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Chapter One

Amid the graves, it was difficult for Rafen to tell exactly where the sky ended and the land began. He became still for a moment, halting in the shadow of a large tombstone in the shape of a chalice, the muzzle of his bolter calm and silent at his side. The wind never ceased on Cybele; on it came over the low hills and shallow mountains that characterised the planet, moaning mournfully through the thin stands of trees, rippling the grey-blue grass into waves. The gently rolling landscape flowed away from him toward an endless, unreachable vanishing point, an invisible horizon where grey land met grey sky. The distance was lost in the low clouds of stone dust that hovered overhead, stained like a great shroud of oil-soaked wool. The haze was made up of tiny particles of rock, churned into the sky by the torrent of artillery fire that had etched itself across the planet hours earlier.

Cybele wailed quietly around Rafen. The wind sang through the uncountable numbers of headstones that ranged away in every direction as far as his visor’s optics could see. He stood atop the graves of a billion-fold war dead and listened to the breeze as it wept for them, the familiar hot battle-urge of caged frenzy boiling away beneath the veneer of his iron self-control.

Steady and unmoving, an observer might have mistaken Rafen for a tomb marker. Indeed there were places on Cybele where stone-carved likenesses of Space Marines topped great towers of granite. In those hallowed grounds, men bred from Brother Rafen’s own bloodline were buried as a measure of respect for the planet and the great memorial that it represented to the Imperium. The moon of a vast gas giant, Cybele was a war-grave world, one of hundreds of planets declared Mausoleum Valorum throughout the Ultima Segmentum. Rafen kept his statue-like aspect as a flicker of movement danced on the edge of his auspex’s sensors.

Presently, a figure emerged from behind an oval sepulchre carved in pink vestan stone, and it nodded toward Rafen before making a series of sign-gestures with a gauntleted hand. The two of them were almost identical: their man-shapes broad and hulking in red ceramite sheaths, the colour glistening from the soft, reverent rain.

Rafen returned the nod and emerged from his cover, low to the ground and swift. He did not pause to check if Brother Alactus was following him; there was no need. As Alactus followed Rafen, so Brother Turcio followed Alactus, and Brother Bennek followed him. The team of Space Marines had drilled and fought alongside each other for so many decades that they functioned as pieces of the same machine, each a finely-tooled cog linked to the other, operating in perfect unison. To move now in silence, without a single spoken word between them, was child’s play for soldiers who had trained to fight under the most testing conditions. He could sense their eagerness to meet the foe; it was like a palpable scent in the air, thick and coppery on his tongue.

Rafen slipped around a smashed obelisk that rose like a broken bone from the cemetery grass, an accusing finger pointing upward and decrying the foul clouds. He dropped down into a shallow valley. A day earlier, this sheltered place had been a devotional garden dedicated to naval pilots lost in the war for Rocene, but now it was a ruined bowl of broken earth. A stray round from the enemy’s opening sub-orbital bombardment had landed here and carved out a hemisphere of ground, fusing the dirt into patches of glassy fulgurites. Brown puddles gathered where ornate caskets were torn open and their contents scattered around Rafen’s metal-shod feet: bones and decayed, aged medals crunched into the dirt where he walked. The Space Marine picked his way through the skeletons and traversed the opposite lip of the crater, pausing to check his bearings.

He glanced up to see the shape of an angelic statue curving away above him, arms and wings spread as if about to take flight. The statue’s face was unblemished and perfect; its eyes were raised to stare at some exquisite heaven that was an infinity away from the crude reality of this earthly realm. For one serene moment, Rafen was convinced that the stone seraph was about to turn its countenance to him, to display the face of Lord Sanguinius, the hallowed founder and primogenitor of his Chapter. But the instant fled, and Rafen was alone with the dead once more, stone angel and Blood Angel alike both wreathed in the mist and rain. He looked away and allowed himself to listen to the wind once more.

Rafen felt a churn of revulsion in the pit of his gut. A fresh sound was being carried to his helmet’s auto-sense array, buoyed along with the ceaseless moans of the breeze: screaming, thin and horrific. It was a noise torn from the very darkest places in a man’s heart, an utterance that could only have issued from the lips of one truly damned. The Space Marine surmised the Traitors were preparing to make an augury from the entrails of one of their slaves before they began another sortie.

Rafen considered this for a moment. If the archenemy were getting ready for another attack, then it made his mission all the more urgent. He moved off, a frown forming behind the formidable mask of his breather grille. A troop of lightly armoured, fast-moving scouts would have been able to accomplish the same task in half the time. But every single one of the pathfinder squad in Rafen’s detachment had been killed in the first assault, when a fusillade of krak shells had torn through their ranks. He had been standing in the lee of a Rhino’s hull when the shriek of superheated air signalled the incoming salvo, and in his mind’s eye Rafen recalled the moment when a scout bike had spun up and over his head, as if it were nothing but a plaything discarded by a bored, petulant child. All that remained of the young Space Marines were some torn rags and flecks of burnt ceramite.

He buried the dark ember of his anger deep and pressed on, shuttering away his recriminations. It mattered little now what they had been told before arriving on Cybele, that the posting here was purely a ceremonial one, that it was a matter of honour rather than a battle to be fought. Perhaps he and his battle-brothers had been lax to believe that the corrupted would have no interest in a cemetery world; now they would repay that mistake with the blood of their foes.

Rafen slowed to a steady walk as they closed in on the grove the enemy had chosen for their staging area. The pristine, manicured lawns of the graveyards elsewhere were no longer evident here – around the perimeter of the Traitor camp, great dark tendrils of decay were trailing out through the grasses, emerging through an expanding ring of soiled plants and toxic slurry. In some places, the ground had broken open like an old wound and disgorged the dead from beneath it. Grave markers lay slumped and disfigured next to black twists of bone vomited from the newly putrid earth. Rafen’s finger twitched near the trigger of his bolter, his knuckles whitening inside his gauntlet. The rush of righteous fury was tingling at bay within him, the longing for combat singing in his veins. He gestured for the other Blood Angels to stand back and hold their positions. He found a vantage point at the corner of a ruined vault and for the first time that day Rafen laid eyes on the enemy. It was all he could do to resist the urge to riddle them with gunfire.

Word Bearers. Once they had been an Adeptus Astartes Chapter of the most pious nature, but those days had long since turned to dust. Rafen’s lips drew back from his teeth in a sneer of disgust as he watched the Traitor Marines move to and fro, marching arrogantly between tents of flayed ork-hide and the still steaming orbs of grounded dreadclaw landers. He closed his ears to the pestilent shouts of the enemy demagogues as they wandered about the edges of the encampment, spitting their vile prayers and chants over the cries of the slave-servitors, and the incessant cracks of neuro-whips against the backs of the helots.

The Word Bearers were a dark mirror of Rafen and his brethren. Their battle gear was doused in a livid scar-red the shade of fresh gore, their armour dominated by a single sigil – the face of a screaming horned demon against an eight-pointed star. Many of the Chaos Space Marines sported horned helms with filigree and fine workings cored from children’s bones, or pages of blasphemous text drawn on skin-parchment and fastened into the ceramite with obsidian screws. Others went about bareheaded, and these ones displayed faces rippled with ritual wheals, tusks or hooks of warped cartilage.

It was one such Traitor Marine who was carefully ministering to the torture of the slave whose screams had carried so far on the wind. One of his arms ended in a writhing cluster of metallic tentacles that flicked and whipped at the air as if they had a mind of their own. In his other hand, the torturer held a vibra-stave that he used like a sculptor, lopping off slips of flesh with infinite care. The victim’s cries wavered up and down the octaves and Rafen abruptly realised that the enemy soldier was playing the man like an instrument, amusing himself by composing a symphony of pain. Rafen looked away, concentrating on the mission at hand. His squad leader, Brother-Sergeant Koris, had made the orders quite clear – Rafen and his team were to merely locate the enemy camp and determine the strength and disposition of the foe. They were not to engage.

Training his auspex on the assembled force, he picked out assault units and the massive bulks of Terminators, but only a handful of vehicles. He considered the options: this might be a testing force, perhaps, maybe a blunt brigade of heavily armed troops sent in to probe the defences of the planet before a larger attack could begin. For a moment, Rafen wondered about the fate of the ship his company had left in orbit; it was a forgone conclusion that if so large a Traitor force had made planetfall, the skies already belonged to the enemy. He did not dwell on the prospects of what that would mean for them. With a full half of their force dead or crippled in the initial surprise bombardment, the Space Marines were reeling and on the defensive; the momentum of battle was on the side of the foe.

But in the next instant, Rafen’s grim train of thought was abruptly stalled. From out of the open hatch of a deformed Razorback transport strode a figure that came a full two heads higher than every other man in the Traitor camp. His armour was chased around its edges with sullen gold plating and traceries of infernal runes that smudged and merged as Rafen’s auspex struggled to read them. Wrappings of steel chain ending in flaming, skull-shaped braziers dangled from his arms and waist, while his shoulder plates mounted a fan of necrotic spines that appeared to be venting thin streams of venom into the air. Rafen had seen the champions of the archenemy before and so he was in no doubt that the being he looked upon was the master of the war force at Cybele.

A fragment of memory drifted to the front of Rafen’s mind as he watched the tall Word Bearer approach and converse with the torturer. He recalled a snatch of description from the indoctrination lectures of his training, the words of old Koris back when the grizzled veteran was serving as a mentor. The Word Bearers, who forever bore the aberrant mark of Chaos Undivided, practised their foul religions under the stewardship of the highest ranked Traitors among their number – and Rafen was sure that the tall one was just such a being. A Dark Apostle, and here, in his sights! The hand around the bolter twitched again and he allowed himself to entertain the idea of killing this bestial adversary, despite the sergeant’s orders ringing in his head. Bloodlust rumbled distantly in his ears, the familiar tension of pre-battle humming in his very marrow. With a single shot, he might be able to send the enemy into instant disarray; but were he to fail, their survey would be compromised and his brethren back at the Necropolita would be lost. Reluctantly, he relaxed his grip a little.

In that moment of choice, Rafen’s life was almost forfeit. A fierce rune blinked into being on the Space Marine’s visor, warning him too late of movement to his flank. With speed that belied the huge weight of his battle armour, Rafen spun on his heel, reversing his grip on the bolter as he did. He came face to face with a Word Bearer, the Chaos Space Marine’s hideous countenance a series of ruined holes and jagged teeth.

‘Blood Angel!’ it spat, declaring the name like a venomous malediction.

Rafen answered by slamming the butt of his bolter into the Word Bearer’s face with savage ferocity, forcing the enemy warrior to stagger back on his heels and into the cover of the vault. He dare not fire the weapon, for the report of a bolt shell would surely bring every Traitor in the camp running, and he knew that none of his other battle-brothers could come to his aid lest they expose themselves. It was of little import, however, Rafen had killed enough warp-spawned filth to be sure that he could murder this heretic with tooth and nail alone if need be. Caught by surprise, he had only heartbeats in which to press his advantage and terminate this abomination – this thing that had polluted the universe since before he was born.

The Word Bearer’s hand snapped toward the gun on its waist. Fingers with far too many joints skittered across the scarlet armour. Rafen brought the bolter down again and smashed the hand flat like a pinned spider. The Traitor recovered and swung a mailed, spike-laden fist at Rafen’s head; the blow connected with a hollow ring and Rafen heard his ceramite helm crack as fractures appeared on his visor. Letting the gun drop into the oily mud at his feet, the Blood Angel surged forward and locked his gloved hands around the Word Bearer’s throat. Had his enemy been helmeted too, Rafen would never have been able to strike back at him this way, but the corrupted fool had thought this place secure enough to show his face to the air. Rafen pressed his fingers into the tough, leathery hide of the Word Bearer’s neck, intent on showing him the cost of his folly. Gouts of thick, greasy fluid began to stream from the Traitor’s wounds, and it tried in vain to suck air through its windpipe, desperate to scream for help from its brethren.

The spiked glove returned, crashing into his head again and again. Warm blood filled Rafen’s mouth as his teeth rattled in his jaw. The Traitor butted him, but the Blood Angel stood firm, the joyous lust of his hate-rage flattening the pain. Rafen’s vision fogged with the sweet anticipatory surge of a hand-to-hand kill, as the Traitor’s black snake-tongue twitched madly, lapping at breaths it could not draw in. He was dimly aware of the Word Bearer punching and striking at his torso, flailing to inflict some sort of damage on him before he ended its repellent life.

Rafen registered a flashing bone dagger at the edges of his vision, then the sudden bloom of pain on his left thigh; he ignored it and squeezed tighter, compacting the Word Bearer’s throat into a ruined tube of bloody meat and broken cartilage. Voiceless and empty, the Traitor Marine died and slipped from his ichor-stained fingers to the ground. Rafen staggered back a step, the thunder of adrenaline making him giddy. As his foot came down, fresh streams of agony surged out of his leg and he saw where the Traitor’s tusk blade had cleanly pierced his armour. Shock gel and coagulants bubbled up around the wound, and turned dark as they struggled to combat the after-effects of the cut. Rafen grimaced; the daemon knives of the adversary always carried venom and he did not wish to be cut down by the dying blow of such an unworthy foe.

The Blood Angel gripped the haft of the Chaos blade and he felt it writhe and flex in his grip, quivering like a creature seeking escape. He could feel the movement of bladders inside it, fleshy organs pulsing as they sucked in his blood like a parasite. With a snarl, Rafen tore the serrated weapon from his thigh and held it up before his eyes. The blade was a living thing, each ridge of its saw-tooth edge a yellowed chevron of enamel crested by a tiny black eye spot. It hissed and chattered at Rafen with impotent hate, contorting in on itself. Before the Space Marine could react, the blade puffed up its air sacs and spat out a cloud of his siphoned blood, scattering it in a fine pink vapour.

Rafen broken the thing in two but it was too late: in the enemy encampment, the Word Bearers had stopped what they were doing and were glancing upward, nostrils and tongues taking in the thin stream of scent-taste.

He swore a blistering curse and tossed the dead creature aside, breaking vox silence for the first time in hours. ‘Fall back!’

The four Blood Angels erupted from cover, moving as fast as their augmented limbs and power armour would let them; ten times that number of Word Bearers crested the lip of the grove and gave chase, bolters crashing wildly and voices raised in debased exaltation.

In the encampment below, Tancred hesitated, the vibra-stave wavering in his hand as he shifted forward to join the pursuit; but then he realised that his master had not moved an inch, and with careful deliberation he relaxed and cocked his head.

Iskavan the Hated, Dark Apostle of the Ninth Host of Garand, let his bloodless lips split in a smile wider than any human orifice was capable of. One of his tube-tongues flickered in and out, sampling the damp air. ‘A mewling whelp,’ he pronounced at last, rolling the faint flavour of Rafen’s spilt blood around his mouth. ‘A little over a hundred years, by the taste of him.’ He eyed Tancred. ‘Perhaps I should be insulted that these mongrels saw fit to send children to spy on us.’

The torturer glanced back at the twisted ruin of flesh that was his handiwork. ‘A handful of scouts are hardly worth the effort, magnificence.’

Tancred saw Iskavan nod in agreement from the corner of his eye, and he suppressed a smile. The Word Bearer had risen to the rank of second to the Dark Apostle through a mixture of guile and outright ruthlessness, but much of his skill stemmed from his ability to predict Iskavan’s moods and to know exactly what his commander wanted to hear. In four and a half centuries of service, Tancred had only earned his master’s displeasure on three occasions, and the most severe of those was marked forever on him where his organic arm had been severed by Iskavan’s dagger-toothed bite. The torturer gave his tentacle replacement an absent flex.

‘Let the hungry ones hound them back to their verminous hiding place,’ said Iskavan, as much to Tancred as it was to the rest of the Word Bearer camp. ‘We will join them momentarily.’ The Dark Apostle turned the full force of his baleful gaze on the torturer and toyed casually with a barbed horn on his chin. ‘I shall not be interrupted before I have completed my sacrament.’

Tancred took this as a cue to continue and beckoned a pair of machine-bound helots forward. Each of the once-men picked up an end of the rack on which Tancred’s victim lay. The homunculae moved into the centre of the camp on legs of burping gas pistons, their arms raw iron girders ending in rusty blocks and tackle, rather than flesh and bone. Their burden was moaning weakly but still clinging to the ragged edge of life, thanks to the consummate skill of Tancred’s art.

The Word Bearer bent close to the dying slave’s head and whispered to him. ‘Give,’ he husked. ‘Give up your love.’

‘I do,’ the helot managed, between blood-laden gurgles, ‘I give my heart and flesh and soul to you, great one.’ His teeth appeared in a broken grin, the beatific glaze in his eyes locked on the heavy, dolorous clouds overhead. ‘Please, I crave the agony of the boon. Please!’ The slave began to weep, and Tancred ran his clawed hand over the man’s scarred forehead. The poor wretch was afraid that he would be allowed to die without the exquisite pain of Iskavan’s blessing.

‘Do not fear,’ Tancred cooed. ‘You will know torment such as that which Lorgar himself endured.’

‘Thank you! Oh, thank you!’ The helot coughed and a fat globule of heavy, arterial crimson rolled from his mouth. Tancred resisted the urge to lick at it and turned to bow before his master.

‘With your permission, lord Apostle?’

Iskavan wet his lips. ‘Bring me my crozius.’

The Blood Angels had reinforced the edifice of the Necropolita even as the dust was still settling from the bombardment, toppling stone needles and broad obelisks to serve as makeshift cover. The building had been an ornate combination of Imperial chapel and outpost facility, but now it was in ruins. Its sole occupants, the priest-governor of the planet and his small cohort of caretakers, were among the first to perish when the building’s central minaret had been struck. Now for good or ill Cybele was under the complete command of Brother-Captain Simeon, the ranking Space Marine officer. Crouching atop the corner of the Necropolita that still stood, Simeon was the first to see the enemy approach through the tombstones, and he drew his chainsword with a flourish.

