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  Like the avatars of the Machine-God that they were, the great engines of Legio Maledictis strode across the plains, towering above Rollumos’s own pedestrian, humble, insignificant accomplishments. Oftentimes he would ascend the gantries when only menials were present, and run a mechadendrite across the armour of an inactive Titan, his inner processors generating picts of himself working on a god-machine, striving to bring forth the soul of the engine from its silent bulk.

  Tormented by his own position in the Legio’s hierarchy, at least he hid his displeasure from the unblinking eyes of his more respected brethren. That was cold comfort, but enough to keep his shame hidden.

  It was no matter that this hierarchical deceit placed him within harm’s way. His body was significantly enhanced to deal with the kind of threats faced by tech-guard infantry, and he had no worries of sustaining personal harm.

  And yet, this deceit was one he came to regret in the final minutes of his life.

  They were dropping Astartes into his regiments.

  Astartes. Entire squads of them. A night-dark drop-pod lashed groundward, pounding into the plain some five hundred and eleven metres from where he stood, deep within a phalanx of his favoured skitarii.

  Rollumos cogitated their allegiance. The winged skull symbol. The forks of lightning inscribed upon their armour. The… immediate and total viciousness of their assault, bolters discharging and blades hewing into precious augmented skitarii flesh.

  Night Lords. This was not optimal.

  As Rollumos directed a greater number of his soldiers in the direction of this closest pod and its troublesome burden, the first regrets were just beginning to sink in. These regrets reached their peak – and ended abruptly – exactly seven minutes and nine seconds later.

  ‘Kill,’ Uzas voxed to First Claw. He wasn’t even out of breath. ‘Target slain.’

  Uzas raised Rollumos’s metal head in one hand, like a primitive tribesman bearing the skull of a murdered foe. The tech-guard around him shrank back as he howled.

  ‘Who’s next?’ Cyrion asked. The others heard the pounding of weapons against his armour transmitted over the vox. ‘I’m already bored of this.’

  ‘Skitarii Captain Tigrith,’ Talos answered. ‘Look for banners. Further north.’

  First Claw returned to the Covenant of Blood nine hours later.

  Septimus and Octavia were waiting for them in the hangar bay, both mortals dressed in their Legion serf uniforms. The Thunderhawk bringing them back was Nightfall, one of the only other gunships still functional within 10th Company. Two other squads disembarked first. First Claw came last, and Octavia swore softly under her breath.

  Almost ten hours of solid fighting at the front line had taken a clear toll. Cyrion’s arm was limp and unmoving, the hastily-attached augmetic limb having given out hours before under the relentless demands of battle. Xarl’s collection of skulls hanging from his armour was reduced to no more than scarce fragments of bone dangling on a few remaining chains. Uzas and Mercutian both bore horrendous damage to their battle armour: las-burns had carved blackened furrows through the ceramite or burned it black on deflected impact; huge axes and chainblades had chopped the images of their edges into the dark plate elsewhere.

  Adhemar was bareheaded, his face decorated with bloody cuts, already scabbed and sealing with his enhanced physiology.

  Talos was the last to leave the Thunderhawk. The defiled Imperial eagle upon his chestpiece sported some intriguing new desecrations. One wing was now severed by a blade’s impact, unjoined to the rest of the image, and the eagle’s ivory-white body was black – charred by a flame weapon was Septimus’s guess. Talos’s right hand was locked into a curled claw, rigid and unmoving. Evidently, the gauntlet had finally failed, and would need a great deal of care in its repair.

  Septimus noticed two things immediately, the first of which was how much effort it was going to take to repair Talos’s armour. The second made his blood run cold.

  ‘Where’s his gun?’ Octavia asked. She’d noticed it, too.

  ‘I lost it,’ Talos said as First Claw strode past.

  ‘Lord, where are you going?’ Septimus said.

  ‘To see the tech-priest, and the 10th Captain.’

  Deltrian attended to Malcharion personally.

  The damage he’d sustained in the desecration of the Hall of Remembrance was almost fully repaired, though several joint-motors within his upper body were still functioning at half-capacity, their systems untested at full power.

