The Iron Warrior blocked the strike with the vambrace of his truncated right arm. The chainsword snarled, biting shallowly into the flesh beneath as it lodged within the iron and ceramite of Zelazko’s armour.

  Traxel’s krak grenade had torn the flesh from most of the right side of Zelazko’s head, along with his nose and lips, reducing much of his face to a glistening crimson skull. Glaring hatefully with his remaining bloodshot eye, Zelazko struck Norroll with a vicious backhand. The recon trooper crashed backwards against the platform’s blast shielding and collapsed in a limp heap.

  Yanking the chainsword from his vambrace and tossing it aside, Zelazko lunged after the stricken Scion.

  Atebe dived to the deck at nearly the same instant Norroll hit the ground on the other side of the platform, entering the Killstate and taking in the scene before her through the obscuring cloud of thick black smoke. Traxel was sprawled out on his back, no more than fifteen yards from her, while Norroll lay face down across the landing pad in the lee of the blast shield. She felt the heat radiating from the Valkyrie’s wreckage through her carapace armour and smelled the burning reek of promethium fumes through her respirator’s filters.

  Even limping, the Iron Warrior crossed the deck with uncanny speed. His bare, bloody jaw worked, though his words were lost to Atebe. Reaching Norroll at a run, the Space Marine grasped the recon trooper by the head and lifted him from the ground.

  Drawing in a deep breath, Atebe lined up her crosshairs over the right side of the Traitor Astartes’ flayed head.

  The las-bolt struck Zelazko two inches above where his right ear had been, blowing a chunk free from the top of his reinforced cranium. The Iron Warrior swayed, dropping Norroll limply to the deck as he pivoted to face the new threat. He stared bemusedly at Atebe, drooling blood from his slack jaw.

  His remaining eye blinked once, and Atebe shot him through it.

  The flatline screamed from Daviland’s vambrace as she sprinted over blood-smeared tiles, past the dead and cowering wounded in the corridor. Laspistol raised, she raced pell-mell for the hatchway to Skyshield Four.

  Atebe lay prone on the floor in the doorway – she was fine, and Daviland ignored her, rushing past her onto the landing pad. The Iron Warrior’s nearly headless corpse smouldered, face down on the deck, and she ignored that as well. She headed for Traxel, holstering her pistol as she ran and readying her medi-kit. She trusted Atebe to cover her as she slid to a halt on her knees next to the Tempestor.

  Traxel gazed skyward, all the traumas and uncertainty which had plagued him since Tecerriot finally released. She glanced at her medi-slate, though she didn’t need it to know what her senses already told her – Tempestor Traxel was dead.

  ‘Emperor light your way, Tempestor,’ she whispered, rising to her feet.

  Gathering her medi-kit, she trudged to Norroll’s side. Her legs and back were stiff, her feet leaden, as she slumped down beside him. His pulse registered clearly on her vambrace, rapid and shallow but steady.

  ‘Atebe,’ she called, ‘are we clear?’

  Atebe shut the blast door behind her, cutting off any interruption from inside. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come here and hold his head. This is easier with two.’

  Atebe complied, though she made sure she continued to face the doorway. ‘What now?’

  ‘Hold his head steady.’

  Daviland unclasped the seals on Norroll’s helmet and gently lifted the fractured armour free. The entire left side of his face was unrecognisable where severe blunt-force trauma had shredded the flesh to the bone and burst his eyeball. Beneath the swelling and discolouration, his cheek buckled visibly inwards. Blood drooled from his slack, puffy lips.

  Daviland removed a brace from her medi-kit and snapped it into place, immobilising Norroll’s neck with Atebe’s help. She unfolded a stretcher from its compartment beneath the kit’s armoured housing directly beside Norroll before unbuckling his cuirass. ‘I need your dagger.’

  Atebe handed Daviland her Scion blade without comment.

  Cutting open Norroll’s fatigues, Daviland reached back into her medi-kit and produced a stimm injector, loading it with a heavy dosage.

  ‘Hold him steady,’ Daviland said. ‘He’s going to jump.’

  Atebe pressed down on Norroll’s shoulders. ‘Ready.’