‘Sons of Sanguinius!’ His voice cut the air like the peal of a cloister bell. ‘To arms!’

Below him, where the marble plaza ended and the graveyards began, Brother-Sergeant Koris dug one armoured hand into the fallen stone pillar and pushed himself up to sight toward the foe. He saw Rafen’s unit charging and firing, sending controlled bursts of bolter-fire over their shoulders as they closed; behind them was a seething wall of Chaos Space Marines, a cackling, screaming horde that moved like a swarm of red locusts.

‘Brothers on the field! Pick your targets!’ he ordered, and to illustrate his point, the seasoned soldier shot the head from a Word Bearer just hand-spans away from Turcio’s back.

Bennek was less fortunate, and Koris growled in anger as the Space Marine lost his leg from the near miss of a plasma gun. Bennek’s armoured form tumbled and dropped, and the Word Bearers rolled over him without stopping.

With a yell of effort, the crimson flash of a Space Marine leapt over Koris’s head and twisted in mid-air, landing perfectly behind the stone barricade. The sergeant turned as Rafen, panting hard, brought up his bolter and laced the air above him with shot; a Traitor who had been snapping at his heels made it halfway over the obelisk before Rafen’s shells sent him screaming backward. The air sang with energy and explosion around them as the two sides clashed.

‘Damn them, these fiends are on us like desert ticks!’

Koris gave Rafen a brief, sharp grin. ‘You brought some company back with you then, eh lad?’

Rafen hesitated. ‘I…’ Salvos of Traitor gunfire chopped at the dirt near their feet.

‘Brother Rafen!’ Simeon loped over the pockmarked ground toward them, weaving around the flashes of new impact craters and the keening of lethal ricochets. ‘When I told you we needed to study the enemy closely, I did not expect you to take me so literally.’ The captain let off a ripping discharge from his bolt pistol, right into the enemy line. ‘No matter.’

Koris drew back from the skirmish and let Turcio take his place. ‘Speak, lad. What do these warp-spawn have for us out there?’ His voice was urgent, carrying over the constant fire.

Rafen gestured to the south. ‘An assault group, most likely a reconnaissance in force,’ he replied, calmly relaying his report with the same dispassion he would have showed in a training exercise. ‘A squad of Terminators and armour, at least three Razorbacks.’

Simeon grimaced. His few Space Marines with little or no heavy weapons would be hard pressed to hold the line against such a detachment. ‘There’s more,’ he added – a statement, not a question.

Rafen ignored the low hum of a bolt that lanced past his head. ‘Indeed. Terra protect me, but I looked upon one of their foul ceremonies, a sacrificial augury. There was a Dark Apostle in the camp to observe it.’

‘You’re sure?’ Koris pressed, the crack of rounds flicking off the tiles around them.

‘As the God-Emperor is my witness,’ Rafen replied.

Simeon and Koris exchanged glances; this made matters more complicated. ‘If one of those arch-traitors has befouled the graves here, then his plans for Cybele are clear.’ Simeon loaded a fresh clip into his gun, eyeing the torrid battle line as blood-red and gore-red armour clashed and fought. ‘He will seek to erect one of their own blasphemous monuments here and salt the earth with their profane benedictions.’

‘It shall not be,’ Rafen grated. A heat of fury flooded into him.

‘No, it shall not,’ Simeon agreed, bearing his fangs. With a roar, he dived into the fray, his chainsword braying as it cored a Word Bearer sending it skittering over the marble. Rafen and Koris waded through the fight with him, weapons flaring.

‘Hear me, Blood Angels!’ Simeon’s voice called. ‘In the name of the red grail, turn back this tide–’

The captain’s words were cut short as a tiny supernova engulfed him, and wreaths of hot plasma turned the stone to slag around his feet. Rafen had a single, momentary vision of brilliant white, then Simeon’s ammunition packs detonated all at once and threw him aside in the shock wave.

Iskavan gathered up his most impious symbol of office and cradled it as a parent would a beloved child. The crozius in his hand gave off an actinic glow that surged as his fingers wrapped around it. The weapon sighed, pleased that its master was near, excited by the prospect of what was to come next. Murmuring a litany of un-blessing beneath his breath, the Dark Apostle dipped the disk of blades at the staff’s head into the catch-bucket beneath Tancred’s torture rack. He stirred the thick, fresh blood. The liquid flashed into steam, boiling around the accursed weapon.

‘From the fires of betrayal,’ Iskavan droned. ‘Unto the blood of revenge.’

Tancred raised the vibra-stave over the helot’s body, so he could see that death was upon him. ‘By the bearer of the word, the favoured son of Chaos.’ The torturer plunged the stave into the slave’s stomach and tore it open, savouring the screams.

The Word Bearers standing watch around them spoke as one voice. ‘All praise be given unto him.’

Iskavan held up his soaked crozius to the grey sky, the ritual of desecration repeated once again as it had been on countless worlds, before countless victories. He glanced at Tancred, who hunched over the spilt innards of the sacrifice. ‘What do you see?’

It took the most supreme effort of Tancred’s life to lie to his master. ‘Death comes. Lorgar’s sight is upon us.’ The words were almost choking him. ‘We shall feed the hunger of the gods.’

His black heart shrinking in his chest, Tancred stared at the entrails before him in fear and dismay. The loops of fallen intestine, the spatters of blood, the placing of the organs – the configuration was terrible and ominous. There, he saw the signs of something impossibly powerful rising into life, a coming force so strong that it dwarfed Tancred and his master. The play of light and shadow was confused, and so the torturer could not be sure from where this energy would emerge, but he could see clearly that it would bring ruin and destruction in its wake. At last, he managed to tear himself away from the sight, his final reading bringing a disturbing prediction to bear. Both he and Iskavan would not live to see the end of the events they would set in motion on this day.

The Dark Apostle met his gaze and something like suspicion danced there. ‘Is that all you see, Tancred?’

The words pushed at the torturer’s decaying lips, fighting to be heard, but he knew with blind certainty that such a fatalist divination would enrage Iskavan, to the degree that Tancred would be first to taste the freshly-blooded crozius’s power. He looked down in what he hoped would seem like reverence, praying to the gods that he be spared his master’s displeasure. ‘I see death, lord.’

‘Good.’ Iskavan chained his twitching, eager weapon to his wrist. ‘Let us take the word to our adversary, and see them heed it… Or perish.’

The Chaos Space Marines whooped and yelled black hymnals and mantras as the battle force rolled forward and amid them all, Tancred picked at his newborn fears like a scabbed wound.

Simeon’s violent end tolled around the perimeter like a death knell; it was felt almost as a physical shock by the Blood Angels ranged about the Necropolita’s edge. The hero of Virgon VII, victor at the Thaxted Insurrection and decorated warrior of the Alchonis Campaign, was gone, swept away. The brother-captain was honoured and respected by every Space Marine in the Chapter, and in the centuries they had fought alongside him, each one of them could trace a debt of life to the bold officer. Rafen himself had almost been killed on Ixion by a mole-mine that Simeon had spotted a moment before it emerged. And now, as the Blood Angel considered the patch of scorched ground that marked the spot where the captain had died, he found the memory of that moment slipping away from him, as if it too had been lost in the plasma burst.

Koris was the ranking officer now, and the craggy old warhound seemed determined to cut a blood cost for the captain’s death from each and every Word Bearer. But Rafen knew the veteran better than most of the Space Marines there, and he saw the signs of distress on his former teacher that others did not.

For all of Koris’s encouragement and rousing, Simeon’s sudden killing had dealt their morale a fatal blow, and the will of the remaining men lay wounded, bleeding out into the grass.

Rafen saw the surge in the enemy line as the rest of the Word Bearers’ force joined the fight, and in that moment, he was certain they would die here. Unhallowed lighting flashed in the distance from a blazing force weapon, and the Traitors roared with approval. They drew back, a ruby tide retreating from the land’s edge before returning as a flood. And then on they came, killing and ripping Rafen’s comrades into fleshy shreds. His gun clattered, the barrel spitting hot as rounds big as fists tore into the foe – but then a sound, a heart-stopping shriek of sundered air, fell across the battlefield.

Rafen instinctively looked up, and felt ice in the pit of his stomachs. Swooping in through the low cloud by the dozen were bright red Thunderhawk drop-ships, each one bristling with missile and cannon, each one heavy with more Space Marines to feed the fray. Half-glimpsed in the contrails and gunsmoke, the flyers looped over the enemy and turned.

‘We are lost,’ said Turcio, as if the words were his dying breath. ‘With such reinforcements, we will be drowned in a sea of corrupted ones.’

‘Then we’ll litter this place with their dead before we do…’ Rafen’s voice tailed off as the Thunderhawks opened fire as one, and bright spears of light lanced from their lascannon. But the shots never reached them. The beams fell short of the Space Marines and struck the middle of the Word Bearers’ force with devastating effect, killing a unit of Chaos Terminators in one blaze of fire. Now the other flyers released packs of hellstreak warheads, which tore into the Traitors with furious abandon.

Rafen’s eyes widened as the leading drop-ship cut the sky above him, and in a blink of crimson he saw the sigils painted on the aircraft: a pair of silver angel’s wings, adorned with a shimmering teardrop of blood. As the Emperor willed it, so the Blood Angels had been delivered from the jaws of oblivion by their battle-brothers.

Chapter Two

In their unfettered arrogance, Iskavan’s Word Bearers had expected only token resistance at the Necropolita. With the unerring accuracy of their artillery strikes from the murder-class cruiser Dirge Eterna in low orbit and the lightning speed of their ground assault, not one of the Traitor Marines had doubted that the day would be theirs. The de-consecration of Cybele in the name of Chaos Undivided would come to pass, or so they had believed. Those certainties were now ashes in the mouth of Tancred, who watched as his soldiers became screaming torches of flame under the punishing beam salvoes from the Blood Angel’s Thunderhawks.

The torturer had paused as the entire forward phalanx of his most celebrated warriors vanished in a plume of blazing hellgun fire. The Space Marines on the ground, the tiny band of men who just seconds before had counted their lives on the ticks of a failing clock, surged forward with renewed vigour and scrambled over the dead Word Bearers to break the Chaos line. And with his enemy dropping from the grey sky on wings of fire and his soldiers falling about him, Iskavan turned a stony countenance on Tancred. Then he gave the order that disgusted the torturer to his very core. The Dark Apostle told his troops to fall back, and, cursing the corpse god of men with every step they took, the Word Bearers broke apart and drew away, fading into the endless graveyards.

Tancred studied the face of his commander and he saw the anger of his men reflected there; and yet still he had given the demand. It was almost as if – dare he even think such a thing? – Iskavan had been given orders to let the Blood Angels live. It was the sacred war doctrine of the Word Bearers to advance, advance and never give quarter, yet Iskavan called out for them to retreat and led them into the shadows without comment or explanation. Tancred considered this as they broke away by ranks, firing as they went. There would have to be some plan that his master had concealed from him, some greater scheme at work that would later redeem this indignity. The torturer prayed that this was the reason. The only other alternative was that Iskavan had realised that Tancred’s prognostication had been false. If that were true, Tancred would never see his death coming.

Rafen stayed close to Koris as they tore chunks out of the Word Bearers’ division. Eventually it fragmented, until at last there was no enemy to follow. The brother-sergeant halted his men at the ridge where Rafen had hidden in the shade of the angel statue. The young Blood Angel glanced up to see the graceful stone figure still there, untouched by the passing of the archenemy.

Koris approached him, the old warrior’s bearded face grim. ‘They’ve gone to ground. Without a force big enough to seek them out, we’ll not be able to destroy them all.’

‘We live still,’ said Rafen, hardly believing the turn of events himself.

Koris gave him a brusque nod. ‘Aye, but this matter is not concluded, lad. Not by a long way.’ A drop-ship turned overhead, the roar of its engines halting the conversation until it passed downwind. ‘Those horned bastards never break unless they have to. I’ll warrant they’ll be digging in to make ready for a counter-strike before sunset.’

Rafen watched the Thunderhawk drop into a hover to let a couple of men descend to the ground. ‘But with reinforcements, they’ll be no match for us.’

‘Do not be so sure,’ Koris spat. ‘They caught us unawares once, Rafen. By the Throne, they’ll have more surprises in store.’ He made a cutting gesture with the blade of his hand. ‘The Word Bearers are tenacious.’

One of the Blood Angels from the drop-ship approached at a run. ‘Hail!’ he called. ‘I am Corvus. Who commands here?’

‘Brother-Sergeant Koris of the Fifth Company,’ the veteran Space Marine replied, tapping his heart and his head in a gesture of gratitude. ‘You have our thanks.’

The warrior threw a glance over his shoulder, in the direction of the ruined Necropolita. ‘The governor is dead, then?’

Koris nodded. ‘Along with every member of his retinue, and our captain. I am what passes for authority on this planet now.’

‘No longer. You will find that burden has been lifted from you, brother-sergeant,’ the Blood Angel said smoothly. ‘By his decree, the Inquisitor Ramius Stele has declared the planet Cybele under his stewardship from this moment onward. He expects you at the star port immediately.’

‘Stele?’ Rafen repeated. ‘The leader of the Bellus Expedition?’

‘The very same. The ship stands at high anchor above as we speak,’ said Corvus, then added, ‘The inquisitor is not known for his patience, brother-sergeant.’

Koris made a sour face and headed for the Thunderhawk, the rest of the squad filing into the ship alongside him. ‘Rafen, you’ll accompany me.’

He nodded. ‘I confess I am curious to see the faces of our saviours.’

Koris said nothing as they scrambled after Corvus into the drop-ship’s cramped interior.

From the air, the true scale of the Word Bearers’ attack was made manifest. The Thunderhawk’s pilot kept the aircraft just below the lower edge of the cloud deck, rumbling over the thermals that coiled up from smoking bomb craters bored into the blue-green turf. Endless rows of identical grave markers stretched to the horizon from every direction. Blackened darts of poison were strewn where the warheads had fallen, and the toxins and manufactured taints had been worked into the metal of the shells so that they spread corruption on everything they touched. The landmarks of giant crypts dotted the landscape like bunkers in a war zone.

‘What is that?’ Turcio asked, pointing at a livid purple stain around the base of a memorial ziggurat.

‘Binder fungus,’ said one of the other Space Marines, without looking. ‘The enemy lace their engine fuel with it, so it is cast adrift in the air from their exhaust fumes.’

‘What does it do?’

‘Whatever they want it to,’ snapped Koris. ‘The Chaos biologians impose patterns on the spores with their rituals. When the fungus takes root and grows, it forms the shapes of their vile symbols.’

Turcio’s nose wrinkled, as if he smelled something foul. He could see where the mould was already taking on the shape of an eight-armed star.

The myriad rings of weapon strike points drew overlapping ovals around the landscape, many of which were centred on the site of the Necropolita. Rafen’s only memory of the ornate marble keep was when they had first approached it, as they drove in from the east on the Great Penitent Bridge that spanned the Ghona Canyon. The Blood Angel had chanced to look through the firing slot of his Rhino’s door and saw the magnificent white shape thrusting into the air, circled by thin towers in organ-pipe clusters. Gone now, all rubble and shattered ivory splinters. The flyer banked as they passed the ruins; the direct hit that had killed the priest-governor had blown the building down like a house of tarot cards. Rafen noticed a pair of grounded drop-ships nearby, survivors loading themselves aboard in skirmish lines. His augmented vision counted few men on the ground, however; it seemed that a retreat was in progress, not a reinforcement.

‘We have been ordered to draw all forces back to the star port,’ Corvus spoke, as if he saw the question forming in Rafen’s mind. ‘We noted from orbit that the Necropolita was lost. The port makes a better location for a strongpoint.’

Rafen agreed; it was a tactically sound choice. After the Word Bearers’ bombardment, Captain Simeon had said the very same thing, but the enemy strikes had been carefully targeted to down the bridge behind the keep, and with only one or two remaining ground vehicles in their possession there had been no way for Rafen’s detachment to cross back over. The handful of Chapter serfs and men they had left behind at the port had no doubt been killed in the same shell deluge that struck the outpost.

The canyon flashed past beneath them, the torn edges of the suspension bridge blunted and bent. The great statues of Cybele’s first pilgrims that held up the trestles were gone, dashed to pieces on the ravine’s floor kilometres below.

Rafen glanced at his battle-brother. ‘There was a naval warship that brought us here, the Celaeno. What was its fate?’

Corvus shook his head. ‘I do not know the specifics, but it is my understanding that the frigate’s remains were detected when we emerged from the warp. The Word Bearers’ vessel we engaged in orbit must have caught them unawares.’

‘Unfortunate,’ Rafen said. Koris stood nearby, silent, his face steady and unreadable. The younger Blood Angel considered the men aboard the Celaeno, imagining them unprepared and alone before the ferocity of a Chaos strike vessel more than twice their tonnage. He hoped for their sake that the Emperor had taken their souls quickly.

The flat ferrocrete expanse of the star port appeared beyond a strip of woodland, clusters of hangars and fuel tanks visible in the distance. The landing field was practically unmarked by enemy fire, which instantly made the plans of the Word Bearers clear: they intended to keep the port intact so that they might use it themselves. Without ceremony the Thunderhawk’s nose dipped sharply into a landing pattern.

