Table of Contents

Cover

The Arkunasha War - Andy Chambers

Sir Dagobert's Last Battle - Jonathan Green

The Inquisition - An Interview with Sarah Cawkwell

Phalanx - Chapter Ten - Ben Counter

Survivor - Steve Parker

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THE ARKUNASHA WAR

Andy Chambers

Cymbals and drums sounded tinny and distant in the thin, cold air as they welcomed him to the new world. Looking down from the top of the ramp, the shuttle’s only passenger seemed surprised to find any kind of welcoming committee, even one as small and dispirited as this one, awaiting him. High overhead, twin suns lit the scene with a fierce glare but little warmth; what little heat there was to be had was being ripped away by a chilling breeze filled with fine, irritating dust. Gentle ripples of rust-red sand marked the edge of the landing pad and marched off towards the foreshortened horizon with monotonous discipline. A small collection of domes, blocks and stubby towers in the mid-distance constituted the apparent entirety of Arkunasha’s one and only colony, the handful of off-white shapes looking lonely and isolated on the too-wide canvas of an empty world.

The newcomer was tall and broad-shouldered, and showed scarification, unusual in a society with the capacity to heal any such blemish at will. A warrior, clearly, past his first flush of youth but still vital. There was a penetrating look to his dark eyes as he squinted through the glare and stinging dust at the welcoming party, wishing he had accepted a filter plug for his nasal slit when the shuttle pilot had offered him one. He beheld the tall, serene-looking profile of the colony leader and the squat shape of the chief engineer among a handful of others at the bottom of the ramp. One of the cymbal players, a wiry-looking fellow with blue facial markings, broke away from the small crowd and hurried upwards.

‘Please to be meeting with the exalted prince, great warrior, I, unworthy associate, will conduct you hence if willing?’

‘Of course, I…’ But the low ranking associate was already backing away and gesturing as if to draw the warrior forward on invisible strings. The bemused warrior followed him, his armoured toe-hooves clacking down the ramp and onto the first true ground he’d touched in weeks of travel.

‘To make introductions,’ the associate said, gesturing to the broad-shouldered warrior and the colony leader in turn. ‘This great warrior is Shas’o Vior’la Kais Mont’yr. This exalted prince is Aun’o T’au Vasoy Ty’asla.’

The warrior knelt before the stately Aun’o and bowed his head before rising and addressing him.

‘Aun’o, I am flattered that you came to meet me but I would not have discomforted you so.’

The Aun’o’s face was thin and high boned, virtually a T-shape with a narrow slit of a mouth at the bottom that radiated faint but constant disapproval. The Aun’o’s mark of celestial devotion gleamed from the top of his nasal slit like a third eye. When he spoke his voice seemed dull and flat, a disinterested burr.

‘Nonsense, Shas’o, it was only seeming for me to be present in order to make acquaintance and welcome you to Arkunasha at the first moment of your arrival.’

The associate cleared his throat and rattled his cymbals quietly before speaking again.

‘Also, great and exalted ones, here is honoured trustee Fio’ui Ke’lshan.’ The portly engineer nodded stiffly to the warrior, who saluted him in return.

‘We shall have much to discuss, Fio’ui,’ the warrior said politely, ‘and I hope we can work closely together for the protection of the colony.’

The flat-faced engineer gave a non-committal grunt at the prospect, eliciting the shadow of a frown on the warrior’s face. The associate smoothly broke into the moment of silence that followed.

‘Please to be moving to the concourse area where refreshments are now being served.’ Taking their cue the drums and cymbals rattled again as the water caste members began leading the way towards a torus–shaped structure nearby. The warrior refused to be immediately drawn after them, addressing a question to the associate.

‘And where are the warriors I am to command? I am surprised to find that they have left greetings, welcome as they are, to others, while absenting themselves.’

The Aun’o answered directly, cutting across the associate’s platitudes even as they began.

‘The Shas’la are sulking in their barracks after being refused permission to bring weapons along to a greeting. They declared that they would rather go naked than suffer the shame of being disarmed at the first encounter with their Shas’o! This, on a world completely empty of any other living beings save for ourselves. Just whom do they propose to shoot, I wonder?’ The Aun’o tittered briefly at the thought, before subsiding into an indulgent clucking. The frown returned to the Shas’o’s face and remained there.

‘What’s that supposed to be?’

‘It’s a world, boss, the mekboss wants to go there.’

Ork Warboss Gorbag Gitbiter leaned forward, peering down at the wiry little gretchin before his throne. The gretchin quaked, the big shard of glass in its hands quivering and making the dirty yellow-brown ball on its surface bounce around uncertainly.

‘The mekboss, eh?’ Gorbag rumbled with a voice like stones tumbling down a shaft. ‘Well, I’m the warboss and I say where we go!’

The gretchin rocked back on its heels at the blast of sound and spittle flying from the impressively tusked jaws of the hulking warboss. It desperately wanted to chuck away the viewing glass and run off behind a console or into a duct, but it was smart enough not to try. The complex symbiotic relationship between the warlike orks and their smaller, weaker gretchin cousins has long depended on the quick wits and diplomacy of the latter. Thousands of years of genetic heritage conspired to keep the gretchin’s mind focussed enough to squeal out the words that might save it.

‘The mekboss said the ships are gonna break if we don’t go!’

The warboss paused at that. Glaring red eyes pierced the quivering gretchin with new interest.

‘What… did you just say?’

The gretchin’s healthy green pallor had gained a distinctly whitish cast, the world in the viewing glass oscillated tightly back and forth in its grip.

‘The mekboss said to tell you we got too many holes. Some are so big the boys are falling out and all the... the breathy stuff is leakin’ out.’

Gorbag thrust his mighty jaw out truculently. ‘Breathy stuff? You mean the air, you stupid little grot?’

‘Yes boss!’

‘So we’re gonna be stuck there?’ Gorbag’s three-metre tall form seemed to sag at the prospect. No more reaving across the stars for him and his bloodthirsty crew of freebooters; they would be stuck on one stinking planet with no way off it and nothing to fight but each other.

‘No, boss! The mekboss says there’s metal on this world. We can fix all the holes an’ keep goin’!’

Gorbag seemed to swell up visibly at the prospect. He grabbed the viewing glass from the gretchin with a gnarled claw as big as its torso and glared at it with a rapacious gleam in his eyes. The gretchin failed to relinquish its grip quickly enough and ended up dangling from Gorbag’s fist by one arm.

‘Anything to kill?’ Gorbag demanded.

‘No boss,’ the grot squeaked apologetically, ‘leastways nothing good.’

The Shas’o found the warriors beneath his command awaiting him at their barracks, just as the Aun’o had said. The warriors stood in ranks inside the quadrangle formed between their quarters, garages and armoury. Each was in full armour, the jointed plates giving them an insectile quality in the harsh glare of the twin suns. They held their pulse rifles upright before them, long-barrelled firing chambers pointing rigidly at the skies. Small mounds of windblown dust reaching up to their ankles showed they had been silently awaiting him for quite some time. The Shas’o dropped his single carry bag with an audible clank before blowing out his cheeks in a long-suffering sigh.

‘And just what is the meaning of this?’ he shouted in a parade ground bark very different to the tone he had used with the Aun’o and Fio’el. A fire warrior with the stripes of a Shas’ui took a step forward and replied.

‘It is my responsibility, Shas’o,’ the Shas’ui said, their voice made slightly distorted by the audio pickup of their enclosed helmet. ‘Any punishment due is mine alone.’

A murmur of discontent rippled out behind the Shas’ui as they spoke and the forest of pulse rifles swayed slightly in response. The Shas’o raised a hand to silence it.

‘I am led to understand you all refused to leave your barracks unarmed? On the idea that it would shame you in my eyes not to greet me as warriors?’

‘The Aun’o believes that with no enemies present our weapons are only a danger to ourselves and others, Shas’o’ The Shas’ui replied cautiously. ‘The exalted one believes us too ill-trained and unreliable to bear arms.’

‘Enough! Put down your weapons at once!’ The Shas’o barked. As one, the assembled fire warriors placed their rifles on the ground. ‘Now take off your armour. You heard me, every piece!’

The Shas’o watched while the warriors more hesitantly unclipped shoulder guards and breastplates, thigh pieces and curved helmets. The Shas’ui proved to be an attractive female with a fine scalp-lock, the others lost their uniformity and were revealed as a selection of males and females of a young age, few probably even close to their first trial by fire. The variety of their physiognomy showed that they hailed from a variety of different septs. There were some dark faces from Vior’la that were eyeing him with approval, a gaggle of pallid D’yanoi that look confused, several Sa’ceans that obeyed quickly and efficiently without hesitation.

Finally, each warrior’s weapon and armour sat beside them in the dirt and they stood shivering in only their undersuits. The Shas’o walked over to the Shas’ui’s neat little pile of equipment and kicked it over.

‘These… objects do not make you a warrior!’ he shouted into her face. He stalked to another pile and scattered it, catching the owner’s look of horror as their cherished pulse rifle clattered to the ground. He laughed, a short, harsh sound within the confines of the quad, and pushed another warrior in the chest causing them to stagger back a pace.

‘The will… the ability to fight, to be a warrior, does not reside in your weapons, nor is it inside your armour unless you bring it there yourself! The warrior begins within, a warrior is one who still fights with whatever they have and with nothing at all if they must!’

The Shas’o had their complete attention now, every eye was on him and he saw the unconscious flaring of nasal slits in approval on many faces. He bent down and drew two fighting sticks from his carry bag, ironwood rods as long and as thick as his forearm. He tossed one into the dust before the fire warriors and hefted the other in his fist.

‘Now… who among you is enough of a warrior to fight me for the right to put your armour back on?’

Two days later, a Devilfish personnel carrier skimmed over low dunes with all the smooth agility of its namesake, its graceful lines speeding across the sands. Inside, the Shas’o watched the external monitors with interest, noting the tall double plume of dust snaking in their wake that would be visible for miles. He bore the pain of his bruises stoically, as did the five other fire warriors beside him in the passenger compartment.

He’d beaten all of them, one on one, even though it had taken all night and most of the next day. The smarter ones had waited until he was tired before taking their chances, managing to get a few telling strikes on him. Afterwards, the Shas’o had fought them in pairs and groups to allow them a little revenge. Not bad, but some of them really were ill-trained and all of them were very inexperienced. More importantly, they were now thinking of themselves as warriors again, instead of scolded children. He turned to the Shas’ui, raising his voice above the whine of the Devilfish’s ducted turbines.

‘No other living things on the entire planet?’

‘Nothing at all, not a plant, not an animal’. The Shas’ui’s responses were clipped and coolly professional but the Shas’o could tell that she was barely holding her excitement in check. The Aun’o, in his ineffable wisdom, had virtually confined the fire warriors to their barracks for fear of accidents or unnecessary wear and tear on their equipment. The current reconnaissance run into the desert would be their first training hunt in months.

‘But our colony here is purported to extend over three-quarters of the planet’s surface,’ the Shas’o prodded.

‘That is something of an exaggeration, Shas’o, the main colony is here in the Argap highlands. The Fio have indeed established many other facilities but they are all small, highly automated and widely dispersed.’

‘Their purpose?’

‘Metal extraction and purifcation. The sands we are traversing bear huge quantities of metallic oxides mixed with silica and carbon. The Fio believe them to be the detritus of a civilization that once covered this world.’

The Shas’o blinked with surprise. ‘My briefing material said nothing about this, perhaps you jest with me, Shas’ui?’

The Shas’ui gestured at the red dunes sliding past on the monitors, ‘No, Shas’o, I do not jest. The sands you see out there really are composed of rust. The Fio don’t know whether the gue’la or or’es’la lived here, certainly it was a long time ago.’ She paused. ‘Permission to ask a question, Shas’o?’

‘Granted; I value obedience, but ignorance is a weapon placed in our enemy’s hands. What is it?’

‘Your name - Shas’o Vior’la Kais Mont’yr. You’ve earned two adjuncts to your name already; you have seen battle and been named as skilful by your fellow warriors. You must have passed at least three trials by fire to achieve the rank of Shas’o…’

‘I’m sure you have a question in there somewhere, Shas’ui. What’s troubling you?’

‘It’s just… why would the Shas’ar’tol send someone like you to a place like this? Surely you would do more good in an active conflict region than being crèche supervisor in some forgotten outpost.’

‘I go where the greater good commands, like any diligent student of the Tau’va,’ the Shas’o replied. ‘If my seniors at high command believe I can have the most effect here, then that becomes my singular purpose and I give no thought to potential glories lost elsewhere.’

The Shas’ui looked at him in frank disbelief, and seemed to be trying to deduce just who he had offended and how. She opened her mouth to ask another, probably even more impertinent, question when the Devilfish lurched suddenly, banking sharply to one side. The fire warriors were thrown against their restraining harnesses with a chorus of suppressed groans. On the monitors, the Shas’o caught a glimpse of a yawning darkness amid the dunes that rapidly vanished down one side of the personnel carrier.

‘Canyon,’ the Shas’ui explained. ‘Natural erosion cuts channels into the desert, they–’

‘I know; that part was in the briefing materials. It also means we’ve arrived at our destination. Prepare to disembark.’

The sand-laden winds had ground the exposed rim of the canyon to a pitted smoothness. Across the gap, the far cliff was marked with uneven bands of strata made up of a fantastic array of reds, browns and blacks. Thirty metres below, on the canyon floor, spires and mushrooms of basalt protruded from a bed of rust-coloured sand. Behind the Shas’o, three Devilfish carriers lifted off in unison and turned their elegantly curved prows back towards base. Three bemused squads of fire warriors were left standing in the thick cloud of dust kicked up by their departing personnel carriers. They looked questioningly at the Shas’o. He opened a common frequency to address them all.

