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  ‘What did you say, my prophet?’ the Exalted asked, purring the way a contented lion might.

  ‘You,’ Talos pointed up at the altered figure with Aurum, ‘are insane.’

  The ship shivered under the attentions of Imperial guns. No one paid attention, except for the mortal crew at their stations that ringed the unfolding scene between their masters.

  The Exalted licked its fangs. ‘And by what leap of the imagination do you arrive at such a conclusion, Talos?’

  ‘There was no need for such risks. I heard about Fifth Claw.’

  ‘Yes, a shame.’

  ‘A shame?’ Talos almost went for his bolter. His hesitation was evident in his body language, for Malek of the Atramentar stepped forward. Both Cyrion and Xarl raised their bolters and aimed at the elite guards either side of the throne. Uzas did nothing, though they all heard the chuckling from his helm speakers.

  ‘Yes,’ the Exalted said, utterly unfazed by the standoff. ‘A shame.’

  ‘We lost five Astartes in a single operation. For the first time in millennia, 10th Company is below half-strength. We have never been so weak.’

  ‘10th Company,’ the Exalted smirked, preening and condescending. ‘10th Company has not existed for millennia. We are the warband of the Exalted. And this night, we have earned much honour in the eyes of the Warmaster.’

  The confrontation would change nothing. Talos lowered his blade, letting his anger bleed from him like corruption from a lanced boil. He buried the urge to blood his sword with the life fluids of the Exalted. Sensing the change in him, Cyrion and Xarl lowered their bolters. Champion Malek of the Atramentar stepped back into position, his tusked helm watching impassively.

  ‘Fifth Claw is no more,’ Talos said more quietly. ‘We are in dire need of recruitment. We cannot function for long with barely forty Astartes.’

  He let the unwelcome words hang. Every one of them knew the decades of attention and effort recruitment would require. To sustain a company’s fighting strength, it needed a great deal of materiel and expertise to gene-forge new Astartes from prepubescent male infants. The Covenant of Blood lacked almost all of what would be required, which was why no recruitment had been done since the Great Betrayal. The remains of 10th Company had been fighting with the same warriors since the Horus Heresy.

  ‘Change is inevitable,’ the Exalted growled. ‘The Shaper of Fate is with us, and it knows the truth of this.’ At those words, the Atramentar both nodded their heavy helms in respect. Uzas grunted a monosyllabic sound that could have been respect or pleasure. Talos felt his skin crawl, and his dark eyes narrowed.

  ‘Who are we to answer the demands of the Ruinous Ones? We are the Night Lords, the sons of the eighth primarch. We are our own masters.’

  ‘The Shaper of Fate demands nothing,’ the Exalted said. ‘You do not understand.’

  ‘I have no wish to understand the entities you are enslaved to.’

  The Exalted smiled, patently false, and waved a clawed gauntlet. ‘I am tired of reminding you, Talos. I control this. Now leave before First Claw joins Fifth in no longer existing.’

  Talos shook his head at the threat, disgusted it had even been made, and smiled back before stalking from the strategium.

  Once they were outside the bridge, Cyrion voxed to Talos. ‘He is worse than before.’

  ‘As if that was possible.’

  ‘No, brother. His fear. I can feel it boiling beneath his skin. He is losing the fight with the daemon that shares his body.’

  Septimus and Eurydice were still in the port hangar bay.

  The Thunderhawk Blackened sat on its landing pad, occasional jets of pressurised steam venting from its ports as the raptor-like gunship cooled. The boosters at the rear of the troop-carrying attack ship matched the gunship’s name, the engine exhausts charred from decades of orbital and sub-orbital flight. Septimus was diligent in ensuring Blackened remained in as good a condition as could be expected, but he was an artificer first and foremost, not a tech-priest. His skills lay in repairing and maintaining the master’s weapons, not keeping an ancient gunship flying.

  Eurydice watched the slave as he sat on the deck of the landing bay in the shadow of the Thunderhawk, turning his master’s skull-faced helm over in his hands.

  ‘This,’ he said to himself, ‘is not going to be easy.’