The battalion laid out at the port seemed a world away from the tattered remains of the late Captain Simeon’s company, who trickled out from the returning drop-ships with their armour scorched and pitted by near-misses and shrapnel. The wounded Space Marines were guided by Apothecaries to a makeshift staging area, while the others stood warily in a loose group as the Blood Angels from the Bellus ranged around them, their battle gear parade-ground pristine and untouched.

The survivors of the Word Bearers’ attack were stern-faced and muted; each of them had been convinced, as Rafen was, that they were due to meet their end this day. Simeon’s death and the sudden reversal of their fortunes had left them in sombre mood. Brother Alactus was leading them in a prayer of thanks to Terra, but none of them could shake the pervasive sense of doom they felt in the endless field of tombstones. Nearby, servitors were assembling the remains of the Guardsmen that had been garrisoned at the port’s orbital defence guns; each of the men had died in horrific pain from the nerve toxins dropped by the Word Bearers. Their bodies were twisted and gnarled by the muscle spasms that killed them. The faint bouquet of the poison, far too weak to give a Space Marine anything more than a mild headache, still lingered in the air.

Koris and Rafen left Turcio to assemble the troops into some semblance of order and moved deeper into the port, past pairs of Baal-pattern Predator tanks and land speeders. Some of the vehicles showed battle honours on their sponsons that Rafen did not recognise.

‘You have seen many engagements, Brother Corvus?’ he asked the Space Marine who walked with them.

‘The greenskins may be dull-witted beasts, but they fight hard,’ he replied. ‘You know the mission of the Bellus?’

‘Who could not?’ Koris was blunt and clipped. ‘A most sacred endeavour indeed.’

Rafen answered with a nod. To great fanfare and good omens among the Chapter faithful, the battle barge Bellus had been sent on its way a decade earlier by Commander Dante himself, high lord of the Blood Angels. Crewed with a hand-picked force of men on an assignment to trace an artefact that dated back to the Horus Heresy, the Bellus’s quest was to recover the archeotech device known as the Spear of Telesto, an object thought lost in the confusion of those dark times. It was only the chance discovery of a storehouse of documents on Evangelion that had led to the founding of the ship’s mission, and under the command of Ramius Stele – an inquisitor of most rigid nature trusted by both the Chapter and the highest levels of the ecclesiarchy – Dante had sent the Bellus to the ork-held worlds on the borders of the Segmentum Obscurus. Word of the expedition’s imminent return had been spoken of among the Blood Angels for many months now.

Corvus was speaking. ‘It has been a challenging campaign, but we were blessed. Sanguinius was watching over us.’

‘And the spear?’

Pride swelled the Space Marine’s words. ‘Secure in the deep holds aboard Bellus.’ He glanced at Rafen. ‘Truly, brother, it is a sight to behold.’

‘You laid eyes upon it?’ said Koris, in a low voice.

‘We all did,’ Corvus noted. ‘Stele himself brought it out of the ork warren on the morning we killed the last of them. He held it up for every man to see.’ His eyes glazed over for a brief instant, as the moment replayed in his mind. ‘I felt the radiance of the Lord Primogenitor upon my face that day.’

‘Hard to imagine a servant of the Ordo Hereticus would be allowed to place his hands on something so sacred,’ Koris said, his voice carefully colourless. ‘Some Blood Angels would decry such a thing.’

Corvus gave the veteran a hard glance. ‘Only those who do not know Stele would say the like. He is a true comrade to our Chapter.’

‘Of course,’ Koris allowed. ‘I do not mean to infer otherwise. The honour debt between the Blood Angels and Inquisitor Stele is well documented.’

Rafen watched the interplay between the two men and said nothing. Throughout all his years of service, Koris had never been one to take anything at face value, and he would often probe and press at the thoughts of the men he served with. Sometimes he challenged them to the point of near-heresy. It was, he had often said, the only way to see the truth behind the prayers and catechism that formed so much of their daily lives. To believe, one must first be the greatest sceptic.

Rafen had seen the tapestries of Riga that hung in the silent cloister of the fortress-monastery on Baal, they depicted the ancient depictions of Sanguinius and the Spear of Telesto in action against the Slaughter-Lord Morroga. The great battle was rendered in threads dyed a million shades of red, every strand coloured in the blood of a fallen brother. And across the vast, heavy landscapes of dull ruby, the golden archangel who was their Chapter’s founder was shown – his beautiful face in its most terrible aspect, driving back the tide of Chaos. In every panel, the holy spear blazed like a shard of the sun, and Rafen found himself wondering what it would be like to hold the haft of a weapon that once belonged to his eternal liege.

The trio came to a halt outside an ornate pavilion of dark material that sported arcane wards and had silvery threads that chased through it. Dangling across the threshold was a pair of braziers forged from steel-plated skulls. Each grinning visage was crested with a stylised letter ‘I’: the unmistakable mark of the Inquisition. The tent was protected by a pair of Blood Angels honour guards, their golden helmets glinting in the watery sunlight.

‘Brother-Sergeant Koris, if you will attend? Lord Stele awaits your report.’ Corvus gestured for the veteran to follow him inside.

Rafen made to accompany them, but the closest honour guard came off his mark and blocked his path. ‘Just Brother Koris,’ said Corvus.

Koris threw Rafen a look. ‘Stand to, lad. I’ll not be long.’

Reluctantly, Rafen did as he was ordered. The Inquisition’s penchant for secrecy and obfuscation grated on the Blood Angel, as it did on most members of the Adeptus Astartes. Space Marines believed in the strength of direct action, of decisive deeds set forth without the petty minutiae of politics and endless discussion. Although he would never give it voice, Rafen disliked the fact that someone like Stele could sit here in the midst of a Chapter encampment as if he were the Chapter’s master in all things. Rafen turned away, dismissing the thought – and found himself staring at a familiar face.

White flashes from the winged crests on the armour of a tall Blood Angel drew his gaze. The figure strode purposefully across the star port runway from the mouth of a freshly landed Thunderhawk, with a pair of Space Marines trailing at his flanks as a personal guard.

‘Sachiel?’ he called. ‘Brother Sachiel?’ Although it was a breach of protocol to address a priest in such an informal manner, Rafen spoke without thought and approached him.

The man gave Rafen a quizzical look. Then abruptly, a thin smile of recognition emerged on his face. Sachiel threw a glance at one of his guards, then back to Rafen. ‘Can it be?’ he asked. ‘Rafen the Ready, as I live and breathe?’

Despite himself, Rafen frowned at the nickname from his days as a novice on Baal Secundus. ‘You are well, Apothecary?’

Sachiel tapped an armoured finger on his shoulder pauldron. ‘Time has passed, Brother Rafen. For the glory of Sanguinius and by the grace of our comrade inquisitor, my rank is now that of high priest.’

Rafen gave him a reverent nod. ‘Forgive me, lord. It pleases me to see you alive after all these years.’

‘Indeed,’ Sachiel replied, with the very smallest hint of pride. Like his brethren, Sachiel’s powered armour was blood red, but as an honoured Sanguinary High Priest, his battle gear was trimmed with lines of white detailing. A number of purity seals were fixed about his waist, beneath a bone-coloured crest of two spread angel wings. Rafen noted the shape of a velvet drawstring bag on his hip; inside, Sachiel would be carrying the traditional symbol of his rank among the Blood Angels, a sacred chalice modelled on the great red grail of Sanguinius.

Rafen did not dwell on the question of how Sachiel had advanced in rank so quickly during the Bellus’s mission; he was certain that if the verbose priest’s personality had not changed in ten years, he would soon be regaled with the whole tale.

Sachiel’s smile grew. ‘This is certainly an omen of good fortune. It is not enough that we paused in our journey through the Empyrean at just the right moment to hear the cries from the Celaeno, but to arrive here and discover our own battle-brothers in need of deliverance…’ His hand strayed to the bag on his belt. ‘The God-Emperor guides us in all things.’

‘As he wills,’ Rafen agreed.

‘And yet…’ Sachiel seemed not to notice that he had spoken. He studied him carefully. ‘I sense that your faith has been sorely tested this day, Rafen. I see it in the poise of your stride, the lilt in your voice.’

Unbidden, a flare of irritation sparked inside the Blood Angel. What could he know of Rafen’s thoughts? ‘I faced the archenemy, as is my eternal duty, and you say I was tested? You know this within moments of meeting me, despite the fact that we have not laid eyes on one another for a decade?’ Rafen found himself falling back into the same patterns of rivalry he and Sachiel had shared as trainees; the two men had never overcome their mutual dislike.

Sachiel gave a languid nod, his expression laced with a faint air of superiority. Rafen remembered why it was he had never enjoyed the priest’s company. ‘I do. But I could not expect you to understand the things I have seen during the voyages of the Bellus, Rafen. While you have served Sanguinius in your own way, I have ventured into the very heart of the xenos and faced the absolute inhuman. Such things change a man, Rafen. They grant you insight.’

You have not changed at all, Rafen thought, except you may have grown more vainglorious. But instead of voicing these thoughts, he nodded to the priest. ‘I imagine it must be so.’

Sachiel’s smile remained fixed, and Rafen was certain that the Sanguinary Priest knew exactly what question was pressing at the Space Marine’s mind; the thought that had been clamouring to be voiced from the very moment he had heard the name of the Bellus. After a long silence, he spoke again. ‘I must ask, Sachiel. Rumours have spread throughout the Chapter since the astropaths received word that the Bellus was to return. There is the talk of deaths among the brethren sent to recover the spear.’ He paused, the next words heavy and sharp in his chest like rough-hewn lumps of lead. ‘What became of my brother? Does he still live?’

Sachiel cocked his head. ‘Your brother? But are we not all brothers under the wings of Sanguinius, Rafen?’

‘If it pleases you, high priest,’ Rafen’s temper flared again, ‘I would have you tell me what happened to my sibling Arkio.’

The Apothecary gestured to one of his guards, and the Space Marine holstered his weapon, reaching up to remove his combat helmet. ‘The bonds of blood transcend all others,’ Sachiel said, quoting a line of scripture from the book of Lemartes, ‘but no blood runs stronger than that of Sanguinius.’

Rafen said nothing. Even when they had fought alongside each other as novice brothers, Sachiel had always tried to turn each conversation into a lesson, as if he felt the need to constantly prove his knowledge of Imperial dogma at every opportunity. Rafen preferred to keep his faith a personal issue and illustrate it with deeds, rather than trumpet the words incessantly. At that moment the Space Marine guard at Sachiel’s side revealed his face.

His younger brother’s youthful and yet serious countenance stared back at him, and Rafen broke into a broad grin. ‘Arkio! By the Throne, you’re alive! I had feared the worst.’

Arkio gave a rueful smile. ‘Well met, my brother. I–’

Rafen didn’t let his sibling get any further, crushing him into a bear hug with a bark of laughter. Their armour clanked together; and for the first time since he had set foot on Cybele, Rafen’s black mood was forgotten.

Corvus stepped to one side and came to attention as Koris halted. With his helmet cradled under one arm, the veteran Blood Angel’s vision was only as good as the augmented occulobe grafted to the back of his retinas. Under normal circumstances he would have been able to penetrate the darkness, but here inside the inquisitor’s tent the shadows that fell around him were as deep as the void of space itself. The sergeant wondered if some sort of witchery was at work; he did not know enough of Ramius Stele to glean what powers the inquisitor had at his command. He knew only of the tale of Stele’s honour debt, and the unbreakable ties that made the man a trusted comrade of the Blood Angels – but as with anything that was declared a matter of faith, it was in Koris’s troublesome nature to question it.

The true story of the debt was known to a select few, and even a seasoned warrior like the sergeant understood it only in the broadest strokes; there had been an incident when the inquisitor was travelling aboard a navy ship with the great Brother-Captain Erasmus Tycho of the Third Company. Allegedly, a daemon had manifested inside the ship’s engine core and Stele had killed it single-handedly when the beast had battered Tycho into unconsciousness. The hereticus agent’s actions had earned him a personal commendation from Commander Dante and the respect of the Legion Astartes.

Part of the darkness before him shifted – a cloth drew open from another chamber inside the tent’s voluminous folds – and he caught the scent of parchment and oil before a figure stepped into the light. Koris had seen the inquisitor only once before, at a conclave of Blood Angels following the great victory at Thaxted Duchy; then, the sergeant had been one of hundreds of men who heard him speak from a podium. Here and now, he had the immediate sense that Stele remembered him, even though his had been a single face among many.

‘Honoured sergeant,’ Stele’s voice was rich and resonant. His bald scalp glittered in the thin yellow light of the glow-globes, making the aquila electoo on his forehead seem bright in comparison. ‘I am distressed to hear we arrived too late to preserve Captain Simeon and the Governor Virolu.’

‘As am I, honoured inquisitor. The Word Bearers’ attack came without warning. Several brothers lost their lives under their guns, and others now flounder with severe wounds.’

Stele approached an ornate chair but did not sit. ‘I have learned that the Celaeno was obliterated by a warship called the Dirge Eterna. I led the Bellus against the foul vessel, but it retreated behind the gas giant and may hide there still.’ He absently touched his ear, where a silver purity stud glinted. ‘I chose to save your lives rather than pursue it.’

‘My men thank you.’

The inquisitor made a dismissive gesture. ‘As the Emperor wills. It was a calculated risk, sending empty Thunderhawks from the port to harry the enemy line from the air. Had the Word Bearers not broken, it would have been for nought.’

Koris’s expression hardened. ‘They have not broken. They will regroup and attack again.’

Stele looked directly at him for the first time. ‘You are correct, sergeant. The sons of Lorgar do not retreat without good cause, and even now my auxiliaries in orbit are reporting signs of their formations.’ He paused, considering something. ‘I am about to take my leave and return to Bellus, so that I may direct the search for the Dirge Eterna. But I wanted to look into the eyes of the man who held the line at the keep before I departed.’ Stele gave a thin, humourless smile. ‘I see I have little cause for concern.’

The veteran flashed a glance at Corvus, who stood silently by. ‘What will be the disposition of my men?’

Stele turned and walked back toward the other part of the tent, pausing only to recover a pict-plate. He gave Koris a sideways look. ‘I am placing the Sanguinary Priest Sachiel in command on the surface. You will obey his orders as you would mine.’

‘And those orders are?’

‘Hold,’ Stele said as he walked away, his back to the Blood Angel.

The shuttle cut the air with a crackling roar as it blazed into the clouds on a white spear of flame. Arkio watched it go with a reverent cast on his face. ‘Lord Stele returns to our barge,’ he noted. ‘I think the enemy counter-attack shall not be long in coming.’

The pair of them stood alone on the ferrocrete apron. Rafen studied his younger brother without answering. His mind picked over the memories of the last time they had spoken; it had not gone well on that day. Arkio had told him of his acceptance into the Bellus expeditionary force and Rafen had disagreed with his choice. Such a mission was for seasoned Space Marines, he argued, and Arkio was anything but that. Although Arkio was Rafen’s junior by a few years, they had become Blood Angels at the same time. Nevertheless the elder brother Rafen could not shake the duty that he had sworn to his father as a child: that he would protect Arkio for as long as he lived. They parted with cross words between them, but on the morning of the Bellus’s launch, Rafen had swallowed his pride and made peace with Arkio’s choice. If they served in the same company, Arkio would forever be seen as a youth in comparison with Rafen, so until he stepped from his elder’s shadow, Arkio felt he would never achieve the fullness of his potential. And so they parted with a salute, each man proud of the other, but secretly afraid that they would never meet again.

‘You’ve changed,’ Rafen said at length, ‘and yet, you have not.’ He chuckled. ‘My brother has matured while he was away from my stewardship.’

‘True enough,’ Arkio noted, not without a touch of challenge in his voice. ‘I’ve shed blood on countless worlds and faced more foes than I thought possible. This and more, brother.’

Rafen accepted that. ‘You make me proud, Arkio. Proud that we share a bloodline as much as we are warriors in the name of the Golden Throne.’ He hesitated, his voice thickening. ‘I hoped… I hoped that I would not see my end until I learned of yours, brother. This very day I feared that I was moments away from the Emperor’s peace, and nothing vexed me more than the thought I would not know the fate of my kinsman.’

‘You know it now, brother,’ Arkio said carefully. ‘So does this mean you will seek out death?’

Rafen gave him a sharp look. Arkio’s words were curiously barbed, his manner outwardly calm, but with a cold glitter dancing in his eyes. He truly has changed, Rafen thought, and perhaps in ways that hide themselves from a first glance.

The Blood Angel pushed his musings away. How could he have expected the callow youth of ten years gone by not to mature and grow hardened by the ordeal? He had no doubt that Arkio was probably looking at him in the same fashion, wary of a man who at once was his blood relative and a stranger.

‘My fate will come to me without me having to look for it,’ Rafen said with mock lightness. ‘Perhaps it already has.’

‘Perhaps–’ Arkio began, but then his words died in his throat. Both he and his brother froze as the wind brought a faint clatter to their ears.

‘Bolter fire,’ Rafen snapped, and grabbed his weapon. Arkio mirrored his actions, and the two brothers broke into a run, toward the port proper.

Brass leaves forming the bridge’s iris hatch sighed open to admit the inquisitor and his retinue. The two honour guards immediately stepped into alcoves either side of the door, and Stele’s lexmechanic and trio of servo-skulls hovered close by.

‘Captain Ideon,’ the inquisitor addressed the Blood Angel’s officer wired into Bellus’s command throne. ‘Status?’

‘Under way, lord.’ The Space Marine’s voice was a guttural snarl that issued not from his lips, but from a bulbous voxcoder implanted in his neck. ‘We will reach the orbit of the gas giant in moments.’

Stele examined the view ahead in the vast holosphere that dominated the wide control deck. The Cybele moon was depicted as a small, featureless ball to one side, dwarfed by the mass of the supergiant planet that forever held it locked in a tidal embrace.