‘Until now, you’ve only thought about these canyons as obstacles to be crossed,’ the Shas’o told them. ‘We’re here to learn that they can be your best ally or your worst enemy. In this hunt, you must simply return to the colony without being tagged. The Devilfish will be patrolling the desert; hostile pathfinders and gun drones are in the canyons. Question one, which way do you go?’

‘Through the canyons, Shas’o,’ the Shas’ui responded promptly.

‘Very good,’ nodded the Shas’o. ‘Now tell me why.’

‘The Devilfish would easily detect us and tag us in the open.’

‘You discount the threat of pathfinders and gun drones?’

‘No, but the pathfinders will require support to stop us and the Devilfish will be highly restricted if they enter the canyons. The gun drones can be outsmarted or outfought one-on-one as necessary.’

‘I concur with your theories, Shas’ui. Now let’s go and put them to the test. Pay close attention because we will be performing another hunt out here tomorrow, with battlesuits.’

Pulse blasts criss-crossed the canyon in a flickering web of light. Every nook and cranny seemed to birth and receive its own false lightning faster than the eye could follow. After a week of successive hunts in the desert, the fire warriors were improving, the Shas’o noted with approval. The blue ‘prey’ cadre in this hunt had turned on their pursuers and caught them with a classic mont’ka, a killing blow. The strung-out red cadre suddenly found their lead elements caught in a canyon too narrow to redeploy in. In thirty more seconds the surrounded warriors would be cut down and the red cadre would become prey.

Shas’o and his team leapt from the canyon lip eighty metres above, the flat plates of their crisis battlesuits gleaming in the bright suns. Blue-white stabs of flame from their shoulder-packs steadied their fall as the canyon floor rushed up to greet them. At the last second, their jetpacks kicked in and robbed them of their momentum, their duralloy leg-claws crunching into the sands in unison. The three-metre tall armoured suits raised arm-mounted weapon pods and rapid bursts of plasma rifle fire ripped into the firefight from a new angle.

The blue cadre ambushers were caught between the crisis suits and the red cadre survivors. Decisive action could still have saved them; enough were combat effective that a concerted attack on either the battlesuits or the reds might have still carried the fight. But the blue cadre’s cohesion had disintegrated when the crisis team landed. They panicked and fought their own immediate battles without regard to what was happening behind them. In a few seconds, the moment had passed and the red cadre carried the blue’s position. The blue’s hasty ambush became their last stand.

‘You cheated!’ the Shas’ui was standing before the Shas’o’s suit, glaring defiantly up into the monitor lenses that peppered its head. The Shas’ui’s own light armour was discoloured where simulated plasma fire had killed her in the fight.

‘I’m sorry, Shas’ui, in what way did I cheat?’ The voice came from the battlesuit’s external speakers, somewhere in its midriff.

‘You said that you would observe and take no part in the action!’

‘I did, but sometimes in combat you will also find things to be different to what you anticipated.’ The suit’s speaker made the statement flat and unaffected, yet it ended the Shas’ui’s tirade as if she had been struck.

‘I apologise, Shas’o; I did not mean to impugn your teaching.’

The heavily-armoured suit raised one weapon-mounted arm in a curiously lifelike gesture of conciliation. ‘No, it is I that should apologise, Shas’ui. The reds were fairly caught, and credit is due to you for that. I felt there was no further lesson left to be learned there. However, there was still a lesson for you to learn. Can you tell me what it was?’

‘No rearguard,’ the Shas’ui said bitterly. ‘When I was sure we’d caught them, I didn’t detail anyone to watch our back.’

The Shas’o broadcast his findings on the hunt to all of the fire warriors present, reds and blues alike.

‘You have fought well, but with mistakes on both sides. Overlooking that a force of which you are unaware might come against you during an engagement is an easy mistake to make, just as easy as rushing headlong after a fleeing enemy and suffering a reverse. Natural eagerness to turn every weapon on the acquired target can obscure the need for a rearguard, or a reserve, to cover the eventuality that all does not proceed as hoped for. Learn from this.’

The Shas’ui was studying the patina of simulated pulse rifle hits on the commander’s suit. ‘Are those mine?’ she eventually asked when the Shas’o’s wisdom had been dispensed.

‘Indeed they are; some nice grouping, Shas’ui.’

‘I’ll get you next time.’

It took two more weeks of training hunts before the Fio’ui took exception to the additional maintenance burden the fire warriors were incurring. As the Shas’o returned to the barracks after dusk, he sighted the Fio’ui’s dumpy form waiting patiently beside the gate post like some carved heathen icon.

They had been using battlesuits again that day, and the Shas’o’s was close to the limits of its endurance. The suit’s armoured casing was streaked with smears of dust and its clogged servos whined plaintively with every step. They’d found that the crisis battlesuits were excellent for supporting the troopers in the close confines of the canyons, far more practical than the larger Devilfish or Hammerhead support vehicles. The only downside was the battlesuit’s limited endurance, which meant they would need to cache extra power cells to operate in areas remote from the colony.

The Shas’o’s mind was filled with plans as he approached, but the sight of the Fio’ui gave him pause. He halted the crisis suit and opened its chest cavity so that he could dismount and meet the Fio’ui face-to-face. One of the earth caste would never be intimidated by a piece machinery, however martial its function, but it never hurt to show some politeness to another caste. The Fio’ui was of the Kel’shan sept, and so apt to be stubborn and mistrustful of outsiders at the best of times.

‘Greetings Fio’ui,’ the Shas’o began. ‘You come without the Por’la at your side. Am I to understand that this is a social visit with no call for negotiation?’

‘You understand wrongly,’ the Fio’ui grumbled. ‘I have come to inform you that your… outings must stop. There is serious work to be done and my apprentices are being distracted by your indulgence.’

‘Training is no indulgence, Fio’ui, if my warriors are to retain any value as a fighting force. Just as your own apprentices would not expect a mechanism to function if it was left unattended, I cannot expect my warriors to fight if they never lift a weapon.’

The Fio’ui thrust his jaw out truculently and began again. ‘It must stop. The Aun’o demands maximum output.’ Having evoked the name of the Aun’o, the engineer closed his mouth and moved to leave, as if no more need be said.

‘Wait, Fio’ui,’ the Shas’O said. ‘Even absent the Por’la can we not come to compromise?’

The Fio’ui seemed a little shocked by the concept, but he paused to listen. Encouraged by his own boldness, the Shas’o pressed his point further.

‘I have many pairs of idle hands on Arkunasha colony, not to mention numerous drones without true purpose. Teach my fire warriors how to perform their own maintenance schedules and I will have them assist in monitoring the extraction and purification facilities across the planet. You would exceed your estimated output in no time.’

The Fio’ui’s heavy brow furrowed uncertainly as he wrapped his mind around the unfamiliar concept. His voice was still gruff but there was a gleam of hope in his eye. ‘The Shas’la would refuse,’ he muttered ‘you of the fire caste have always believed manual labour beneath you.’

‘Bold words,’ Shas’o smiled, ‘some fire warriors would demand satisfaction for their bruised honour on hearing them. I am not so ignorant and I’m ready to shoulder my burdens alongside my brothers and sisters. The Shas’la will obey my commands, and they are just as eager to be of more value to this colony. Only caste barriers prevent their willing contribution to it.’

‘Very well, Shas’o, I shall consider your unorthodox proposal and discuss with my own kind. I… thank you for your time.’

The Shas’o watched the chief engineer shuffle away through dim pools of illumination cast by the colony lights. He smiled to himself. Another opponent laid low by a surprise attack. After a time he went inside to prepare briefings for the next training hunt.

Fire and iron thundered out of the void with twisting, belching black trails chasing at its back. One, two, then three fiery meteors were vomited from the sullen skies, the clouds peeling back in ragged tatters where the smoking lances pierced them from above. Distance made the churning smoke and fire trails seem absurdly slow-moving as their burning tips crawled across the sky.

The Shas’o watched the apocalyptic sight through the screens of the colony information center. A crisp line of characters at the bottom of the image announced that it was being relayed from a metal extraction and purification facility somewhere on the far side of the planet.

‘Still no word from the Vior’la Gal’leath M’shan?’ he asked.

The Fio’La technicians hunched their shoulders helplessly. The only ship within communication range of Arkunasha colony had dropped off the grid hours before. All their attemptss to raise it had met with stubborn silence. The Fio’ui was clinging tenaciously to the idea of a meteor storm being responsible for the break in communications. He gestured sharply at the screens.

‘Meteors, see?’ the engineer grunted. ‘They’re starting to break up.’

A handful of smoking coals were indeed dropping away from churning masses and curving downward at a steeper trajectory. The Shas’o shook his head as most of the smaller smoke trails corkscrewed and levelled out just before they hit the ground. One came rocketing straight towards the extraction facility, creating a momentary impression of something big and close before the image disintegrated into static.

‘Facility 7352 is no longer transmitting, Fio’ui,’ one of the Fio’la called apologetically.

‘Because those are Ore’s’la ships and attack craft, not meteors,’ the Shas’o said quietly. ‘Fio’ui, I need you to tell your people to prepare for evacuation–’

‘You will do nothing of the kind, Fio’ui,’ the Aun’o’s voice rang out in the quiet information centre as he swept in through the outer doors. ‘There is no call for such precipitous action at this time.’

The Aun’o stood at the entry surrounded by a small coterie of nervous-looking water caste members. His expression was that of a tutor finding his students engaged in some distasteful, and probably illegal, activity.

‘My apologies, Aun’o,’ the Shas’o replied somewhat tautly, ‘but the protection of this colony is my responsibility and I must advise immediate evacuation.’

‘Because a handful of pirates have landed on the far side of the planet? Something of an overreaction on your part. Understandable, I suppose – this must be very exciting for you.’

‘Apologies again, Aun’o, but this is no mere handful of pirates. Or’es’la ships of that size carry tens of thousands of their warrior caste. I have insufficient forces to defeat them all when they locate the colony. We must remain mobile to stay ahead of the invaders until reinforcements can arrive.’

‘Don’t you mean if they locate the colony, Shas’o?’

‘I mean what I say. It will only be a matter of time before the Or’es’la locate more of the extraction facilities, and believe me they will trace them back to us. They will travel any distance to find battle, Aun’o; we must not be here when they arrive.’

Aboard the lead ork cruiser, warboss Gorbag Gitbiter gripped the arms of his command throne and laughed uproariously at the sight of orks and grots being hurled around the ship’s bridge. Smoke and blasts of flame accompanied their thunderous progress through the skies. The vibrations running through the ship felt like a thousand jackhammers were being jammed against its patchwork armour plating.

Gorbag mashed random buttons on the arm of his throne until a frightened-sounding grot voice squeaked from a speaker grill in response.

‘Tell the flyboys it’s time to drop and give ‘em a boot up the arse from me,’ Gorbag growled happily. With nothing to kill on this planet, the landing was going to be the most fun part and he was going to squeeze out every bit of it. Distant clunks reverberated through the hull as landers and flyers dropped away from the giant ship with all the aplomb of baby chicks falling out of a large, ugly nest.

A chaotic selection of viewscreens flickered into life around the bridge, half exploding in showers of sparks before immediately going dead. Of the remainder, some showed only static, but others showed the juddering, leaping views from the noses of the ork flyers. Boring-looking sand dunes and rocks bounced around on the working screens for a few seconds before one was lit by the stabbing flames of nose guns firing. Gorbag’s attention snapped to the screen and his impressively-tusked jaws champed convulsively. A little sprawl of silvery towers and pipes in the desert was disappearing in a storm of explosions. Gorbag cuffed a nearby gretchin excitedly and sent him flying.

‘Something to kill!’ Gorbag roared, jabbing one clawed finger at the flickering image ‘Get us down there! Now!’

The desert horizon that had once been so crisp and clear was smudged with plumes smoke. The Or’es’la had been busy destroying every extraction facility they could find in this part of the world, apparently racing one another for the joys of reaching them first and destroying the handful of drones defending them. The Shas’o glanced out to his flank, where two Hammerheads were churning through the dust, their dart-like hulls completely dwarfed by the long railguns they carried in their turrets. He looked down into the canyon lying diagonally before him, where fire warriors advanced through rocks and took up positions.

It had taken almost a week of strenuous argument to persuade the Aun’o to allow the fire warriors out of the colony at all. Eventually the Aun’o had conceded that at least tracking the invader’s progress was necessary, and some reconnaissance might be in order. If the Aun’o had paid attention to the forces the Shas’o had chosen to take on his ‘reconnaissance’ mission, he might have questioned his intentions more thoroughly. He had brought almost a full cadre; half a dozen fire warrior squads in Devilfish carriers, pathfinders, two crisis teams and a squadron of Hammerhead tanks as a ‘covering force’. Even so they were horribly outnumbered by the or’es’la in this region.

Flickers of light at the horizon caught the Shas’o’s attention. He increased the optical gain on his battlesuit’s sensors in time to see several disc-shaped drones fly into view. Brightly glowing tracers chased them, kicking up spurts in the dust as the drones bobbed and weaved frantically to avoid them. A second later, the first of their pursuers leapt over the horizon on a belching tail of smoke, a crude looking or’es’la flyer with its nose aflame with twinkling gun flashes. The Shas’o’s crisis suit immediately registered two high-energy discharges to his flank as the Hammerheads fired their railguns in unison. The flyer disintegrated into an expanding cloud of flaming debris an instant later. The rain of hot shrapnel was still falling as the horizon darkened with the arrival of the main enemy force.