  Immobilising Norroll’s legs with her left arm, Daviland jammed the injector between his ribs, directly into his heart.

  Norroll gasped, kicking and flailing as the cocktail of medicinal compounds coursed into his bloodstream. Daviland and Atebe strained against his thrashing, struggling to keep him secure as his muscles spasmed. After nearly half a minute’s writhing, the convulsions subsided, leaving Norroll gasping on the landing pad’s deck. He groaned, burbling unintelligibly for a few seconds through his broken jaw and missing teeth.

  ‘Stay still,’ Daviland said.

  ‘S’lenna?’ he slurred, opening his watering right eye. He looked up at Atebe. ‘Tadia?’

  ‘Best you don’t move,’ Atebe said.

  ‘Did we win?’ Norroll murmured.

  ‘We won,’ Daviland said wearily. ‘Don’t talk. He fractured your mandible and your left maxilla and zygomatic arch.’

  Norroll winced as he probed the damage with his tongue. ‘My what?’

  ‘Your face, Gry,’ Daviland explained. ‘He broke your face.’

  ‘Oh,’ Norroll mumbled. Atebe pushed down on his shoulders as he suddenly struggled to sit upright. ‘Where’s the Tempestor?’

  EPILOGUE

  ‘Thank you for your account, Tempestor,’ the interrogator said. He rose from his folding chair on the opposite side of a simple Munitorum-green field desk, steadying himself on his walking stick of decoratively twisted black iron. ‘As ever, the dedication of the Militarum Tempestus and its unwavering devotion to the Throne are appreciated. Your duties here on Rilis are discharged in full, and we do not wish to further delay your departure.’

  ‘Of course,’ Norroll said. His words were still slurred, though he was getting accustomed to speaking through the right side of his mouth. The left half of his face was swathed in bandages and his jaw remained wired shut. Daviland had implanted the augmetic grafts for his left eye a month before and had assured him they were taking well.

  A wave of nausea struck him again. He had felt queasy for weeks, a side effect of the counter-radiation tonics the medicae-adept had subjected them all to.

  He and the interrogator stood face to face in the makeshift headquarters which had served as the 139th Mech’s command centre. Half a pace behind Norroll, Daviland and Atebe silently flanked their Tempestor, lasguns held across their chests. Their armour had been patched and functionally repaired, but still bore all the scars accrued months earlier.

  A squad of five Scions in the halved red-and-black carapace of the 32nd Thetoid Eagles stood behind the interrogator, their right pauldrons emblazoned with the Warwing, the stylised eagle symbol of their regiment. Utterly immobile, they mirrored Daviland and Atebe, hotshot lasguns held across their chests and the lenses of their battle helms glowing with a faint green light. Neither group of Scions had spoken so much as a word to each other in the months since the 32nd Thetoid’s arrival.

  ‘If you don’t mind my asking, sir, what will happen here next?’

  The interrogator rapped his cane on the ground thoughtfully, scrutinising Norroll with deep-set eyes as forthcoming as knapped flint. He was an older man of middling height and build, swathed in a heavy greatcoat of black leather, with thinning sleet-grey hair and a hard-worn, craggy face. The edge of his left eye was deformed by a long scar which marred his features from brow to jaw. He appeared physically robust, despite his advancing years and what appeared to be a debilitating injury to his left leg.

  ‘As you know, Lord General Trenchard has taken direct command of the military reconquest of Rilis, and three Rilisian divisions have been recalled from across the segmentum to secure their planet,’ the interrogator replied. ‘Along with the contingent of Tempestus Scions from the Thirty-Second Thetoid Eagles who accompanied us from Enth, I am confident in the inevitability of this world’s return to the Emperor’s light. I fear it will be some time before we complete our investigations here, but rest assured, my master’s intent is to get this system back up and running in service to the Throne as quickly as possible.’

  Norroll nodded stiffly. He didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘I hope that satisfies your curiosity, Tempestor,’ the interrogator said with a thin smile. ‘Return to the Thirty-Sixth Xian Tigers with honour. You have accomplished great things here.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘You are dismissed.’

  As one, the eradicant turned on their heels and left. Traxel’s chainsword thumped against Norroll’s left hip.

