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  ‘Master–’

  The demigod held up a hand. ‘Silence. She is moving.’

  Septimus couldn’t hear anything, except his master’s vox-clicks as he changed channels to address the rest of the squad.

  ‘I have her,’ he said, and calmly turned to catch a blur of shrieking movement that launched at him.

  Eurydice had been watching from her darkened hiding place between two rumbling generators. She had no weapon except for a crowbar that she’d scrounged from her tools, and although she’d been scowling alone and telling herself she would go down fighting, kicking and screaming, that pledge faded a little when she saw the two figures coming down the gantry. One was a human, armed with two pistols. The other was a giant, well over two metres tall, and wearing archaic battle armour.

  Astartes.

  She’d never seen one before. It was not a pleasant sight. Awe met fear, mixing to form a feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach and a sour taste that doggedly coated her tongue no matter how much she tried to swallow it. Why were the Astartes attacking? Why had they killed Syne and destroyed the Maiden?

  She retreated into the shadows, willing her heart to calm, and gripped her crowbar in sweating fists. Maybe if she aimed for the joint where his helmet met his neck? Throne, this was insane. She was dead, and there was nothing she could do about it. With a mirthless grin, she suddenly regretted all the mean things she’d said to… well, to everyone. Except to Syne. He was always an arse.

  For all her faults, her spiteful tongue among them, Eurydice Mervallion was no coward. She was the daughter of a Navigator House, even if their name wasn’t worth spit, and had looked into the madness of the warp and guided her ship safely each and every time. The sight of a demigod stalking closer to her made her head ache and her guts tighten, but she kept the promise she’d made to herself. She’d go down fighting.

  They drew near, walking down the aisled gantry. Eurydice’s forehead itched with fierce sensitivity, and with her free hand, she pulled off the bandana of black silk. The recycled air of the lander’s internal atmosphere tingled unpleasantly on her third eye, even closed as it was. As naturally as drawing a breath, she opened the eye slowly, feeling the uncomfortable tingle intensify, on the edge of irritation now. The tickling connection of the eye’s milky surface meeting the air forced a shiver through her body. It was a sickening sense of vulnerability. The eye saw nothing, yet it felt the warm, scrubbed air brush over its soft surface with every movement she made.

  She was ready. Eurydice clutched the crowbar in both hands again.

  The giant passed slowly, and as he did, she leapt at him with a cry.

  The crowbar banged against his helm with the dull clang of iron on ceramite. It was a strange sound, half a metallic chime, half a muted and echoless clank. She swung with all her strength coupled with a rage born of desperation. The impact would have staved in the head of a human, and had she chosen her target better, Septimus’s skull would have collapsed under the blow, killing him instantly. But she chose the Astartes.

  That was an error.

  The bar had already struck three times before she realised two things. Firstly, her furious strikes against the giant’s helm were barely even causing him to move his head. His skull-faced helmet glared at her with ruby eye lenses, juddering only slightly under each of her flailing strikes.

  Secondly, she hadn’t landed yet. That was what sent her into a writhing panic. He’d caught her as she jumped, and was holding her off the ground with his hand around her throat.

  The realisation hit her when he started to squeeze. The pressure on her throat choked her so suddenly, so completely, that she didn’t even have time to squawk a cry of pain. The crowbar landed one last time, deflected from his forearm by the dark armour he wore, before it clattered to the ground with a reverberating clang. She couldn’t hear it; all she heard was her own heart thundering in her ears. Eurydice kicked out at him as she dangled, but her boots clacking against his chestplate and thigh armour met with even less success than her crowbar had.

  He wasn’t dying. Her eye… it wasn’t killing him. All her life she’d heard tales that allowing any living being to stare into a Navigator’s third eye would result in some arcane, mystic, agonising death. Her tutors had insisted this was so – a by-product of the Navigator gene that granted her this obscene and priceless mutation. No one understood the reason behind it. At least, no one in the ranks of House Mervallion, but then Eurydice knew she’d only ever had access to tutors of relatively poor quality.

  She stared at the giant with her third eye wide and open, as her human eyes narrowed in breath-starved pain. Yet the Astartes stood unfazed.