The dark silhouettes of what seemed like hundreds of vehicles came streaming into view, a mobile mass of churning dust and metal. The two Hammerheads turned tail and fled, in accordance with their orders, turning their long railguns rearwards to menace their still distant pursuers. As the enemy drew closer, they became distinguishable as a column of tanks, bikes, guns and trucks mixed together without any apparent formation. They came on with the subtlety of a battering ram, completely intent on the vanishing Hammerheads and unaware of the fire warriors lurking on their flank.

Invisible markerlight beams fired by the pathfinders reached out to the onrushing horde to guide in a salvo of seeker missiles. The seekers were a precious commodity, one-shot self-guided weapons being launched from a trio of Devilfish hidden further down the canyon. The slender missiles flashed unerringly into their designated targets, ripping ragged holes in the column wherever they struck. The or’es’la dissolved into a chaotic mess of vehicles, charging in every direction, careening into each other, crashing into rocks and toppling down soft dunes. The rapidly-thinning horde spilled within pulse rifle range and the fire warriors’ bright volleys crashed out to immolate individual vehicles in dirty orange explosions. Submunitions from the disappearing Hammerheads blossomed over the scene almost as an afterthought, shredding the exposed or’es’la gunners and drivers in a storm of hyper-velocity shrapnel.

The remaining vehicles turned for the horizon and sped away as fast as their tracks and wheels would carry them, leaving perhaps half of their number as twisted wrecks on the desert dunes. The Shas’o was tempted to lead his crisis teams into the field of burning wreckage to chase down the survivors to truly seal the victory. There would be no quarter asked or given by the or’es’la, and any that escaped now would fight again with renewed ferocity in their next battle. He checked his impulse and signalled the fire warriors to begin withdrawing to the waiting Devilfish. More smudges were appearing on the horizon all the time, showing that more or’es’la were converging on this position. It was time to leave and set another ambush elsewhere.

The link to Arkunasha colony was weak and uncertain, jumping and sliding as the signal bounced off the ionosphere. Even so, the Aun’o’s disapproval communicated itself readily through the tiny screen in the Shas’o’s battlesuit as he trudged through a shadowed canyon along with the rest of his weary cadre. Night was falling, the time when the or’es’la stopped moving and the Shas’o’s dwindling force could quietly shift between sectors. Endless days and nights of ambushes and running fights had taken their toll on the Shas’o’s endurance, and his patience.

‘I understand your concerns, Aun’o,’ he said tiredly. ‘However, it is necessary for me to remain in action. As I explained before, should the or’es’la reach the colony, they will destroy it and kill everyone there. I can only ensure your protection by engaging the enemy–’

‘You overrate your personal importance,’ the Aun’o chided, ‘even if what you say is true – which, frankly, I doubt – your Shas’ui can command in your absence, is that not a keystone of your warrior philosophy?’

‘Leaving an inexperienced Shas’ui in command at this juncture would amount to a gross dereliction of duty on my part. My presence at the colony is completely unnecessary and would jeopardise my warriors.’

The tiny image bobbed and darted silently for a moment and the Shas’o feared the Aun’o was going to give him a direct order to return. The other tau’s high-boned face turned away for a moment as someone spoke to him from off-screen. After several moments the Aun’o turned back with a pallid look on his face.

‘A courier has arrived from the Shas’ar’tol… they say no reinforcements are available at this time. Limited evacuation may be possible later, but for now Arkunasha colony is exhorted to resist to its last breath, for the greater good.’

‘For the greater good,’ Shas’o agreed. He waited for the Aun’o to say something else but the silence stretched on until he spoke again.

‘Aun’o, you must board that courier and leave the colony at once. I will accept no argument about this and, if necessary, I will return and put you on the ship myself. Your protection is my first responsibility and the dangers will only increase from now on. Leave now while you still can. I must attend to my warriors.’ The tiny head on the screen nodded abruptly in response and the image vanished.

The Shas’o looked at the lines of fire warriors winding along the canyon on foot and felt an invisible burden lift from his soul. With the Aun’o gone, he would have a free hand at last, no more negotiating and explaining every action. He turned his mind to current dispositions. The surviving Devilfish were out some distance away, scouting for the enemy and the Hammerheads were perched somewhere above on the dunes, keeping a watch for flyers. Their attrition so far had been light, but maintaining supplies of ammunition and energy cells was a constant concern. The supply cache they were approaching was one of the last that had been placed before the invasion and the only one close to what now amounted to the front lines. Risk of interception and limited resources meant most of the newer caches were only a day or two’s travel from the colony. Too close, but they had been left with little choice.

One of the fire warriors left the line and picked their way to where the crisis suits were labouring along the soft sand of the canyon floor to conserve their energy. It was the Shas’ui, her armour flecked and chipped where she had been caught in an or’es’la shell burst that morning. The monocular eye-piece of her helmet gazed up at the Shas’o’s monitor head in mute question until he opened a channel to her.

‘Word has arrived from the Shas’ar’tol that there are to be no reinforcements,’ the Shas’o told her simply. ‘We must fight on with what we have.’

‘Not long ago I would have said that was impossible, but these past weeks you’ve led the or’es’la around by their noses so well that I can’t see why we can’t do it forever.’

‘Supplies, mostly, and the or’es’la will learn to be less cooperative over ti–’

An urgent communications request from the Pathfinders was winking in the corner of one of the Crisis suit’s screens. The Shas’o accepted it and was treated to a grainy view of the desert above. His stomach turned over at the sight and his exhaustion vanished. An array of dark brown shapes were moving through the gathering gloom, the sullen flames gouting from their exhaust stacks briefly illuminating their rusting armour and the swarming or’es’la warriors clinging to every vehicle.

‘Course?’ the Shas’o snapped.

‘Closing on our position. They haven’t sighted us yet.’

‘Pull back into the canyon and let them pass, we can’t–’

‘Second group sighted, Shas’o!’ The view spun to show another distant column converging on the opposite side of the canyon. ‘The first group are halting now, it looks as if they’re stopping for the night.’

‘Plant five photon grenades on maximum delay and pull back immediately.’

‘Acknowledged, Shas’o.’ He closed the link and addressed the Shas’ui on a direct channel.

‘Pass the word, Shas’ui, I want the supplies recovered and brought back down the canyon as quietly as possible, no one is to engage the or’es’la.’

‘Shas’o?’

‘I have something much better in mind for them.’

The Shas’o triggered his jet pack and bounded away down the canyon in a series of low, swinging leaps to stay below its rim. He reached the retreating Pathfinders and had them markerlight the position of their photon grenades up above. He turned and leapt for the opposite lip, using his remaining reserves of energy lavishly to thrust himself over the edge. Dark shadows blotted the frozen waves of dunes to either side of the canyon and were made hard-edged by guttering oil-fires lit by the or’es’la.

The Shas’o levelled his plasma rifle and let rip at the closest targets. They were beyond effective range, but he loosed off several incandescent bolts into the gloom before jumping back down into the canyon. A moment later, the photon grenades detonated, their stark white flashes burning away the night vision of anyone looking for the source of the incoming fire. Fat red tracers buzzed across the canyon in both directions, followed by the distinctive crack-swish sound of larger projectiles.

The crisis suit’s energy reserves were into the orange, but the Shas’o leapt a short distance further along the canyon before mounting the opposite side and firing again. That provoked another wild burst of fire from the or’es’la, and in the brief moment he was above the lip of the canyon he glimpsed the insane crossfire already occurring between the two camps. He dropped to the canyon floor and left the or’es’la to their sport; with any luck they would keep shooting at each other all night.

‘O’Shovah?’ the Shas’ui’s voice was unsteady, the pain of her shattered body edging the word.

Shovah meant ‘farsight’. The fire warriors had taken to calling him that during the desert campaign. O’Shovah, Commander Farsight, just a jocular nickname at first but it had grown into a watchword, almost a prayer. Farsight will see us through, Commander Farsight will outwit the or’es’la once again, they can never catch Farsight.

It seemed like a bitter reprimand now, trapped for weeks in the Argap highlands with no room to manoeuvre and endless hordes of foes surrounding them. Every day was another day of grinding siege, insane assaults, and casualties on both sides. The or’es’la died by the dozen for every fire warrior they dragged down, but each loss was keenly felt by the small band of defenders.

Now the Shas’ui was among the fallen, another casualty ticked off the shrinking roster of colony defenders. She had been caught in an or’es’la rocket attack while dragging an injured comrade clear, her limbs shattered and torso pierced by randomly flying metal. It all seemed so senseless.

‘Rest easy, Shas’ui,’ he said. ‘Another shuttle got through. You’re going to be evacuated.’

‘No!’ The Shas’ui lurched on her narrow cot, trying to rise ‘I will stay and fight!’

‘You will heal and fight another day,’ the Shas’o, O’Shovah as he was coming to think of himself, said coldly. ‘Your injuries would impede you in battle to the point of uselessness.’

The Shas’ui sank back, too weak to protest further, her eyes searching O’Shovah’s face. ‘Why don’t they evacuate all of us? Why are we still here?’

O’Shovah had no answer. The Aun’o was gone, the colony ruined and most of its population killed or fled. There was no reason to stay but the Shas’ar’tol insisted that they hold on. Reinforcements were trickling in, but they were barely enough to keep pace with the attrition incurred by the siege. No counter-offensive was possible, only endless positional warfare through the peaks and passes of the highlands.

‘I don’t know, Shas’ui,’ he confessed. ‘We must place our trust in the greater good.’

Shells screamed down in ragged salvos, pulverising rock and throwing up towering clouds of dust at the edge of the colony. They were concentrating on the dugouts around the skeletal remnants of the workshops. Their howling mingled with the first explosions, and soon the fire warriors could hear nothing but the crash of explosions and the whickering of shrapnel.

In recent weeks the or’es’la had fallen into a pattern of hoarding up their ammo and loosing it all off before an assault. In terms of inflicting casualties, it was actually less effective than their old method of firing short, unexpected bombardments whenever a crate of shells was brought up, but it was a lot more unnerving. It meant the or’es’la were coming again.

O’Shovah crouched in his crisis suit inside a shelter he’d helped the Fio to dig for him at the head of a feature they’d dubbed the slipway. It was an erosion-cut channel leading down from Arkunasha colony to a nearby valley in the highlands. Windblown sand and dust from the plateau poured continuously down the slipway like a slow motion avalanche confined by high rock walls on both sides. The or’es’la had fixated on the area as the widest point of approach and it was already littered with half-buried wrecks left by their previous attempts to storm it.

O’Shovah crouched in his hole, feeling the bedrock tremble as shells burst nearby. He found that he trembled with it. The bombardment seemed endless, maddening. Shells of all calibres poured down and were joined by the howl of rockets just as it seemed it could get no worse. Red flames spurted up on all sides and flashes filled the air. The world seemed engulfed by roaring giants on every side.

Suddenly, the or’es’la barrage dribbled away to nothing, a few paltry shells whistling down as the towering smoke clouds began to drift away in the wind. Then he heard the roar of many engines and the rumbling sound of tracks. O’Shovah emerged from his shelter, far enough to see down the slipway, as around him, surviving fire warriors looked cautiously out from their own redoubts and bunkers. Perhaps four teams remained, holding onto a precarious horseshoe of positions at the top of the slope, with barely one team in reserve. Ugly or’es’la battle-tanks were crawling to the base of the slipway, five steel giants with groups of smaller vehicles ranged to their left and right. Behind them, another wave of at least twenty vehicles was coming into view, labouring hard in the soft sand.

O’Shovah was speechless. The enemy had never before attacked in such strength. A wave of improvised seeker drone-missiles flew past, plummeting into the approaching behemoths. Two of the leading vehicles crumpled in flames and were soon joined by others as two Hammerhead tanks began firing from the heights. The air was split by harsh flames as the duel was played out, the or’es’la firing at the blue-white flashes of the Hammerhead’s railguns. The first enemy tank was hit and burst into flames. A second, immobilised with track damage, continued to fire until it was hit beneath a turret by a railgun round. The shot tore the turret from the vehicle in a spray of sparks. Flames shot into the air, enveloping the crew as they tried to escape.

A call came in. ‘Infantry climbing the slipway, O’Shovah!’

From among the tanks appeared or’es’la warriors in blood-red armour. They were running up the slipway and making better progress than the slithering wave of vehicles. At an order from O’Shovah, precision pulse rifle fire swept across them, temporarily clearing the slope of running shapes. The Hammerheads were now firing in salvos. A dozen burning enemy vehicles lay scattered in the sand as testimony to their handiwork. The leading vehicles had climbed as far as a chain of tethered charges hidden in the slipway. Three were disabled with shattered tracks and the rest swung away to one side in apparent confusion. The second wave of vehicles began to climb the slope. Three took direct hits from the Hammerheads and blew apart, but the rest kept churning upwards towards the workshops with single-minded determination.

O’Shovah emerged from his shelter and signalled his surviving bodyguard to follow as he moved behind the protective glacis to reach the dugouts at the workshops. They loped along behind roughly-piled foam-metal blocks, already half buried by the sliding sand. Shells fired by the or’es’la hammered into the area. Red and yellow tracers from their secondary armaments buzzed around the fire warrior positions. A quick glance at his lateral monitors showed O’Shovah more vehicles climbing up on his right as he approached, while his two bodyguards loomed reassuringly in his rear view. O’Shovah leapt over the top of the glacis. Tracers streaked past him as he broke cover. He zig-zagged the battlesuit with surprising dexterity for such a cumbersome device, spotted a large, half-collapsed crater just below him and took cover in it. A moment later, his bodyguards were also in position above and below him on the slope.

