‘Apologies, Tempestor, but I really can’t talk now,’ Daviland said. She screwed something together in Phed’s midsection. ‘I need time and space to work.’

  Traxel nodded. ‘Commissar, if you would accompany me, we will link up with the others when they return.’

  Fennech followed Traxel across the mortar-scarred earth outside. Norroll followed a slight distance behind them, still keeping his distance.

  The air was thick with the cloying reek of burning promethium. The Iron Warriors’ drop pod smouldered where it had toppled over on its nearby landing pad, destroyed by what could only have been some manner of melta weapon. Rilisian troopers fired on the crippled assault craft, their shots pocking the armoured hull as they used the Iron Warriors’ skull insignia for target practice.

  Heat haze rippled over the hard-packed, dry ground. Squinting in the glare of sunlight, Traxel drew his canteen and took a sip of water.

  Norroll watched the Guardsmen at the landing pad defacing the fallen drop pod. The troopers who were not engaged in the vandalism wandered aimlessly, silent and looking somehow bereft. Norroll would have expected a sense of jubilation from them, but there was none.

  ‘After three months of hard fighting and survival, they now find themselves adrift, unsure of what to do next,’ Fennech noted, as if somehow overhearing Norroll’s thoughts. ‘I should like to speak to them before we depart, Tempestor. They have won a great victory here today, but their role in this war is not yet finished. I expect they will be annexed into the Hundred-and-Thirty-Ninth, before it moves on Vytrum. I feel compelled to restore their purity of purpose.’

  ‘Of course, commissar,’ Traxel agreed neutrally, though Norroll fancied he caught a glimmer of relief in the Tempestor’s voice.

  Fennech went to rigid attention, clicked his heels together and offered Traxel a clipped bow. He tramped down the hill towards the landing pad, leaving Traxel and Norroll on the ridgetop.

  Norroll watched Traxel in silence, dreading the Tempestor’s acknowledgement while finding himself simultaneously wishing for it. After several minutes, he began to wonder if Traxel was even aware he was there.

  It was likely immaterial to him – Traxel was Traxel, after all, and Norroll had already received acknowledgement enough from him that day.

  Turning away, Norroll returned to his fellows inside, leaving the Tempestor to his solitary thoughts.

  XI

  Hurdt paused inside the threshold of the Stygians’ strategium and saluted. He received no response – not that he had expected any.

  Zelazko stood at the centre of the hololithic display, his gleaming armour suffused with cold green light as he simultaneously analysed schematics, assessed astronomic travel distances between Rilis and no fewer than six other systems west of the Great Rift, and monitored the ever-updating flow of data cascading in from Ganspur. The only sounds in the data node were the grinding whine of Zelazko’s reactor pack and the intermittent nonsense burbled by the servitors operating the hololith.

  Hurdt took his place at Captain Dorran’s right – seemingly mesmerised by Zelazko, the commander of the 25th Stygian appeared not to notice. Dorran’s breach of protocol irked the general somewhat, though he thought better of making an issue of it in Zelazko’s presence.

  Hurdt held no illusions as to how Dorran and her company of Stygians felt about him. He knew many of them were becoming increasingly vocal in their belief that the general’s insistence on acting openly against the Imperial tyrants was to blame for the ongoing civil war.

  He was introspective enough to understand their perspective – Hurdt’s insistence on overtly eliminating the governor and seizing control of Vytrum was the precise genesis of the conflict. Had he worked with greater secrecy, there was a chance that he could have got Zheev and Mawr to come to their senses without bloodshed. He had never expected they would take things so far.

  Hurdt scowled. Had he taken the Stygians’ counsel, they would still be beneath the yoke of Imperial tyranny on Rilis. He had been right then, and posterity would hold that he remained so.

  Still, he knew he had to tread carefully – though they were but few, Dorran and her black-armoured terror troops were heavily favoured by the Iron Warriors, and such support was not something Hurdt would challenge lightly.

  He straightened his leather greatcoat, a habitual gesture betraying his irritation, and absent-mindedly rubbed the winged-skull emblem of the Imperialis yet emblazoned across the ochre plastron of his carapace armour.

