And each was priceless – an artefact of unrivalled possibility.
‘It is done,’ the tech-adept said, and began to gather the data-slates, apparently unaware that no one was paying him any heed at all.
He turned to the melee in time to see the alien beast, its body a mess of burst wounds and both ovoid eyes left as ragged, fluid-weeping craters, cleave Variel’s leg at the knee with one of its few remaining limbs. A scythe of blackened bone, its bladed edge cracked and bleeding, chopped down in a lethal arc.
Ceramite armour shattered. The Astartes went down, his leg severed, and still he fired up at the horror drawing closer to slay him.
The death blow came from Talos. His armour a broken mess of claw-chopped metal plating, the prophet took another flailing limb strike to the side of the head in order to risk coming close enough to use his power sword. Lightning trembled along the golden blade as it sparked into life, even as the genestealer patriarch clashed a half-amputated sword-limb against the Night Lord’s helm. White-painted shards of his faceplate tore free, scattering across the metal decking like hailstones.
Talos was close enough now. With half of his face laid bare and bleeding from the creature’s last blow, he rammed the relic sword into the beast’s spine, plunging it two-handed through exoskeletal armour, toughened subdermal muscle flesh, and finally into vulnerable meat and severable bone.
A twist, a wrench, a curse and a pull. He sawed the sword left and right, foul-smelling blood welling up from the widening wound.
The alien shrieked again, acidic ichor spraying from its damaged teeth to rain upon Variel’s armour in hissing droplets. Talos gave his golden blade a final wrenching pull, and the beast’s head came free.
The creature collapsed. It twitched once or twice, the savage wounds across its body leaking sour fluids as well as dark blood. The smell, Septimus would later tell other slaves back aboard the ship, was somewhere between a charnel house and a butcher’s shop left open to the sun for a month. It broke through all air filters, clinging right to the sinuses.
Variel’s armour was pockmarked gunmetal-grey where the corrosive juices from the beast’s maw scored away his war plate’s paint. His severed leg wasn’t bleeding – the coagulants in Astartes blood were already working to seal the wound and scab it over. Any pain was dulled by his armour’s narcotic injectors dispensing stimulants and pain suppressors into his bloodstream.
Yet he growled a curse as he dragged himself away from the stilled beast, and swore in a language only he understood. Deltrian analysed the linguistic pattern. It was most likely a dialect of Badab – a tongue from Variel’s home world. The details were irrelevant.
Talos’s suit of armour was almost entirely stripped of colour, the acids and burning blood having blistered the ceramite and scorched the dark paint away. He regarded the creature’s steaming body, with half of his face visible due to the damage he’d taken to his helm.
The tech-adept saw the prophet scowl, and fire another bolter shell into the dead alien’s severed head. What remained of the genestealer’s skull vanished in an explosion of wet fragments that clacked off the walls, the floor and Talos’s own armour.
Septimus looked on, catching his breath. He knew repairing and repainting both of these ancient suits of battle plate was going to be a time-consuming process. He felt it was to his credit that he didn’t say so here, and busied himself holstering his Guard-issue laspistols, before leaning against the wall.
‘To hell with that,’ he breathed.
Deltrian watched this scene for exactly four point two seconds.
‘I said, “It is done”.’ He couldn’t keep the rising impatience from his tone. ‘May we leave now?’
X
When the Echo of Damnation pulled away from the hulk, the Shriek fell silent as plasma contrails misted the void behind the ship. Engines running, breathing the mist into space, the Echo tore away from the vast amalgamation of forgotten ships.
On the command throne, his armour still a grey and cracked ruin, Talos watched the occulus. It showed a slice of deep space – no more, no less.
‘How long ago did they leave the system?’ he asked. These were the first words he had uttered since returning and taking the throne. The answer came from one of the ageing human officers, still in his Imperial Navy uniform, albeit stripped of the Emperor’s insignia.
