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  Xarl’s chainsword was a standard-issue Astartes weapon, incredibly tough and resistant to damage, with vicious serrated teeth honed to monomolecular points. But Aurum, the blade taken from a slain captain of the Blood Angels, was a relic of incredible potency. A standard power sword would sunder even an honourable blade like Xarl’s Executioner, and Aurum was closer to an artifact than a weapon. They duelled without the crackling blue fire of the power sword and the roaring whine of the chainblade.

  In a way, it was worse. Their movements reeked of training instead of true battle. Talos always felt the relative silence of sparring to be unnerving and unsatisfying, and it was times like this he dwelled most on how he had been gene-forged and bred for the battlefield. He was a weapon more than a man; never was it more obvious than in the moments of his disquiet.

  By mortal standards, it would have been considered a duel of the gods. The blades sliced the air faster than the human eye could follow, clash upon clash in a storm of relentless speed and force. Had any Astartes been witnessing the fight, they might have seen with a deeper clarity. Both warriors were plainly distracted, their thoughts elsewhere, obvious in every minute hesitation and flicker of the eyes.

  Around them, banks of human-sized passages formed into the arena walls had once housed a small army of combat servitors, engineered for practice and destined for destruction under the blades of the Astartes that came to hone their skills here. Such days were long past. The halls where the servitors had trundled from storage-engineering chambers beneath the arena were silent and lightless, another reminder of a time now gone forever.

  Talos felt his anger swell up as he leaned back and deflected a throat cut. Melancholy was not something that sat well with him. It was alien to his thoughts, yet of late it would cling there like it belonged.

  That made him angry. It felt like a vulnerability in his defences, a wound that wouldn’t heal.

  Xarl sensed the frustration in his brother’s blows, and as their deactivated swords locked again, Xarl leaned in close. Their faces – already similar due to the genetic enhancements that moulded their bodies – glared into one another with mirrored anger. The bitter gaze from their black eyes met as surely as the blades in their hands.

  ‘You’re losing your temper,’ he snarled at Talos.

  ‘I’m annoyed that I need to go easy on you because of the leg,’ Talos growled, nodding almost imperceptibly down at Xarl’s healing limb.

  In response, Xarl hurled his brother back with a laugh, disengaging with surprising grace for one who relied so often on fury to win his fights.

  ‘Do your worst,’ he said, smiling in the darkness. Like all areas of the Covenant of Blood restricted to the Astartes alone, the sparring chambers were utterly lightless. No hindrance at all to the dark eyes of the Nostramo-born, but in former days combat servitors had required night vision visors and aural enhancer sensors to aid with detecting movement.

  Talos came on again, his guard high as he executed a flawless series of two-handed cuts from the left designed to force Xarl onto his right leg more and more. He heard his brother’s pained grunts as he defended himself.

  ‘Keep it up,’ Xarl said, still not even breathing heavily despite the fact they’d been duelling at an inhuman pace for almost an hour. ‘Still need to get used to taking weight on this leg again.’

  Instead of pressing the attack, Talos stopped.

  ‘Hold,’ he said, raising a hand.

  ‘What? Why?’ Xarl asked, lowering Executioner. He looked around the silent, dark arena, seeing nothing but the empty rows of witness seats, hearing nothing but the dim growl of the ship’s orbital drives, smelling nothing but the sweat from their robed bodies and the faint tang of centuries of weapon oil. ‘I sense no one nearby.’

  ‘I saw Uzas kill Cyrion,’ Talos said, apropos of nothing.

  Xarl laughed. ‘Right. That’s good. Are we going to fight or not?’ In a moment of uncharacteristic concern, Xarl tilted his head to regard his brother. ‘Has your head not healed? I thought it was fine.’

  ‘I am not joking.’

  In the darkness, pierced with ease by the vision of one born on a sunless world, Xarl saw his brother’s black eyes regarding him without a trace of humour.

  ‘Are you speaking of your vision?’

  ‘You know I am.’

  ‘You saw wrong, Talos,’ Xarl said, spitting onto the decking. ‘Cyrion is easy to hate. He is corrupted in the worst of ways. But even a rabid fool like Uzas would never kill him.’

  ‘Cyrion is true to the Night Haunter,’ Talos said.