  Although it wounded him with secret shame to adopt such a human reaction to his injuries, he cursed Vraal each time his diminished physical aptitude caused an adjustment in his motion and movement.

  The tech-adept and several of his servitors worked on the Dreadnought’s hull, resealing, repairing, amending and reshaping. The Hall of Remembrance echoed with the sounds of maintenance.

  Talos had greeted Deltrian formally upon entering, but quickly lapsed into vox conversation with the ancient warrior.

  ‘Forgive me for the rudeness, tech-priest,’ the Astartes said, replacing his helm back over his head. ‘It is necessary if we are to speak over the noise.’ Deltrian had bowed in response. The sounds of holy maintenance were loud by necessity. Through such song was praise offered to the Machine-God.

  ‘Captain…’ Talos voxed.

  ‘Captain no longer. Speak, Soul Hunter.’

  ‘The plains are ours.’

  ‘A fine landing site, they shall make. The siege begins with the dawn.’

  ‘It will be close. Even if we take the city within the week…’ Talos trailed off. Malcharion knew as well as he did. Time was not their ally. The Blood Angels were less than three weeks away.

  ‘Abaddon’s seers are still sure, are they not?’

  Talos snorted. ‘I heard from his own lips that they are failing him all too often these nights.’

  ‘Then why does he trust them?’

  Irritation – and doubt, Talos realised with a jolt of unease – had crept into Malcharion’s vox-tone. He was a warrior from an age when almost no psychic tolerance pervaded the Legions. Such abominations were either barred from loyal service or strictly trained and regulated, not relied upon as part of a war’s planning.

  ‘He works with what he has. In this case, astropaths across the fleet confirm it.’

  ‘Does Krastian agree?’

  ‘Krastian is dead, sir. Slain sixty years ago. We have not had an astropath on board since.’

  ‘For the best, perhaps. Psykers. They are deviants and not to be trusted.’

  ‘The astropaths aboard Hunter’s Premonition align their predictions with the Warmaster’s own. The relief fleet is still weeks away.’

  ‘Hnnh.’

  ‘How was your first battle, sir?’

  Malcharion had already answered this question several times. Upon his own return to the Covenant, visitors from several squads came to pay their respects and speak about the surface conflict.

  ‘Glorious, brother. The splash of blood against my armour… The exaltation of ending a legion of lives with cannon and fist… It will be a great triumph when we take this world in our father’s name.’

  Talos smiled. Barely.

  ‘Now tell me the truth.’

  The servitors attending Malcharion paused momentarily as the Dreadnought made a gear-shifting grind of a sound.

  ‘Joyless. Passionless. Lifeless.’

  ‘Are you are angry at me for waking you?’

  ‘Were I angry, brother, you would already be dead. I would erase you from my sight the way I annihilated that Atramentar bastard Vraal. I never liked him.’

  ‘No one did.’

  ‘I do not understand what is needed of me. That is all.’

  Talos considered this for a moment. ‘Do you realise how you sound to me, sir? To all of us? How your voice hangs in the air like the echo of thunder, and stampedes across the vox?’

  ‘I am not obtuse, boy. I am not blind to this form’s inspiration
al qualities. But I am dead, Talos. That is the truth, and it will tell in the end.’

  ‘Tonight was a fine victory. Not a life lost. We make planetfall again in three hours. Dawn will see the mountain fortress-foundry breached.’

  ‘And I will pretend to care, brother. Have no fear.’

  ‘I heard how you rallied Ninth and Tenth Claws on the field of battle.’

  ‘All I did was kill for hours and bellow at the enemy.’ Another grinding sound clunked from the depths of the Dreadnought.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘My auto-loader cycling,’ Malcharion lied. It had been how his behemoth body translated a chuckle. ‘Now dispense with the formalities, Soul Hunter.’

  ‘I could live without you calling me that, sir.’

  ‘And you think I am inclined to agree with your desires? I am Malcharion the Reborn, and you are an Apothecary with delusions of command.’

  ‘Point made,’ Talos smiled.

  ‘Enough foolishness. Why are you here? What troubles you?’

  ‘I lost my bolter.’

  ‘Hnnh. Have mine.’