Ahead of them, an or’es’la assault group was breaching the top of the slipway, moments away from overrunning the position. O’Shovah locked on to a vehicle and its surrounding infantry, punching a plasma bolt into the former and allowing a salvo of smart missiles to pick off the latter. More plasma bolts and fusion blasts from his bodyguards ripped into the flanked or’es’la. Almost simultaneously, a burst of heavy calibre slugs stitched across the upper torso of O’Shovah’s armour, pitching him out of the crater and sprawling him full-length in the sand. His systems displays were alight with warning indicators as he struggled to stand. His bodyguards moved to protect him. One was blown almost in half by a stray shell, his crisis armour bursting open like rotten fruit.

The shattered remnants of the assault group were running towards them with a truly enormous or’es’la in the lead. Darkness was sliding across the battlefield behind the charging alien like the shadow of death. O’Shovah sighted manually on the bestial-looking warrior and punched a plasma bolt into its torso. To his dismay the creature’s armour shrugged off the strike and it continued to surge forward with its hugely tusked jaws roaring thunderously. O’Shovah tried to fire his rifle again but found it inoperative, he tried to operate his jetpack and found that inoperative too. The or’es’la continued to charge forward, only metres away now.

A blaze of energy engulfed the or’es’la from above, brilliant white beams dancing from one figure to the next, leaving burning torches in their wake. Gazing up, O’Shovah laughed as he saw wide delta shapes blotting out the suns. The familiar silhouettes of Manta missile destroyers hovered above like guardian angels, finally enough of them to evacuate the whole colony.

The Aun refused his requests for an audience immediately after evacuation. It was just as well; he’d been furious when he first saw the tau war fleet in orbit. That anger had cooled and hardened in the intervening time. He had visited the Shas’ui and seen her adapting to her newly-grown prosthetics day by day. He had seen the other survivors of Arkunasha colony and mourned their dead with them. When the Aun finally sent for him he came calmly enough.

There was a triumvirate aboard the Vior’la Gal’leath M’shan comprising Aun’o T’au Vasoy Ty’asla and two other Aun, a male and a female, that O’Shovah did not recognise. They did not introduce themselves, nor speak at all when O’Shovah was conveyed to their veiled, opalescent sanctum. Instead Aun’o Vasoy smiled fondly at O’Shovah as he entered and bid his accompanying water caste associates to leave them. Only when they were alone did the female speak.

‘You have done well, Shas’o. You bring credit to your caste and your sept. We understand that you are distressed by the casualties incurred under your command.’

She paused as O’Shovah shook his head.

‘Casualties are a fact of war,’ he replied. ‘I am distressed by being starved of reinforcements that evidently exist and the unnecessary hardships thereby inflicted on my command.’

The unidentified male Aun spoke, ‘Surely it is not your place to question the strategies of the Shas’ar’tol?’

‘It is my place to question poor strategy whenever I see it, and this strategy did not originate from my honoured colleagues at the Shas’ar’tol.’ He paused to pull a flimsy sheaf of message transcripts from inside his tunic. ‘I checked.’

Aun’o Vasoy replied. ‘Your success in small unit engagements with the or’es’la has enabled the build up of large reserves. When the campaign to retake Arkunasha begins, it will be undertaken with overwhelming strength.’

‘In other words, you decided to throw away lives now for an easier victory later.’

‘As is our remit, for the greater good.’

There was an awkward moment of silence as O’Shovah failed to respond. Aun’o Vasoy seemed genuinely puzzled.

‘Shas’o, you act as if the war was lost, when your actions have virtually assured victory.’

O’Shovah dashed the transcript on the floor in sudden fury. ‘Because I was not told!’

The Aun drew back from his anger, their eyes becoming hooded. O’Shovah breathed deeply, mastering himself before speaking again.

‘You allowed me and my cadres to fight in the belief that no help was coming while you sat in orbit doing nothing. With sufficient forces, I could have ensured that the or’es’la never even reached the colony!’

‘Possibly,’ Aun’o Vasoy admitted. ‘Yet your situation spurred you to the highest efforts. As you said yourself, casualties are a fact of war. Yet you minimised your own and maximised those incurred by the enemy. Is that not victory?’

‘Of a sort,’ O’Shovah admitted bitterly. ‘And yet superior attrition seems to be the lowest form of success to my eyes.’

‘Come now, you must lay aside your grief for your lost warriors,’ Aun’o Vasoy said reasonably. ‘You have the gratitude of the tau empire and the approbation of your fellow caste members. I understand that they have even gifted you a new name in celebration of your success.’

The warrior’s face had become an immobile mask. He revealed nothing of his inner feelings when he responded finally.

‘Indeed, they have dubbed me O’Shovah – Commander Farsight – for my alleged ability to see into the future, and I have pledged to them that in future times the tau empire will remember my name.’

SIR DAGOBERT’S LAST BATTLE

Jonathan Green

I

The first to die had been Argulf’s youngest.

The child had been making daisy chains in the high pasture when the first of the greenskins emerged from the forest, gibbering and hooting with savage delight. The girl, barely four summers old, panicked and froze, howling for her mother as the cleaver-wielding greenskin cut her down.

Reynard had witnessed the child’s savage murder with his own eyes, his face slack with shock, his voice stolen from him in the same moment that the girl’s life was taken. But that abrupt act of unthinking brutality had only been the precursor to the slaughter that was to come.

The goblins poured from the forest in a tumbling tide of bone-knotted loincloths, flint-tipped spears, feathered headdresses and moss-coloured flesh. Despite their number, they were little more than a disorganised rabble. There were a few desultory arrows fired towards the village, but there was no cohesion to their attack.

Reynard had fought for his feudal overlords in the armies of Gisoreux as a young man, when a proliferation of orcs had bled into the lands of Ombreux from the Pale Sisters to the north-east and laid waste to the fiefdom for miles about. And he would fight again now, despite having given up the life of a man-at-arms years ago, to protect his home and his loved ones.

Snatching up his pitchfork from beside the back door of his cottage, he ran to meet the goblins’ insane charge. The stringy specimens he had encountered when still a young man had at least demonstrated some rudimentary discipline, even if it had been forced upon them by their larger cousins. But the shambling mob he was facing now had lost all semblance of order. Some squabbled with their own kin and they were not above trampling each other underfoot as they poured down the wind-swept escarpment from the forest’s edge. Their chaotic charge made it look more like they were fleeing from something rather than hurrying to attack the village huddled in the valley below.

But what they lacked in organisation, they more than made up for in numbers. Only now they were one down, a squirming mewling goblin skewered on the end of his improvised weapon. Bracing a booted foot against the creature’s chest, Reynard twisted sharply, the action accompanied by a grisly sucking sound. The squealing goblin fell silent and stopped struggling as the peasant pulled the pitchfork free of its filthy carcass.

The horde had fallen upon Layon just as locusts had fallen upon the wheat crop three years before. The village had only just recovered from that disaster and now there was a host of greenskins at their door. The rampaging horrors trampled the corn that had been less than a week from the sickle and scythe, slaughtering the livestock that had been intended to feed the villagers during the bitter months of winter.

Reynard blinked in the face of the smoke drifting across the village, seeking the source of the echoing hoof beats.

A shadow fell across the village as light bled from the sky.

‘Reynard!’

The scream snapped his attention back to the immediacy of the battle. It was his wife, Fleur. She stood at the threshold of their home, frying pan in hand, as a scrawny creature – no taller than a child of eight – bounded towards her, naked except for a strip of rabbit fur tied at its waist with grassy twine. It carried a rough axe in its bony fist, what looked like a large tooth set within it to create a serrated cutting edge.

As the greenskin lunged at his wife, Reynard sprang, thrusting the butt of his pitchfork forwards, using it as he would a quarterstaff. The hard wood connected with the base of the goblin’s skull, knocking the creature was sprawling to the ground. Reynard followed up with a second sharp blow to its skull, smiling grimly as he heard the sharp crack of bone fracturing.

Things were at their darkest now – the firmament the colour of pewter, the coming storm casting its pall across the face of the sun – as the greenskins rallied in the face of the villagers’ desperate defence. Men and women, as well as the young, the elderly and infirm, had all been forced into the fight, using anything that came to hand to help them save their homes from the tumbling tumult of shrieking greenskins, whether it was an axe from the woodpile or an iron poker from the hearth.

The goblins were everywhere now, or so it seemed, swarming along alleyways, over the churned mud of the village square and around the flower-bedecked roadside shrine to the Lady.

A shrill whinny carried to Reynard’s ears over the tumult of battle – the shrieking of goblins, shouted oaths to the Lady and the clash of billhook on axe – as if it rode upon a wave of power that deadened all sound before it. He turned, and his heart lifted.

On the ridge of the escarpment beyond the village, dark silhouettes against the beaten metal sky, was another ragtag band. Swords held aloft, they only numbered ten in all. But at their midst, sat astride a barded warhorse, was the unmistakable form of a noble paladin, the crest atop the warrior’s helm clear for all to see, even in the failing light that came before the storm.

For this was not just any knight. Their saviour was a chosen champion of the Lady of the Lake, one upon whom the holiest of honours had been bestowed. A grail knight.

The silent ranks of the knight’s entourage watched as the massacre continued unabated. Just as Reynard was expecting the knight to issue his challenge, the men dropped to their knees, bowing their heads in prayer. The knight’s tabard rippled in the breeze that heralded the oncoming storm.

Reynard caught sight of a green blur from the corner of his eye and turned his attention from the silent men-at-arms back to the melee consuming Layon. He spun on his heel, sweeping the blunt end of his pitchfork before him, feeling the vibrations of the goblin’s bone-cleaver vibrating through his arms as the two weapons made contact.

Knowing that a chosen champion of the Lady had come to their aid filled him with renewed strength. It felt as if the very life-blood of Bretonnia was flowing through his veins.

Sliding the improvised weapon through his hands, grasping the shaft closer to the prongs, he swung the longer end round sharply. The goblin’s blade slipped from the smooth wood, the creature stumbling forwards on its spindly legs and into the path of the whirling tip. The end of the weapon caught the goblin in the throat, the force of the contact throwing it onto its back in the battle-churned mud of the village square.

With a cry of ‘For the Lady!’ the fighting unit lined up along the spur of high ground moved as one, pelting down the steep slope of the escarpment. Swords raised, shields hanging loosely at their sides, they hurled themselves pell-mell towards the battle while the grail knight watched from his position at the crest of the hill.

Finally, with a harsh neigh from his steed, the paladin charged down the slope, a morning star swinging from the end of his outstretched arm.

Reynard turned from the charging battle line, feeling hope and pride swell within him. There was fire in his heart, in every fibre of his being. The end of the pitchfork sticky with goblin blood, the retired man-at-arms headed back into the fray, a cry of ‘For Layon and the Lady!’ on his lips.

The bellowed entreaty to the Lady, that she might bestow her blessings upon the faithful, became an incoherent roar in the throat of the battle pilgrim known simply as Arnaud. With his blessed blade raised high, he had been the first to break from his position on the ridge. It was he who led the charge, a battle-cry of zealous fury on his lips.

The blade he held so tightly in his right hand, knuckles white around the worn leather bound about its grip, was scarred and pitted with the patina of age. Its edge was no longer as keen as it might have been had it enjoyed the kiss of the whetstone a little more often. The man’s tunic was torn and patched, the rough fabric still bearing burn marks in places. The hair on his head was an unruly mess, his balding scalp forming a natural tonsure, such as those favoured by the faithful, while thick greying stubble coated his jowly cheeks like a rash. The end of his nose was swollen and purple with broken blood vessels.

But for all he lacked in attractiveness he was thickset and still strong. Every drunken brawl that had left him with a broken nose, or missing another tooth, had also honed his skills, teaching him to fight dirty. And there was no doubting his faith in the Lady, or the high regard in which he held his master, the thrice-blessed Sir Dagobert.

No individual among their number was greater than any other else, for all commoners were equal in the sight of the Lady. They were simple folk who had given up their former lives, turning their backs on the lot that accident of birth had handed them, that they might have the honour of serving the noble paladin who had been chosen by the Lady, whose personal crusade it was to rid Her fair land of the greenskin, the rat-kin and the beast-spawn. There was no one among their number who held dominion over any other, for all were as maggots compared to the shining example set by the grail knight.

But there was one among their number, nonetheless, to whom the others looked for guidance and approval, whose strength of heart and absolute conviction in his faith in the knight and the Lady was an example to them all. That one was Arnaud.

Battle-cry still on his lips, the brawny pilgrim crashed into the goblin throng like a ship’s keel ploughing through foaming waves. His notched blade descended as he brought the pommel down on the head of a greenskin. Still running, he levelled his sword and thrust forwards, putting all his weight and momentum behind it.

The weapon’s tip pierced the spine of a stringy creature which died with a squeal as Arnaud barrelled into it, its skull crushed beneath his heavy hobnail boots. Then he was piling into the next, hacking at its legs, his weapon breaking the creature’s kneecaps and then stopping, its dull edge failing to sever the bone and gristle completely.

The rest of Arnaud’s brethren had joined the fray now with bludgeoning swipes of axe and mace, their weapons relics of other campaigns the grail knight had prosecuted against all that was unholy and an affront to the sanctity of fair Bretonnia.

