the belly. Each lance had gone far enough forward to skewer through three or four humans, and the two Snakes had moved with such speed that those humans would barely have seen the strike coming.

‘And the colonel, then?’ Xander asked as they twisted the lance hafts, half-withdrew from the lunge and whirled the weapons about their heads. The move turned Xander’s back to his captain as they both spun to their next facing, and Priad waited until they had finished the full turn and were side by side again before he answered.

‘He made a face, and then made a great show of polishing his glasses, and then dropped the subject and shepherded us all back up here. I have a feeling he still thinks he’s going to get his way on the subject once Warmaster Macaroth finds out about it.’

‘Macaroth.’ Xander let the name hang. They went through the final half-dozen steps, strikes and repositions without speaking, their footsteps scraping on the courtyard paving. If he listened carefully, Priad could hear the tiny hums and clicks of the machinery that encased them, in such perfect sync he could barely separate them. That pleased him.

‘You’re smiling,’ Xander said as they came up from the final position and to attention, raised their lances in salute, then broke the moment and stepped away.

‘Was I? I was concentrating.’

‘Nothing from the Warmaster to bring a smile on, then?’ Xander said, idly shifting his lance from hand to hand, tilting and spinning it, feeling the point of balance.

‘No. Nothing from the Warmaster at all.’

‘That’s not normal. I mean, pardon my bluntness, brother-captain, but it’s not. We did a lot of fighting with this Macaroth as just a name and vague sense of a grand command being out there somewhere along the front, but this? We’re on the same world, Priad. We’ve been sharing a planet with the Warmaster of the entire crusade for years now. He came among us and spoke with us before first planetfall.’ Xander’s brow furrowed. ‘Didn’t he? Was that him? Black hair, shorter than most of them. Heraldry was a cannon shell and a starfield, I remember that.’

‘That was him.’ Priad was still smiling.

‘And since then, what? Nothing.’

‘Not nothing,’ Priad said. ‘I spoke with the Warmaster on a few occasions between Ghentethi and the end of the Eotine Walk. Our missions around the Krethir Sea came from one of his commanders or another, but the communiques carried Macaroth’s seal to show his endorsement. Now, though, you’re right. Nothing. The orders appointing Damocles to guard the Saint came from one of the generals in the command fortress at Eltath. There was no sign of the Warmaster’s hand in it at all. And…’

‘And?’ Xander asked after a moment. It was not like Priad to leave a thought unfinished.

‘They were orders,’ Priad said slowly, as though he were thinking it through for the first time. ‘Macaroth himself would make requests of us. Or he’d describe a situation, or at least have it described to us, and then point out where our intervention would be the most beneficial to his plans. At the Tourmal Drift, and twice during Morlond, he simply let Cules and I select where we would take our squads, then he adjusted his plans around what we told him we would do. When we dealt with his subordinates that was always how it worked. I believe he gave orders that that was how they were to treat with us.’

‘You’ve never told me about any of this before. The plans we were part of, of course, but not how we arrived at them.’

Priad waved the observation away.

‘It never seemed much worth noting before now,’ he said. ‘And perhaps it’s taken me longer to notice than it would have taken one of their own. But I find myself wondering, now. We’re on the same world as the Warmaster of the entire Sabbat Worlds Crusade. Elect of Terra, commander of armies the size of planetary populations. And yet it feels like you described to me earlier. That he’s vanished. He’s just some distant, notional presence whose proxies attempt to give us orders he has no idea about. What’s happened over there at Eltath, do you think? Has he fallen ill? Has there been some ruction among his command? Has an Archenemy assassin got to him?’

Xander was shaking his head.

‘I don’t envy you,’ he said. ‘All the talk, and conferences, and the–’ He left off with words and just swept a hand through the air. ‘Can you not just tell them to thrash all their stupidity out with each other – or of each other – and just let us know when there’s an enemy to kill?’