  She was right. Had the demigod looked into her sightless eye the colour of infected milk, he would have died instantly. But behind the crimson lenses, his own eyes were closed. He knew what she was. He had foreseen this moment, and a true hunter didn’t need every sense to bring down prey.

  Her vision started to swim. She couldn’t tell if she was really being pulled closer to him, but his skull helm filled her sight, bone-white and blood-eyed. The giant’s voice was low, inhumanly low, grinding like distant thunder. As her vision misted and finally blackened, the demigod’s words followed her down into unconsciousness.

  ‘My name is Talos,’ he growled. ‘And you are coming with me.’

  Septimus’s master was the last to leave the asteroid. He stood on the surface, his boots leaving eternal prints in the silver-grey dust, and he looked up at the stars. Stars he didn’t recognise from the last time he’d stood upon this rock and stared up into the heavens. This asteroid had been a world once – a planet far from here.

  ‘Talos,’ Cyrion’s voice crackled over the vox. ‘The servitors are loaded. The prisoner is ready to be taken to the mortals’ decks aboard the Covenant. Come, my brother. Your vision was true, there was much to discover here. But the Warmaster calls us to Crythe.’

  ‘What of those who fled?’

  ‘Uzas and Xarl have ended them. Come. Time eludes us.’

  Talos knelt, seeing how the dust clung to his black-blue armour in an ashen covering. Like sand sifting through his fingers, he watched a fistful of the dust cascade from his open hand.

  ‘Time changes all things,’ Talos whispered.

  ‘Not everything, prophet.’ That was Xarl, his voice pitched in respect as he waited in the gunship. ‘We fight the same war we’ve always fought.’

  Talos rose to stand once more, making his way to the waiting Thunderhawk. Its engines cycled live, blasting dust away in all directions as it readied for the return flight, where the Covenant of Blood waited in orbit.

  ‘This rock came a long way,’ Cyrion voxed. ‘Ten thousand years of drift.’

  Uzas chuckled. It wasn’t that the emotional significance was lost on him. It was simply that the situation held no emotional weight in his mind at all. He couldn’t have cared less.

  ‘It was good to come home again, hmm?’ he said, still smirking inside his helm.

  Home. The word left a burning afterimage in Talos’s mind – a world of eternal night, where spires of dark metal clawed at the black sky. Home. Nostramo. The VIII Legion’s home world.

  Talos had been there at the end, of course. They all had. Thousands of the Legion standing on the decks of their strike cruisers and battle-barges, watching the shrouded world below as the end rained down upon it, piercing the caul of cloud cover, tearing holes in the dense blanket of darkness in the atmosphere and revealing a venomous illumination: the orange glow of flame and tectonic ruination blazing across the surface. The skin of the world split, as if the gods themselves were breaking it apart out of spite.

  And in a sense, they were.

  Ten thousand years before, Talos had watched his world burn, shatter, and crumble. He’d watched Nostramo die. It was sacrifice. It was vindication. It was, he told himself, justice.

  Ten thousand years. To Talos, his life measured from battle to battle, crusade to crusade, it had b
een no more than a handful of decades since his home world burned. Time was enslaved to unnatural laws in the regions of hell-space where the Traitor Legions hid from Imperial retribution. It was maddening, sometimes, to keep track. Most of his brethren no longer tried.

  Talos’s boots thudded on the ramp as he boarded the gunship. Once inside the hangar, he cast a single glance at the herd of lobotomised servitors standing impassive in the deployment bay, and thumped his fist against the door lock pressure pad. The ramp withdrew and the blast doors slammed shut in a grinding chorus of hydraulics.

  ‘Do you think we’ll ever see another shard that size?’ Cyrion asked as the Thunderhawk shuddered into the air. ‘That must have been at least half a continent, all the way down to the outer core.’

  Talos said nothing, lost for a moment in the memory of raging fire flickering through breaks in dense cloud cover, before an entire world came to pieces before his eyes.

  ‘Back to the Covenant,’ he finally said. ‘And then to Crythe.’