‘Praise be to the Lady!’ a rangy, gaunt-faced pilgrim cried with evangelical glee, his eyes rolling into his head as the rapture took him, sinking what a woodsman’s axe, hung with pewter charms, into the head of another of the goblins. The man had to put both hands on its haft to pull it out again. ‘Praise be!’ he cried again, tears running down his grime-smeared cheeks as the axe came free at last.

The press of goblins and desperate villagers soon brought the pilgrims’ eager charge to a halt. Surrounded by capering greenskins, Arnaud set about himself with renewed zeal. Every kick, every punch, every bludgeoning swipe he made with his shield, every head-butt, every barrelling body blow, every hack and slash of his blade was accompanied by an angry grunt or a bellow of pious rage.

He lashed out with his sword wildly, the flat of the blade smacking another of the greenskins on the head. He followed this up with a punch to the beast’s face on the return stroke, the weapon’s cross guard gouging out an eye.

Feeling teeth puncture the flesh of his calf he gave a cry of pain and annoyance. Dropping his shield, he grabbed hold of the wriggling green thing responsible, lifting it clear of the ground, kicking and snarling, before running it through with his blade. The blade came out again with a wet sucking sound, smeared with gore and what passed for blood among the greenskins. Dropping the limp body he met the charge of another of the vile creatures with a kick to the stomach that left it doubled up and in prime position to receive the kick to the face that followed.

As the goblin dropped to the ground gasping for breath, Arnaud recovered his shield from the quagmire at his feet and brought its tip down across the back of the creature’s scrawny neck, almost slicing its head clean off.

Shield in place upon his arm once more, his blade ready to meet the next ill-considered charge, Arnaud braced himself, catching his breath for a moment, surveying the pockets of fighting that filled the village.

‘For Sir Dagobert and for the Lady!’ he shouted as he barged his way past startled combatants, making for the centre of the village where the fighting was at its most desperate and most savage.

The sickle Reynard had snatched from where it hung on a peg in the cowshed slipped from his hand as the goblin toppled backwards, the curved blade having carved through the creature’s shoulder and into its neck. Returning his pitchfork to a two-handed grip, Reynard stepped out of the barn, leaving the distressed cattle anxiously lowing behind him, readying himself to meet the next charge. But none came.

Reynard looked across the village at greenskins faltering before the pilgrims’ relentless retribution, those that could still walk turning tail and running for the sheltering shadows of the forest once more. His heart rose. The greenskins were in retreat. The goblins had been routed. ‘Thank the Lady,’ he gasped, the adulation escaping his lips as barely more than a whisper.

He could hear other cries of joy, supplications to the Lady and even cheers rising from the beleaguered defenders. The battle-hardened pilgrims, who had come to their aid when everything seemed at its blackest, dealt with the last of the greenskins that hadn’t had the sense to flee while flight was still an option.

A few of the grizzled pilgrims looked ready to pursue the fleeing goblins until one of their number – a brawny, barrel-chested brute of a man, his nose broken in several places and purple from too much ale – shouted for them to hold.

Reynard looked at the man. Who was he to command his fellow pilgrims before the Lady’s champion had even spoken? But then Reynard had not heard the knight issue one command since arriving at Layon. In fact, he could not even be certain that any battle-cry had issued from the noble paladin during the battle.

Head bowed low, keeping his eyes firmly on the ground, Reynard approached the pilgrim throng. The other villagers held back, happy to let Reynard take the lead. As a retired man-at-arms and former aide to the seneschal of the lord of Ombreux himself, Reynard had seen far more of the world than many of the inhabitants of Layon, the majority of whom had never travelled beyond the perimeter of the valley. He also had a better understanding of how to speak to nobility.

Nonetheless his heart was racing now, and not just from the exertions of battle. To speak out of turn to a knight was to risk the paladin’s ire at best. At worst, it could result in him having his head cleaved from his shoulders by the Lady’s champion.

‘My lord,’ he stumbled, anxiety getting the better of him as he neared the pack of panting men, catching a glimpse of the fire that had yet to leave their battle-ready bodies. Taking a deep breath in an attempt to quell his nerves he tried again. ‘Most honoured lord, a thousand thanks. If you hadn’t happened by, it’s likely the greenskins would have done for us all. If there’s anything we can do for you–’

‘Sir Dagobert needs nothing you could offer him.’

Reynard started. He was sure it was the brawny battle pilgrim who had spoken out of turn again. Other gasps of shock came from those villagers assembled behind him. He was not the only one to have noticed the affront, and yet none of the pilgrim’s fellows saw fit to comment.

‘Sir Dagobert seeks only to serve the Lady.’

How could the knight allow this disgrace to continue?

Unable to help himself now, a melange of anger, fear and disbelief welling up inside him, Reynard slowly raised his head. And, for the first time since he had been aware of the knight’s presence, he saw things as they really were.

He took in the chainmail shirt and faded tabard hanging loose about the knight’s frame, and the morning star hanging limply from the knight’s still outstretched arm. He saw the sheared-off lance gripped forever in his other hand. He saw the horse’s battered barding, rusting at the rivet-joints, and the yellow gleam of bone beneath. He saw the votive trinkets draped across the knight’s shield and became aware of the four men who acted as the knight’s pall-bearers. And finally his eyes met the empty gaze of the skull locked within the knight’s helm.

Reynard felt disappointment pour into him, filling the aching void that the aftermath of the battle had left. Their saviour was dead and had been so for a very long time.

‘Sir Dagobert does not require anything of you,’ the burly pilgrim said, a cruel sneer making him appear even uglier. ‘But we do.’

‘More ale,’ the pilgrim’s leader shouted from his place at the makeshift table – two apple barrels, a barn door and a couple of benches from the village shrine – upending the empty flagon clenched in his callused fist as if to emphasise the point.

Reynard motioned for Melisande to hurry up with the two earthenware jugs she was filling from the barrel at the back of the house. She nodded, wiping away the tears she shed for her younger brother – fallen during the initial greenskin assault – with the corner of her beer-stained apron, before hurrying to obey as quickly as she could, encumbered as she was by two heavy pitchers.

It seemed that half of those villagers who had made it through the goblin attack were now preoccupied with tending to the pilgrims’ needs. And those needs were surprisingly considerable for men who had supposedly given up all worldly cares when they had chosen to follow the grail knight in service to the Lady.

The holy reliquae the pilgrims carried into battle, that acted as both standard and inspiration to the rabble, had been set down before the village shrine and a number of the village children were preparing garlands of meadow flowers with which to adorn it.

Curiously, with the routing of the goblins and the arrival of Sir Dagobert’s entourage, the wind had changed and the coming storm had passed them by.

Reynard stared at the reliquae. It was effectively a portable altar. Had the passing of the storm been a coincidence, or was there more to it than that?

Before the girl could reach the pilgrims’ table, Reynard intercepted her, taking the foaming jugs and dismissing her with a nod. Melisande gave him a grateful smile before running home, the tears for her dead brother coming anew.

‘So, brother,’ Reynard said as he began to refill the pilgrims’ cups, ‘to what do we owe the good fortune of your arrival? What brings you to Layon?’

‘Not us, peasant, but Sir Dagobert, the thrice-blessed,’ the pilgrim’s leader corrected him. ‘His quest takes him where the Lady of the Lake wills. We merely follow.’

Reynard glanced at the relics resting before the shrine. He could see quite clearly now that the saint’s bones had been mounted on a scarecrow frame of bound sticks, as had the bleached bones of his former steed. The numerous votive medallions had been tied on with ribbons, along with entreaties to the Lady scrawled on strips of parchment.

‘So what was it that brought Sir Dagobert–’

‘The thrice-blessed,’ the pilgrim added helpfully, the ugly, gap-toothed grin back on his face.

‘The thrice-blessed,’ Reynard echoed. ‘What was it that brought him here, at the hour of our need?’

‘I have already answered your question.’ The pilgrim fixed him with beady black eyes. ‘The Lady guides him. It was the Lady that sent him here now, when Sir Dagobert was most needed. Just as it was the Lady that sent him to join Duke Theobald’s campaign to purge the lands north of here of the greenskin menace.

‘But now we eat, for killing greenskins builds up an appetite like nothing else. And then maybe some women, that we might quench the fires of our ardour in their embraces.’

The succulent smells of the suckling pig that was being roasted in honour of their guests carried to Reynard on the breeze, making his mouth water and his stomach grumble, realising how hungry he was after his own exertions to repel the goblins. He nodded to the armoured skeleton atop its hobby horse steed. ‘And will Sir Dagobert be joining the feast?’

The knight’s spokesman could not hold back his guffaw of derisive laughter at that, and it was soon taken up by several of his fellows seated at the table. ‘Don’t be foolish, peasant!’ he snorted. ‘Sir Dagobert is fasting.’

II

It was cold inside the chapel, colder that the misty autumnal day beyond its walls, but the knight cared not.

‘That which is sacrosanct I shall preserve. That which is sublime I will protect.’

The words spilled from his lips in what was little more than a whisper. The sound of the water escaping the mouth of the stone lion above the font was a soothing counterpoint to the knight’s vow.

‘That which threatens I will destroy, for my holy wrath will know no bounds. That which is sacrosanct–’

Hearing the chapel door groan behind him the old man faltered, but only for a moment. The only indication that he was irritated by the interruption was a tightening of his jaw.

‘That which is sacrosanct I shall preserve.’

First there had been the squeaking of hinges, now came the sound of clumsy footsteps and a rough cough as the intruder cleared his throat. The peasant would have to wait; the old knight was at prayer.

‘That which is sublime I will protect. That which threatens I will destroy, for my holy wrath will know no bounds.’

Only then, with his pledge complete did the knight open rheumy eyes, blinking against the rainbow of sunlight that fell through the small stained glass window above the font. The painted panes were an inspiration to him, depicting the moment the Goddess had appeared to Dagobert and offered him the Grail, that he might drink of the restorative waters of the spring and be healed of the mortal wound he had suffered in battle with the dragon Crystophrax, the monstrous wyrm that had razed the Castle Perillus to the ground and made its lair within the ruins.

Putting his weight on the pommel of his sword he eased himself up from his genuflection, old joints and weary muscles protesting as he did so, a twinge in his back making him catch his breath.

The grimace of rheumatic pain on his face became a twisted scowl of annoyance. He did not need to lay eyes upon the one who had disturbed his vigil to know who it was. When he turned he would see the one who, for no obvious reason, had taken it upon himself to speak for the rest of the oafish rabble that dogged his every move, following wherever he led, although he had never asked them to and would have preferred to have been left alone.

But the pilgrims’ adoration was just another duty that fell to a knight who had been blessed by the Lady, and in the old knight’s opinion there was no duty more onerous. But bear it he did, for the sake of the Lady.

The Lady called men from all ranks of society to fight for Her – to defend Her fair fields and meadows, woodlands and babbling streams – and so the old knight tolerated them too. But of all the oafish rabble, the one he found hardest to abide was their pompous, self-appointed leader.

‘My lord,’ the ugly, gap-toothed oaf began. ‘Much as it grieves me to disturb you whilst you are at your vigil–’

‘What is it?’ the old knight snapped. He was too old and life was too short for him to have to put up with another obsequious monologue from this jackanapes.

The man blinked in surprise. He appeared almost affronted. His mouth gaped open, affording the knight an unpleasant view of his appalling teeth. A moment later the pilgrim recovered himself.

‘My lord, I thought you should know…’ He broke off again, suddenly hesitant.

‘Come on, man! What news could be so important that you broke my vigil to impart it?’

To his credit, the man remained firm in the face of the old knight’s simmering anger.

‘There is talk of ratmen in the region, the Lady curse them!’

‘Rumours of ratmen? You disturbed my vigil to tell me this?’

‘There is talk down in the village at the bottom of the valley, my lord. Word is that the vermin have crawled from their holes once more and are spreading like a plague across Vienelles, blighting crops and slaughtering livestock as they come.’

‘You do not need to tell me the ways of the rat-kin,’ the old knight muttered. ‘And where did you hear these rumours?’ he growled. ‘At the bottom of a keg of beer, I’ll warrant. By the Lady, I can smell it on your breath from here!’

‘Are you saying you don’t believe me?’ the peasant railed.

The guardian of the grail shrine pulled himself up to his full height. He still cut an imposing figure in his chainmail and tabard, despite his age. His muscles were taut, his body made strong through a life of service to the Lady, and not one driven by the appetites of lesser men like the one before him now. He took a step forward and as he came between the pilgrim and the stained glass window, he was surrounded by a nimbus of radiant light.

‘You forget yourself. You forget your place!’

The vassal bowed low, though he didn’t once avert his beady stare from his master.

‘No, my lord, never,’ the pilgrim protested. ‘It’s just that a band of refugees arrived in Baudin last night. They had fled in advance of the horde reaching their doors. They said that Castain has already fallen.’

‘I see,’ the knight said levelly, ‘and what would you have me do?’

‘Lead us to war against the rat-things,’ the pilgrim faltered, the look in his eyes making it clear that he wasn’t sure if he was being tested.

The knight said nothing.

‘Meet the abominations in righteous battle and soak Bretonnian soil with their vital juices.’

Still the knight made no comment.

‘It is an affront to allow these vermin–’ He spat the word, saliva flapping from his lips as he did so. ‘–to despoil the Lady’s fair lands a moment longer.’

‘You doubt my sworn duty to the Lady?’ the old knight queried, taking another step closer to the pilgrim, raising the tip of his sword to point at the man’s chest as he did so.

The other took a step back. ‘No, my lord, I…’ For once, the babbling wretch was lost for words, instead dropping to his knees before the knight, casting his eyes at the floor. ‘I beg your forgiveness if I said anything that might have offended you,’ he spluttered as he found his tongue again.