‘Contact,’ said a servitor to his right. ‘Capital ship, deceleration curve evident.’

Inside the sphere, the image remained static. ‘Where?’ Stele demanded, gesturing at the space ahead. ‘Where is it?’

‘Astern.’ The display flickered before resolving into a larger-scale view, which showed the planet far behind them. A blinking glyph formed in close orbit.

‘It’s the Ogre Lord,’ Ideon noted. ‘A grand cruiser, repulsive-class. They must have been hiding out above the pole, waiting for us to break orbit.’

‘Then where is the Dirge Eterna?’ Stele snapped, even as new detections bloomed into life on the holosphere. The cruiser they had been pursuing was now emerging from behind the gas giant with two more ships in line formation.

‘Confirm, Dirge Eterna and unidentified idolator-class raiders on intercept course,’ droned the sense-servitor. ‘Advise condition on battle stations.’

‘Rot them, they planned this!’ Ideon spat static. ‘Shall we engage, my lord?’

Stele gave a brisk nod. ‘Weapons free, captain. They’ll burn for their temerity.’ About the bridge, gun-helots began a litany of prayers as they sought firing solutions for the battle barge’s missile batteries.

The finger-thick cables feeding into Ideon’s skull brought with them vox traffic from the surface of Cybele and sensor readings of innumerable landers falling from the central hull of the Ogre Lord. ‘Sir, I read a massive drop assault in progress on planet… Without orbital cover, the men on the ground–’

‘They will fight and they will die,’ Stele said. ‘For the glory of the God-Emperor and Sanguinius.’

On Cybele the Word Bearers boiled out from behind the marble tombstones and low sepulchres in a tide of screaming, chanting ruby. Man-forms in pitted, ancient armour turned the manicured lawns black in every place where their clawed boots fell. The toothed tracks of their Rhinos ground the grave markers of brave men into powder behind them.

Rafen found Koris at the spearhead. The veteran’s gun was hot with constant fire; his crimson greaves were dashed with licks of polluted blood. From the corner of his eye, Rafen watched Arkio move and shoot, pause and reload, without a single gesture or movement wasted. He grinned; he would look forward to hearing his sibling’s tales of battle when this was over.

‘How did they cross the bridge?’ he said aloud, discharging a burst into a pack of turbulent enemy hymnal-servitors.

‘The point is moot,’ Koris retorted. ‘It matters little where we kill them–’

‘Just as long as we kill them,’ said Rafen, switching his bolter over to single-shot mode. He paced rounds into the face and chest of a Chaos Space Marine emerging from a sluggish Chimera transport.

‘Listen!’ Nearby, Brother Alactus was calling out. ‘Do you hear it?’

Rafen strained his senses to pick out the noise from amongst the crash of bolters and the foul cacophony of the Word Bearer’s exaltations. ‘Thrusters!’ Alactus shouted. ‘Listen! Our deliverance falls from the skies for the second time today!’

Arkio paused, replacing a spent sickle magazine. ‘I think not,’ he said grimly.

Something in the tone of Arkio’s voice made Rafen pause and look skyward. From the thin grey morass of Cybele’s clouds came a myriad of iron teardrops, each one glowing cherry-red with the displaced heat of re-entry. Rafen heard Koris curse under his breath, as the skies above turned black with enemy landers.

Chapter Three

The Ogre Lord spat murder and flame across the surface of Cybele, raining destruction over the grasslands and shallow mountain ranges. To the far north-west, where the great Valkyrie towers climbed skyward, it sent atomic warheads and fuel-air explosives laced with poison. The minarets were the glory of generations of memorial artisans, commissioned by the Adepta Sororitas to venerate those lost in the savage Phaedra Campaign; each one was hollow, their innards a network of acoustic channels cut from raw marble. In the high season, the wind would sing through them in perfect tones of mourning. But no pilgrims stood before the towers as the archenemy’s nuclear retribution bloomed overhead, and no human ears heard the final, awful screams that were forced from within them, in the seconds before the shock wave of super-heated air scoured them from the face of the planetoid.

Closer to the starport, low-yield munitions and finely targeted lance strikes fell on the Imperium forces. Rafen was dazzled as a discharge ate into the ferrocrete apron. In an instant, the rock flashed to toxic vapour and air molecules crashed as heat split them into atoms. A skirmish line of Blood Angels’ tanks caught in the weapon’s footprint became blackened humps of slag, featureless and smouldering. Overhead, precise discs of sky shone through the wide holes the beam weapons punched in the clouds.

As fallout ash began to settle, all about him the air was cut and slashed by the profane hoots of the enemy. Garbled litanies and exhortations of violence assailed his ears, blasphemous descants warring with repellent pulpit speeches broadcast from speaker horns. Without conscious thought, Rafen’s lips began to move, forming the words of the Barbarossa Hymnal, and as he gave it voice, he heard the song spread to his battle-brothers on the firing line. He drew strength from the sacred lyrics, and advanced.

Turcio was at his right hand now, a heavy bolter in his grip. Rafen did not ask where he had acquired the weapon, rather he marvelled at his brother’s use of it, as shells cascaded from the muzzle and shredded the enemy advance. The hymn’s words became a dull rumble in Rafen’s ears, as a hot flood of adrenaline charged through his muscles. The eager twitching of his gun-hand’s fingers returned, so he gave it freedom, his bolter joining the chorus of chain-fed death laid down upon the Word Bearers. At the edges of his vision, crimson spectres danced just out of sight – the ever-present ghost of the rage. Rafen kept the dark impulses firmly in check – control was the key to staying alive in a battle like this one.

Waves of spiny dreadclaw drop capsules landed around them, the earth shaking with each hammer-blow impact. Like vile seedpods, they broke open to spit out fresh Chaos Space Marines or the warped forms of dreadnoughts. Every one of them added to the bloody discord of the battle, tearing Cybele’s quiet landscape of pious contemplation into shreds. Rafen removed his combat blade from the eye socket of a Word Bearer who had strayed too close, and wiped gore from the serrated edge. Turcio’s gun bawled and cut another Traitor down, splitting him asunder as surely as if he had been gutted by a chainsword.

‘Still they come,’ the Space Marine said through gritted teeth, ‘How many more?’

‘Too many,’ Rafen retorted. ‘Blood for blood’s sake!’ He bellowed, firing to underline his words with lead. More landers came to rest in the distance, the closest collapsing a crypt with a gust of decayed air. Rafen paused, readying a brace of krak grenades to feed its passengers the moment one of them dared to emerge. He waited until the broken slabs of the tomb roof began to move and lobbed them in. He dropped to one knee as the explosion coughed, the muffled report lost in the clamour of the Word Bearers’ advance. Rafen sighted at the ruined crypt, taking a moment to kill any stragglers that might have survived. But instead of a seeing a stunned Traitor emerging from the rock, a thick pincer-like limb extended itself from the stones. The heavy iron armature wavered and then came down hard, biting into the turf. Rafen and Turcio stumbled backward as more legs grew out of the rubble, pushing up a box-shaped body with a toothy fan of blades.

‘Defiler!’ Turcio cried out the machine’s name, and rang bolt shells heedlessly against its gore-streaked hull. Rafen was more careful. He placed single rounds into the clusters of weapons along the war engine’s flanks, hopeful that a lucky hit might crack a flamer line or sever power cabling. The red metal of the walker rippled under the strain of sudden movement, as the skin of a vast beast would show the flexion of its muscles. It let out an ear-splitting honk from a war trumpet as it pulled itself up on six fat legs. It was met by an atonal choir of replies. Rafen’s gaze flicked to the other landers that had come down with this one and saw that each had the same cargo: a dozen more Word Bearer defilers were stepping from their pods, swivelling their guns to bear. As the first jets of burning liquid promethium gushed across the Blood Angels’ forces, Rafen yanked on Turcio’s arm to pull him out of the firing zone.

Somewhere in the melee, he had lost sight of Arkio. He had been distracted by the crack-snap of lasgun shots. Rafen returned fire and ejected a spent magazine, while Turcio covered him.

‘Those grotesques will overrun us!’ Turcio snapped angrily, ‘Where is our armour?’

Rafen remembered the boiled pools of metal that had once been tanks and said nothing. He ignored Turcio’s words and watched the defilers shifting into position: the walkers were preparing to break the Blood Angels’ line. If they had still had armour, the Space Marines might have stood a chance at blunting it, but with these light arms… The endless rain of Word Bearer troops was tipping the odds ever further against the Blood Angels, even with the men left behind by the Bellus.

Wherever he was, Brother-Sergeant Koris had come to the same conclusion. The veteran’s gruff voice issued out of the Space Marine’s ear-bead. ‘Fall back to the inner fence by squads!’ came the order. ‘Let these warp-spawn come at your heels, but don’t get caught up!’

‘Let’s move,’ Rafen shot a glance at Turcio. ‘Come now, we’ll give them their push and then shove it back down their throats.’

Turcio glanced over his shoulder as they ran, fighting down his disquiet.

A chain-reaction of short-circuits sent sparks ripping across the portside gun console, and frying the synapses of the cannon-servitor connected there. Stele wafted a hand in front of his face to dispel the burnt meat stink that assailed his nostrils. The other gripped the brass rail that bordered the warship’s giant glasteel porthole. They were close enough to one of the idolator raiders to actually see it with the naked eye, the tumbling dart of metal stark against the emerald hue of the gas giant. The quick application of a tactic refined by Ideon’s anti-ork sorties had granted Bellus first blood against the Chaos flotilla. A high-gravity turn, more akin to the manoeuvres of Thunderbolt fighters than capital ships, had allowed the battle barge to rake Dirge Eterna with her bow guns, although the nearest of the small raiders had surged forward to protect the large ship, as if its crew would receive some cryptic honour for accepting the hell storm intended for the cruiser.

The wounded raider was bleeding gases into the void and Stele’s servo-skulls relayed scans of a cracked fusion bottle. He pressed one finger on the glass, blotting out the shape of the vessel. The ship was a cripple, and so the inquisitor had already dismissed it from the complex game board arrayed in his mind.

Captain Ideon was conversing with one of his subordinates. ‘Set to work on repairing the torpedo tubes first,’ he ordered. ‘The warp drives can wait.’

Stele took a quick step forward. ‘So our damage is worse than you first stated, captain?’

Ideon’s face remained fixed but his voxcoder’s tones were terse. ‘I have revised estimates.’

As they pulled away from their first strike, the second raider had come about to flank the Bellus, taking advantage of her weakened void shields to the aft. Hard impacts on the stern quarter had sent tocsins wailing on every deck, and although Ideon had said nothing, Stele knew that they had been disabled – at least, temporarily.

Time was short, there were only moments now until the Dirge Eterna’s commander moved into formation with the undamaged raider and advanced on Bellus. The odds were poor with the ship in this sluggish condition. Stele studied the Blood Angels’ officer, aware that Ideon was courting the same thoughts. ‘We must not allow the enemy to place us on the defensive. Bellus must maintain the initiative, or we are lost.’

‘I concur, my lord, but if we move on our previous heading, we will be caught between the Dirge and the Ogre Lord.’

‘Correct,’ Stele noted, dipping his hand into the holosphere. ‘Instead, we will draw away, toward the gas giant.’ He indicated the huge green orb streaked with white cloud. ‘Take us into the upper atmosphere. The vapour will conceal us long enough to return the ship to full readiness.’

Ideon considered this. ‘To do that would mean that my brothers on Cybele would have no hope of rescue. We would be leaving them to an uncertain fate.’

‘On the contrary,’ said the inquisitor. ‘Their fate is all too certain, but if we do not wish to share it, this is the course we must pursue.’ He nodded at the captain, and allowed himself an expression of rueful sadness. ‘Execute my orders without delay, and by Terra, let His light protect those who stand and fight on Cybele.’

The starport’s ornamental gates had been wilted by a plasma blast, and the cannon turret that once defended it was now a black stump. Sachiel had ordered a pair of Trojan tenders parked across the road as a makeshift barricade, but none among the defenders fooled themselves into thinking it would do more than slow the Word Bearers’ advance.

Rafen ran toward the stone revetments that edged the fence. Crossfire from his brothers and traitors alike cut past with high-pitched screams. One instant they were in open ground; the next they were inside the port. Rafen blinked away the moment. In the thick of the fight, there were often flashes of time that seemed stretched thin or compacted without rhyme or reason. The Space Marine had learned to take them as they came and trust in his training.

‘Assault troops inbound!’ a voice called. ‘Look sharp!’

Rafen reloaded for what seemed like the thousandth time that day. His hands worked the bolter by touch alone as the grim visage of his helmet scanned the low cloud. He saw them instantly: the bulky shapes of Traitor Marines bobbing up in jet-fuelled skips, every one of them rising and falling on dirty orange plumes of flame that spat from their mammoth thruster backpacks. Streams of energy hotter than a sun’s core issued from the pistols in their mailed fists. The plasma guns carved blackened streaks across dirt, stone and flesh alike. Other men close to him were already opening fire, stitching tracer into the sky in lazy red threads. The Word Bearers’ assault cadre wove in and out of the lines of shot, with grace that belied their obdurate mass. Rafen held back. It was better to wait until the jump-packs slowed the Traitors for a landing, he reasoned; it was better to hesitate and pick that instant when the enemy hovered like a hawk about to swoop.

As that thought formed in his mind, Rafen saw his opportunity and trimmed a falling flyer as a gardener would prune thorns from a plant. He took off the Word Bearer’s left leg below the knee, then his arm at the shoulder. Suddenly unstable, the Space Marine tumbled out of the air and landed in a mud slick at the base of a bomb crater. Puffs of heat overhead marked the deaths of a handful more. But a few of the Chaos Space Marines had made it over the fence and had dropped into firing crouches, guns ripping with mad abandon.

Turcio’s vision filled with the foetid shape of a Word Bearer as an enemy soldier bore down. He jerked the trigger of his heavy bolter, but something gave a hollow click inside the breech and the fat-barrelled gun stayed silent. Turcio swore a curse that would have earned him fifty lashes if a senior brother had heard it. He brandished the inert weapon like a club as the Word Bearer felled him in a bone-shaking tackle. The enemy warrior had a deformed power claw where his right arm should have been, and he used it to cleave the jammed bolter in two. Locked together, Turcio punched the Word Bearer, but the clawed Chaos Space Marine took the blows without pause. Lukewarm spittle bubbled out from the attacker’s faceplate, and seething emerald eyes peered at Turcio from behind dirt-flecked lenses.

The young Space Marine’s gorge rose; the stench of the beast made his gut rebel. He drew back and head-butted the Word Bearer, getting a string of unholy invective in return. The claw-hand raked down the breast of Turcio’s armour, ripping through the ceramite and cutting vital connections. The Blood Angel felt cold air touch his bare skin.

Then the Word Bearer said the first words that Turcio could actually understand. ‘Give your flesh,’ it burbled.

‘Not today.’ Rafen’s voice was right in Turcio’s ear, and he jerked away as a red flash blurred into his line of sight.

The Chaos Space Marine barely had time to recognise the shape of a godwyn-pattern bolter pressed to its head, before Rafen fired point-blank and turned its skull into a grimy mist of filthy blood and brain matter. Some nerve connection still firing in the Word Bearer’s glove control jerked. Abruptly the headless soldier flew back up into the sky, and spiralled wildly; he had become an unguided missile. Rafen saw it spin and fall like a mortar shell – back into the advancing enemy line.

Black with exhaust soot, Turcio struggled to get up; the myomer muscles in his broken armour whined. ‘Brother, are you able?’ Rafen asked, helping him to his feet.

Turcio coughed. ‘Give me a weapon that works and I’ll show you just how able!’ He failed to keep a waver from his voice.

Rafen smiled grimly. ‘Good man. Here.’ He handed him a laser pistol, an Imperial Guard-issue weapon he’d found discarded by the gates. ‘Make do.’

Undisturbed by the ceaseless thunder of weapons’ fire, wisps of haze drifted across the open landing field of the port from discharged smoke grenades and the wreckage of burning Thunderhawks, obscuring the far edge of the broad ferrocrete oval. Rafen could see shapes moving out there, but even the enhanced sensory capacities of his auspex could not give him anything more than the most basic information. Metallic fumes thrown into the atmosphere by the fighting baffled the scanner and roughened every breath the Space Marines took. It would have cut an ordinary man’s lungs like broken glass, but there were no ordinary men left alive on Cybele.

Patchwork blobs of sunlight crossed the tarmac now and then. They caught the haze and conjured ghost images in plays of light and shadow. Rafen found himself glancing over his shoulder, to make sure that the enemy was not coming up behind them. There could easily be hundreds of them out there, concealed in the fog of battle and waiting for the right moment to strike.

Shot after shot from the Chaos host pitted and nicked the sparse stone fortifications. Lasers carved down great curls of razor-chain fence where they melted through the links. Ahead, the leading elements of the Word Bearers’ force were pressing into the Blood Angels’ barricade, and one of the defilers gave the parked Trojans a desultory kick. The red war engine crouched down and threw itself at the tracked vehicles, ramming them away in a gout of orange sparks.

In reply, a blue-helmed Devastator Space Marine sent a pair of missiles into the defiler’s prow. The rockets leapt eagerly to meet their target, and a dozen troopers poured fire into the same place, forcing the machine to stagger backward.

‘Rafen!’ The Blood Angel turned to see Koris, his gun smoking. ‘Report!’ The veteran absently brushed rock chips off his armour as a stray round shattered a decapitated statue close by.