  Xarl snorted. ‘We’ve had this argument before. He is an Astartes that knows fear. That is as corrupt as can be imagined.’

  ‘He understands fear.’

  ‘Does he still hear the daemon warring within the Exalted?’

  Talos let the silence answer for him.

  ‘Exactly,’ Xarl nodded. ‘He can sense fear. That is unnatural. He is corrupted.’

  ‘He senses it. He does not feel it himself.’

  Xarl looked down at his chainsword, silent in deactivation. ‘Semantics. He has been corrupted by the Ruinous Ones, as surely as Uzas has. But they are still brothers, and I trust them – for now.’

  ‘You trust Uzas?’ Talos tilted his head, curious now.

  ‘We are First Claw,’ Xarl answered, if that justified everything. ‘At least the corruption within Uzas is visible. Cyrion is the dangerous one, brother.’

  ‘I have spoken to Cyrion about this many times,’ Talos warned, ‘and I tell you, you’re wrong.’

  ‘We’ll see. Tell me of this vision.’

  Talos pictured again the sight of Uzas, an axe in hand, moving over the rubble of a shattered building, leaping at Cyrion as he lay prone. He explained it to Xarl now, as faithfully as he could, omitting nothing. He spoke of the blaring war horns of the Titans above and the dusty grey stone of the fallen buildings, still magma red in places where the rock had been cooked by the towering god-machines’ guns. He described the fall of the axe, the way it hooked into Cyrion’s neck joint, and the blood that flowed in the moments after.

  ‘That does sound like Uzas,’ Xarl said at length. ‘A vicious kill, and perfectly made against helpless prey. I am no longer so sure this was a foolish joke of yours.’

  ‘He despises Cyrion,’ Talos pointed out. He moved to the side of the arena, where Aurum’s sheath rested against the metal wall. ‘But I have been wrong before,’ he said over his shoulder.

  Xarl shook his head again. He looked more thoughtful than Talos had ever seen him, which was disquieting purely for its unfamiliarity. It occurred to him for the first time that perhaps Xarl was one of those that invested great faith in his prophetic curse. He seemed almost… unnerved.

  ‘When?’ Xarl said, ‘A handful of times in how many years? No, brother. This has the stench of unwelcome truth to it.’

  Talos said nothing. Xarl surprised him by speaking more.

  ‘We all trust you. I don’t like you, brother – you know that. It is not easy to like you. You are self-righteous and you take risks as foolish as the Exalted sometimes. You assume you lead First Claw, yet were never promoted above any of us. All you were was an Apothecary, yet you act like our sergeant now. By the False Throne, you act like the Captain of 10th Company. I have a hundred reasons to dislike you, and they are all valid. But I trust you, Talos.’

  ‘Good to know,’ Talos said as he sheathed the blade and stood once more.

  ‘When were you last wrong?’ Xarl pressed. ‘Humour me. When was the last time one of your auguries went awry?’

  ‘A long time ago,’ Talos said. ‘Seventy years, perhaps. On Gashik, the world where it never stopped raining. I dreamed we would see battle against the Imperial Fists, but the planet remained defenceless.’

  Xarl scratched at his cheek, musing.

  ‘Seventy years. You’ve not been wrong in almost a century. But if Cyrion does die, and you were right that he isn’t corrupt, we could use his proge
noid glands to gene-forge another Astartes in his place. No loss.’

  Talos considered drawing the blade again. ‘The same could be said for the death of any one of us.’

  Xarl raised an eyebrow. ‘You’d harvest Uzas’s gene-seed?’

  ‘Point taken.’ And it was. Talos would sooner burn that biological matter into ash before he saw it implanted within another Night Lord.

  Xarl nodded, clearly distracted as Talos carried on. ‘If this comes to pass, I will kill Uzas.’

  Talos wasn’t even sure he heard him.

  ‘I will think on this,’ Xarl replied, and without another word, he walked from the arena, descending into the deeper darkness of the ship. After the awkwardness of the brotherly candour a moment before, this was much more like the Xarl Talos had grown to tolerate – stalking off in silence, keeping his counsel to himself.

  Caught between the desire to follow Xarl and seek out Cyrion, Talos was denied the choice a moment later.