‘There are times I want to do just that,’ Priad admitted. ‘But let’s not get too pleased with ourselves for our pure and simple purpose. We can usually ignore all of that stupidity because these men and women do the work for us. How can we trace the routes these infiltrators use to steal their equipment and carry out attacks like these? How do we sift out the fifth columnists from folk who are coming to our lines just grateful to be able to rally around an aquila again? How do we plan a conquest so that each successful action gives the crusade one more piece of territory, one more industrial base or transit route, on which to build the next action, until we have a planet that is productive again instead of a ball of dead rubble? How do we catch their spies while we send out our own? For us, most of those questions are intractable. We come from a world that’s nothing like this, from a Chapter House with not much more than a thousand other faces in it, to join an army of billions fighting for a world of tens of billions, that has to be taken intact for the sake of the fate of trillions. We’re fortunate. We get to ignore the complexities.’

‘Except for you. You and Cules.’

Priad tilted his head from one side to the other, a gesture that made do for a shrug in the heavy-shouldered power armour.

‘That’s part of it, though. Part of captaincy. It’s what Cules was teaching me, before our undertaking got divided up. We must move in harmony with the rest of the crusade, just like each of us moves in harmony within a squad. So he and I are having to at least dip a hand over the side and make sure we keep that harmony. And what can I say? They asked.’

Xander snorted.

‘Did you really tell them you’d follow the Beati to the bottom of the ocean if that was where she went? I’d have liked to have been there for that.’

‘Remember what Khiron told us on Iorgu?’ Priad asked. Khiron was Damocles Squad’s dour old Apothecary, currently sequestered away in the aerodrome auditing and re-auditing his supplies. ‘He has a way with expressions that I remember deciding was worth emulating. We were there to show our banners at that coronation. We wondered at being in the midst of it, a little like tonight, and I remember him saying we had to remember what we were made to do. We were made to fight, but over and above that we were made to serve. If we could serve the Emperor best by fighting and killing, then that we would do. If it were by standing at attention while this king was crowned, then we would stand. If a day came when we could serve Him best by supporting a toppling temple, then we’d square our shoulders and take the weight. And if it turned out the day after that that we could best serve the Emperor by stripping naked and standing on our heads, why, then we would do that too.’

‘I remember it,’ Xander said. ‘But I like your version better,’ he added after a pause. ‘It has a little more gravitas.’

‘Thank you.’

They stood looking up at the starless, ashen night sky.

‘Some of us do it, though, don’t we?’ Xander said.

‘Some of us do…?’

‘That. The…’

‘The stupidity,’ Priad said with a smile.

‘Yes, well. You have instructed me on that score, brother-captain, so I shall call it something else from now on. But yes. Some of us seem to manage it.’

‘Are you talking about Cules?’

‘No, some of us outside Ithaka,’ said Xander. ‘The Ultramarines command a realm, not just a Chapter. The White Consuls too. I know there are others. For those of us who hold ourselves to ourselves, it’s a choice we’ve made. Not the way it must be.’

‘Is it a choice you think we might make differently, one day?’ Priad asked. ‘Speak freely. I find myself more intrigued by questions like these the more I discuss them.’

Xander thought about that for a time.

‘I can’t get to grips with it,’ he said at last. ‘If I’m going to take your example, and be humble about our good fortune in our simplicity, then perhaps I’m too well adapted to that simplicity to turn to questions like that one. Or perhaps I just need to take a boat out on a good soothing swell when the winds are gentle, and think about it in the sun for an afternoon.’

Priad laughed at that, and clapped his battle-brother on the shoulder. The clang of ceramite bounced off the courtyard walls.

‘I give you leave,’ he said, ‘if you’re still in that mood when we’re on Ithaka again. And provided you don’t disgrace us when you deliver our declaration of deeds for this campaign.’

‘I don’t plan to. I was down practising it in the cistern chambers under the compound this afternoon.’ He gave a little smile. ‘I just need to find out how it ends.’

Priad nodded in approval.

‘Alright then. I’m mandating an hour of full-sleep for us tonight. One at a time. The Beati will be moving in the morning, and so will we.’

Damocles
Rhole Cliffs

The next morning, quietly, unceremoniously, Saint Sabbat moved on from Rhole Cliffs.

Soon it would be impossible to conceal that she was moving towards the front, or that she had reached it – indeed, that was the point. Soon she would raise her banner at the battle lines, and let everyone on Urdesh, friend and foe, know that the Beati was taking the field. But for now, with enemy flyers not yet completely suppressed, with the chance of Sek partisans abroad with knowledge of her location, with the sea channels not yet completely secure, she bowed her head and went in secret.