  ‘It felt like that would never end,’ Atebe breathed as they walked through the jumbled corridors of the complex which had served as the 139th Mech’s command centre. The Xian Tigers themselves were never maltreated during the interrogation process, simply kept sequestered from the other internees for the duration. ‘Three weeks of inquiries.’

  A tent city had been built outside the headquarters, the entire area walled up and transformed into a massive processing centre. Survivors of the Rilisian civil war on both sides had been brought here for incarceration, interrogation and, frequently, execution. Norroll had heard of another such centre on Ganspur.

  Autumn had come to Rilis in the three months since the civil war’s end, and the ridges rising to the east of the Zholm River were ablaze with orange and crimson in the late afternoon’s golden sunlight.

  Passing without comment through a gate guarded by a pair of Scions from the 32nd Thetoid Eagles, First Eradicant made for the field which had once served as a makeshift motor pool. The area had been converted into a landing zone housing four separate landing pads, and the Xian Tigers crossed to the far side of the field, where a black Valkyrie, marked with the thrice-crossed ‘I’ of the God-Emperor’s Holy Inquisition, awaited them.

  ‘Any idea what’s next, Tempestor?’ Atebe asked as she and Daviland boarded behind Norroll. One of the door gunners slid the passenger hold’s door shut behind them.

  ‘None,’ Norroll admitted as he sat down. ‘I’m to meet with Tempestor-Prime Bassoumeh as soon as we arrive on Sindral-Beta, but I’ve no clue what she wants to speak to me about, or what she’s got in mind for us afterwards.’

  ‘Probably another operation,’ Atebe said as the gunship rose into the air on its vertical thrusters and pivoted westward.

  ‘Probably,’ Norroll agreed neutrally.

  Bound for the Inquisitorial frigate parked at low anchor above, the Valkyrie climbed into the upper atmosphere. Within, as Rilis fell away beneath them, the Scions lapsed into quiescence, ready­ing themselves for their next deployment.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  R S Wilt made his first foray onto the battlefields of the Dark Millennium during the early days of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. His previous works for Black Library include the short stories ‘Eradicant’ and ‘The Guns of Enth’. A retired United States Army officer who spent most of his career bouncing around Europe, he lives with his family.

  An extract from The Fall of Cadia.

  Blood and iron.

  Iron and blood.

  One lay on the other, and within the other. The slick shine of the iron-rich blood – still warm – on the cold surface of the bell. Two related elements, joined in accidental symbolism.

  If records were to be believed, the bell had been forged from blood.

  It was said that when Saint Gerstahl – the sacred soldier, favoured patron of the Cadian trooper – fell defending the Gate in the centuries after the Great Heresy, acolytes collected his vitae in a crystal reliquary. There it stayed for centuries, a venerated and lucrative relic on the shrine world christened with his name.

  Until, one night, Blessed Gerstahl appeared to the cardinal with a message: he must extract the iron from the tarry, coagulated remnants and forge it into a bell.

  A bell that would toll when Cadia was in mortal danger.

  The cardinal forged the relic as instructed, then took the bell on a tour of the Cadian Gate, purifying world after world with the vibration of its holy resonance. A fortunate choice, since it escaped destruction when the Despoiler immolated the shrine world – and Gerstahl’s incorruptible remains – during the Third Black Crusade.

  On Solar Mariatus, two million welcomed the bell. Sobbing crowds parted to make a path for the fifty Battle Sisters of the Order of Our Martyred Lady who formed its vanguard. In the Derades Subsector, it was said that its chime healed the deaf and straightened crooked limbs. And on Laurentix, in the Belis Corona System, the populace wailed in ecstasy when it tolled a dozen times without being touched by human hands.

  That was when the Black Legion descended upon it, in the opening raids of the Twelfth Black Crusade.

  The vanguard had sworn to die rather than surrender their relic. And they fulfilled that oath. Their bodies now lay beneath the cold iron of the bell, some resting in its shadow. Chest cavities blown open, limbs severed from the impact of traitor bolt-shells, their own vitae splashed onto the blood-forged iron. It ran in frozen rivulets down the engraved surface, turning the scrollwork and decorative psalms into channels of gore.