The knight stopped in front of him. ‘And I grant it,’ the knight growled, suggesting that it was not given willingly.

‘My first duty is to the Lady,’ the knight intoned, as if reciting another prayer. ‘My second is to this holy place that I raised from the stones of fallen Castle Perillus with my bare hands.’ At this declaration the old knight’s voice began to crack, not with age but with raw emotion.

‘I swore to protect this holy place and I have not forgotten the vow I made in all the years since the Lady deigned to appear to me…’ The knight broke off, no longer able to speak.

He took a deep breath, his left hand bunching into a fist as he fought to compose himself.

‘...since She appeared to me here. This is hallowed ground and I will defend it until the Lady sees fit either to release me from my solemn duty or send me a vision that she wishes me to fight upon another field.

‘My third duty is to the people of these lands.’

He turned back to the gurgling font, the water droplets cascading from the font head into the catch bowl below, glittering like rubies, emeralds and sapphires in the light of the stained glass window.

‘So, until the Lady wills it otherwise, I shall remain here and defend this shrine with my life’s blood.’

An unaccustomed smile split his dry lips as he knelt once more before the shrine’s simple altar, the silvered fleur-de-lys that stood upon it having once adorned the lance that now stood propped in the corner, before he earned the right to bear the image of the grail itself upon his coat-of-arms.

‘After all, if she needs me, she knows where to find these old bones.’

‘Yes, Sir Dagobert,’ the vassal said getting to his feet and bowing once again as he left the shrine.

III

‘Do you remember that time Sir Dagobert – thrice-blessed be he – purged that nest of corpse-eating ghouls in La Fontaine?’ Arnaud demanded, his beery tones rising above the slurred conversations of his brother pilgrims.

The hubbub of other voices dropped to a murmur.

‘Aye, Brother Arnaud,’ said the gangly pilgrim whose name was Ambrose. The man had even less hair and fewer teeth that the brawny former blacksmith. ‘That was a great day indeed, praise be.’

‘And do you recall the expression on the baron’s face when he discovered his own father was one of them?’ Arnaud gave a bark of laughter.

The pilgrims were virtually alone at their makeshift table now, with only a pair of desultory maidens still waiting on them. The day was drawing on and the villagers had left them to their feast, having no stomach for food themselves, and taking the opportunity to tend to those who had been injured during their encounter with the goblins, and to take care of the dead.

Bonfires had been raised at the edge of the village, those who had fought greenskins and their kind before knowing from bitter experience that their corpses should be burnt, lest their pernicious spores settle in a dark, damp hollow and give rise to another harvest of death.

One of the girls was tying a strip of cloth from the hem of her skirt around Groffe’s arm. Odo was muttering something through a mouthful of pork fat to Jules, who was slumped across the barn door-table, looking like he had already passed out. None of them were paying Arnaud much attention.

‘Eh? Do you remember?’ Arnaud laughed, louder this time.

‘We remember,’ Brother Hugo replied with less enthusiasm.

‘I remember the time that wyvern almost did for us in the Pale Sisters,’ Waleran muttered.

‘And what about the time Sir Dagobert led us to the Sisterhood of Saint Salome?’ Arnaud went on, ignoring Waleran’s doom and gloom recollections. Arnaud was never one to tire of the sound of his own voice. ‘I’d never seen so much sin in one place.’

‘Yes, plenty to go around,’ Groffe chuckled crudely, putting an arm around his nurse’s waist and spinning her unceremoniously onto his lap. The girl gave a half-hearted squeal of protest, and when Groffe pulled her chin round to plant a beery kiss on her pretty mouth, she kicked him in the shins and pulled herself of his lecherous grasp.

At this, Arnaud burst out laughing again, spiteful mirth shaking his corpulent frame.

There was little left of the suckling pig now other than bones and grease. Tearing off a hunk of gritty bread from a hard end of loaf, Arnaud used it to mop up the congealing pork fat and stuffed the whole lot into his mouth.

‘So where do you think Sir Dagobert will lead us next?’ one of the others asked, indicating the garland-decked reliquae outside the shrine with a casual wave of a gnawed rib bone.

‘Where the Lady wills, Brother Gervase. Where the Lady wills,’ Arnaud replied, a thoughtful look on his face.

‘Praise be!’ piped up Brother Ambrose.

‘But not for a while, I think,’ Arnaud added, his gaze roving from the food on the table and the drink in his hand to the rolling hips of Groffe’s failed conquest. ‘No, not yet. I think Sir Dagobert – thrice-blessed be his name – likes it here.’

Reynard missed the boy’s cries at first, what with all the noise coming from the pilgrim’s table.

It was Fleur, who was fetching water from the well to wash the bodies of the dead in preparation for their journey into Morr’s kingdom, who heard the child first.

Hearing her call his name, Reynard ducked under the lintel and into the street. Fleur pointed.

The boy was pelting across the field, the forest that bounded its edge spread out across the horizon, an impenetrable darkness lurking between the trees. Dusk had already fallen within that primal woodland.

It was Tomas, the woodcutter’s son. As he came closer, not slacking off the pace for a moment, Reynard understood the look of blanching fear on his face. ‘Greenskins!’

‘More of them,’ Reynard muttered under his breath. He turned to his wife. ‘Get the children back inside and warn the others.’

He was running too now, joining the other men who had heard the boy’s fearful warning, gathering up what weapons they had and what could be turned to the defence of the village.

‘What was that?’ the leader of the pilgrim band demanded, rising unsteadily to his feet and moving to join Reynard at the periphery of the village.

‘There’s more coming,’ Reynard informed the pilgrim dejectedly, the fight all but gone out of him already.

‘More you say?’ the pilgrim railed. ‘More of the heathen abominations?’

The pilgrim turned, shouting to his brothers who were already rising from their seats at the makeshift table.

‘To arms!’ he shouted. ‘To arms! Ready yourselves, brothers! The bastards are coming back for another taste of our lord’s fiery zeal, and we wouldn’t want to disappoint them now, would we?’

‘Praise be!’ his gangly companion declared, leaping for the sword he had left propped beside a barrel.

Others moved to raise the reliquae upon their shoulders, ready to carry the dead knight into battle once more.

IV

Dagobert slowly opened his eyes. His eyelids were sticky with rheum. Something had brushed his cheek, something as light and as soft as goose down. He looked down at the inlaid marble tiles of the sanctuary floor.

There it was: a tiny thing, nothing really, just a single curled white petal.

He blinked himself alert, startled by the presence of the flower. He inhaled sharply as he caught his breath in surprise–

–and suddenly the chapel was filled with the heady scent of apple blossom, petals falling like snowflakes all around him – on his head, his outstretched arms, his open palms – as moisture filmed his old eyes.

He peered beyond the drifting petals to the stained glass window above the altar. A blaze of light shone through the painted panes as the first rays of morning touched the shrine. The image of the Lady realised in glass and mineral pigments was shining like silver moonlight, her hair like spun gold ablaze with holy light, her eyes sparkling like stars in the night sky.

And at the edge of hearing he caught the lilting melody of angel voices singing.

As he stared at this radiant image of beauty divine, he fancied the Lady turned to him, reaching out to him from the glass. But it was no longer the grail she was holding in her lily white hands, but his blessed blade.

He reached for the sword with shaking hands, clutching at the blade with trembling fingers, the tears coursing down his cheeks. But the blade dissolved like mist at his touch and he stumbled forwards, putting out a hand to stop himself from falling.

And there was his sword before him, the polished metal alive with myriad rainbow colours, light picking out the letters inscribed upon it. The letters that spelt out the blessed blade’s name: Deliverer.

Sword in hand once more, Dagobert rose stiffly to his feet.

The door to the chapel burst open and a panting pilgrim entered the shrine at a run. He skidded to a halt on the stone flagged floor, struggling to catch his breath. Before he could open his mouth to speak, Dagobert fixed the man with his sapphire stare, silencing him.

‘It is time,’ the knight said. ‘The Lady calls.’

They came to him then, the penitent, the faithful, those who had given up everything to follow him, that they might receive the blessing of the Lady and, in return, purge the land of all unholy things that would despoil its sacred groves, its fertile fields, its abundant pastures and clean wells.

As the words of the grail vow spilled from his lips in a ceaseless declaration of honour and duty and love, the pilgrims helped him don his armour, and hand him his holy weapons of war.

And so, when all was ready at last, Dagobert stepped through the chapel door and out into the world once more.

There stood his charger, Silvermane, eighteen hands high, the magnificent white warhorse also ready for battle. His steed’s barding draped with the knight’s personal colours, the horse was champing at the bit, impatient to be about the business of killing vermin.

Stepping up into the stirrups, the old knight swung himself up into the saddle with the grace and ease of a man half his age.

The mists crept through the knots of grey trees, their roots worming between the tumbled stones of the tower that had once stood at this spot.

‘The rat-kin are that way?’ Dagobert asked, taking his lance from a retainer and pointing through the cloying fog towards the spot where the village of Baudin nestled at the foot of the valley.

‘Yes, my lord,’ the gap-toothed pilgrim confirmed, making a respectful bow.

‘Then to battle,’ the old knight said.

‘That which is sublime I will protect!’ Sir Dagobert bellowed, his declaration of duty a furious battle-cry. Silvermane whinnied, the stallion bringing its hooves crashing down on the armoured head of another of the black-furred vermin. The blow from the mighty warhorse caved in the mutant’s bladed helm and splintered its skull. The ratman gave a brief tortured squeak which abruptly cut off as soupy brain matter bubbled from its ears.

‘That which threatens I will destroy!’

As the horse wheeled and turned, Dagobert swung the morning star clutched tight in his right hand again, deft flicks of the wrist sending the spiked metal ball whirling in a killing arc. Silvermane pounded towards the scrabbling rat bodies, the air thick with the reek of the musk they involuntarily sprayed in fear as the pack broke. But they couldn’t outrun Silvermane.

The morning star found its target, smacking into the back of another rat skull as the snivelling creature bounded from the knight’s charge at a hunched run, practically moving on all fours. The blow sent the thing flailing into the dirt, to be trampled by the rest of the pack, their only concern saving their own flea-ridden hides as they poured over one another in a rippling torrent of greasy fur and scabrous flesh.

Yeomen fought side by side with Dagobert’s followers, fending off the serrated blades of the vermin-kin, matching them in ferocity if not in number, and they were slowly gaining the upper hand. Bowmen stuck the ratmen with arrow after arrow.

Bodies lay all around him, the corpses of downtrodden peasants as well as the carcasses of the rat-kin.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a yeoman, clad in hauberk and helm, pulled from his horse by myriad clawing hands. The weight of the man’s armour only made the task easier for the rat-things. The yeoman’s mount screamed as the vermin tore its belly open, ripping out the animal’s entrails with chisel-sharp incisors.

Dagobert heard arrows zipping overhead and saw the trails of smoke and flame arcing through the clammy air. These were followed by more shrill squeals and enraged hisses of pain as the brazier-lit barbs penetrated armour and cauterised the flesh of the rat-things encased within.

Pulling hard on the reins, Dagobert brought Silvermane round again, the warhorse crushing another pair of fleeing ratmen under its hooves, breaking backs and splintering skulls.

As the vermin parted before the unstoppable charge of the Lady’s champion and his powerful steed, something monstrous lifted its malformed head from where it had been busy gnawing at the carcass of another horse, the purple-grey ropes of equine intestines hanging from between its over-sized yellow jaws. The sheer size of the monster gave Dagobert, veteran of a hundred battles, reason to pause, but only for the briefest second.

A sound that might have been a deep-throated squeak, but which sounded more like a wolfish bark, escaped the monster’s jaws as it snapped at the air with tusk-like incisors, catching the paladin’s scent on the breeze. It was to one of the rat-kin as an ogre would be to a man. Its mere presence dominated the battlefield. As broad across its abnormally muscled shoulders as it was tall, its rodent head was disproportionately small, making the wobbling throat sac stitched beneath its chin seem even more grotesquely distended. Its hide was patchy and scabbed, and between clumps of mangy, matted fur the knight could make out the criss-crossing scars of clumsy stitching. In other places the unholy, claw-scratch ideograms that passed for script among the under-dwellers had been branded into its taut flesh.

It came at them at a loping run, clearing a path through the scrabbling throng of men and rats, claws like scythe-blades gutting and dismembering any and all that got in its way.

As Silvermane closed with the rat ogre, Dagobert thrust the grip of his morning star under the rim of his saddle and pulled the huge warhorse round sharply, spurring his steed away from the massively-muscled abomination.

Several villagers watched in bewildered fear, believing that the knight was quitting the field. But Dagobert had no intention of running away. He just needed the right tool to take the monster down.

Running down more of the rat-things that suddenly found themselves frantically fleeing towards the charging knight, Dagobert reached the spot where he had thrust his lance into the ground before he had engaged with the enemy, in case he should he need it later in the battle.

He needed it now.

As Silvermane drew alongside the waiting lance, Dagobert grabbed hold and pulled it from the soft loam. Silvermane whinnied. The knight could sense the warhorse’s excitement as he turned it back towards the bounding rat ogre.

‘That which threatens, I will destroy!’ the grail knight bellowed, his pious battle-cry matching the ferocity of the guttural roar that escaped the monster’s throat at his challenge.

Positioning the lance against his side, he lowered its tip, aiming it directly at the monster’s chest.

‘For my holy wrath will know no bounds!’ he declared, his strident voice ringing out across the battlefield, filling the muster of Bretonnia with the resolve they needed to keep fighting.