‘Just over two hours, my lord. The Salamander vessel was running dangerously hot. We think the Shriek unnerved them – they broke orbit and ran, rather than seek the signal’s source.’
‘They did not find the ship?’
‘They barely even looked, my lord. They withdrew their boarding teams and fled.’
Talos shook his head. ‘The sons of Vulkan are placid and slow, but they are Astartes and know no fear. Whatever sent them crawling from the system was a matter of grave import.’
‘As you say, my lord. What are your orders?’
Talos snorted. ‘Two hours is not an insurmountable head-start. Follow them. Make ready all Claws. Once we catch them, we will tear them from the warp and pick apart the bones of their ship.’
‘Compliance, master.’
The prophet allowed his eyes to drift closed as the ship rumbled into activity around him.
The Hall of Reflection housed what few relics remained to the warriors of Talos’s warband. In more glorious eras, such a chamber would have been a haven for prayer, for purification through meditation, and to witness the Legion’s history through the weapons and armour once borne and worn by its heroes.
Now, it served as something not quite a workshop, and not quite a graveyard. Deltrian was lord of the chamber, a haven where his will and word were law. Servitors worked at various stations, repairing pieces of armour, replacing the teeth-tracks of fouled chainswords, forging new bolter shells and creating the explosive innards.
And here, in ritually preserved stasis fields, the ornate sarcophagi of fallen warriors were mounted on marble pedestals, awaiting the moment they would be mounted in the bodies of dreadnoughts and sent to war once more. Several fluid-filled suspension tanks bubbled away, most empty – in need of flushing and scrubbing – and a few occupied by naked figures rendered indistinct by the milky, oxygen-rich amniotic fluids.
Deltrian had returned to his sanctum several minutes before, and was already inserting the data tablets into the sockets of his own cogitators, to drain the lore into his own memory banks. The doors to the Hall of Reflection remained open. Deltrian allowed the data transfer to occur unwatched, and instead waited for the guests he was expecting.
At last, they arrived. Twelve warriors, in a ragged line. Each of the dozen Astartes showed signs of recent and grievous battle. Each of them had survived a harrowing six further hours on board the hulk, fending off genestealers and hunting the accursed creatures back to their nests.
The Salamanders had done an admirable job in their purging, but had still lost a total of six warriors on board the Protean, thanks to the efforts of Vorasha and the Bleeding Eyes diverting wave after wave of xenos beasts into their section of the ship.
Six souls lost, six warriors fallen. It did not seem many, on the surface of things. The Night Lords had lost nine – all of them from the Bleeding Eyes. Lucoryphus seemed untroubled.
‘The weak fall, the strong rise,’ he’d said as they boarded the Echo of Damnation. Deltrian observed that this was as close to philosophy as the degenerate warrior had ever come. The Bleeding Eyes leader had no reply to that.
Deltrian watched the twelve Astartes enter the Hall of Reflection now. Each pair carried a great weight between them: the broken bodies of armoured Salamander warriors. One of the butchered warriors was carved with both surgical precision and gleeful brutality, slain by the Bleeding Eyes and earning the ignoble honour of being the first to fall. The others showed a vicious spread of genestealer wounds: punctured breastplates, sundered limb guards, crushed helms.
But nothing, Deltrian mused, that would be irreparable.
This haul, this sacred bounty in the blessed Machine-God’s name, was worth infinitely more than the lives of fourteen Night Lords. Deltrian caressed the draconic emblem of the Salamanders Chapter, embossed in black stone on one dead warrior’s pauldron. Such markings could be stripped, the armour itself modified and refashioned… the machine-spirits turned bitter and of more use to the VIII Legion.
Let the Night Lords spit and curse for now. He could see it in their black eyes: each one of them recognised the value of this haul, and each one hoped to be one of the elite few ordained to wear this holy armour once it was profaned and made ready.
Nine lives in exchange for the secrets of a Titan Legion and six suits of the most powerful armour created by mankind.
Deltrian always smiled, for that was how his skullish face was formed. Now, however, as he regarded his newfound riches, the expression was sincere.