  ‘“Have mine”?’ Talos laughed. ‘With such great reverence you treat Legion relics.’

  ‘I certainly don’t need it any more.’ The war machine raised and lowered its twin-barrelled autocannon. Two servitors working on the barrels emitted error sounds from throat-voxes as their work was interrupted.

  ‘Sorry…’ the Dreadnought boomed in its true voice.

  Deltrian bowed, reaper-like and sinuous. ‘All is well, lord.’

  ‘Fine,’ Malcharion spoke into the vox again. ‘Get on with it, Talos.’

  ‘I had a vision, sir.’

  ‘This is hardly remarkable to me.’

  ‘This one was different. It is… wrong. Some of it, at least. It’s not coming true. Right from the first moment I woke from it, everything within the images felt unlikely. It felt like a lie uncoiling inside my mind. Uzas of First Claw, killing Cyrion. And now, as the planet stands on the very precipice of being conquered, I wonder at the rest of the vision. Faroven has not died, as I dreamed he would.’

  ‘Are you so certain these events must take place on Crythe?’

  ‘I was,’ Talos admitted. ‘Now I am unsure they will take place at all. I look at so many of our brothers – even Cyrion and Uzas. I fear their taint has spread to me. Could my second sight be corrupted by exposure to the Ruinous Powers?’

  ‘How many visions have you suffered? Are they as frequent as they were before my entombment?’

  ‘More than before. They grow more frequent.’

  ‘Hnnh. Maybe he will die on Crythe. Maybe he will die later. Maybe he will not die in the manner you have foreseen, and you worry over nothing. I don’t recall you whining this much in the past.’

  ‘Whining? Sir…’

  ‘Even the primarch’s visions were nebulous at times. Vague, he would say. Clouded. What right do you have to claim infallibility when even our gene-father’s second sight was imperfect?’

  ‘Wait. Wait.’ Talos stared up the giant machine, his vision coloured killing-red. The image of Malcharion in life, clutching those three helms, stared back at him.

  ‘Our father’s dreams,’ Talos whispered, ‘were sometimes wrong?’

  ‘The virtue of such dreams is sometimes in the symbolism.’

  ‘This… cannot be true.’

  ‘No? This is why you always bred enemies within our ranks, brother. A Legion is a hive of one million secrets. You, Soul Hunter, have always assumed you knew everything. I always liked that about you. Liked your confidence. Not everyone felt the same.’

  ‘Did the gene-sire ever speak of me?’

  ‘Only to tell me why you were named as you were. I laughed. I thought our father joked at my expense. It seemed so unlikely that anyone would disobey his final order.’ Malcharion made the strange gear-changing growl again.

  ‘Least of all you.’

  XVII

  SOUL HUNTER

  ‘Because the name suits you.

  One soul, my son. One hunt, in the name of revenge.

  You will hunt one shining soul when all others turn their backs on vengeance.’

  – The Primarch Konrad Curze

  Addressing Apothecary Talos of First Claw, 10th Company

  Talos had called to her from the darkness. He’d called the assassin’s name, spoken in a whisper that emerged as a crackle of vox.

  ‘M’Shen,’ he hissed.

  The assassin broke into a run. Talos followed.

  The others would follow later. When the shock broke, when their tawdry and infantile ambitions overcame their grief. When they would look at the body of their slain father and weep not for his death, but for the fact his relics were taken from their greedy grasp.

  Talos cared for none of this. The Imperial bitch had murdered his father, and she was going to die for it.

  This was the age before Aurum. In his gauntlet he gripped a chainsword, gearing it into howling life as he pursued her. Although bareheaded, his vox-bead was in place. The shouts of his brothers transmitted with punishing clarity.

  ‘Does he hunt her?’

  ‘Brother, do not do this!’

  ‘You defy the father’s last wishes!’

  Talos let them rant and rage. The hunter had no concern for anything beyond his prey. Bolts streaked past her as he fired and she dodged in blurs of dark lightning. Each bang was a storm’s echo within the black halls of the Night Haunter’s palace on Tsagualsa.