  He dropped his hand as if he had burned it, glancing about the chamber to see if any had noticed. The golden Imperialis was an uncomfortable reminder of the sacrifices Hurdt had made to secure victory on Rilis, and he sensed that he still had far to go. He feared the elimination of the world’s Imperial authorities was hardly the nadir of their fall before they wrested Rilis from the Imperium’s grip.

  If siding with the Iron Warriors was the price which ensured Rilis’ people could live in freedom, then it was worth the cost. He would deal with the Traitor legionaries when it was advantageous.

  Dorran watched the Iron Warrior with rapt intent. She had frequently expressed her awe for Zelazko, especially in his capacity to absorb and process the fathomless inflow of information which continually bombarded him. The Adeptus Astartes only moved to shut off certain feeds or bring up new ones with the wave of a hand or the flick of a finger. Dorran admired him greatly, and not just because Zelazko and his brothers had rescued the Rilisians from the dank pit they had been left to rot in, deep within the bowels of Enth – indeed, Hurdt was beginning to feel the degree of her admiration was rapidly degenerating into something of an obsession.

  The general stood on her right, hands clasped behind his back and still scowling, for Dorran’s lack of acknowledgement yet vexed him.

  He realised he was staring at the Stygian captain again. Her baptism in the reeking effluent of Oranesca’s underhive had twisted her into a ghoulish caricature of the proud officer she had been. Her flesh had been rendered cold and waxen, bleaching her skin an anaemic, lifeless white. Her hair had likewise become chalky and lustreless, colourless strands wisping like cobweb from her scalp. Tears perpetually streaked her cheeks, dripping incessantly from unblinking, rheumy orbs which had sunk into creased sockets bruised black.

  From the corner of her eye, Dorran noticed Hurdt’s stare.

  ‘Is there something on your mind, general?’ she asked with contrived innocence.

  Hurdt glanced away quickly. Looking at Dorran for long was never comfortable, especially when she knew he was staring.

  He noted the slow grin spreading across Dorran’s pallid lips with disgust.

  Zelazko continued his evening’s status review from Ganspur. Though he was proportionately gigantic, the Iron Warrior’s features lacked the slab-like transhuman brutality Hurdt had come to associate with Adeptus Astartes in his past dealings with them. This lack did not serve to humanise him in any way, but rather accentuated the opposite – Zelazko’s features appeared flawlessly symmetrical, one side of his face mirroring the other with such uncanny perfection that it seemed manufactured, rather than innate. His eyes, a brilliant, honeyed amber, hungrily absorbed data, consuming every bit of information available as a flame might devour the fuel in its path and become a conflagration.

  Unscarred despite countless years of war, Zelazko’s immaculate visage had earned him the moniker ‘The Unmarked’ from his brothers. Zelazko himself seemed to view the title with distaste, as if it were a double entendre too obscure for Hurdt to understand. Blodt particularly seemed to delight in the nickname, mocking Zelazko with it as he might tease a younger brother.

  Bathed in the glowing green light of the hololith, the Iron Warrior’s stillness rendered him even more mythic, a stature forged of iron and gene-wrought flesh. The servo-arm mounted to the right side of his armour’s backpack gripped a massive lascannon furnished in immaculately gleaming bronze and burnished iron, its hazard-striped muzzle cowling aimed skyward. Zelazko wore a bolt pistol on his left hip, while his bronze-embellished chainsword lay mag-locked to his right, the blade’s housing also emblazoned with hazard stripes.

  The hatch at the far side of the room hissed open on well-maintained pneumatics as Sylera Dvart, Zelazko’s tech-priest, entered. Dvart was a gangling, reed-thin shadow wrapped in mouldering robes stained nearly black by oils and other, less identifiable fluids. She drifted into the room, scuttling forward on the clicking, multitudinous assemblage of steel armatures replacing her legs, bowed almost double by the weight of the bulky apparatus moored to her spine. Twin servo-arms sprouted from either side of the burbling, crackling banks of machinery, their pincer-like callipers bedecked with a motley of esoteric tools that seemed to defy function. Three servo-skulls bobbed serenely above her head, tethered to the hardware on her back. She leaned heavily upon the haft of a massive axe, the smile of its blade a twisted homage to a toothed cog.

  ‘Shomael,’ Dvart said, her unaltered voice quavering with a crone’s reedy tremulousness. ‘A moment.’