‘I have seen a time when the Imperium can no longer breathe.
When Man’s empire chokes on its own corruption,
Poisoned by the filth and sin of five hundred deluded generations.
On that night, when madness becomes truth,
The Gate of Cadia will break open like an infected wound,
And the legions of the damned will spill into the kingdom they created.
In this age at the end of all things,
Born of forbidden blood and fate’s own foul humour,
Will rise the Prophet of the Eighth Legion.’
– ‘The Crucible Premonition’ recorded by an unknown VIII Legion sorcerer, M32
PROLOGUE
RAIN
The prophet and the murderess stood on the battlements of the dead citadel, weapons in their hands. Rain slashed in a miserable flood, thick enough to obscure vision, hissing against the stone even as it ran from the mouths of leering gargoyles, draining down the castle’s sides. Above the rain, the only audible sounds came from the two figures: one human, standing in broken armour that thrummed with static crackles; the other an alien maiden in ancient and contoured war plate, weathered by an eternity of scarring.
‘This is where your Legion died, isn’t it?’ Her voice was modulated by the helm she wore, emerging from the death mask’s open mouth with a curious sibilance that almost melted into the rain. ‘We call this world Shithr Vejruhk. What is it in your serpent’s tongue? Tsagualsa, yes? Answer me this, prophet. Why would you come back here?’
The prophet didn’t answer. He spat acidic blood onto the dark stone floor, and drew in another ragged breath. The sword in his hands was a cleaved ruin, its shattered blade severed halfway along its length. He didn’t know where his bolter was, and a smile crept across his split lips as he felt an instinctive tug of guilt. It was surely a sin to lose such a Legion relic.
‘Talos.’ The maiden smiled as she spoke, he could hear it in her voice. Her amusement was remarkable if only for the absence of mockery and malice. ‘Do not be ashamed, human. Everyone dies.’
The prophet sank to one knee, blood leaking from the cracks in his armour. His attempt at speech left his lips as a grunt of pain. The only thing he could smell was the copper stench of his own injuries.
The maiden came closer, even daring to rest the scythe-bladed tip of her spear on the wounded warrior’s shoulder guard.
‘I speak only the truth, prophet. There’s no shame in this moment. You have done well to even make it this far.’
Talos spat blood again, and hissed two words.
‘Valas Morovai.’
The murderess tilted her head as she looked down at him. Her helm’s crest of black and red hair was dreadlocked by the rain, plastered to her death mask. She looked like a woman sinking into water, shrieking silently as she drowned.
‘Many of your bitter whisperings remain occluded to me,’ she said. ‘You speak… “First Claw”, yes?’ Her unnatural accent struggled with the words. ‘They were your brothers? You call out to the dead, in the hopes they will yet save you?’
The blade fell from his grip, too heavy to hold any longer. He stared at it lying on the black stone, bathed in the downpour, silver and gold shining as clean as the day he’d stolen it.
Slowly, he lifted his head, facing his executioner. Rain showered the blood from his face, salty on his lips, stinging his eyes. He wondered if she was still smiling behind the mask.
On his knees, atop the battlements of his Legion’s deserted fortress, the Night Lord started laughing.
Neither his laughter nor the storm above were loud enough to swallow the throaty sound of burning thrusters. A gunship – blue-hulled and blackly sinister – bellowed its way into view. As it rose above the battlements, rain sluiced from its avian hull in silver streams. Heavy bolter turrets aligned in a chorus of mechanical grinding, the sweetest music ever to grace the prophet’s ears. Talos was still laughing as the Thunderhawk hovered in place, riding its own heat haze, with the dim lighting of the cockpit revealing two figures within.
The alien maiden was already moving. She became a black blur, dancing through the rain in a velvet sprint. Detonations clawed at her heels as the gunship opened fire, shredding the stone at her feet in a hurricane of explosive rounds.