  The assassin dared a laugh. And well she might. What was a lone Astartes to a trained agent of the Imperial Callidus Temple? Nothing. Less than nothing. She ducked and weaved and flipped over the bolts.

  Outpaced with ease, Talos cursed as he slowed to a halt, and melted back into the shadows.

  The hunt was not over.

  M’Shen licked her lips to moisten them. The air of Tsagualsa was bitter and dry, an effect only magnified by the stilted air within this palace of the damned. Her fingers curled in the hair of her slain prey, the head of the Traitor Primarch clutched hard in her grip.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  She was painting the onyx floor with trickles of blood from the severed neck. The blood’s scent was cloying and too rich, like powerful spices. This was the holy blood of the Emperor, soured into rancidity by corruption and evil. M’Shen resisted the urge to cast the grisly trophy away. Evidence. She needed evidence the deed was done.

  It was strange. The primarch’s genetic inhumanity was revealed once more even in death – the severed head had taken several minutes to start bleeding. Clotting agents within the blood were finally breaking down, releasing this dark trickle.

  She could have simply taken the artifacts he wore, such as his simple crown circlet, the silver blade sheathed on his back, or the cloak of black feathers draped across his shoulders. But these relics, while valuable, could be stolen from the living as well as the dead. She needed overwhelming evidence to cast before her superiors. In the form of the dead god’s head, the assassin had all she would require on that score.

  The artifacts she’d taken were for her personal honour, not just the honour of her temple. And oh, how they would praise her for this.

  M’Shen’s pict-link back to her ship’s data recorders, while scarcely reliable over such a distance, was gone now. She’d felt it die as she leapt at the Night Haunter and that, too, reeked of the most poetic corruption. The timing of such severance… Something about this place…

  It made no sense. Her memory was as close to eidetic as the human mind allowed – yet still, she was lost. These black and bone-lined corridors, how they shifted and weaved. Sound carried strangely here. Sometimes it carried not at all.

  The wall next to her head exploded in a shower of debris. She was already moving, already leaping to the side and falling back into her sprint with infinite grace. She was Callidus. She was the most murderous art rendered into human form.

  On and on she ran. Constantly she passed A
startes in their outdated mark III and newer mark IV war-plate. At the sight of her, these warriors would freeze. Some trembled with the suppressed urge to draw weapons and meet her in combat. She felt their bloodthirst as an overwhelming presence in the air. A few, a rare few, shouted curses at her as she fled past. But not many. These were the stoic sons of a most moribund father.

  And their gene-sire had died willingly. Still this most astonishing of developments assailed her thoughts. Fully half of the Callidus Temple, beloved instrument of the God-Emperor, hunted across the galaxy’s Eastern Fringe for the lifeblood of Konrad Curze, Eighth Primarch, father of the Night Lords Legion.

  Here, on barren Tsagualsa, within this palatial fortress of onyx and obsidian, of ivory and bone and banners of flayed flesh she had found him.

  Willingly, he surrendered his life.

  She, M’Shen, was the death of a primarch. Godslayer, her mistresses would name her…

  Tremendous weight smashed her to the ground. The primarch’s head rolled from her clutch, her own face smashed against the tiled floor. Stimulants flooded her blood and she hurled the burden away. Within a heartbeat’s span, the assassin was on her feet once more, looking back at the Astartes she’d thrown back against the wall.

  Him. Again.

  Talos’s own blood burned. His armour squirted fast spurts of searing chemicals into his body, through sockets in his spine, his neck, his chest and wrists. His chainblade shrieked in a series of enraged whines as it cut nothing but air. The assassin weaved aside from each blow, seeming barely to move, her body slipping into the minimal amount of movement necessary to dodge each swing.

  The assassin’s blue eyes, the blue of seas long boiled away on Terra, regarded him with fading amusement. She had nothing to say to him, and no reason to fear him, Astartes or otherwise. She was an Imperial assassin. She was the limit of human perf–

  Talos’s blade edge nicked her black weave armour, slashing a cut in the synskin over her bicep.

  Eyes wide in alarm, she made a diving roll to the side, grabbed the trailing black hair of the primarch’s head, and sprinted away faster than any Astartes could hope to follow.