He jerked a thumb at the sky to indicate the Chaos command ship. ‘They must be spawning up there like maggots, brother-sergeant. There are four of them to every one of us…’ His words trailed off. ‘Tycho’s blood, this isn’t the kind of hit-and-fade we’ve handled before. They mean to raze the planet and make trophies of us!’

‘Aye,’ Koris said with a dour nod. ‘This world has no tactical value, but they choose it because their very presence here is an affront to the Emperor.’ He shook his head. ‘A world full of graves and just a handful of men to guard it? Bah! We’re standing on the lip of a corpse-grinder!’

Shapes moved in the smoke, white and red flickering amid the grey. ‘Take care, Koris,’ Sachiel’s voice was clear and hard. ‘Defeatist talk belittles us all.’ The Sanguinary High Priest approached with a unit of men at his heels. Rafen noted with slight concern that none of them was Arkio.

Koris stepped closer to Sachiel, his voice low. ‘Pragmatism is the watchword of any Blood Angel, priest. I taught you that lesson when you were still a whelp.’

Sachiel’s eyes narrowed. ‘I’ve had other teachers since you, old man,’ he said, ‘other lessons learned.’ He gestured with his chainsword. ‘I gathered the men who survived the bombardment intact. I’ve ordered them to come forward and reinforce the line.’ Sachiel threw a nod to the Space Marines with him and they rushed forward to take up firing positions at the barricade.

‘To what end?’ Koris demanded. ‘We are assailed on all sides – those blighted scum are tightening the noose around us as we speak! Surely you see that?’

‘Lord Stele’s orders were to hold,’ the priest shot back, ‘and hold we will.’

The sergeant showed his teeth at Sachiel’s tone. ‘Hold what, priest? Tell me that. What patch of ground? A metre? A kilometre?’ He shook his head. ‘We stand and we die, and Stele – if he is even still alive – returns to find the Word Bearers chewing on the bones of my men.’ He flashed a glance at Rafen. ‘I will not allow it.’

‘The port must not fall–’

‘It has already fallen!’ The words bubbled up out of Rafen before he was even aware of it. Sachiel gave him a barbed look. ‘We’re just slowing them, not halting them.’ As if to lend its agreement to the words, one of the defilers spat out a deafening hoot of sound as it speared the husk of a smouldering speeder. ‘We need to regroup, before it’s too late.’

Despite himself, Sachiel hesitated. The priest’s many battles over the decades had been in conflict with xenos scum of every stripe, but this was the first time many of the warriors of the Bellus had met their traitorous brethren at close hand. As much as he loathed admitting inferiority in anything, he had to admit that Rafen and Koris had the greater benefit of experience against this foe. Sachiel’s fingers strayed to the bone wings on his breastplate and the ruby blood droplet depicted there. There would be no glory in dying in a graveyard after surviving so much to recover the spear.

‘Give the order,’ he told Koris, after a long pause. ‘But watch your tone in future.’

The sergeant turned away and relayed the command, leaving Sachiel and Rafen together. ‘You dislike me, don’t you?’ The priest said suddenly. ‘You have never given me any more than what is expected of you.’

Rafen covered his surprise at Sachiel’s words. ‘It is my duty to respect the holders of the grail–’

Sachiel waved him into silence. ‘You respect the office, but not the man, brother. Even after all these years, you slight me.’ The priest turned as the rest of the Blood Angels began to draw back. ‘But I will have your respect, Rafen,’ he said gently. ‘You will give it to me.’

Rafen tried to form an answer, but none came to him. Koris’s voice in his ear-bead pulled his attention away.

‘There is a gap in the Word Bearer line to the north. Take the lead and secure a regroup point at the reservoir dome’

‘Acknowledged,’ he said. ‘I’ll need some men.’

‘You can have one. Go with your brother.’

The Blood Angel came about as a throaty roar signalled the arrival of a fast attack bike from across the landing field. The low-slung motorcycle growled to a halt and idled. Arkio beckoned to his elder brother. Rafen gave him a nod and bounded up to the rear spoiler, gripping the back of the seat with one hand. Arkio gunned the engine, and the bike threw itself into the wavering lines of mist. Behind it, a crimson stream of Space Marines disengaged from the fierce fighting, and with weapons running dry, they reluctantly gave their backs to the enemy.

Arkio tore across the flat apron, veering the bike around the remains of drop-ships, skirting the places where beam fire had cut the ground. With his bolter clasped in his free hand, Rafen picked targets as they moved and strafed them. Arkio arrowed the vehicle toward a pack of Word Bearers pushing forward from the western side of the port and triggered the twin guns atop the front wheel. Orange tracer lanced through their warp-changed bodies even as the sound of the bike’s approach reached their ears.

‘There!’ Arkio shouted over the engine’s roar. ‘I see the breach!’

Rafen followed his brother’s outstretched arm. Ahead of them, the Word Bearer line had become strung out where the Traitors had allowed their fire discipline to become lax. To Rafen’s trained eye, the weak point stood out like obsidian against ivory. ‘Sergeant Koris,’ he spoke into his helmet communicator pickup, ‘rally to us. We’re breaking through.’

‘Firing!’ called Arkio, as he unleashed the twin bolters again. Rafen hesitated as something caught his eye back in the smoke haze.

‘What is it?’ asked his brother.

‘I thought I saw…’ Rafen replied, dispatching a Chaos Space Marine fumbling with a tube-launcher. ‘People.’

Then they were off the level ground of the ferrocrete and into the mud and grass of the graveyards, and all of Rafen’s attention was spent on the enemy troopers, who popped up from behind the headstones like targets in some carnival shooting gallery.

While Sachiel led Koris and the troops from the barricade in an orderly retreat, there were other Blood Angels’ units following the same orders. From the hangars came the few walking wounded that had not been killed when the makeshift hospital had been bombed, and with them the support units whose Predators had been razed in a single shot from the Ogre Lord’s cannons. Injured and bleeding, they fought hard all the same, daring the Word Bearers to try and stop them.

These were the Space Marines who came across the eight skinny men standing in a ragged group in the middle of the landing field. A novice scout found them first, all of them stumbling around in little circles, humming and mumbling to themselves. Their mouths and eyelids were sewn shut, and some sort of blade-edged chain tied them together in a loose knot.

‘What are these?’ The scout asked his commander, a craggy-faced sergeant. The humming voices were rising in volume.

The sergeant glanced over his shoulder at the wave of approaching Blood Angels and the fire they laid down behind them. He had no time to halt the retreat because of some addled civilians. He stepped closer and studied them. When he was at arm’s length, he realised that their skins – which he had thought were dark in tone – were actually covered in tiny writing. The sergeant saw the representations of a many-angled star drawn there in millions of configurations, and he spat in disgust.

‘Heretics,’ he growled, and every gun around him came up to firing position. ‘Execution detail! Kill–’

His Space Marines didn’t hear the command. The humming chants of the eight men was so loud now, it blotted out his voice.

The scout, who hadn’t taken his eyes off the figures since he first saw them, watched it happen: a sparkle of unleashed psychic energy licking between the men, fanning out into a coruscating globe of sickening light. Linked together since birth and imprinted by Iskavan’s psyche-mages, the eight channelled all their mental energy into the one unstoppable release that was the sole purpose of their lives. They were a psionic munition with a war-shot of pure, violent intensity. Their power arced through every one of the injured Space Marines, and then they died, turning to ash; but none of this mattered to the men their discharge had touched.

The minds of the surrounding Blood Angels – more than three-quarters of the survivors of the two Word Bearer attacks – were shredded instantly; their higher reasoning and intelligence wiped clean. All that remained was naked, primal aggression, and the very darkest core of unchained bloodlust. Brothers who had known each other for centuries, allies and comrades, fell upon one another with monstrous abandon. Sachiel and Koris watched helplessly from outside the radius of the psi-weapon, as Blood Angel killed Blood Angel amid the lusty cheers of their enemies.

Out in the Word Bearer lines, Iskavan the Hated bellowed with laughter and shouted his delight to the sky. ‘Forward!’ He called to his host. ‘Take the port!’

‘There are more out there, my lord. You’re letting them go?’ said Tancred, realising too late that his words might be interpreted as disrespectful.

‘I intend no such thing.’ The Dark Apostle gestured with his crozius. ‘No victory is so complete as the one that comes over an enemy that is broken. We winnow these wretches until only the very strongest of them remain.’ In anticipation, Iskavan’s tongues emerged from the forest of teeth behind his lips. ‘And they will be the ones we will leave begging for the beautiful tortures that please the gods.’

Tancred pushed all thoughts of his dark prediction away and presented his master with an agreeable aspect. ‘By your command.’

The Traitors moved forward over the bodies of the dead.

By nightfall, the last of the Space Marines that had escaped the psi-blast had stumbled back to the rally point. Rafen’s heart turned cold and heavy in his chest as the weak warmth of the day faded. As light drew out of the landscape around him, so hope seemed to follow it. In the dank shadows cast by the reservoir’s dome, injured men and battle-weary survivors sat in sombre silence. Rafen walked among them, sparing a nod or a gesture of solidarity to those he knew personally. Outwardly his manner was neutral, but within it was burdened with grim malaise. There were hardly a handful of them now, not a single man above sergeant’s rank or armed with more than a bolter. He passed Koris as the veteran spoke in low, angry tones to Sachiel; his first order had been to tally up the ammunition and weapons held by the survivors and Rafen could tell just by his expression that the numbers were poor.

Rafen sat by Turcio as he worked to patch his armour with glutinous sealant. Nearby, a watchful Arkio cleaned his bolter. Rafen’s brother had returned from a patrol with Alactus to report the terrible sights of the Traitors’ victory revels only an hour earlier. The wind brought the sounds of distant shrieks for all of them to hear. Some of them belonged to voices that Rafen recognised.

‘Once again we wait for death,’ Turcio’s voice was a hollow echo.

‘Not for the first time,’ Rafen agreed, forcing the doubts from his words, ‘but we will prevail. We are Blood Angels.’

Perhaps on another occasion, the sentiment might have been enough, but here and now Turcio met Rafen’s gaze and he saw the spectre of dread there. ‘I pray that is enough, brother, or else we will join the men on whose graves we trampled today.’

‘We will not die here,’ Rafen said without heat.

Turcio saw the lie and looked away. ‘You know that we will. And it shames us all that these animals will dance upon the bones blessed by the Throne.’

Arkio came to his feet in a rush, startling Rafen. ‘No,’ he said, exasperated. His voice carried iron with it. ‘What shames us is that any Blood Angel would countenance defeat at the hands of the corrupted!’ He advanced on Turcio and pressed a fist into the other Space Marine’s chest. ‘The blood of Sanguinius courses through us all. It is the very stuff of defiance and honour, but you speak as if your heart pumps water in its place!’

The low murmur of speech in the camp was suddenly gone; every man was listening to Arkio’s words. They were caught by the abrupt passion that surged from them.

‘I face my fate with clear eyes,’ Turcio managed. ‘That makes me no less a battle-brother!’

Arkio’s expression was a mix of concern and sadness. ‘My poor friend, you have lost your faith and yet you do not see it. Here,’ he handed Turcio his knife. ‘If you are so sure of death, take this now and slit your throat.’

‘Arkio–’ Rafen began, but his sibling held him at bay with a hand. Something in the younger Space Marine’s manner made him stop and fall silent.

‘Take it,’ he repeated.

‘You mock me!’ Turcio snapped, his colour rising. Without warning, the Space Marine’s dispirited mien broke and in its place was a hot rage. ‘I will take a thousand Word Bearers with me before I go to the Emperor’s side! I will not end my own life like some mewling, broken imbecile!’ The words flowed out of him in an angry rush.

‘There!’ Arkio’s face split in a savage grin. Inexplicably Turcio did the same, baring his fangs. ‘You see, my brother? There is the fire of our Lord Primogenitor! Look within, see it! It still burns in your breast! I merely had to remind you of it…’ The younger Space Marine turned to face the rest of them, the knife glistening in his hand. ‘Look at us, brothers! Have we escaped the enemy only to let them win without a shot? Did our comrades die today just so we might wallow in despair?’

‘No!’ A dozen men shouted out in answer, and Rafen was one of them, speaking without thinking. Something bright and powerful flashed in his brother’s eyes, and he was roused by it. Arkio’s every word was crystal clear, each sentence resonating with righteous energy.

‘The Traitors think we are broken, beaten, defeated!’ he growled. ‘By Lemartes, I say this is not so! I say we will yet bleed them white and send them running!’

Rafen’s gaze locked with his younger brother’s for a second. Arkio looked about him, taking in the faces of all the assembled Blood Angels. In the dimness, the Space Marine’s sharp-angled face and his cut of golden hair made him seem like one of the renditions of the honoured warriors of antiquity, in portraits at the fortress-monastery. In a moment of strange disconnection, Rafen saw Arkio as if he were a Blood Angel from the time of the Heresy, an ancient face of the Chapter’s most glorious past; then the image passed, and Arkio was speaking again. ‘The Traitors do not have the honour to meet us in open battle. They nip and strike at our numbers, wear us down. The Word Bearers do not just wish us dead… They desire the destruction of our souls as much as our flesh! But to the last man we can defy them!’

A chorus of assent greeted his words; but then one voice sounded above them all. ‘Your ardour does you credit, lad,’ said Koris carefully. ‘But rhetoric is never a substitute for gun and blade.’

Sachiel’s face set in pious indignation, but before he could censure Koris for his interruption, Arkio nodded respectfully to the veteran. ‘The honoured brother-sergeant is right, of course – but I have more than just words to offer.’

‘Explain yourself.’ Rafen demanded. He fixed his eyes on his sibling, part of him marvelling at a facet of his brother he had never seen before.

The young Space Marine stooped and pulled at something concealed in the long grass. With a grinding of hinges, a hidden maintenance hatch came open in his hands. ‘If it pleases my brothers to hear it, I dare to have a strategy. A way we can take the fight to the foe, even with numbers as small as this, and still cut their hearts from them.’

Chapter Four

Alactus shook his head and smiled coldly. ‘Have you been so long from true battle that your brain has softened, whelp?’ He stood up and approached Arkio, the rhythm of his gait suggesting he might strike the Space Marine. ‘While you were playing games with greenskins, the rest of us have been fighting the real foes of the Imperium! You presume much to speak so boldly of an untried plan in such a facile tone!’

Arkio stood his ground and let the insult roll off him. ‘I would respectfully hear your thoughts, brother.’ Alactus was barely a few decades older than Arkio and he had little cause to cast the other Space Marine as his junior. Arkio ignored this fact and let him speak.

‘You spout a few words of holy writ and think that you can turn the tide of battle? You have much to learn.’ Now the tension in the camp came to a knife-edge, every strain and unease among the survivors rushing to the surface.

‘Then teach me, Alactus,’ Arkio said mildly. ‘You say you doubt my prowess and that of my comrades from the Bellus, but I know you do not. I see a different reason behind your outburst. You are afraid, and you turn it on me instead of the enemy.’

The other Space Marine’s face flushed crimson with barely restrained anger. ‘You ask me if I know fear? You dare?’ he roared. Alactus stabbed a finger in the direction of the starport. ‘You were not there to see the weapon those unholy fiends unleashed upon our brethren! I was in the last of the ranks to retreat, I stood with Koris and watched the witch-fire engulf every Blood Angel who followed behind us!’

‘I, too,’ said Corvus, from the shadows. ‘I saw it. Men with their dignity stripped away by the touch of Chaos, rendered into blood-hungry beasts. They conjured the red thirst from every one of them.’

The phantom of their Chapter’s gene-curse forced a sullen silence over the assembled men. The anger fell from Alactus’s face and he became ashen. ‘I am afraid, Arkio. Though we face the darkness without until we die, there is no Blood Angel who does not fear the beast within. Any man who says he does not lies to himself. It is what makes us sons of Sanguinius. Our strength… Our bane.’ He shook his head. ‘That these Traitors might seek to use it against us chills me to my marrow.’

Corvus nodded his agreement. ‘By the Emperor’s grace, we few have survived this day, but to have seen such a sight and still live…’ He shuddered.

Sachiel’s voice was a low growl. ‘This morbid prattle spreads like a virus! Your brothers died for the Throne! You should be honoured to join them!’

‘No, priest,’ Arkio broke in, his subdued words reinforced with quiet humility. He hung his head. There was pain in his eyes. ‘Forgive my disagreement, but there is no shame in what has been said here. What kind of men would we be if we could watch our kinsmen die and feel nothing? Are we more than mindless killing machines in the garb of flesh?’ He looked up again, and Rafen felt a physical shock as their eyes locked. Tears coursed down Arkio’s face. ‘I weep for my brothers.’

Arkio took Alactus’s hand and grasped it firmly. ‘I weep for them and I know your fear, brother – but if this is true, you too must know my fury as well, my wish to punish those who transgress against us!’

A change passed over the face of Alactus. ‘I do,’ he agreed. ‘I know it in my heart and my blood.’

Arkio looked to the Sanguinary Priest, and to Rafen’s surprise Sachiel too nodded his agreement. ‘We are Blood Angels,’ said Arkio, his voice thick with emotion, ‘and we carry the flaw, but as Argastes said in the litany vermilion, we are not weak because of it!’

‘The black rage makes us strong,’ said Sachiel, quoting the passage from memory, ‘because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives–’

‘Or be forever lost.’ Koris finished. ‘Arkio is right. We have no choice but to fight.’

Rafen felt the words resonate in his chest. A renewed sense of purpose bloomed among the men, and suddenly the wounds and privations of the battle seemed cursory things. The will had been in them all along, he realised, and it merely took the spark of his brother’s words to rekindle it. Rafen spoke quietly to his brother. ‘You are full of surprises, kindred.’