Priad was the only Iron Snake to ride with her. He had had a little trouble convincing Damocles Squad about that. They all knew about their brother-captain’s speech to Colonel Mazho the previous night, and the unanimous feeling was that leaving Damocles shuffling about the now abandoned sanctuary-compound cut that pretty rhetoric off at the knees. Priad had stood firm. They couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t the presence of their Thunderhawk that had already given the game away at Rhole Cliffs. That had been an error. Instead of compounding the slip of judgement by having the gunship shadow a tiny, nondescript supply column, they would use their visibility to their advantage.

So as the upcoming dawn was sending up a fringe of pale light over the ocean, Mazho’s garrison created a fuss around the wharfers’ barracks below the cliffs at the southern end of the town. It was not the largest building on the docks, nor the most obviously commanding of the town, nor the most obviously defensible. In fact, if an observer were studying the town and dismissing all the obvious targets for a new sanctuary, the barracks was the obvious choice for a non-obvious building.

They drove about it in the morning dimness in haulage vehicles with hooded lamps, and shrouded the big cargo doors with tarps so no one could see what was being moved. They made merry with rivet-hammers and power saws close to the windows so the sounds could drift out, and rousted the handful of remaining personnel out of the surrounding buildings without bothering to explain what was going on. Pyrakmon and Crethon remained with the Thunderhawk, but the rest of Damocles Squad made sure they could be glimpsed stomping about the barracks’ forecourt or appearing briefly at its windows.

And meanwhile, Priad took a full ammunition load, two vials of precious Ithakan seawater, his guns and lance and lightning claw, and fitted himself carefully into the eight-wheeled SC-3 carrier. His bulk filled the rear of the transit compartment, eclipsing the camo-wrapped form of the Saint as the rear hatch swung closed. Such was his weight, in full armour and pack, that the carrier’s rattling and jouncing barely budged him while the others jolted to and fro in their places. Nobody made a sound but for the Beati herself, humming the lilting melody to an old Hagian walking-song that was mostly lost beneath the rumble of the engine and the rattle of the chassis.

Pyrakmon stood in the modified pulpit inside the Thunderhawk’s angular shoulder, his eyes closed, his senses latched on to the larger machine’s through the couplings in his armour. He had personally muted the code signature in Priad’s armour the night before, in case the enemy was listening with better ears than they expected, and so now he traced the convoy by the readings from the aerodrome’s auspex and stolen sense feeds from the checkpoint gates. He watched through borrowed mechanical eyes as the carrier disappeared from view, gave it fifteen watchful minutes, then opened his eyes and addressed his machines.

‘In my hand do I hold the water of Ithaka. In my hand do I hold the sands of Mars. In my grip do I conjoin flesh and steel. Blood and code, pulse as one.’ He brought his hands together in the sign of the cog, and his voice spoke numbers and cipher-phrases that the Mars-crafted vocoder in his faceplate translated into shrilling bursts of binharic. The sacred machine-tongue of old Mars awoke the encryptor cortex in the Thunderhawk’s transceiver array, enjoined the transmitter to its duty, and sent a sharp and powerful blast of code into the sky along a tight, surgically precise beam.

The Phratry had no ship of their own overhead to receive the message, but Pyrakmon had exchanged oaths and understandings with the machine-magi of the Imperial fleet before they had broken warp for Urdesh. His code-burst was aimed at the Banner of Slaydo, a Jovian-class battle cruiser whose watchful high orbit had it passing over Rhole Cliffs that night. The transmission was snagged in the Banner’s keen auspex arrays and passed through her cloistered calculae logi in a nervous bustle of voices and machine-cant. Their apex transmechanic studied the Astartes data-seal on the transmission carefully, added a benediction of her own, and then sent it arrowing back down through Urdesh’s ash-hazed atmosphere, now multiplied into three.

Erasmos
North-east docks, Barenzho City

Word came to Erasmos Squad as they walked to the waterfront. They were eight hundred kilometres north of the Rhole Coast and just over a thousand kilometres west, and the dawn that was lighting the road ahead of the Beati’s convoy was barely a ghost in their sky. Erasmos hefted bolters, meltas and cutters, their Ithakan sea-lances traded for stubby, heavy close-quarters blades. They passed through the little knot of officers and sailors to a series of salutes and respectful murmurs, and halted at the jetty where the battered old harvester sub waited for them.