Silvermane galloped past battling pilgrims, struggling peasant villagers and desperate, cornered ratmen. And then suddenly there were less than five horse lengths left between the knight and his quarry.

Dagobert’s grip on the lance tightened, the tip barely wavering from its target as the horse thundered over broken bodies, discarded weapons and shattered, unnatural war machines in its urgency to engage with the foe. He saw too late that the brute beast was swinging its huge paw-hands together, intending to deliver a double-fisted sideways swipe as Silvermane closed.

The rat ogre was more intelligent than Dagobert had first thought, choosing to strike the knight’s steed rather than the warrior himself.

The savage blow smashed the lance out of the way, splintering its smoothed ash tip even as the devastating punch connected with Silvermane’s caparisoned head, ramming foot-long splinters through the animal’s throat and into its eye.

Dagobert heard the sharp crack of bone over the screams of the rat-things, the clamour of battle, and the barking of the rat ogre.

The horse’s forelegs gave way, Dagobert instinctively leaning back in the saddle as his steed ploughed into the ground. But it was no good. The horse’s back end came tumbling over its head, such had been the force of its charge, and Dagobert was sent sprawling in the stinking mire of blood and mud.

Finding himself with a face full of the befouled soup, Dagobert felt the dead weight of Silvermane’s body fall across his legs, pushing him still deeper into the sucking morass.

Dagobert knew there wasn’t a moment to lose. The adrenaline rush of battle lending him the strength he needed, he pulled himself out from under his dead steed, using the broken haft of the shattered lance still in his hand to push himself to his feet.

He glanced back at the motionless corpse of the horse. Any one of the half a dozen dagger-sized splinters now sticking out of its head would have killed the warhorse had the rat ogre’s blow not already broken the poor beast’s neck.

Dagobert could tell that the beast was almost on him again by smell alone. Its foul stink was a noxious combination of foetid animal musk and the putrid reek of a septic war wound.

Barely on his feet, the old knight took a stumbling step forwards, his feet slipping in the liquid slurry, twisting his body around as he did so, the lance still in his hand. At the same moment the rat ogre pounced, as if Dagobert were the mouse and the monster the hunting feline.

The squealing roar that issued from the rat ogre’s swollen throat sac as the broken spear of the lance pierced its sutured flesh was an appalling sound, but it could only mean one thing.

The creature arched its knotted back, its claws ripping the armour from the knight’s body where they caught, the guttural scream showing no sign of abating as the creature writhed and jerked on the end of the ruined lance.

Bracing the end of the lance against his foot, Dagobert put all his weight and power against the planed ash, pushing it further inside the monster’s cavernous chest. His own roar of rage escaped teeth gritted against the effort.

Thick black blood gouted from the wound as the broken shaft ruptured the monster’s enlarged heart. Its death throes pulled the shattered lance from the knight’s grasp as a primal rage and insatiable appetite for slaughter kept it fighting to the last.

But the Lady had decreed that the beast must die. Unsheathing his sword, he felt its divine power coursing through him. With an incoherent cry of rage on his lips he swung the keen edge at the struggling rat ogre. The sword took the monster’s ill-proportioned head from its shoulders with one clean cut.

The creature’s hulking body slumped to the ground, thick black blood pumping from the stump of its neck, and was still at last.

Dagobert turned from the massive corpse, but he was not done yet. The unit of black-furred ratmen were almost upon him. Hefting his holy sword in both hands, he laid about him with the mighty weapon, prayers to the Lady accompanying every grievous wound he laid against the enemy. The vermin-kin’s defence could not stand in the face of his holy wrath.

As the last of the verminous bodyguards fell, a host of squealing rat-slaves parted, and there before the old knight crouched the warlord of the pack. It was clad in armour, like the grail knight. But where Dagobert cared for his plate mail, keeping it in immaculate condition so that it might serve him as well in battle as he served the Lady in all things, the rat-thing’s armour was scarred and pitted with some unknown, green-black deposit. Where Dagobert wore a fine helm upon his head, a sculpted chalice rising from its crown and the polished metal glinting silver where it was caught by the sun, the ratman had a crudely hammered helm topped with a crest of cruel blades.

‘For the Lady!’ the knight cried, raising the blessed blade Deliverer in his hands once more, putting the aches and pains from his mind with a prayer to the divine damsel.

Meeting his challenge, the verminous warlord gave a furious hiss, foul spittle spraying from its elongated snout. Slabs of muscle rippled and bunched under its scabrous hide as it took up what looked like a halberd looted from another battlefield. The tempered steel of the once finely-wrought weapon was blackened and corroded, despoiled by the runes scratched into it, and it pulsed with a sick green light. Totems of rats’ skulls and human hands had been bound to the haft with knotted leather cords.

‘That which is sacrosanct, I shall preserve. That which is sublime, I will protect. That which threatens, I will destroy, for my holy wrath will know no bounds!’

The grail vow swelling to become a bellow of holy rage, Dagobert charged.

V

At least Layon was ready for the goblins this time.

The first greenskin attack had found the men grown complacent after twelve summers of peace, with nothing to threaten the tranquillity of the valley beyond the occasional beastman incursion. But the goblins’ initial chaotic assault had left the survivors suspecting that they had not yet seen the last of the forest dwelling primitives.

And so when young Tomas passed on his dire warning, the villagers and the grail knight’s retinue set about preparing the defence of the village. Sharpened stakes were raised and thrust into the ground in a ragged line between the village boundary and the perimeter of the forest, forming a barrier of adze-sharpened points with which to greet the enemy.

With the non-combatants safe behind this defensive rampart and a line of bowmen protecting them, Reynard and the rest of the fighting men took up what weapons and shields they had – treasured family heirlooms and swords their ancestors had brought back from the crusades in Araby – and marched out across the field to deal with the greenskin threat once and for all.

The bones of Sir Dagobert went before them, the last rays of the sun, the colour of embers in the hearth, catching the myriad votive tokens – silvered fleur-de-lys and gem-encrusted medallions – and setting them blazing as if aflame.

When they were half way across the field, the men-at-arms came to a halt as one man, as the hollow echoes of falling timber and the splitting of sundered saplings reached their ears. The sounds were coming from the shadowed gloom of the forest where night had already fallen.

The reverberating beat of a drum boomed from beneath the trees. It was echoed by the hammering of Reynard’s heart as the stressed organ beat its own tattoo of nervous anticipation inside his chest.

Giving voice to a multitude of shrieking cries, the goblins burst from the treeline. Clad in loincloths, bedecked with feathered headdresses and waving crude spears, the scraggy greenskins bounded across the field, whooping in delight.

‘For the Lady!’ the pilgrim leader yelled, his fellows adjusting the position of the reliquae poles resting upon their shoulders. Sir Dagobert’s devotees picked up the pace as they commenced their charge across the field.

With the near-naked greenskins bounding towards them, leering faces and wiry bodies daubed with war-paint, Arnaud spied something approaching through the forest: a vast shadow still hidden by the trees.

It demanded his whole attention and he took his eyes off the goblins, staring at the unsettling shape picking its way between the crowding crooked trunks.

‘By the Lady…’ he heard Groffe gasp behind him, as the goblins’ monstrous ally hauled its grotesque, quivering bulk through the natural archway formed by a pair of ancient oaks.

Sir Dagobert and his entourage stumbled to a halt. The sense-numbing effects of the ale evaporated like alcohol fumes in an instant, leaving Arnaud with a queasy feeling in his belly.

Reynard had never seen anything so huge that hadn’t been a building or part of the landscape. The thing didn’t just look like a spider, it looked like it should be the primogenitor of arachnids everywhere. Glutted on blood-rich offerings, grown fat from decades as a prime predator, it now pulled its incredible bulk from the forest on eight chitinous limbs, each as long and as thick as a tree trunk.

As it emerged from the shadows, its carapace assumed a toxic yellow hue, a multitude of shining black eyes, like spheres of obsidian, reflecting the last light of the day. As big as a hill, capable of taking an ox between its crushing jaws as a normal spider might a fly, across its back had been lashed a sturdy platform of broken branches and filthy webs, which teemed with more of the deranged greenskins.

It was all Reynard could do not to soil himself. His worst fears regarding the fate of Forwin the woodcutter were confirmed when he caught sight of the bound body dangling from a gossamer rope as thick as an arm. The silk-bound parcel jerked with every movement the spider made as if it were a broken marionette.

He had heard tales told about such things before – fireside tales of the mythical arachnarok that he had listened to intently at his grandmother’s knee, savouring every gruesome detail – but he had never actually believed such a thing could be real.

Now that his childhood nightmare had taken on an unnatural life of its own, Reynard dearly wished that it had stayed in the realm of myth. Worse yet, there could be more of the horrors waiting beyond the treeline in the primeval darkness of the ancient forest.

Arnaud cursed. Doubt had no place in the soul of one of the faithful. To have doubt was to have lost faith, and he who lost faith did not deserve the blessing of the Lady of the Lake. Sir Dagobert would never have faltered in the face of a fight, and neither would he now.

As the immense spider emerged from the forest, its myriad legs moving with a jerky peristaltic motion, the pilgrim saw great rents in the softer flesh of its under parts, arrows sticking from its bony shell, cracks in its carapace where lumps of masonry fired by a field trebuchet had found their target and claw marks made by some great beast, congealing with the foul purple ichor that passed for the spider’s blood.

The abomination was injured, a victim of Duke Theobald’s purge, the same campaign that Sir Dagobert and his faithful had been a part of, the aftermath of which had led them to Layon in pursuit of the routed greenskins. But the spider was not dead yet. It still moved with a predator’s gait and its gigantic mandibles worked ceaselessly, droplets of some deadly toxin dripping to the ground to form steaming puddles.

It was not dead yet, but it was dying, and it would be a worthy adversary for Sir Dagobert.

‘Destroy that which threatens,’ Arnaud announced, his voice as clear as his purpose. He raised the worn blade in his hand, what might have been incised script blazing in the light of the setting sun.

Hefting the reliquae upon their shoulders, the pilgrims resumed their bold march towards the monster.

Beneath its chainmail hood, the burnished skull of Sir Dagobert – polished to a lustrous sheen like mother-of-pearl – shone gold.

VI

Dagobert twisted as the rat deflected his blade with a sharp swipe of its own weapon, the halberd scraping along Deliverer’s keen edge. Foul sparks were thrown from the corroded metal and the rat used its momentum to carry it forward under the old knight’s guard.

Turning his sword to deflect his enemy’s attack, Dagobert brought the blade down swiftly, parrying the thrusting halberd. The warlord hissed again and rolled away from the paladin, throwing itself onto the ground and twisting its spine so that it was able to catch the bloodied blade against the haft of its weapon.

Dagobert spun round, raising an iron-shod foot, ready to bring it down on the rat-thing’s skull. Moving with deceptive speed, especially considering it was clad in armour, the rat scrabbled out of his way. It was on its clawed inhuman feet again in a second, back hunched, chittering in a horrible high-pitched unvoice, holding the halberd with both hands, as if it were a quarterstaff.

His vow on his lips, gauntleted hands tight about the grip of his sword, the knight thrust the weapon’s lethal point towards the pack-leader as the ratman angled its own hooking blade to parry the blow.

Dagobert rained blows upon the horror while the rat-thing tried every underhand tactic at its disposal to best the knight’s skill with a sword.

To the pilgrims who fought with him, Sir Dagobert was a living saint, an inspiration to them all, a paradigm of what a life dedicated to the Lady could achieve. Every blow he laid against the warlord’s battered armour gave them the courage they needed to push the chittering horde back still further. For every one of the faithful that fell to a poison-coated blade, five of the mangy vermin paid with their miserable lives as the pilgrims exacted their revenge.

But with his battle rage as hot as dragon’s breath, Dagobert’s attention was fully focused on the twisting, perfidious thing before him.

Where the knight was honourable, the rat-thing was conniving and treacherous, prepared to try any devious trick to gain the advantage. Where the knight was bound by oaths of duty to the Lady, the rat-spawn was motivated by nothing but its own loathsome self-serving nature. Where Dagobert’s sword was straight and true, the rat’s halberd was serrated and fashioned with snagging hooks. And every time the two blades connected, Dagobert’s weapon threw virulent green sparks from the rune-etched halberd.

A bone-numbing, wearying pain was creeping up Dagobert’s arms, but despite his failing strength, his faith in the Lady remained steadfast. And faith was the greatest weapon of all against such a foul and unholy enemy.

The warlord made a sudden lunge for the knight, ducking in under the smooth arc described by his sweeping blade. Contrary to expectations of age, Dagobert managed to jerk his torso round so that the warlord’s blade scraped along the mail protecting his stomach, splitting the links of chain and sending more of the poisonous green sparks flying from the sundered steel rings.

The rat gave a squeal of enraged frustration as its lunge carried it forwards, exposing it to Dagobert’s counter-attack.

‘That which is sacrosanct, I shall preserve!’ the old knight declared, with a bellow of vindication. Reaching the end of his sweeping swing and twisting his arm at the elbow, he turned Deliverer deftly in his grasp. The tempered steel sang as he brought it down towards the rat-thing’s exposed neck.

‘That which is sublime, I will protect!’

But the rat proved just as fast as the knight, and even more agile. It twisted its back, bringing its defiled weapon to bear once more, braced before it in both paws.

Dagobert would not be denied.

‘That which threatens, I will destroy,’ he chanted as he brought the blade down, muscles in his arm on fire as his faith in the Lady granted him all the strength he needed. ‘That which threatens, I will destroy!’