Arkio gave him a brittle smile. ‘No, Rafen. I am as you are, a Space Marine and servant of the Emperor and Lord Sanguinius. No more.’

‘And how will we serve them now? You spoke of a strategy…’

The young Blood Angel stooped. ‘Look here, brothers.’ He gestured towards the hatch he had opened in the ground. ‘During the battle I became separated by the shelling. A mortar round took me from my feet and I found myself thrown against a grille on the surface of the landing field…’

‘A drainage channel,’ said Turcio. ‘There are many of them throughout the starport.’

‘Indeed. The rainy season on Cybele is fierce, is it not? And the waters are diverted here, to the catchment reservoirs.’

Koris gave a quiet grunt of laughter. ‘By the oath, this bold young pup has found us a route back to the port. The flood channels can take us right under the Word Bearers.’

Sachiel studied the open hatchway. ‘A clever tactic, Arkio. But what are we to do with this course? If we emerge in the midst of the Traitor scum, we will be no better off than if we had stayed at the barricade.’ He gave Koris a hard stare. ‘And as I was told, that would be certain death.’

‘It would,’ Arkio noted, ‘which is why we would send only a few men. Brother-Sergeant Koris will correct me if I err, but I believe that only one is required to operate the port’s defence batteries, yes?’

‘The anti-ship guns?’ Koris nodded, and looked to a surviving Techmarine from his company. ‘If you took Lucion here, it could be accomplished.’

The Techmarine tapped the cog-and-skull symbol on his chest-plate in a gesture of agreement. ‘I can turn my hand to that. It would be simple.’

‘But once you have the guns, what then?’ asked Sachiel. ‘They cannot depress low enough to strike at the Word Bearers.’

Rafen felt a rush of excitement as he saw the plan unfold in his mind. ‘We will not use the guns on the ground troops. We target the Ogre Lord overhead.’

‘The command ship?’ said Lucion. ‘It orbits directly above us… If it fell from the skies, it would be like a storm of meteors…’

‘Aye, this borders on madness,’ said Koris. ‘But for Sanguinius, it will be done!’

Sachiel reached for the velvet bag on his belt. ‘So ordered. I will take command of the strike team personally. Arkio, for your eloquence you will join me with Corvus and Lucion.’ He turned to Koris. ‘Brother-sergeant, choose a squad of men to accompany us. You will lead the remaining troops to stage a diversionary raid on the perimeter once we are within the port’s confines.’

Koris masked his ill humour at the orders with a salute; the veteran had clearly hoped to lead the team himself. ‘As you command.’

As Sachiel stepped away, Rafen laid a hand on his commander’s shoulder. ‘Sergeant, I would have you choose me to go too.’

Koris raised an eyebrow. ‘You want to keep a watch on the lad, eh? In case he has any other flashes of tactical brilliance or sudden urges for oratory?’ The elder warrior gave a terse nod. ‘Very well. Take Alactus too, and draw full stocks of ammunition from what assets we have.’

‘Lord, that will leave the rest of you with next to nothing–’

‘Bah,’ Koris waved him away. ‘We’ll beat them with stones and harsh language if need be. You take your brother’s plan and make it work, Rafen.’

Rafen said no more, as a silence fell across the survivors. Sachiel held up a brass chalice and murmured a benediction. Each of the Blood Angels was drawn to the glittering replica of the red grail. The priest drew his combat blade across his bared forearm and let a thin stream of blood trickle into the cup. Then he handed it to Koris, who did the same. The chalice went from man to man until each of them had added a run of their own vital fluid to the mixture. The container had the same shape and form as the most sacred and ancient of the Chapter’s artefacts, the red grail that contained the blood of every Sanguinary High Priest. So the Chapter’s scripture said, these men – of which Sachiel was one – shared an iota of the primarch’s blood; it was injected into their veins in a sacred ritual. Now the priest took a draught from the cup. ‘By blood we are bonded,’ he intoned, ‘and by blood we serve.’

He passed the chalice back along the line of men, and each of them sipped from the dark, coppery liquid. ‘We drink deep of victory, and remember the fallen.’ The cup, empty now, returned to Sachiel’s grasp. ‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius!’

With one voice, the last warriors of the Imperium on Cybele took up the cry. ‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius!’

The flood channel was a tight fit for the Space Marines, and it was a credit to their battle discipline that they moved quietly through the waist-deep water, never once brushing against the worn brickwork that closed in around them. The water-course was not the product of a single construction: over the centuries, the pipes had been extended and built over one another as more and more of Cybele’s surface had become a resting place for war dead. In some parts, the Space Marines were able to stand line abreast instead of single file, passing through the stone foundations of huge crypts and mausoleums. Alactus led the way with a faint biolume in his hand. The dull green glow from the lamp shifted and danced off the walls and the sluggish water.

Rafen picked out the shapes of small vermin and carrion insects as they scattered from the light. Now and then, Alactus would pause and study the path ahead, the faint glow illuminating aged text in High Gothic on the subsided memorial stones. The Space Marine studied one such monument, canted at a wild angle, half buried in the earth. The names of hundreds of men were carved there in an endless train of letters; victims of some long-forgotten atrocity on a world that likely no longer existed. Since he was a child, there had always been something about tombstones that at once attracted and repelled Rafen; it was as if he sensed that one day he would discover a stone that bore his name. The moment of reverie broke as he became aware of Lucion behind him. Alactus had started forward again, and Rafen followed on.

As they moved closer to the starport, the occasional breaths of night air along the tunnels became more frequent, and with them they brought disturbing sounds that were ghostly and incoherent. Rafen noticed that the water had changed consistency; it ran more sluggishly now, and it had a dark, oily sheen. Alactus paused again and made a quick set of gestures with his hand. Rafen showed him a slow nod to indicate he understood and relayed the signs to Lucion behind him. The Space Marine on point had found a place where the walls had partly fallen in, and they would need to drop to a crawl to pass it. Alactus slid into the thick waters and the light from the biolume vanished with him.

Rafen let his helmet visor adjust to the darkness, rendering the channel in a monochrome grey. He felt a pat on his back and he went down to his knees, then his chest, and into the liquid embrace. Submerged, the Space Marine moved forward by touch, letting his fingers lead him through the heaps of rubble and thick slides of disturbed earth. Once, his hand traced over the shape of something that felt suspiciously like a human femur, but then he was past it and rising up from the viscous grip of the run-off. Alactus pulled him to his feet and Rafen reflexively drew his hand across his faceplate to wipe off the oily matter. The red ceramite glove came away with purple-black clots of coagulated fluid glistening on it. Rafen realised that he had been holding his breath, even though the sealed Adeptus Astartes power armour had its own internal oxygen supply. Toggling a vent in his gear, he allowed himself to sip at the air in the flood channel, and a million scent-tones raced through his sense memory.

The channel was knee-deep in blood, and he did not need to look at the other Space Marine to see that he knew it too. As the other members of the squad emerged, Rafen looked up to take in the place where they had risen.

They were inside the perimeter of the starport now. By Rafen’s reckoning they were quite close to the place where the first Thunderhawks from the Bellus had touched down. The narrow pipe had given way to a tall, vaulted run-off chamber where other, smaller effluent channels converged. Some six metres above his head, set in the landing field’s surface, was a long slot that showed dark sky beyond, barred by thick rods of steel grille.

In the rainy season, water would sluice off the ferrocrete pads and through those grids, but what fell from them now was something quite different. Irregular shapes were heaped over the drains above, piled in discarded heaps. They were bodies and there were countless dozens of them, some still clad in broken pieces of Blood Angel armour. A continuous rain of blood was falling, the vital fluid of their dead brethren greeting them like some arcane shower of anointment.

Beyond the mournful patter of the dead men’s blessing, there were other noises that merged into one rolling thunder of sound. Demagogues and mechanised loquitur-drones led the massed ranks of Word Bearers above them in thanksgiving for their victory. Rafen resisted the urge to spit and turned away. Arkio stood close by, his helmet turned to the sky, his expression hidden behind the fearsome mask.

‘Brother?’ Rafen’s voice was a whisper. ‘Do you see something?’

With a near-physical effort, Arkio broke away from the sight. ‘Only the dead.’

The Word Bearers had made camp amid the port’s broken structures. Tancred found his liege-lord picking at a heap of soft, fish-belly white meat. He appeared deceptively languid in his auto-throne with one hand cupped under a Space Marine helmet. Iskavan eyed the torturer as he approached and held the helm to his lips, licking cold blood from it.

‘Speak.’ Iskavan grunted. Tancred knew instantly from the tone in his voice that the Dark Apostle was annoyed, even though they had won the day against the Blood Angels.

‘News from orbit, master. The Dirge Eterna has located the human ship in the atmosphere of the gas giant world and commenced bombardment from low orbit. Guided by the ruinous powers, we will force them from their hiding place or destroy them.’

Iskavan spat harshly. ‘A fine victory indeed,’ he said with leaden sarcasm. ‘But no amount of holy murder will lessen my disgust!’

Tancred’s tentacle-hand shivered, as it always did when he was concerned. ‘Lord, what ails you? You have taken this world in the name of the blight but yet you stand aside from our victory revels. I would know why.’

In answer, Iskavan drained the last draught of blood from the Astartes helmet, then pitched it away into the chanting crowds of his own soldiers. ‘You were there, Tancred. You saw it as well as I did.’ He shook his head. ‘By the order of our warmaster, we fell back. We retreated.’ Saying the word made the Apostle twitch with anger. ‘What orders are these that a Word Bearer must step back from an enemy?’ With that he was on his feet, kicking over the food tray. ‘Ever forward, never back! That is our creed, by Lorgar’s eyes!’

Tancred stood his ground. ‘Above all others, we are bound to serve the word of Lord Garand…’

Invoking Garand’s name had the desired effect: the Apostle’s mood softened – but only a little. ‘There is more at work here than we know, Tancred,’ he hissed. ‘Garand moves us about like regicide pieces on a hooded board and grants us the merest slips of information, but Iskavan the Hated is the pawn of no one!’

‘But what choice do we have, dark one?’

‘What choice?’ Iskavan snorted. ‘What–’ Without warning, the Chaos warlord’s voice choked off in mid-sentence and he licked at the air. When he spoke again, all trace of his previous mood was gone. ‘Do you taste that, Tancred?’

‘My lord?’

The Apostle jumped down from the makeshift dais where his throne sat and beckoned a warrior to him. ‘You! Give me your name.’

The Word Bearer bowed to his master. ‘I am Xanger FellEye, if it pleases great Iskavan.’

‘I scent men hereabouts. Gather your most zealous and search the perimeter.’

Without another word, the Chaos Space Marine turned and ran to his task. Tancred watched him go. ‘Lord, surely no more than an insignificant few of the man-beasts remain alive? Our puppeteers saw to that.’

Iskavan’s hideous mouth split in a too-wide smile as he recalled the injured Blood Angels murdering one another in frenzy. ‘Yes. If Garand had granted us more of those precious psyker-helots, then this world would have been subdued in an hour, not a day.’ He dismissed the thought with a blink of his yellow eyes. ‘How many are left does not matter. It only matters that they are left.’ Iskavan drew himself up to his full height. ‘Tancred, when the dawn rises on Cybele I will erect the first great obelisk to the glory of Chaos Undivided, and mark me, I shall have it made from the fresh-hewn bones of the Adeptus Astartes.’

The edge of the sprawling Chaos encampment seemed close enough to touch through the optics of the gun’s target scope. ‘I have a target, sergeant,’ Turcio sub-vocalised, the sensor pickups in his throat relaying the words as clearly as a shout. The Space Marine held his aim steady on the Word Bearer guard post; he was still carrying the laser that Rafen had pressed into his grip in what seemed like an age ago.

‘Hold your fire, lad,’ the veteran replied. ‘We’ll go just as soon as the priest says so.’ The remnants of his unit lay in wait, spread out behind him and hidden in the lee of a hill. All of them were burning for revenge.

Turcio watched the Traitor Marine pause at the door of the ruined hut. One squeeze of the trigger plate and its head would pop like an overripe fruit.

‘Wait for the word,’ Koris repeated, as if he read his mind. ‘It’ll come soon enough.’

FellEye found his thoughts wandering as he approached the edge of the landing fields. Under other circumstances, he might have called it a blessing that he had been selected for a mission by the Dark Apostle himself – but the events of the day on this blighted corpse-world had left him, like many of his comrades, disturbed. Of course they had routed the hated Blood Angels – and Xanger had never doubted that would take place – but Iskavan’s confused orders during the initial assault had left the Word Bearers under his command wary. And now there was this, the sudden demand to search for survivors. FellEye was torn between his desire for the raucous cacophony of the victory carousal and his duty to his lord. Hushed whispers that Iskavan’s mind was unsettled had long been spoken of in the Legions of the ninth host, and many of the men blamed the Apostle for their poor victories of late – but until today the veteran Word Bearer had never given them any credence.

He sniffed the air. The Dark Apostle said he smelled man-flesh out here, but then so could Xanger. The whole moon was a repository for rotting human carcasses, after all, and the earth was churned to mud where bright rivers of enemy blood had pooled. FellEye shook off the thought. It was not his place to question the orders of an exalted one. Not yet, anyway.

One of his men grunted through his tusks. ‘I saw movement.’ The other Word Bearer pointed at a metal grate in the ferrocrete.

‘Open it,’ Xanger commanded, gesturing to the rest of his patrol with the flat of his hand.

The tusked Chaos Space Marine bobbed his head in a bow and tugged the covering off with a squeak of complaining hinges. He dropped into a crouch so he could see clearly into the flood channel.

Sachiel’s chainsword entered the Word Bearer’s flesh just above his sternum and sank into the meat of him, before ripping back out in a wound that opened his skull from the inside. The Traitor fell away as the Blood Angels erupted from their concealment, boiling out of the vent in a burst of red.

Xanger fired wildly. Bolter rounds from his skull-mouthed weapon skipped across the runway as he walked his fire into the mass of emerging enemy bodies. The other Word Bearers in the patrol reacted a spilt-second slower than he; they were surprised by the sudden appearance of the foe in their midst. These men paid for their laxity with their lives. FellEye’s shots clipped a figure and one of the Blood Angels tumbled back the way he had come. Just as suddenly the guns of every Space Marine converged on him and Xanger’s millennia of service to Chaos ended in a screeching whirlwind of agony. The warrior’s corrupted form came apart in chunks of decayed flesh and ceramite.

‘The word is given,’ Sachiel hissed into his throat mike as the other men dispatched the rest of the patrol. ‘Commence attack!’

‘Lord, please,’ Tancred said, a lilt of concern in his voice, ‘I fear you may be allowing your mind to play tricks–’

‘Silence!’ Iskavan cuffed him to the ground with a cursory flick of his wrist. ‘Rally the men! Don’t you hear it? Gunfire!’

Tancred struggled to recover his dignity, fuming inwardly. ‘Perhaps you are mistaken, dark one. All I hear is the popping of human bones on our pyres, the spree of our warriors.’ But just as he spoke, the torturer caught the distinctive snap-crack of a laser discharge on the wind. Rising to his feet, he looked to the western edge of the starport and saw beams flaring there and the hot globes of grenade detonations. ‘Forgive me, lord! You are correct!’ He bellowed commands to the soldiers around him and wrapped his tentacles around his plasma pistol. He was not aware that Iskavan was looking in the opposite direction.

‘Where are they?’ the Dark Apostle asked, turning to study the distant flares of Sergeant Koris’s attack. Iskavan’s eyes narrowed. ‘An echo, then,’ he told himself, dismissing his suspicions.

Cowering in case he might be struck again, Tancred held up his master’s crozius. ‘Your weapon, lord…’

Without another word, Iskavan took up the device and strode westward, eager for battle.

‘They’re taking heavy fire,’ Lucion said, his face implacable as he listened to the signals from Koris and the Space Marines at the diversionary front.

‘Then let us make use of every second they give us,’ Sachiel snapped. The priest looked up. Just as they had planned, Alactus had led them to the shadow of the four great defence cannons that loomed over the starport in stubby, sharp-edged ziggurats. Thick tubes emerged from the capstones of each construction, tilted at steep angles toward the sky. Inside those imposing structures were mechanisms and conveyers that fed shells as big as Thunderhawks into gaping, hungry breeches.

‘We’ll need to pass the gate…’ said Rafen, considering the doors that blocked the firing bunker from the outside world.

Arkio smiled. ‘I have an idea.’ A vehicle, far enough away to miss them as it raced toward the attack on the perimeter, rumbled by in the mists. Arkio filled his lungs and shouted, his voice carrying. ‘Hail!’

Alactus grabbed his arm, a second too late. ‘You fool, what are you doing?’

The running lights on the vehicle twitched and grew as it turned and approached them. The shape of a Word Bearer tactical Space Marine was visible, half out of the roof hatch. He threw a chest-beating salute at them as the tracked machine slowed in jerks and fits.

‘A Rhino,’ whispered Rafen. ‘One of ours…’

The transport was indeed of Blood Angels’ issue, but as it came closer it was clear that a glancing melta-blast had ripped most of the port armour away. The old Imperial or Blood Angel sigils had been painted over with crude Chaos symbols. Rafen could see three more Word Bearers through the hole in the hull.

‘Hail!’ the Traitor called, as the Rhino skidded to a halt. ‘Host-brothers! Will you come join our hunt for the men-prey?’ In the darkness, with their wargear coated by blood and detritus, the armour of the Blood Angels appeared the same shade as the gore-red the Word Bearers wore themselves; it was enough for the enemy to lower their guard.

‘I think not,’ said Arkio, and opened fire. Rafen and the other Blood Angels did the same, killing everything inside the Rhino before they could even draw a weapon.