  II

  VISION

  ‘Surprise is an insubstantial blade, a sword worthless in war.

  It breaks when troops rally. It snaps when commanders hold the line.

  But fear never fades.

  Fear is a blade that sharpens with use.

  So let the enemy know we come. Let their fears defeat them as everything falls dark.

  As the world’s sun sets…

  As the city is wreathed in its final night…

  Let ten thousand howls promise ten thousand claws.

  The Night Lords are coming.

  And no soul that stands against us shall see another dawn.’

  – The war-sage Malcharion

  Excerpted from his work, The Tenebrous Path,

  Talos walked the corridors of the Covenant, wearing his battle armour without the confining presence of his helm. While he lacked the vision-enhancing modes the helmet’s sensors offered, there was a comforting clarity in piercing the ship’s darkness with his natural sight.

  The mortal crew struggled to see in the blackness, their eyes too weak to perceive the trace illumination emitted by the ship’s powered-down lighting. They were permitted lamp packs, allowing them to see in the dark when they must move from one part of the ship to another. To the Nostramo-born Astartes, the gloom simply didn’t exist. Talos moved through the wide passageways, nearing the war room, which had long since become the meditation chambers of the Exalted. A natural attuning, coupled with the genetic manipulations performed on his brain during his ascension into the ranks of the VIII Legion, meant he saw the Covenant’s interior as clearly as dawn on a far brighter world.

  Cyrion, clad in his own war-plate, drew alongside. Talos glanced at his brother, noting the creases of strain around Cyrion’s black eyes. It was strange to see one of his fellow Legionnaires show signs of age, but Talos was under no delusions. Cyrion was struggling under the pressure of his own curse – one that weighed upon his brother far more heavily than Talos’s own visions wracked him.

  ‘You’re not coming in with me,’ Talos said, ‘so why are you following?’

  ‘I might come in,’ Cyrion replied. Both of them knew how unlikely that was. Cyrion avoided the Exalted at all costs.

  ‘Even if you wanted to, the Atramentar will bar your way.’ They walked through the labyrinthine halls of the great ship, accustomed to the silence that framed their presence.

  ‘They might,’ conceded Cyrion. ‘They might not.’

  ‘I’ll let you keep that mistaken belief for another few minutes, Cy. Don’t ever say I am not a generous soul.’ Talos scratched the back of his shaven head as he spoke. One of his implant ports, a socket of chrome in his spine just above his shoulder blades, had started aching these past few days. It was an irritating, dull pulse at the edge of his attention, and he felt the vibrating hum of the symbiotic coupling there that merged him to his armour. The machine-spirit of his war-plate must be appeased soon, and Septimus would need to be set to work preparing the unguents and oils that Talos used to tend to his inflamed junction sockets. The invasive neural connections from his armour into his body were growing aggravated from the amount of time he spent in battle. Even his inhuman healing and physical regeneration could only cope with so much.

  In better days, several Legion serfs and tech-adepts would have tended to his bionic augmentations and monitored his gene-enhancements between battles. Now he was reduced to a single slave, and as talented as Septimus was as an artificer, Talos trusted no one to come near his unarmoured form – not even his own vassal, and especially not his brothers.

  ‘Xarl is looking for you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Uzas, as well. They want to know what you saw while afflicted.’

  ‘I told them. I told you all. I saw Nostramo, a shard of our home world, spinning in the void. I saw the female Navigator. I saw the vessel we destroyed.’

  ‘And yet the Exalted summons you now.’ Cyrion shook his head. ‘We are not fools, brother. Well… most of us are not. I make no claims for Uzas’s state of mind. But we know you are going to meet the Exalted, and we can guess why.’

  Talos cast him a sidelong glance. ‘If you are planning to spy, you know you are doomed to failure. They won’t let you in.’

  ‘Then I will wait for you outside,’ Cyrion conceded. ‘The Atramentar are always such wonderful conversationalists.’ He wouldn’t be distracted. ‘This summons is about your vision. We’re right, aren’t we?’

  ‘It’s always about them,’ Talos said simply. They walked the rest of the way in silence.