  ‘I cannot be disturbed, Sylera,’ Zelazko said calmly, still focused on his data feed. ‘I am behind schedule as it is.’

  The tech-priest’s bank of optical augmetics shifted, clusters of lambent green whirring as they refocused beneath the folds of her hood. ‘I would not disturb you were it not important.’

  Dvart represented what she referred to as the True Mechanicum, though any distinction between that organisation and the Martian priesthood was moot to Hurdt. Dvart devotedly heaped scorn upon the Adeptus Mechanicus with the zeal of a true schismatic and had even initiated a purge of the more senior tech-adepts on Ganspur before Zelazko had intervened. From what Hurdt could gather, Dvart and Zelazko had been together for an unfathomable span of time, and while the general recognised that the Iron Warrior appeared to value Dvart’s counsel more than any other, the tech-priest’s zealotry occasionally put the pair at loggerheads.

  Zelazko paused his data feeds. ‘Very well. What can be so important for me to risk my Warsmith’s ire?’

  ‘Your brother Numus’ signal dome has collapsed.’

  ‘I know. It appears the Three-Hundred-and-Seventeenth has finally shown its mettle. I warned my brother of the risks he was taking with his entertainment.’

  ‘Not just the regiment,’ Dvart said. ‘Another force accompanied them. One not known to us.’

  ‘They are called Tempestus Scions,’ Hurdt volunteered. ‘A small force of them arrived on Rilis at the start of the revolution.’

  ‘Tempestus Scions?’ Zelazko murmured. He turned to Hurdt. ‘Ah, yes. The ones who are like Captain Dorran’s Stygians, but not.’

  ‘That is the common view,’ Hurdt admitted. ‘The Two-Hundred-and-Twelfth wiped out their command structure before the assault on Kiemchek. These must be the survivors.’

  ‘What of them?’ Zelazko asked, turning back to Dvart.

  ‘The Foretrak Gap has fallen,’ Dvart reported. ‘These Scions and their allies in the Three-Hundred-and-Seventeenth breached the automated defences and have taken the fortress.’

  ‘What of the garrison?’

  ‘We expect they were culled.’

  ‘And Blodt?’ Zelazko asked. ‘What of my brother?’

  ‘We suspect…’ Dvart began. ‘We do not know. Yours was the last transmission from him we received.’

  Anger twisted the pristine mask of Zelazko’s features, quickly followed by an expression Hurdt had not expected from an Adeptus Astartes – concern.

  ‘Numus?’ he called into the vox-transmitter in his gorget. ‘Brother, respond.’

  Zelazko glared into the diffuse green light of the hololith, a nagging sense of trepidation bleeding from him as seconds trickled past. Every eye in the room focused on the immobile Iron Warrior in dreadful anticipation.

  Zelazko’s disquiet ultimately evaporated in the foundry heat of his anger.

  ‘Blodt,’ Zelazko snarled. ‘Answer me, damn you!’

  Hurdt found himself paralysed, afraid to so much as exhale beneath the awful fear radiating from the Space Marine. Even trapped beneath Oranesca’s crushing darkness at the height of an orbital bombardment, he had not experienced such elemental terror as this.

  Dorran was likewise rooted where she stood, rendered static beneath the horrible weight of Zelazko’s menace, the Adeptus Astartes’ spell over her momentarily broken.

  Zelazko was a blur, his armoured bulk moving so rapidly it was nearly impossible for human eyes to follow as he leapt from the dais. The head of the rightmost hololith servitor seemed to vanish in a spurt of oily blood, the action so sudden and so fierce that Hurdt scarcely had time to register it. Tiles shattered as the Iron Warrior mashed what remained of the servitor’s steel-shod skull into the floor, over and over.

  He was up again before Hurdt was even conscious of it, tearing another of the servitors free of the hololith and snapping its spine over his knee. He grasped the spasming construct, beating it against the dais until it came apart. He tore the last servitor free of its moorings, hurling it across the room and into a bank of cogitators. Zelazko rounded on Dorran and Hurdt, his lascannon snapping up on its servo-armature, whining as it drew power from his armour’s reactor.

  Dorran flinched. Hurdt remained rooted in place.

  It seemed somehow fitting for it to end like this.

  ‘Shomael.’