  They had saved it, in a sense.

  Their stoic defence had given Trazyn time to lock the bell and its entourage in stasis, then spirit it to the archival vaults of Solemnace.

  Now it hung, unmoving and fastened in time, among the relics of Cadia past. Gazed upon by the unseeing eyes of general officers snatched from the battlefield, zigzag trench-lines full of Shock Troops and a rank of Chimera variants bisected to show internal detail.

  Overhead, a squad of Night Lords Raptors arced through the vaults above a lit display of human eyes.

  All of them, artefacts of the Cadian Gate. The ephemera of Abaddon the Despoiler’s twelve Black Crusades.

  Darkened exhibits stretched across twenty-five square miles, a private gallery of humans, exquisitely arranged to please the historical and aesthetic tastes of the alien curator who’d imprisoned them.

  Nothing in the gallery apart from maintenance scarabs had moved in over a millennium.

  Which is why the soft pat-pat-pat of fluid echoed as far as it did.

  It fell from the iron surface of the bell like the first drops of icicles melting on the eaves of a hab. Drip. Drip-drip.

  Jewelled drops met the upturned forehead of a slain Battle Sister and stained her pale skin with splashes of crimson.

  Pat. Pat-pat.

  More drops. Coalescing on her brow, trickling into her open eyes.

  Blood moved on the bell’s skin, collecting in beads like rain on a window and falling in defiance of the stasis field.

  And the bell, without propulsion or force, began to swing.

  A hand’s breadth at first. A sway. Its clapper moving in a soft pendulum arc too weak to do more than scrape the sides.

  Then, the arc widened, the violent motion of the bell flinging droplets of blood to either side, spattering the faces of stasis-locked Shock Troopers. Sizzling on the protective fields of lasgun displays. Swaying wider until the bell went fully perpendicular and the clapper inside dropped, its hammer striking the iron of the bell.

  Clang.

  One.

  The blackstone floor vibrated. A rank of medals swayed, its stasis field shorting out. An organic clatter filled the chamber, the sound of ten thousand jaws – held shut by hard-light holograms – shaken so hard that the teeth rattled.

  Overhead, the flight of Night Lords Raptors tumbled from the vaults and into a trench display, snapping bones and crushing lasgun barrels. Neither Traitor Space Marines nor Guardsmen reacted.

  Clang.

  Two.

  Trazyn, Overlord of Solemnace, Archaeovist of the Prismatic Galleries and He-Who-Is-Called-Infinite, screamed in rage.

  ‘Sannet! What is happening?’

  ‘Unclear,’ answered his chief cryptek, his multijointed fingers dancing across phos-glyph panels. ‘Unknown resonance. Macro-seismic. Cracking the vaults, releasing coolant. We’ve lost the Ooliac sand sculptures.’

  ‘Call the restoration scarabs.’

  ‘Not responding,’ Sannet answered, data-chains flashing across his ocular. ‘Our nodal program misinterpreted the vibration as a re-interment signal. The legion has entered radical shutdown. I cannot rouse them.’

  Trazyn cursed the very wheel of the cosmos. The interval between shocks had been only seconds apart, and while mental speech between he and Sannet was near instant, they were running out of time before the next tectonic shudder would hit.

  ‘It’s not tectonic, lord,’ said Sannet. ‘It’s coming from the gallery.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Black Crusades wing.’

  ‘That’s only two levels do–’

  Clang.

  Three.

  The shockwave shook Trazyn apart, his joint servos spasming and dislocating with the intensity of it.

  He evacuated the dying body and rushed his spirit-algorithm into the network of data-channels in the walls. Found a waiting lychguard he could use as a surrogate. Melted and reshaped the borrowed body into his accustomed form as he ran towards the gates of the Cadian gallery. Waved a hand at the enormous gates in a gesture of opening.

  Clang.

  Four.

  The doors ahead, twice the size of a monolith, blew off their hinges and toppled down at him. He felt them crumple the necrodermis of his cranium like parchment and burst his central reactor before he transferred to another body, sheltered in the lee of a Baneblade.