  Thudding footsteps drew his attention as another figure emerged at the first tier of witness seats. Lightning-marked armour, too bulky even for Astartes war-plate.

  ‘Prophet,’ said Champion Malek of the Atramentar.

  ‘Yes, brother.’

  ‘Your presence is required.’

  ‘I see.’ Talos didn’t move. ‘Inform the Exalted I am currently engaged in my meditations, and will attend him in three hours.’

  The sound of a rockslide avalanche rumbled from the hound-like helm of Malek’s Terminator armour. Talos assumed it was a chuckle.

  ‘No, prophet, it is not the Exalted that demands your presence.’

  ‘Then whom?’ Talos asked, his fingertips stroking the sheathed hilt of Aurum at his hip. ‘No one demands my attention, Malek. I am no slave.’

  ‘No? No one? And what if the presence of the Night Lord prophet was demanded by Abaddon of the Black Legion?’

  Talos swallowed, neither scared nor worried, but instantly on edge. This changed things.

  ‘The Warmaster wishes to speak with me,’ he said slowly, as if unsure he heard correctly.

  ‘He does. You are to be ready within the hour, along with First Claw. Two of the Atramentar will accompany you.’

  ‘I need no honour guard. I will go alone.’

  ‘Talos,’ Malek growled. Talos still looked up at him. None of the Atramentar had ever used his name before, and he felt a terrible gravity within the use of it now.

  ‘I am listening, Malek.’

  ‘This is not the time to stand alone, brother. Take First Claw. And do not argue when Garadon and I also stand with you. This is a show of strength as surely as the Exalted’s tactics in the void war.’

  It took several seconds, but Talos finally nodded. ‘Where is this meeting taking place?’

  Malek held up a massive power fist, his Terminator armour clanking and the servo-driven joints snarling as he moved. Four blades slashed from his knuckles, each one as long as a mortal man’s arm. At a command word Talos didn’t hear, the lightning claws lived up to their name, becoming wreathed in a crackling power field that brought stark, viciously flickering light to the blackness of the arena.

  ‘Solace,’ Malek replied. ‘The Warmaster walks the surface of his most recently conquered world, and we are to meet him there.’

  ‘The Black Legion,’ Talos said after a few moments, a dark little smirk crossing his features. ‘The Sons of Horus, with a heritage of treachery as great as their fallen father.’

  ‘Aye, the Black Legion.’ Malek’s claws slid back into their housing on the back of his massive armoured fists, locked until reactivation. ‘Which is why we are going in midnight clad.’

  The surface of Solace was the mixed, dusty red-brown of old scabs and burned flesh. It was an ugly world in all respects, even down to the taste of the air. Because of intense volcanic activity raging across the southern hemisphere for centuries, the myriad mountain ranges breathing fire into the atmosphere left the thin air tasting of ash across the planet.

  The spires of the penal colonies were no easier on the eyes than anything else on the surface: towers of red stone, clawed and brutish, jutting like broken blades from natural mountain formations. The Gothic architecture so beloved of many Imperial worlds was in evidence here, but in its crudest and most unskilled execution. Whoever designed the prison spires of Solace – if indeed any real design had taken place at all – knew all too well how the world would be home to souls that barely counted as part of the Imperium. His prejudice against the prisoners that were destined to come to this world and rot under its dull skies was all too obvious in the architecture.

  The Night Lord Thunderhawk Blackened streaked across the weatherless sky, its pilot adjusting thrust output as the gunship broke from orbital to atmospheric flight.

  ‘On approach,’ Septimus said, easing back on one of the several levers that handled the gunship’s thrust. In the creaking control chair, which was obviously made for a larger pilot, he clicked a cluster of switches and watched the vivid green hololithic terrain display – updated every few seconds from auspex returns. Altitude dropping gently, speed falling, he spoke without taking his eyes from the console’s displays.

  ‘Internment Spire Delta Two, this is the VIII Legion Thunderhawk Blackened. We are on southern approach. Respond.’

  Silence greeted his attempts at communication.

  ‘What now?’ he asked, over his shoulder.

  Talos, armoured and armed, standing behind the pilot’s throne, shook his head. ‘Don’t bother repeating the hail. The Black Legion is hardly noted for excellence in re-establishing infrastructures upon the worlds it conquers.’