  It was a miracle the helm hadn’t come to pieces: it was severely dented on the left side where Talos’s head had smashed into the edge of the breached wall once the vacuum had pulled First Claw into space. Eurydice said nothing. She was still unnerved by the shaking of the ship, and replayed the last hour over and over within her mind. Powering up the Thunderhawk… Taking it out into the middle of an orbital battle… Throne, this place was insane.

  Septimus looked up at her, his jade eyes narrowed. She wondered if his thoughts matched her own. As it happened, they did.

  ‘It’s not always that bad,’ he said without a smile.

  She grunted what might have been an agreement. ‘Is it ever worse?’

  ‘Often,’ Septimus nodded. ‘If you think the Astartes are bad, wait until we go to the crew decks.’

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t want to know.

  Septimus held up the oversized helm once more. ‘I should get started on this.’ But he didn’t move. He was lingering, she knew.

  Finally, she bit. ‘You’re not allowed to leave me alone.’

  ‘The only way you may leave my presence is if one of us is dead.’

  Her forehead, and her permanently sealed third eye, ached with sudden ferocity. It felt as though her warp-gaze sought to stare through the steel and slay the foolish, cocky slave before her.

  ‘I hate it here,’ she said, before she even realised she was going to speak.

  ‘We all hate it here,’ he nodded again, speaking slowly, and not just because of his awkward Gothic. He spoke as if stating the obvious to a slow child. ‘We all hate it here, more or less. We are worthless to them. They are demigods.’

  ‘There are no gods but the Emperor,’ Eurydice sneered.

  Septimus laughed at that, and his casual blasphemy grated against her. ‘You are a heretic.’ She said the words softly, but unpleasantly.

  ‘As are you, now. Do you think the forces of the Throne would welcome you after even a short time on board a Traitor Astartes vessel?’ His humour faded. ‘Open your eyes, Navigator. You are as ruined as the rest of us, and this ship,’ he gestured at the dimness of the launch bay around them, ‘is your home now.’

  She drew breath to argue, and he held up a hand, cutting her off.

  ‘Enough arguing. Listen to me.’

  He let the skullish helm rest on his lap as he scratched the back of his neck. ‘This is the 10th Company of the VIII Legion. Thousands of years ago, they would have had serfs and servitors and Astartes enough that me taking a relic Thunderhawk out into the black would have been punishable by death. They lack resources, including the souls to serve them.’

  ‘A fitting fate,’ Eurydice smiled coldly. ‘They’re traitors.’

  ‘You think that smirk you wear hides your fear.’ He met her eyes and stared for several moments. ‘It doesn’t. Not from me – and definitely not from them.’

  The smile left her face as quickly as it had arrived.

  ‘I don’t deny that they are heretics,’ Septimus continued, ‘but let me put it another way. Have you ever heard of Lok III?’

  She reluctantly moved to join him, seated on the Thunderhawk’s gang ramp in the gloom of the spacious hangar bay. Across the cavernous area, other Thunderhawks sat idle and silent, untouched in years. Decades, perhaps. Cargo trucks and munitions loaders sat equally lifeless. Fifty metres away, a lone servitor lay slack and unmoving on its back, its grey skin rendered greyer by the touch of dust. It looked like it had lost power and collapsed, left there to decay in the presence of these venerable war machines. Eurydice couldn’t take her eyes from the corpse. Its skin was withered and drawn tight agains
t its bones, almost mummified, though actual decomposition was probably delayed because of the machine parts fighting off decay in the organic sections that remained.

  She shivered. It was all too easy to see how this ship was a hollow image of itself.

  ‘No,’ she said at length, taking grim comfort in his body heat as she sat next to him. The Covenant was so cold. ‘I’ve never heard of Lok III.’

  ‘Not much to hear of,’ he admitted, then lapsed into silence, thinking.

  ‘I’ve not seen much of the galaxy,’ she said. ‘Syne kept most of our prospecting runs within a handful of sectors to save on journey costs. Also, I…’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘My family, House Mervallion, is on the lowest tier of the Navis Nobilite. I think Syne was worried about pushing me too hard. Worried his Navigator was of… poor quality.’

  Septimus nodded, with a knowing look in his eyes Eurydice didn’t like. When she expected him to comment on her confession, he merely cut back to his previous line of conversation.