Brother-Sergeant Symeon plucked a little vial from the holder at his waist. The top was designed to be easily opened by thick power-armoured fingers and he unfastened it with ease. Spiridon, Erasmos Squad’s Apothecary and the first in line, stepped forward and opened his hand.

Symeon poured a little dash of water into the armoured palm, cupped expertly to let as little as possible spill. Spiridon turned and dropped the water into Anysios’ open palm with a quick, practised turn of his hand. Anysios turned to Laukas and poured the water out again.

Down the line the gesture was repeated. By the time it reached Menoetios at the rear there was barely more than a drop of water left to fall into his glove, but it was enough. Each Iron Snake had had the waters of the Ithakan oceans pass through his hand. Their physical preparation was done; now they were in spiritual readiness too. Finally, Symeon looked down to where the power sword Akanthe, heirloom of Erasmos Squad and badge of office of its sergeant, sat at his hip. He touched his hand to the sword’s pommel. There was the barest gleam of water, but it was enough. This far away from home for this long, they made do.

The submersible lowered noticeably in the water as the Iron Snakes climbed aboard, bending and hunching to fit through human-proportioned spaces. Symeon paused briefly at the hatch as though he were listening to something, then gave a soft hmm before he stepped through and took his place just behind the control cabin.

‘Something we should know about?’ Anysios asked him as he wedged himself into the position opposite.

‘News from our brother-captain,’ Symeon answered, speaking aloud through his helmet grille rather than through the squad’s close-vox channel. He waited for the hatch to clang shut behind them before he told them the rest.

‘The Saint is on the move.’

Platonos
Low Urdesh orbit

‘The Saint is on the move,’ Brother-Sergeant Iapetos told Platonos Squad across the vox-link. The howl of the air past the hull and the roar of the Thunderhawk’s engines made it useless to try and speak out loud.

‘New orders?’ asked Panagis. Iapetos shook his head.

‘Not yet. Nor exact details, but Priad mentions the Troadine tide in passing.’

‘The what?’ put in Adrastes, looking up from the plasma gun he cradled in front of him. A moment later he worked it out, nodded, and dropped his gaze again.

Urdesh was a world of islands and straits, seas and channels, tides and currents, but none of them was the Troadine tide. That was a name from Ithaka, the tide that had carried the very first Iron Snakes to their first victorious battle with the Old Enemy of that world, back when they were still making Ithaka their own, before they had even taken their name. It was not a reference any outside the Phratry would understand, but Iapetos had understood it straight away. Priad was warning them that the Saint was on her way to war.

Iapetos considered that. Their altitude and trajectory meant they were passing through the airspace of several battle zones. They were hammering down through the turbulence left by orbital lance strikes into the desperate naval battle around the Kortethi Islands. The savage fighting around the Imperial push into Ghereppan would be to their west-south-west. But their destination, if Hamiskora was right, was an abandoned personnel hub in an almost deserted stretch of drylands, nominally under enemy control, nowhere near an active battle zone. All in all, Iapetos did not see the need to change their immediate mission because of the Saint’s proximity.

It would be interesting to set eyes on her, he thought, this one that they said was the manifestation of the adored Beati herself. Saint Sabbat, the girl whose charisma and zeal had inspired the first conquest of these worlds. Who had, he was told, reincarnated herself on Herodor and struck down the daemonic general Enok Innokenti in single combat.

‘An example for all of us, then,’ he murmured aloud, tilting his helm back up to look at the sea-lances racked overhead. Once he had their latest quarry skewered and headless on his lance, perhaps they might be reassigned and he could see the legend for himself.

Wind shear slammed the Thunderhawk across the sky, and Iapetos looked around.

‘Are we close?’ he voxed.

‘Five-minute warning coming up!’ Cepheas answered cheerfully. He had been complaining about losing his edge shuttling the squad up and down through Imperial-controlled airspace, and graceless about the reminders that he could have been stuck on the ground like Crethon at the Rhole Cliffs aerodrome. It was good to hear him enjoying a challenge like this.

Five minutes then, more or less. Iapetos relaxed, closed his eyes, paid attention to his breathing. Almost time to hunt again.

Click here to buy Urdesh : The Serpent and the Saint.

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.

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Cover illustration by Lorenzo Mastroianni.

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