‘Good thinking,’ Sachiel commented, striding over to the idling vehicle. ‘Get these unblessed monstrosities out of this machine. Lucion!’ He addressed the Techmarine. ‘Take the wheel.’

‘Idiots!’ said Noro, his one organic eye squinting through the fire-slot. ‘The Rhino is returning.’ The Chaos Space Marine gave his comrade a quick look of confusion. ‘What now?’

The other Word Bearer shrugged, the gesture magnified tenfold by the bulk of his armour. ‘Be wary,’ he hissed through blunted snake’s teeth. ‘I will meet them at the gate.’

Noro watched him turn the crank that released the iron doors to the firing bunker. Typically, it was he who had been left behind when the humans started shooting and the other Word Bearers in his squad wanted to go and join the battle. Noro shook his head in disgust. Dropped from the Ogre Lord in the very last wave, Noro’s unit had missed every moment of the fury, and then they’d been ordered to guard the defence battery instead of taking part in the communion. He hadn’t even seen a single live Blood Angel all day. Noro cursed his luck and spat hissing acidic phlegm on the stone deck.

‘Something is amiss.’ said the other Word Bearer, studying the approaching Rhino. ‘The vehicle is gaining speed.’

And then, the bionic optic in his other eye socket provided him with a close-up image of the transport. Noro saw the distinctive winged blood drop on the armour of someone inside the vehicle, and he knew precisely what was going on. ‘Warp take them!’ he screamed. ‘Secure the gate!’

To his credit, his comrade didn’t ask for an explanation. Instead he turned the crank the other way and forced the iron doors to reverse back into the closed position, but the effort he’d used trying to open them made the task twice as hard and twice as long. So the gates to the bunker had three feet of clearance between each edge when the prow of the Rhino struck them at full throttle.

Lucion handled the tracked transport like a guided missile and rammed the gate at precisely the point where their resistance was least. The impact stunned the Techmarine into giddying moments of semi-consciousness, but the rest of the team had jumped free just seconds before the collision. Now they poured in behind the broken form of the Rhino, forced like a crimson wedge between the doors.

Noro’s comrade was gutted by a lucky collateral kill when splintering segments of the Rhino’s tracks took his head from his shoulders. There were other Word Bearers in the bunker, but they had not even understood that anything was amiss until the transport’s explosive arrival. Now all of them were taking up guns, shooting and dying as the Blood Angels brought them death.

Arkio was at the head of the pack, his bolter a murderous roar of devout vengeance. ‘Imperator excommunicatus!’ he cried, sending the Chaos Space Marines and their chattering servitors screaming into hell.

Noro thought about his warp-forsaken luck and crossed gazes with the young Blood Angel. The Word Bearer fired his bolt pistol, but the rounds never seemed to even get close, skipping away as if the human had some charm about him. Noro cried out in Lorgar’s name and rushed forward to bury his knife in the furious face of the whelp, if nothing else, but he was met by a horrific storm of metal-shattering bullets.

Noro was the last of the Word Bearers in the bunker to fall, and Arkio pitched back his head to cry out in anger. ‘More!’ he spat. ‘More to slake the thirst!’

‘Aye! More!’ Alactus was with him, eyes wide with need.

Rafen shot his brother a glance as he helped Lucion to extract himself from the crumpled Rhino. ‘Which way now?’

‘Down.’ Lucion indicated a wire-cage lift. ‘The firing control is below us.’

Sachiel ran his hand over the white and red of his armour. ‘By the grail, Sanguinius graces us this day! We turn the tide!’

As they rode down into the lower level, Rafen chanced another look at Arkio. For a moment, the orange hue of the emergency lamps made his armour seem bronze in colour, and Rafen was reminded of the Riga tapestry again; then the moment passed, and they had arrived.

A few single-shot kills made short work of the helots cowering amid the consoles, and while the Space Marines cleaned up, Lucion began the ritual of activation. Above, inside the stone ziggurats, the four gun tubes groaned and shifted, as if the weapons themselves sensed what was about to happen.

Bellus burst from the gas giant on the shock wave of a nuclear firestorm, volatile elements in the planet’s air combusting around her. Although he had no firing solutions, Captain Ideon ordered every gun to fire blindly, sending up a wall of destruction. The battle barge raced away, and the Cybele moon grew rapidly in its forward screens.

‘This was an error,’ Ideon grated, ‘We will be caught between the ships.’

Inquisitor Stele shook his head. ‘Study the aft monitors and tell me, captain, would we have not been destroyed if we had remained?’ View-plates aimed astern showed the flaming patch spreading to ignite pockets of gas all across the massive planet. ‘Those corrupted scum would see the entire world put to the torch just to end us.’

Ideon’s impassive face twitched slightly. ‘You may have only delayed our fate, my lord, and not for long.’

‘Contact,’ droned one of the servitors. ‘The Ogre Lord has seen us. She is bringing all weapons to bear. Dirge Eterna is also turning for broadside.’

‘Not for long,’ Ideon repeated.

Fines of rust flickered through the shafts of their biolumes as the massive gun carriages turned to track the Chaos cruiser in orbit. Nerves jerked in Lucion’s cheek as a trio of mechadendrites extended from his skull and into waiting slots in the targeting pulpit.

Three of the four loading glyphs had now turned green, and Sachiel was becoming impatient. ‘What is the delay?’

Arkio answered for Lucion. ‘We must fire the guns as one, high priest. We may not get a second chance, and the rounds will do the most damage if they strike together.’

Deep, bass thunder rolled around the chamber and the last glyph changed colour. ‘Ready.’ Lucion’s voice was breathy and distant. ‘The Emperor’s eye sees the enemy. His wrath is at your command.’

Sachiel nodded at the young Space Marine. ‘Let the honour be yours then, Arkio.’

‘Thank you, lord.’ A fierce smile danced over the lips of Rafen’s sibling, and he placed a hand on Lucion’s shoulder. ‘By the blood of every brother dead this day, let their vengeance be fulfilled!’

‘So shall it be,’ intoned the Techmarine.

The guns discharged so close together that the report from the muzzles came as a single thunderous howl of noise. The shockwave compacted rings of air into dense hoops of vapour around the barrels, and an earth tremor took ill-prepared Word Bearers and Blood Angels alike off their feet.

Four huge rocket-assisted proteus-class anti-starship munitions screamed skyward with a sound like tearing flesh. The Ogre Lord did not see them coming until it was too late. The enemy warship, still turning to face Bellus, had put all power to her lances and dorsal void shields, leaving the belly she bared to the moon below utterly unprotected.

Each of the shells found purchase in the hull metal of Ogre Lord, the staged fusing in their adamantium-sheathed warheads pushing them through the plates of ablative armour and into the soft meat of the ship’s interior. There, the main fusion cores that were the poison hearts of the proteus missiles went critical and detonated.

Ogre Lord rippled from within, and shattered.

Chapter Five

‘Vandire’s oath!’

The curse slipped from Brother-Captain Ideon’s voxcoder in a spit of static. Wired as he was into every sensor output from the detectors that lined the Bellus, the ship’s commander viewed the death of the Ogre Lord with a thousand eyes. He was witnessing the killing of the Chaos cruiser in ranges of vision beyond ordinary sight. In the higher frequencies of infra-red, Ideon saw plumes of hot atmosphere gush out into the black void; under warp-scan, he saw the twinkles of aberrant daemon-life as they tore asunder in explosive decompression and through the lenses of the rho-field trackers he watched the bright flood of liberated mesons and neutrinos as the enemy vessel’s fusion bottle cracked. Even at this distance, waves of hot energy from the blast licked at the Bellus’s void shields.

Ogre Lord came apart like rotten wormwood struck by a hammer. Great chunks of the craft span away propelled by the monstrous detonations of the proteus missiles. Chain-fire licked across the upper quarter of the ship as it distended and broke, and munitions blocks of shells all exploded at once.

‘Glorious,’ said Stele, the angles of his face lit by the backwash of light from the ruined craft. ‘Do you see, Ideon? The Emperor delivers us.’

Under his breath, the officer whispered a prayer of thanksgiving and continued to monitor the fragments of Ogre Lord’s hull, which were now flickering embers as they dropped into Cybele’s upper atmosphere. ‘I wonder who fired those shots from the surface?’

‘A bold soul, I would warrant,’ Stele fingered the purity stud in his ear. ‘Such a fearless gambit will turn the skies to fire down there, and set the archenemy on their heels.’

Ideon hoped he would live to meet the man who had pulled off so risky a gambit. But perhaps the poor fool would perish along with the Word Bearers on the ground when the Ogre Lord’s remains began to rain down. In the periphery of his normal vision, he noted the way that his astropaths were twitching and cowering as the enemy cruiser succumbed. The psychic death-screams of untold numbers of the corrupted in close proximity disturbed their mental equilibrium. Ideon idly wondered what consequences that effect would have on the enemy psi-sensitives on the planet.

Stele spoke as if he had read the captain’s mind. ‘There were a great many slave-psykers on board that ship. I imagine their deaths would have been a mercy for them.’

With effort, the captain pulled his attention away from the dying ship. ‘We must act swiftly to enjoy this bounty.’ He flicked a glance at his adjutant. ‘Where is the Dirge Eterna?’

‘Still turning,’ the Blood Angel snapped, without looking up from the pict-slate in his hand. ‘The loss of the other vessel has confused them – they are in danger of extending too far from their attack pattern.’

‘Perfect.’ Ideon’s eyes narrowed as he willed the hololithic screen before him to display a fresh series of firing solutions. ‘Bow guns to ready condition. Bring us to bear.’

‘Complying,’ answered the servant at the helm. ‘Number three gun does not answer.’

The inquisitor raised an eyebrow and made a tsk noise. Ideon ignored him, a feral heat building in his chest as the screen drew about to show the other Chaos vessel. ‘We’ll shoot with what we have. Fire at will.’

A sensor-servitor let out a chirp of warning. ‘New target entering the firing line!’ As the sightless bondsman bound into his scanner pulpit registered the incoming Idolator-class ship, Ideon saw it too in his mind’s eye. Raw jags of data streamed into him down the lines of his mechadendrites. The dagger-form of the raider copied the same manoeuvre that had crippled its twin in the earlier engagement, physically placing itself in front of the Bellus’s war shots to protect the Dirge Eterna. Some higher element of Captain Ideon’s tactical intellect turned this over, wondering just what it was about Dirge that made it so worthy of protection, but that was a matter for consideration after the second raider had been punished for its audacity.

His synthetic voice spat and hissed. ‘If they are so eager to court oblivion then they’ll find we have it to spare. The order is revised: strike that idolator from my sky.’

‘Your will,’ nodded his adjutant, and the junior officer repeated the command to the cannon-servitors.

The raider rotated to present its prow to the Bellus. The idolator ship was distinctive: the broken red tooth of the bowsprit was dominated by a huge brass-plated dome in the shape of a human skull. The eyeless shape was tipped backward, as if it was screaming, and from the open jaws a blunt gun muzzle emerged. Ideon had once been told that the figurehead skulls of these vessels were made from metals recovered from the bodies of the dead. They were forged with the iron recovered from the blood furnaces of slaughterhouse worlds in the Eye of Terror. He did not care if the rumour was true; the archenemy’s ships could be made from the bones of the Chaos gods themselves, for all that it mattered to him. They would die like all the other traitors that ever dared to cross the Blood Angels.

‘He means to ram us,’ said the adjutant, half-statement, half-questioning.

‘Then show him the error of his ways,’ rumbled Stele.

Bellus obeyed.

The battle barge’s hammer-shaped bow sported four massive gun tubes each the length of a Cobra-class Imperial destroyer, and in a glare of violent discharge, all but one of them spat their death-loads at the idolator. Each cannon was powerful enough to deal a shattering blow to void shields or hull armour, and to use them against a lighter capital ship like the Chaos raider was complete overkill. Shots from the first, second and fourth guns – the third was still inoperative – savaged the vessel and opened it to the vacuum. Unlike the Ogre Lord, whose crew had moments of screaming fear to understand what was happening to them, the raider simply ceased to exist.

In one murderous detonation of energy, steel and twisted bone-metals flashed to atoms and became gas; it was as if the ship had been flung into the heart of a star. Under Ideon’s command, Bellus pushed on through the expanding wave front of the ship’s vaporous remains and bore down on Dirge Eterna. With the balance of power tipped back towards the Blood Angels, the enemy ship fell away from the gas giant and made speed for Cybele’s orbit, raked by the barge’s sub-cannons as she passed. With her engines still below full capability, Bellus could only begin a slow turn to follow it.

The very air itself was aflame on Cybele as Rafen and the rest of the strike team stumbled from the defence battery bunker. The night sky was no longer dark: wide trails of hot orange fire criss-crossed it in a web of glittering colour. Wreckage screamed through the ragged remains of clouds overhead. Vast slabs of metal as big as islands threw themselves from horizon to horizon, scattering rains of dirty, molten droplets behind them.

Arkio’s face was lit with savage fury, and he stooped to drag a leg’s-length of iron bar from a shallow impact crater. It was a fragment from the Chaos cruiser after the fall. The rod went slack, the heat of re-entry making it distend. ‘What worthless things these creatures are,’ he grimaced, ‘Curse them for forcing us to sully our hands with their blood.’

Lucion held up his hand. ‘Listen… Do you hear that?’

Rafen’s brow furrowed. The ceaseless screeching of the Word Bearer demagogues and the noise of weapons fire had been such a constant companion over the past day that changes to the cacophony were not immediately apparent to him. But then he caught it too, and strained the sensitive lyman organs in his ears to separate the sound from the hypersonic shrieks of falling debris.

‘The Traitors… What are they doing?’ Gone now were the spitting blasphemes of the Word Bearer war-priests, and in their place were anguished yelps and utterances of wretchedness and woe.

Sachiel spared Rafen a grim smile. ‘We have dealt them a terrible blow, kinsmen. They feel keenly the deaths of their foul brethren and it vexes them. Listen to them, they nurse the pain like it is a physical wound!’

The priest was correct. The Word Bearers’ chants were no longer monotonous litanies and corrupt hymnals, but keening wails and funereal chants.

Alactus laughed. ‘Then we’ll give them something to weep for, eh?’ He hefted his bolter and made a show of cocking it.

To the west, the fighting between Koris’s unit and the main force of the Word Bearers was still going on, but now the exchanges of fire were desultory and sporadic, as both sides reeled from the eruption of death-flame from the heavens.

‘Your orders, then, high priest?’ Arkio asked. Strangely, it seemed that none of the Blood Angels had thought to move until the young firebrand had brought it up.

‘Yes, of course,’ Sachiel said, distracted from the burning sky. ‘We should regroup with Sergeant Koris before the enemy gather their wits.’

‘I’ll take the lead,’ Arkio snapped, and with that he was away, racing across the starport fields, dodging from cover to cover. Rafen kept pace with him, pausing to conceal himself in the lee of a wrecked Thunderhawk as once more the sky tore open with the passage of another piece of ship. The dense fragment of hull struck the hills a few kilometres distant with a white flash that underlit the smoke clouds. The shock of the impact reverberated through the ground as the sound of the landing snapped past them. Bits of the Ogre Lord would be raining down on Cybele for days to come.

Rafen considered the ashen landscape. ‘Blood and martyrs, brother. We may have done more damage to this world with one shot than the Traitors did all day…’

‘What does it matter as long as we kill them in kind?’ Arkio’s voice was cool and distant. ‘I am the Emperor’s servant, and by my hand his enemies perish.’ The younger Space Marine leapt from cover as a loose knot of firing Word Bearers approached. Rafen joined him.

Iskavan the Hated gave one of his flamer-troops a savage kick, pushing the wounded Chaos Space Marine face-first into a mouldering pile of dead men. The injured Word Bearer was one of the lucky ones; the Dark Apostle’s accursed crozius had already fed on the life of a dozen more Space Marines who had been too slow to follow their master’s commands.

The lord of the ninth host was literally incandescent with rage. Discs of turbulent electro-telepathic force encircled his head in coronets of lightning. They glowed about his bony horns like Saint Elmo’s Fire. In the near distance, cracks of bolter rounds signalled the places where Word Bearers and Blood Angels fought, but around the main mass of the Chaos Legions were disordered lines of hand-to-hand fighting. Every member of the host had felt the death-throes of the war-psykers on the Ogre Lord, the black shroud of their screaming minds reaching out to hammer all the warp-touched who walked on Cybele. The Word Bearers stood fast and weathered the shrieking. Their disciplined mentalities were rigid and resistant, but the cackling minor daemons and countless legions of helots they had brought with them went mad from the sound in their heads, and they turned on one another.

The unexpected side-effect from the Blood Angels’ sneak attack now changed the Word Bearers’ forces from precise, mechanical formations into a raging, uncontrollable rabble. Iskavan roared with inchoate anger as a dozen gun-servitors dared – they dared! – to attack him in their maddened fury. Slug-throwers burped fat discs of serrated metal at him and blunderbuss horns vomited rains of lead shot, every pitiful round rebounding off his ruby armour. He replied with the most terrible blades of his crozius, sweeping the slave creatures away in a screeching arc of gore and entrails. The Dark Apostle could not reach the enemy Space Marines for hundreds of his own helots were now attacking the Word Bearers and each other alike, tearing at the sallow skin of their faces in vain efforts to quell the insanity boiling through them. Iskavan’s crozius jumped and sang in his mailed fist, rattling the chains that bound it to him. The weapon was spooked by the thick taint of mind-death in the air, and it craved blood to drown out the sensation. The Word Bearers’ leader gave it what it desired by the gut-load: he buried the seething blade head into the bellies of the men-forms around him.