  Zelazko halted and looked to Dvart, breath sawing from between his clenched teeth.

  ‘My brother is dead.’

  ‘And this display will not bring Numus back,’ the tech-priest said. She swept across the floor towards Zelazko, the steel claws tipping her rows of appendages clattering softly over the tiles.

  Eyes screwed shut, Zelazko roared.

  In the next instant, Dvart was on him. She wrapped the massive warrior in the embrace of her servo-arms and pulled him close.

  ‘Hush,’ she cooed, pressing her hooded forehead against Zelazko’s. She stroked his cheek with a pallid, wizened thumb, whispering something unintelligible as she comforted the blood-spattered Space Marine.

  With a shudder, Zelazko finally seemed to relax. He attempted half-heartedly to break free of the embrace, but Dvart’s servo-arms held him fast.

  ‘Why did he not listen to me, Sylera?’ Hurdt heard him whisper. ‘I warned him of the risks in those foolish games of his. Had I ever misled him?’

  ‘Numus was ever one to go about things in his own way,’ Dvart said. ‘Obstinacy, which your brothers have always perversely viewed as a cardinal virtue, is a blight upon the IV Legion.’

  Zelazko nodded, and Dvart released him from her grip.

  The Iron Warrior sighed, seeming to deflate somewhat as his breath hissed out of his nose. ‘Jepthah,’ he called softly into the vox-link in his gorget.

  Hurdt risked a breath. Drops of perspiration beaded in his thick eyebrows and dripped from the tip of his nose. He realised he was fidgeting nervously, scratching beneath his collar and licking his lips apprehensively.

  The full fury of Zelazko’s grief had caught him entirely off guard. It was a side the Iron Warrior had never revealed before, and had Dvart not managed to rein him in, there was no telling what destruction he might have wrought. Mauled servitors twitched in pools of blood and shattered tiles, sprawling before smouldering banks of cogitators and the sparking hololith, unequivocal evidence of the destruction one Adeptus Astartes could wreak, unarmed, in a handful of seconds.

  Hurdt’s throat clenched as the heavy thump of uneven footfalls in the corridor outside announced the arrival of the second of Zelazko’s brothers.

  Matebos lurched into the room, his movements jerky and awkward, like a desynchronised pict feed. He stumped on uneven legs, shoulders rolling from side to side as he balanced and counterbalanced with each step. The right half of his body was armoured in a hotchpotch of components, plated in rusting iron and trimmed in weathered bronze. In ghastly contrast, ­Matebos’ left side had been warped into something of nightmare – a twisted amalgamation of flesh and ironclad ceramite festooned with rusty iron hooks and spikes of bone. A thin trickle of foetid steam leaked from his gorget, twisting over the inward-curving horns adorning either side of his battle helm and hazing the grim sodium-yellow glare of his auto-senses. Thick dollops of treacle-thick sludge oozed from the spiked maw of his helm’s vox-grille, dripping slowly over the edge of his gorget and dribbling down his rust-encrusted cuirass. His left leg was bent backwards like a beast’s, capped by an iron-shod hoof, while an eighteen-inch spike of fused ceramite and bone jutted from his knee.

  The Iron Warrior’s unnaturally hideous mutations would render him terrifying enough, but Matebos clutched the greatest horror in the twisted mass of bone and ceramite that had been his left hand. Held fast in its barbed cocoon of warped flesh and mangled iron, the contorted Adeptus Astartes gripped a blade as wondrous as it was nightmarish. It glowed from within with an inconstant unlight, leaving foul green-and-black afterimages blinking across the vision of any who looked upon it. It filled the air around it with the silken sibilance of barely discernible whispers, pregnant with veiled threats and secret promises of knowledge and power to those willing to listen.

  Hurdt refused to look at the blade. Just being in its presence was painful enough that simply maintaining his footing became a challenge. He blinked rapidly, eyes watering as he tried to focus on Zelazko – yet despite himself, he found his gaze drawn to the hideous weapon.

  Matebos chugged like a steam locomotive. He coughed a thick clot of dark fluid through his voxmitter, his shoulders rolling forward and back uncontrollably with paralysis agitans. ‘You called me, brother?’ Matebos said. He spoke with two voices, each of which said the same words with dissimilar inflection, presenting the listener with two very different ways of understanding his meaning.