One moment she fled across the parapets, the next she simply ceased to exist, vanishing into shadow.
Talos didn’t rise to his feet, uncertain he’d manage it if he tried. He closed the only eye he had left. The other was a blind and bleeding orb of irritating pain, sending dull throbs back into his skull each time his two hearts beat. His bionic hand, shivering with joint glitches and flawed neural input damage, reached to activate the vox at his collar.
‘I will listen to you, next time.’
Above the overbearing whine of downward thrusters, a voice buzzed over the gunship’s external vox-speakers. Distortion stole all trace of tone and inflection.
‘If we don’t disengage now, there won’t be a next time.’
‘I told you to leave. I ordered it.’
‘Master,’ the external vox-speakers crackled back. ‘I…’
‘Go, damn you.’
When he next glanced at the gunship, he could see the two figures more clearly. They sat side by side, in the pilots’ thrones. ‘You are formally discharged from my service.’ He slurred the words as he voxed them, and started laughing again. ‘For the second time.’
The gunship stayed aloft, engines giving out their horrendous whine, blasting hot air across the battlements.
The voice rasping over the vox was female this time. ‘Talos.’
‘Run. Run far from here, and all the death this world offers. Flee to the last city, and catch the next vessel off-world. The Imperium is coming. They will be your salvation. But remember what I said. We are all slaves to fate. If Variel escapes this madness alive, he will come for the child one night, no matter where you run.’
‘He might never find us.’
Talos’s laughter finally faded, though he kept the smile. ‘Pray that he doesn’t.’
He drew in a knifing breath as he slumped with his back to the battlements, grunting at the stabs from his ruined lungs and shattered ribs. Grey drifted in from the edge of his vision, and he could no longer feel his fingers. One hand rested on his cracked breastplate, upon the ritually broken aquila, polished by the rain. The other rested on his fallen bolter, Malcharion’s weapon, on its side from where he’d dropped it in the earlier battle. With numb hands, the prophet locked the double-barrelled bolter to his thigh, and took another slow pull of cold air into lungs that no longer wanted to breathe. His bleeding gums turned his teeth pink.
‘I’m going after her.’
‘Don’t be a fool.’
Talos let the
rain drench his upturned face. Strange, how a moment’s mercy let them believe they could talk to him like that. He hauled himself to his feet, and started walking across the black stone battlements, a broken blade in hand.
‘She killed my brothers,’ he said. ‘I’m going after her.’
I
THE LONGEST DREAM
‘Because we are brothers. We’ve seen primarchs die to blade and fire, and we’ve seen our actions set the galaxy aflame. We’ve betrayed others and been betrayed in kind. We’re bleeding for an uncertain future, fighting a war for the lies our lords tell us. What do we have left, if not blood’s loyalty? I am here because you are here. Because we are brothers.’
– Jago Sevatarion, ‘Sevatar’, the Prince of Crows
As quoted in The Tenebrous Path, chapter VI: Unity
The prophet’s eyes snapped open, bleaching his vision with the monochrome red of his tactical display. The familiarity was a comfort after the madness of the dream. This was how he’d seen the world around him for most of his life, and the dancing target locks following his gaze were a welcome extension of natural sight.
Already, the nightmare fled before him, elusive and thread-thin, unravelling as he sought to hold onto it. Rain on the battlements. An alien swordswoman. A gunship, shooting up the black stone.
No. It was gone. Shadows remained, images and sensations, nothing more.
That was happening more often, recently. The visions refused to stick with any tenacity, whereas once they’d melded to his memory. It seemed to be a side effect of their increasing frequency, though with no understanding of his gift’s genesis and function, he had no way of knowing the truth of the matter.
Talos rose from where he’d collapsed on the floor of his modest arming chamber and stood in silence, tensing his muscles, bunching them and rolling his neck, restoring circulation and checking the interface feeds of his armour. The ceramite suit of layered war plate – some of it ancient and unique, some of it plundered much more recently – whirred and growled in rhythm with his movements.
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