  The war room was at the heart of the ship – a vast circular chamber with four towering sets of doors leading in from the cardinal directions. The Astartes approached the southern door, taking note of the two immense figures flanking the sealed portal.

  Two of the Atramentar, chosen warriors of the Exalted, stood in wordless vigil. Each of the elite Astartes wore one of the Legion’s precious remaining suits of Terminator armour, their hulking shoulder guards formed of polished silver and black iron forged into the snarling skulls of sabre-toothed Nostraman lions. Talos recognised the two warriors by their armour’s insignia, and nodded as he approached.

  One of the Terminators, his war-plate etched with screeds of tiny golden Nostraman runes detailing his many victories, growled down at Talos and Cyrion.

  ‘Brothers,’ he said, the words a slow intonation.

  ‘Champion Malek.’ Talos nodded up at the warrior. He was head and shoulders above most mortal men himself, well over two metres tall. Malek, in the suit of ancient Terminator plate, was closer to three.

  ‘Prophet,’ the voice drawled deep and mechanical from the tusked helm. ‘The Exalted summoned you.’ He punctuated his words with the crackling threat of his gauntlet’s claws wreathing themselves in coruscating energy.

  ‘You,’ the Atramentar repeated, ‘and you alone.’

  Cyrion leaned against the wall, magnanimously gesturing for his brother to go ahead without him. His theatrical bow brought a smile to Talos’s pale features.

  ‘Enter, prophet,’ said the other Atramentar warrior. Talos knew the figure from the heavy bronze hammer it carried over its shoulder. Its Terminator helm, instead of sporting the half-metre tusks Malek favoured, was marred by a vicious bone horn spiking from its forehead.

  ‘My thanks, Brother Garadon.’ Talos had long since given up demanding that others stop referring to him as a prophet. Once the Atramentar had followed the Exalted’s tendency to use the term, it had spread across the Covenant and stuck fast.

  With a last look back at Cyrion, he entered the war room. The doors closed behind him, sealing with a click and a hiss.

  ‘So,’ Cyrion said to the silent, towering Terminators. ‘How are you?’

  Only two souls were present in the room: Talos and the Exalted. Two souls facing each other across an oval table that had once seated two hundred warriors. Around the edges of the room, banks of cogitators and vox-stations
sat idle and silent. Centuries before, they had been manned by live crew: Legion serfs and a small army of servitors. Now the Covenant’s remaining crew strength was focused on the bridge and the other vital sections of the ship.

  ‘Talos,’ came the draconic growl from the other side of the table. The darkness was ultimate: so deep it took Talos’s vision several moments to tune through the blackness and make out the other figure in the chamber. ‘My prophet,’ the Exalted continued. Its voice was as low as the purr of the warp engines. ‘My eyes into the unseen.’

  Talos regarded the vaguely humanoid shape as his sight resolved into an approximation of clarity. The Exalted wore the same relic armour so revered by the Atramentar, but… changed.

  Warped. Literally. Occasional flickers of warp lighting rippled across the surface of the armour. The witchlight gave off no illumination of its own.

  ‘Captain Vandred,’ Talos said. ‘I have come as ordered.’

  The Exalted breathed out, long and soft, the amused exhalation ghosting through the air like a distant wind. It was the closest the creature could come to laughing.

  ‘My prophet. When will you cease this use of my ancient name? It is no longer entertaining. No longer quaint. Our forgotten titles mean nothing. You know this as well as I.’

  ‘I find meaning in them.’ Talos watched as the Exalted dragged itself closer to the table. A mild tremor shook through the chamber as the creature took a single step.

  ‘Share your gift with me, Talos. Not your misguided reprimand. I control this. I am no pawn of the Ruinous Ones, no avatar of their purpose.’

  The chamber shuddered again as the Exalted took another step. ‘I. Control. This.’

  Talos felt his eyes narrowing at the old refrain. ‘As you say, brother-captain.’ His words caused another breathy exhalation, at once as gentle and threatening as a blade stroked across bared flesh.

  ‘Speak, Talos. Before I lose what little patience remains to me. I indulged your desire to seek a rock in the void. I allowed you to once again walk the surface of our broken home world.’