  Cyrion was making final reverent checks over his bolter. ‘And we are?’

  Talos didn’t turn to his brother. In the spacious cockpit, where all of First Claw stood behind Septimus and Eurydice in the pilot and co-pilot thrones, Talos watched the thin, dusty red mist breaking apart over the front windows as they closed in on their destination.

  ‘We do not conquer worlds,’ Talos replied. ‘Our mandate is not the same as theirs, nor is our ultimate aim.’

  Keeping himself out of their debate, Septimus waited until he was sure they would say no more. ‘Five minutes, master. I’ll bring us down on the spire-top landing platform.’

  ‘Your flying is improving, slave.’ It was Xarl who stepped forward, resting a gauntleted hand on the back of Septimus’s chair. There was nothing comforting in the gesture. Septimus could see their reflections in the viewscreen. All without their helms – Talos, handsome and stern; Cyrion, weary with a half-smile; Xarl sneering and bitter; and Uzas, dead-eyed and licking his teeth as he stared at nothing in particular.

  And Eurydice. He noticed her reflection last, still unused to her presence. She met his eyes in the reflection on the cockpit window, and offered him an expressionless glance that could have meant anything. Her hair, scruffy and chestnut brown, framed her face in choppy locks. The iron strip still concealed her third eye, and Septimus often found himself wondering just what it would look like.

  She wore the ragged, dark blue jacket and trousers of the Legion’s serfs, though getting her into the loose uniform had been no easy feat. She’d only relented to Septimus’s insistence when he pointed out how bad she smelled still wearing the same clothes they’d captured her in weeks before.

  They hadn’t branded her, yet. The tattoo beneath his clothes that covered his shoulder blades itched as if in sympathy with his thoughts. A winged skull, in black ink mixed with Astartes blood.

  If she gave her allegiance – if she survived – she’d be branded soon enough.

  Ahead of them, the thin mist parted to reveal a clawed cluster of peaks, topped by a spire that could only be their destination. Talos and the others reached for their helms, sealing them in place. Septimus was familiar with the differences between them, as familiar to him as their natural faces. Cyrion’s helm was older than the other death masks, a mark II design with narrowed eyes and an almost knightl
y aesthetic. He wore few trophies, but his armour was decorated in great detail with jagged bolts of blue-white lightning. Twin storm bolts streaked from his ruby eye lenses like forked tears.

  In contrast, Xarl’s helm was the newest – a mark VII piece, taken from a recent engagement with the Dark Angels. He’d ordered one of the few remaining artificers to modify it, with a hand-painted daemonic skull covering the faceplate. He displayed trophies with relish and pride: alien and human skulls hanging from chains across his armour, scrolls of past deeds draped across his shoulder pads.

  Uzas wore a grim-faced mark III helm, the paintwork crudely done with little care. Stark against the dark blue was a red palm print with splayed fingers, done with his own hand dipped in blood and pressed against the helm’s face.

  Talos’s helm, a studded mark V design freshly repaired by his servant’s craftsmanship, featured a skulled face of creamy bone, with a Nostraman rune branded black into the forehead. When Septimus had been reshaping the helm on the artificer deck of the Covenant, Eurydice had asked what the sigil meant.

  ‘It’s like “in midnight clad”,’ he said, repainting the bone face with both reverence and the ease of familiarity. ‘It doesn’t translate well into Low Gothic.’

  ‘I’m getting tired of hearing that.’

  ‘Well, it’s true. Nostramo was a world of high politics and a complicated underworld that infested all layers of society. The tongue has its roots in High Gothic, but much had changed through generations of unique phrasing by faithless, trustless, peaceless people.’

  ‘Trustless and peaceless aren’t words.’ Despite herself, she smiled, watching him work. She was growing used to his stumbling attempts to speak the universal tongue.

  ‘My point stands,’ Septimus said, painting bone white around the left eye lens. ‘Nostraman is, by Gothic standards, very grand and overly poetic.’

  ‘Gangsters like to think of themselves as cultured,’ she said with a curl to her lip. To her surprise, he nodded.

  ‘From what I gather of Nostraman history, yes, that’s the conclusion I draw as well. The language became very… I don’t know the word.’