  ‘Lok III is far distant, close to the region of space known to Imperial records as Scarus Sector.’

  ‘Half the galaxy away.’

  ‘Yes. I was born there. It wasn’t a forge world, but it was close. Manufactories covered the planet, and I worked as a hauler pilot, ferrying cargo to and from the orbital docks down to the manufactorum that employed me.’

  ‘That’s… nice.’

  ‘No, it was boring beyond words. My point should be obvious. Yes, I’m considered a heretic because of my allegiance. Yes, I am indentured to traitors who make war upon the Throne of Terra. And yes, there’s darkness within this ship that hungers for our blood. But I see things in a realistic light. What I have now is better than death. And once you learn how to walk in the dark places here… it’s almost safe. It’s almost a real life.

  ‘I lived a life of repetition – another tiny cog in a vast, dull existence. But this? This is different. Every week will bring something new, something incredible, something that takes my breath away. Rarely in a good way, I confess.’

  She looked at him. He was serious.

  ‘You’re serious,’ she said, for lack of anything else to say.

  ‘I am. As an artificer and a pilot, I’m given a great deal of freedom on the ship. I am valued.’

  ‘A valuable slave.’

  He narrowed his eyes as he looked at her. ‘I am trying to keep you alive. If you don’t adapt to this existence, your life ends. It’s that simple.’

  After a long pause, she asked, ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘I suspect you think that’s a very insightful and cutting remark.’ Septimus gestured around the hangar bay again. ‘Of course I am not happy. I am a slave to heretical demigods, and I live on a vessel touched by indescribable darkness. The mortal crew lives in fear of the things that stalk the ship’s lightless decks, and those things are not always the Astartes.’

  Septimus chuckled after he said the words, the sound low and devoid of mirth. In his hands, the skull helm grinned up at them both.

  ‘So how did they take you?’ Eurydice asked.

  Septimus didn’t look up from the helm. ‘They attacked Lok III. I was originally taken to serve as a pilot, and the hyp… hypno–’

  ‘Hypnotic?’

  ‘Hypnotic. Yes.’ Septimus spoke the word a few more times as if tasting it. ‘I’m not sure if I forgot that word, or just never knew it. As I said, Gothic was never my first language. But the process was agony. They teach through mental conditioning and hypnotic implantation programs that burn information directly into the mind. That is why I can fly a Thunderhawk – though even after a decade, not with the skill of a true Astartes pilot.’

  She scanned the hangar bay again, imagining how it would look as it should have been: a hive of industry and activity, crew running here and there, servitors and munitions loaders rattling and clanking across the rune-marked floor, the howling of turbines as gunships roared in the moments before launch.

  It must have been so impressive. It was, she hated to admit it, close to what she’d hoped for herself: guiding the vessels of the Astartes across the stars.

  ‘He has you fixing his armour now,’ she said, looking back to Septimus. ‘Is that a demotion?’

  ‘Technically, a promotion. Artificers are the most respected serfs in a Legion’s armoury.’

  She laughed, the sound alien and echoing in the hollow hangar bay.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ he asked.

  ‘You’re not exactly up to your neck in respect.’

  ‘You only say that,’ he smiled, ‘because you have not seen everything, Octavia.’

  ‘Why do you call me that?’

  ‘Because I am the seventh of my master’s servants. And you are the eighth.’

  ‘Not likely.’

  ‘Already your defiance is fading. I hear it in your voice.’

  ‘You’re imagining it.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’ He rose to his feet, the broken helm in his hands. ‘Because if I am, you’ll be dying very soon.’

  As Talos confronted the Exalted, and as Septimus spoke with Eurydice, the last vestiges of the orbital battle played out to their inevitable conclusion. Battlefleet Crythe was annihilated, and the few surviving vessels that managed to flee into the warp are of no further relevance to this record, though most distinguished themselves in their own ways when they merged with other sector battlefleets.

  Consolidation came next.