‘Rip them apart!’ he bellowed, as much to himself as an order to his warriors. ‘Kill for us or be killed by us, you maggot-blood wretches!’

Tancred was suddenly at his side. Perhaps the torturer has been there all along but it was only now that Iskavan noticed him. It mattered little, and it took a moment of effort to pull the crozius away from the neck of his second. The weapon moaned at the blood denied it. ‘Magnificence, the bound daemon-forms are tearing themselves apart!’

He gestured with his tentacle hand and the Dark Apostle saw the rank of wheeled black bone cages, marooned now in the midst of the infighting helots who were supposed to be dragging them toward the enemy. Inside each enclosure a minor daemon beast was held. They were throwing themselves against the bars in bloody madness, and beating their skulls and limbs against the confinement. These were not the towering princes of the warp that the followers of the eight-blade star lived in fear of; they were smaller, bestial life forms, the empyrean’s equivalent of animal predators. They possessed a savagery that nothing from the mortal realm could match, and in conflict they would sow fear and disruption in enemy ranks, provided they were directed properly. Now they were spoiled and crazed, worthless in battle for anything other than cannon fodder. Iskavan cast a disgusted look around and watched the keepers of the beasts fighting one another while others were being chewed apart by their very charges.

‘Wasted! Wasted!’ he spat, lamenting the finely wrought battle plans he had laboured on in the days prior to their arrival on Cybele. The Dark Apostle drew up his crozius with its red blades shining like a beacon, and bellowed out his commands. ‘Clear a path through these chattering dastards! Cut the daemons free!’

‘My lord, the creatures are broken minded – they will tear apart everything in their path!’

‘Of course, you fool!’ Iskavan spat, waving his weapon, ‘but all that will be there will be the corpse-god’s men and those fit for death! Now by my decree, release them!’

The Word Bearers parted like a falling wave and drew back from the skirmish lines. At Tancred’s direction, sharpshooters blasted the fat phase-iron padlocks off the bone cages from a safe distance. As one the inhuman ravagers threw themselves into the melee, fighting and eating and gorging on fresh meat.

Sergeant Koris and his men met the largest of the things as it stumbled toward them, licking gore from its mouthparts. For a moment, the veteran thought the daemon had two heads, as it appeared that one of them was attached to the end of its arm. But then it popped the skull into its mouth and crunched it down, flicking the blood of one of its unholy brethren aside in an almost human gesture. It threw back its head and hooted wetly.

The daemon had too many legs, some of them arched upward in spindly arcs of bone, others low to the ground with fat ropes of muscle. A nest of barbed forelimbs snapped at the air as it came toward them, on its sinuous neck bobbed a broad oval head that seemed to be a random collection of eyes and teeth. It spat out a thin line of black drool before surging forward, to come at the Blood Angels in a stumbling run.

Koris had no need to remind his men to maintain fire discipline. All of them knew just how low on ammunition they were, and not a single Space Marine would waste even one bolt round on a chanced miss. When the warp-beast was close enough that its fetor engulfed them, they shot it. Rounds clacked off the bony claws and egg sacs in its torso with hollow sounds, leaving no mark of their passing. Other more precise shots blinded eyes or gouged divots of hairy flesh from its hide. It was heedless, however, and the Blood Angels scattered as it dived into them. Koris saw Alactus sweep away under the thing, but by the luck of Sanguinius he dodged each crushing footfall as it passed over him. Corvus was not blessed by the same fortune: he spun out as the beast ripped at him with a sickle barb. Another Space Marine, one of the Bellus contingent whose name Koris had not learned, died as his bolter choked on an empty magazine. The daemon opened him up with mad fury, shaking its head so that the razor teeth in its mouth could crack his ceramite cladding. As it swallowed him, Koris gave the command to fix bayonets, snapping his combat knife into the magnetic mount on the bolter’s foregrip.

And then, through the mass of screaming, dying helots came a dozen more Blood Angels, their guns fat with ammunition and spitting fire.

‘Koris!’ Sachiel’s voice hummed over the communicator. ‘Cover fire!’

‘With what–?’ The sergeant demanded, but his words were ignored. He saw the Sanguinary High Priest come forward. He was brandishing his chainsword and pistol and laying rounds into the mottled hide of the warp-beast. The eager fool! He’ll be killed!

The creature sensed the white and red shape in its peripheral vision and spun in a tight circle. As it did so, it whipped out its barbed tail to knock down a dozen more Blood Angels with callous relish. The shock of the strike pushed Koris reeling against a tilted headstone, so that his fire was directed away from the creature’s head.

Rafen saw the beast’s move coming a split-second before Arkio and he dropped, snapping out a kick at his brother’s ankle. His sibling fell just as the spiny club of meat at the end of the creature’s tail thrummed over their heads. ‘Watch it!’ he added.

Arkio’s eyes were elsewhere. ‘Sachiel! Guard yourself!’

The priest went off-balance. The beast was far faster than he had thought; its huge legs belied the thing’s nimble movement. He slashed the chattering chainsword at one of the meaty limbs, but his cut was shallow and did nothing but anger the daemon-beast more. With its hindmost claw, it tore into the Space Marine who stood to Sachiel’s right, then threw his corpse into the priest. The impact tossed Sachiel into a shallow crater and the lanyard connecting his sword to his gauntlet snapped. The blade buried itself upright in the mud, teeth growling.

Dark malice glittered in the creature’s myriad eyes and it flicked at the dirt. It resembled a housecat with a rodent, unwilling to bring the kill too quickly for all the sport it would lose. It ignored the bolt rounds that bit into it from the other Space Marines. It wanted to play.

Rafen squinted into the target sight of his gun and saw Sachiel’s face behind his half-mask. The priest’s skin was pale and drawn with exertion. With unfocussed eyes he was winding up his flank where the beast had casually cut him. Rafen’s finger froze on the trigger. If he had to he would grant the priest the Emperor’s peace rather than let him be a meal for this monster.

Then, like a rising rocket, Arkio burst from his cover and crossed the distance to the beast in a dozen loping steps. The daemon gave him a desultory swipe, angry to be interrupted in its game, but the young Blood Angel dodged easily. He swooped to snare Sachiel’s fallen chainsword. He brought the buzzing blade around in a flickering arc and cut cleanly through a knee joint. A leg as thick as two men fell away in a gout of thick blood, and the creature let out a thunderous shriek. With one splayed claw it pinned Sachiel to the dirt, and snapped at Arkio with the others, probing and shifting in place.

‘He’s going to kill it,’ Rafen heard Turcio’s comment over his ear-bead. The Space Marine was unable to keep the awe at Arkio’s daring from his voice. Rafen fired into the beast, doing his best to cover his brother’s actions. Arkio darted back and forth beneath the animal, slashing at soft parts that lay between iron-hard pads of chitin. Gushes of black fluid spurted from the wounds with ropes of slick, slime-covered intestines drooping from their open mouths.

Sachiel made some sort of strangled yelp – possibly a call for aid, or a warning to Arkio – and his hand flapped feebly at the creature’s claw. The Sanguinary Priest attempted to stab the beast with the acus placidus on his wristguard, but the steel needle could not penetrate the hard bony spines. A shiver ran though the daemon, and for a second Rafen saw a shimmer of pain in its eyes. The agony of its wounds was at last making its way to the thing’s tiny feral brain, enraging it even further.

Before he could react, the monster coiled all its movement into one lightning-fast spin, lashing out at the irritant beneath it. Arkio did not cry out when one of the creature’s blade-quills rammed through his armour. The yellow cartilage emerged from his shoulder with a mist of bright blood about it.

Rafen felt his stomach fill with ice; such a wound would surely be mortal, and his sibling’s life was measured now only in seconds. Rafen’s vision blurred crimson with a haze of hate and he bounded from cover, heedlessly racing at the creature. From the edge of his rational mind, something hot and black began to uncoil. The dark shadow of the gene-curse boiled up inside him, desperate for release. He bellowed an incoherent war cry, his bolter running red-hot as he emptied it into the beast. Rafen saw Arkio dead, cast aside in the mud, with the whirring chainsword still ticking over in his mailed grip. As lucidity threatened to flee from him, Rafen had a mirror-bright flash of memory of his father, on the day that he and Arkio had set off for Angel’s Fall and the place of challenge. Watch over the boy, Rafen. I ask nothing else of you. His father’s face seemed to flow and merge like mercury, shifting into that of the primarch, and Arkio.

Then the impossible became real before his eyes. Arkio rose in one swift motion from a puddle of rainwater and his own blood, apparently ignorant of the vital fluids that streaked his wargear or the black tear in his chest. With a single stab, he drove the sputtering, buzzing teeth of Sachiel’s weapon into the throat of the daemon-predator, and buried the weapon to its hilt. The gnashing blade severed the thing’s vocal chords and cut off its cries in mid-scream. Arkio rolled the weapon back through the beast’s gut and it came apart with a noise like ripping cloth. Organs and undigested pieces of men emptied on to the grass in wet heaps. The beast wheezed and died.

As quickly as it had appeared, Rafen’s rage abated, and he was at his brother’s side, holding him up. Arkio gave him a wan smile and wiped black gore from his face.

‘How could you…?’ Rafen began, words failing him. ‘The wound…’

Arkio face was pale with blood loss but his eyes were as hard as diamond. ‘Faith is my armour, brother. Sanguinius protects.’

‘By the grail, he speaks the truth!’ Sachiel approached them, favouring his injured flank. ‘Did you see him, Rafen? The Lord Primogenitor himself would have been proud to witness such bravery!’

Rafen said nothing and nodded. He was unable to draw his eyes away from his brother’s injury; the cut was deep and bloody, but where it should have torn open arteries and exposed his gory bones, the gash was wet with life, almost as if it were knitting together as he watched.

‘Arkio, you are touched!’ Sachiel added with a gleeful spark in his voice. But a seed of uneasiness was being lodged in Rafen’s heart.

The artificial flatlands of the starport, once drab and featureless, were now stained with thousands of gallons of blood in all shades of crimson, from the rust-brown of humans to the bright scarlet that coursed through the veins of the Adeptus Astartes, and the night-black slicks of ichor from the corrupted ones and their minions. Cybele’s grasslands, which for so long had consumed the flesh and bone of the Imperium’s war dead, were now dyed with the gore of those who fought upon its soil.

Surrounded by the ragged remains of his warband, Iskavan the Hated turned his too-wide mouth to the sky and screamed his rage at the dirty clouds. The sound of his anger cowed his men. It drowned out the constant impact of wreckage plunging from orbit. They were on the verge of losing the engagement to the Imperials, and it drove the Apostle into apoplexy.

At last he recovered enough to speak coherently, instead of hissing and spitting. ‘What ill-starred fate is this?’ he demanded of the night. ‘By the eight, we were promised victory this day!’ Almost the instant the words left his corpse-like lips, the Dark Apostle was turning on Tancred, his crozius humming loudly. ‘You.’ The Word Bearer champion loaded the word with absolute loathing and ire.

The torturer willed himself into stillness, terrified that even the slightest gesture would reveal the duplicity of his earlier prognostication.

‘You told me you saw success, Tancred,’ Iskavan’s voice hovered dangerously low. ‘Where is it?’ he growled. ‘Where is my victory?’

‘Th-the manner of the Empyrean cannot always be–’ the torturer fumbled at an excuse, but the Apostle backhanded him across the face.

‘Silence, pestilent fool!’ He pushed Tancred away and advanced on his men. ‘The eye take these subhuman dregs! We are the sons of Lorgar, bearers of the word!’ Raw fury blurred his features with an unholy psychic light. ‘We have lost our ships, our beasts and helots, but yet we still have our hate!’ Iskavan pointed his crozius at them. ‘Hate enough to choke the bloody mongrels of the carrion god!’

Iskavan expected the Word Bearers to roar back at him with hungry approval, but only silence greeted him. The Apostle was about to strike the nearest Traitor Marine dead for their intransigence when he suddenly realised why. A hooded form was walking through the unkempt lines, glittering with dark witch-fire.

‘Iskavan, my servant. Hear me.’ The voice it spoke with was a breath from a rotted tomb.

‘Warmaster Garand…’ For the briefest of instants, the Chaos champion’s face twisted in a sneer, but then he dropped to one knee and made the sign of the eightfold star. Without hesitation, the remainder of the Word Bearers mimicked his actions. The only sound was the thin keening of the accursed crozius. The weapon was nervous and afraid at the outpouring of ebon psi-energy that lapped about the hooded one’s body.

‘I would know your mind. Your intentions.’ Breathy and disordered, the speech seemed to come from the hazed air itself.

Iskavan could barely keep from spitting as he grated out a reply. ‘I intend no less than to fall on the man-beasts with the curse of great Lorgar on our lips! Kill and kill and not yield!’

‘No.’ The shock of the denial was so great that Iskavan actually dared to look up and into the stygian depths of the hood. A null void stared back at him. ‘You will leave this place. I command it.’

A vein throbbed in the Dark Apostle’s face. ‘Lord, I… You cannot! We are Word Bearers! We do not retreat! Not again!’

Malice hung in the air between them. ‘I must be mistaken. For a moment, I thought you had dared to question me, Apostle.’

Iskavan forced himself to be calm. ‘No, warmaster. The error was mine.’

‘Just so.’ The hooded figure shimmered, and for a moment it became ghostly and insubstantial. ‘Even now, your personal cruiser evades the mongrels to reach transport range of this world.’ It pointed a crooked finger toward the horizon. ‘Recover your teleport beacon and prepare to evacuate.’

‘My lord–’ began the Apostle, in one final, imploring entreaty.

‘Go now,’ the voice added as an afterthought. Then as suddenly as it had appeared, the figure dissolved into the dark, leaving a psyker-helot quivering in its place. The twisted slave had briefly hosted a fragment of the warmaster’s essence. But that fleeting contact had been enough to warp it into a mess of singed flesh.

Iskavan exploded with anger and roared, smashing the helot into bloody chunks with the crozius’s blades. ‘Tancred!’ he shouted, eyes afire. ‘Gather the men! As the Warmaster commands–’ he paused, the emphasis on Garand’s rank dripping venom, ‘–we quit this blighted place!’

And so as dawn crept over the forest of broken monuments, Cybele once more was a domain of the Imperium of man; but the blight of the Word Bearers’ filthy touch was on everything, from the earth itself to the scars that criss-crossed the orange-purple sky. Rafen returned from a sweep of the port with Alactus to find Sachiel ministering to Arkio. He was blessing the works of Lucion as the Techmarine fixed a ceramite patching solution over the gouges in his armour.

The priest ended his litany with a whisper of the primarch’s name and turned, as if noticing Rafen for the first time. ‘Brother,’ he began. ‘What of the enemy?’

For a moment, Rafen was at a loss for words. He spread his hands to indicate the silent battlefield around them. ‘Gone,’ he managed, at length.

Arkio grinned, his perfect white teeth showing through his dirt-coated face. ‘I knew it would be so! In my bones, I felt it!’

‘There’s nothing left but the dead and the dying… and us.’ Alactus noted. ‘We found a few helots here about, and they were dispatched without incident. They appear to have done our job for us, killing one another.’

Sachiel nodded. ‘I have word from the Bellus. Inquisitor Stele will reach orbit in a matter of hours.’

‘They live? Emperor be praised.’

‘Indeed,’ Sachiel continued. ‘The comrade inquisitor informed me that their long-range scanners detected the Dirge Eterna on a departure course. It seems we gave the sons of Lorgar a bloody nose that sent them scurrying back to the maelstrom!’

Rafen shook his head. ‘That… cannot be. The Word Bearers do not retreat. It is not their way…’ His jaw tightened. ‘Perhaps this is a ploy, honoured priest. They may have salted Cybele with munitions or some sort of delayed-action weapon–’

Sachiel’s lips twisted. ‘Rafen the Ready, always ready to find fault, eh?’ He took a step closer. ‘Can you not accept that perhaps our strength of arms was enough to drive them back? Must you belittle our victory even as we hold it in our hands?’

‘Strength of arms?’ He couldn’t keep the incredulous tone from his voice. ‘Tell me, Sachiel, did you take part in some other battle last night, and not the one where we were outnumbered fourfold by the Traitors? They had us on the brink, and then they let us live! Do you not wonder why?’

The Sanguinary Priest shook his head. ‘No, I do not, because my faith answers that question for me. Why did we win?’ He placed a hand on Arkio’s shoulder plate. ‘Victory came to us through the spirit of the Lord Sanguinius himself.’ He turned away from Rafen, dismissing him without a word, and addressed the rest of the ragged group of men. ‘Hear me, warriors of Baal, sons of the blood! This day you may meet the rising sun with pride and honour, as we drink deep and remember the fallen! Know this,’ he paused, drawing his grail from the drawstring pouch on his belt, ‘By the credo vitae, Sanguinius is watching over us, guiding our hands…’

Arkio came to his feet as Sachiel spoke, sparing his sibling a brief, troubled glance before he joined the other men in genuflection.

‘The primarch walks among us,’ Sachiel intoned, studying Arkio’s face. ‘He moves through our actions.’

Rafen considered Arkio for a long, leaden moment; it was subtle and almost invisible, but the Space Marine could see something changed in his younger brother’s manner. It was not the confidence, or the strength that he had grown into in maturity, but an unknowable shift in his eyes. There was a distance, a preoccupation with some inner conflict that he could only guess at.

Overhead, more trails of vapour from debris inched across the heavens, their feathered edges blurred into blades of white.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Deus Encarmine first published in Great Britain in 2004.
Deus Saguinius first published in Great Britain in 2005.
Red Fury first published in Great Britain in 2008.
Black Tide first published in Great Britain in 2010.
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o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.