  The Warmaster’s forces had destroyed the Imperial Navy presence in the area, and his fleet hung in the atmospheric reaches above the penal world, Solace. The insignia displayed by the vessels of his gathered fleet were myriad. The slitted Eye of Horus marked a full seven Black Legion vessels – a massive portion of their mighty fleet – while the fanged skull of the Night Lords was evident on both the Covenant of Blood and its much larger sister ship already among the fleet, the battle-barge Hunter’s Premonition. The majority of the fleet was made up of bulk transports carrying legions of the lost and the damned: Imperial Guard and planetary defence forces that had turned traitor and sworn allegiance to the Warmaster’s cause across recent campaigns. All in all, the Warmaster came to Crythe with the capacity to unleash over two thousand Traitor Astartes and more than a million human soldiers. Pride of place within the fleet was given to the vast hulks belonging to Legio Frostreaver, once of the Mechanicum of Mars. A full Titan Legion at the Warmaster’s beck and call, numbering almost a dozen god-machines of varying classes.

  Such a Chaos fleet was rarely seen outside of the Warmaster’s holy wars against the Emperor’s worlds, and word of this gathering of the Archenemy spread throughout the nearby Imperial planets, with fearful talk of a new Black Crusade in the Despoiler’s name.

  With Solace fallen and the Navy crushed, the war for the Crythe Cluster was only just beginning. Long-range scanners told a grim tale, unnerving even for the captains of this lethal battlefleet. The forge world, Crythe Prime, remained ringed by a vast fleet answering to the Adeptus Mechanicus, which had steadfastly refused to answer Battlefleet Crythe’s hails for help. Curiously, the Marines Errant vessel Severance had withdrawn to Crythe Prime to side with the Mechanicum instead of fighting and dying with the Imperial Navy.

  Time was of the essence, and every officer in the Warmaster’s fleet knew it. The Imperium of Man would answer this aggression with fury of its own, and alongside Naval reinforcements, Imperial Guard and Astartes armies would be en route from the moment the first astropathic cries for aid had been sent by the beleaguered Battlefleet Crythe.

  The Covenant of Blood pulled close to its kin-ship, the powerful battle-barge Hunter’s Premonition. The larger ship had been one of the Legion’s flagships before the scattering of the Night Lords over the centuries, and it was an awe-inspiring sight to those who hadn’t gazed upon an example of their Legion’s strength in many years. Even the Exalted, though he was loath to admit it, felt moved by the sight of the princely vessel, a lance of
midnight blue edged in gold and bronze.

  He wanted it. He wanted command of that vessel, and all upon the deck saw that need burning in his obsidian eyes.

  The destruction of Battlefleet Crythe was not the only reason the Warmaster had ordered Solace taken first. Just as important as the death of the orbital defenders was the preservation of the population below. Had Lord Admiral Valiance Arventaur been more familiar with the Archenemy – instead of spending most of his career fighting eldar raiders – he might have turned the guns of his beloved Sword of the God-Emperor on Solace itself, destroying the population centres of the penal world and denying the Warmaster his prize. Ultimately, this would have done much more to save the Crythe Cluster.

  But, of course, he had not. He had died with a sword in his heart, whispering incoherent curses at his murderer.

  The Chaos fleet hung in space around a world with almost a million prisoners: rapists, murderers, heretics, thieves, mutants and criminals of a thousand other stripes – all held in appalling conditions and discarded by an Imperium that loathed them for their deviance.

  Within the hour, while the hulks of Battlefleet Crythe were still flaming wrecks in space, the Warmaster’s troopships began their landing. On the surface, hundreds of thousands of potential new warriors watched the skies burn, staring up through the windows of their cells as deliverance – and freedom – came for them.

  VII

  THE SURFACE OF SOLACE

  ‘‘Talos. The prophet of the Night Lords. Bring him to me.’

  – Abaddon the Despoiler

  Commander of the Black Legion,

  Warmaster of Chaos

  Talos and Xarl locked blades.

  The sparring chamber was, like most of the Covenant, a shadow of its former activity. In the centre of the chamber, which was tiered and inclined much like a gladiatorial arena, the two Astartes duelled alone, Talos’s deactivated power sword clashing against Xarl’s stilled chainblade. With respect to the weapons’ machine-spirits, the brothers practised with their own swords instead of practice blades, but kept them unpowered.