The worn shaft of the halberd splintered beneath the blessed blade’s keen edge, the gleaming steel catching the light for a moment as the sun burnt through the cloying mists at last. Just for a moment it seemed as if Deliverer burst into flame. The tip of the blade connected with the creature’s breast, parting the exposed flesh between neck and sternum.

‘For my holy wrath will know no bounds!’

Dagobert’s declaration of faith rang out across the battlefield for all to hear. The vermin-kin squealed in fear. The knight’s faithful followers rallied, driving home their advantage as the rat-things fled the battlefield, making their own evangelical calls to the Lady, routing the enemy with vigour.

Dagobert forced the tip of the blade home, ramming it through the throat of the struggling thing, skewering the rat to the ground with his holy sword. The warlord’s shrieking screams dissolved into choked gurgles.

A sudden spear of pain burned in the knight’s side.

Dagobert gasped, staggering back from the stricken ratman, releasing his hold on his sword that still pinned the treacherous creature to the ground. And then he saw the tip of the halberd clasped in its left hand, the dizzying symbols pulsing with sick green light. The knight’s blood smoked as it ran down over the rune-etched blade.

Even with the tainted blade removed, the acid agony remained. The burning pain was joined by a pernicious cold that radiated from the point where the halberd had pierced his side with a creeping malignity.

He could feel his legs giving way under him. His stumbling steps carried him down the rugged hillside towards the babbling waters of a stream that ran pink with the blood of the men and vermin that had met their end upon its banks.

His vision greying, Dagobert made for the brook, his mouth suddenly dry, wanting nothing more than to sup of the waters that tumbled from the same holy spring that filled the font in the Lady’s chapel. The Lady had chosen him to be Her champion and she gave succour to those who needed it and peace to those that had earned it.

Reaching the stream, he gave in at last to the numbness spreading throughout his body. He fell to the ground, feeling the damp earth beneath him as the soil of Bretonnia welcomed him with its soft embrace.

As he attempted to draw the waters of the stream to his mouth with one quivering cupped hand, the words of the vow he had first taken as a youth – so many years ago now – tumbled unbidden from his parched lips.

‘When the clarion call is sounded, I will ride out and fight for liege and Lady. While I draw breath, the lands bequeathed unto me will remain untainted by evil. Honour is all.’

And so the last thing on his lips when oblivion took him was the first vow he had taken on setting out upon the path to honour and glory in the Lady’s name.

VII

The monster’s bile-yellow shell was thicker that a knight’s plate armour. The creature must have survived for centuries within the lightless depths of some primeval forest, having nothing to fear from man or greenskin, growing fat on the flesh of forest goblins and the offerings they made.

Thorn-like protuberances studded the spider’s carapace, forming symmetrical patterns across its back. Some of these spines had grown to enormous proportions, becoming great spears of bone-like chitin that thrust forward over its head, protecting it from attack as sharpened stakes did the ranks of Bretonnian bowmen.

Buoyed absolute faith in the divine blessing the bones of Sir Dagobert conferred upon them, Arnaud led his brother pilgrims across the field, despite the fact that the men of Layon’s charge had already faltered with the monstrous spider’s emergence from the forest.

Bellowing in triumph before they had even engaged the enemy – so sure was he of their forthcoming victory over the greenskins and their monstrous mount – Arnaud led Savaric, Aluard, Fulk and Elias as they bore the reliquae at the head of the pilgrims’ zealous charge.

The spider moved with stilted steps, the gargantuan arachnid favouring its right side and yet still covering as great a distance with one rocking stride as the bier bearers did running at full pelt.

But the pilgrims’ charge did not falter, even as the gibbering greenskins hanging from the web-strung platform rained crude arrows down upon their heads. Brother Hugo fell with a bolt through his thigh but the holy warrior continued on.

Brother Aluard stumbled and went down, a lucky goblin arrow piercing his eye. For a moment, the reliquae bearers – robbed of one of their number – stumbled too. Jules stepped up to take Aluard’s place and the pilgrims surged on across the field.

Through the encroaching gloom and the haze of battle-lust, Arnaud saw again the spears and lances protruding from blackened rifts in the spider’s side, the hafts of the buried weapons clattering together with every stalking step the monster took. He saw that one monstrous eye was gone, ichor oozing from the savage wound the monster had been dealt.

And yet, despite having suffered injuries that would have levelled an entire regiment of men-at-arms, the spider was still standing. More than that, it was still striding towards Layon. But the knowledge that it was hurt made one thing perfectly clear to Arnaud. If the monster could be injured, then it could be killed.

‘In the name of Sir Dagobert! For the Lady! And for fair Bretonnia!’ Arnaud bellowed as the pilgrims closed with the horror. ‘Attack!’

Sir Dagobert met the monstrous beast in battle.

A spearing tarsus came down among the pilgrim mob, running Brother Luc through from shoulder to groin and lifting him clear of the ground, screaming in agony. Another spider claw came down almost on top of the reliquae itself, missing Sir Dagobert’s bones but snagging a piece of Silvermane’s caparison and tearing it free.

Despite the best efforts of the spider and its frenzied passengers, the pilgrims found themselves directly beneath the monster’s furiously working jaws. Strings of corrosive venom drooled from fangs the size of ploughshares, burning smoking holes in the crumbling raiment of the knight’s tabard where they touched.

In no more time than it took Arnaud to blink in startled surprise, the spider struck.

Moving far more quickly than should have been possible for something so vast, the monster’s discoloured fangs snapped closed about the body of the knight. The crushing bite punctured steel plate and splintered bone as if Sir Dagobert was nothing more than a scarecrow of sticks and straw. The idiot beast delivered a great jolt of poison through its fangs deadly enough to drop a giant, pumping the relic-knight’s remains full of venom that corroded the smooth surface of his polished armour and dissolved the links of his chainmail.

Rising up on its hindquarters, the spider tore the reliquae apart, sending tatters of cloth, broken bones and pieces of armour raining down about the pilgrims.

With Sir Dagobert preoccupying the beast, his faithful followers made the most of the distraction and, out of range of the shrieking goblins, ran for cover beneath the bloated arachnid.

Caught within the cage of the spider’s legs, Arnaud froze. The beast’s underbelly seemed to pulse with disgusting peristaltic ripples as if something was moving beneath the white puckered flesh.

Myriad tiny spiderlings swarmed over its leathery hide to drop down onto the pilgrims crouched beneath their monstrous brood-mother. They scampered across the ground around the spider as well, scuttling up the legs of the unwary, squirming inside jerkins and into hose, delivering crippling bites and making the men cry out in pain and horrified surprise.

‘Come, brothers, do not fail Sir Dagobert now when his work here is almost done!’ Arnaud shouted, tightening his grip around his blade. ‘Stand firm and let not your sword-arms fail the Lady and Her champion!’ With that, he thrust his own blessed blade high above his head.

It pierced the pulsating sac of the spider’s abdomen and he pushed it home with both hands, feeling internal organs rupture as he forced its tip deeper into the monster’s belly. Following their leader’s example, the faithful hacked, pierced and bludgeoned the spider’s soft flesh.

The spider made a sound like a high-pitched hissing scream and the pilgrims redoubled their efforts, chanting prayers that called down the Lady’s divine retribution about the unholy monster.

Viscous fluid poured from the beast’s wounds, drenching the pilgrims in a stinking torrent, but still they did not relent. The men hacked and slashed, opening up even more grievous wounds in the monster’s abdomen. Brother Baldric lost his dagger inside the beast as the slime-slicked weapon slipped from his grasp. Reaching for the broken end of a splintered lance still hanging from the spider’s side, he rammed the weapon further inside the beast, screaming with the fury of a zealot.

The gargantuan spider spasmed with every sword thrust, every axe that cleaved its flesh drawing from it more hissing screams. The creature twisted, trying to catch its tormentors in its terrible jaws, throwing screaming goblins from the howdah as it did so. But the pilgrims were sheltered beneath its belly and with every blow they dealt the beast, its strength ebbed, making it harder for the gigantic spider to keep out of reach of their vengeful blades.

Soon, the spider was possessed by the paroxysm of its death-throes, the forest goblins howling in terror, unable to believe that their god had been bested.

Sir Dagobert’s followers had at last finished what the muster of Duke Theobald had begun.

VIII

Dagobert slowly opened his eyes. Flickering shadows resolved into jostling figures and, as his sluggish senses finally caught up, he realised that someone was tugging at his body.

He could feel his slack limbs being pulled this way and that, but felt like he barely had the strength to breathe, let alone resist the attentions of the looters.

He could hear the babbling of a brook close by and smell the mingled scents of blood and fire on the air. Realisation came to him at last as he remembered where he was and what had happened.

He could still feel the burning pain of the death wound the warlord had delivered with its cursed halberd. And yet he was not dead and the hole in his side burned less than it had. Even the numbness was beginning to pass. He would yet live to fight another day.

He had lain dying of his wounds in the sacred stream, as if age itself had finally caught up with him, but the waters of the Lady’s blessed well had saved him, washing the poison from that last grievous wound, and setting him on the road to recovery. With rest and time, and the ministrations of a grail damsel, he would recover, and even return to protect the Lady’s shrine. But there was another obstacle he would have to overcome first.

Dagobert understood what was happening to him now. With the ratmen routed, his idiot followers – clearly believing him to be dead already – had returned to claim what relics and other trinkets they could from his body, whether it be a piece of his armour or some token of the Lady that he carried about him.

‘I’m not dead,’ he tried to say, defiant to the last, but all that escaped his parched lips was a hoarse whisper. Swallowing hard, trying to draw saliva to his mouth, he tried again. ‘I’m not dead.’

A dark shadow passed across the canvas of the featureless white sky and resolved into the lumpen features of the pestering pilgrim. What was his name? Dagobert seemed to recall that the man had been a blacksmith before joining the knight’s entourage. He was staring at the knight, an imbecilic grin splitting his ugly face. Arnaud, that was his name.

‘Arnaud, help me,’ Dagobert commanded, but his voice that was still little more than a cracked whisper. It was certainly unlikely that any of the other pilgrims had heard him. ‘I’m not dead.’

Arnaud knelt down beside him and whispered in his ear. ‘I know, my lord.’

For the briefest moment, hope filled the grail knight’s world. But only for a moment.

‘And I know, too, that you will live forever,’ the pilgrim went on, his voice acquiring a disconcerting quality. A distant look glazed his eyes, as if the pilgrim could see a secret future the old knight could not. ‘You will be an inspiration to all who follow you – to the downtrodden, to those in peril or in fear for their lives – a champion to the threatened and the oppressed. And you shall serve the Lady until the coming of the end times.’

Dagobert suddenly felt a great weight pushing down upon his ribcage, making it even harder for him to breathe. He fought against the pressure, struggling to even lift his head to see, blinking to clear his greying vision.

The pilgrim was sitting on his chest, examining the blessed blade that was now in his hands, turning Deliverer over and over as if scrutinizing its craftsmanship in minute detail.

‘But I’m not dead!’ Dagobert spluttered, gasping for breath.

Arnaud leant over and whispered in the knight’s ear again. ‘You are the thrice blessed; blessed by the Lady when you took up the mantle of a knight, blessed by Her when you drank from Her holy cup, and she blesses you again now with the honour of serving her forevermore.

‘You are a living saint, an inspiration to us all,’ the pilgrim went on. ‘But saints are only ever really appreciated when they’re dead.’

Dagobert wanted to thrash and kick and fight against the dying of the light, as he felt the pressure building behind his eyes and his vision began to fade. But he didn’t even have the strength to lift his arms.

Arnaud didn’t meet his gaze again. Holding the knight’s sword in his right hand, the thug reached over and, without looking, put a firm hand on Dagobert’s brow, forcing his head under the churning current of the holy stream.

Every fibre of his being fought against the pilgrim’s unyielding grasp, but the warlord’s toxic blade, having failed to kill him, had nonetheless robbed him of strength.

The pressure increased and deep inside himself, for the first time in a long time, Dagobert began to panic. The very waters that had saved his life twice now threatened to take it from him.

He could hold his breath no longer. He opened his mouth to cry out in rage at the pilgrim, to give a shout that the whole world might hear and realise he was not done yet. But rather than a wrathful roar, his final breath burst from his lungs in a torrent of furious bubbles.

As his greying vision gave way to the blackness of oblivion, Dagobert saw white flowers falling through the dark. The scent of apple blossom was in his nose and he heard the Lady calling to him across the gulf of eternity, guiding him to his long-deserved rest.

IX

The spider was dead and the goblins gone, having fled back into the forest in shrieking fear after witnessing the agonising death-throes of their forest god. And yet that night only the snores of the grail knight’s entourage disturbed the darkness. No one else in Layon slept a wink.

With the rising of the sun came the thankless task of disposing of the dead. The howdah mounted atop the monster’s carapace loaded with the greenskin dead and set alight, the flammable webs soon catching and the fire spreading until it became a great conflagration that reduced spider, goblins and all to nothing but ash.

As far as Arnaud was concerned, only one task remained: recruiting others to the pilgrims’ cause. There were those in the village who heeded the call of his rabble-rousing, men who had lost everything in the goblins’ attack other than their pitiful lives. With nothing left to live for, and nothing to keep them in Layon, they readily rallied to the pilgrims’ totem. With freshly tonsured scalps, they joined Arnaud and the others in reconstructing Sir Dagobert’s remains from what was left of the grail knight’s bones after the spider’s desecration of the holy reliquae, making up any missing parts with what they could scavenge from the village shrine, their own family heirlooms and even the charcoal-black bones left after the funeral pyres had burned down.

‘We cannot tempt you to stay?’ Reynard asked as the battle pilgrims did what they could to reassemble the bones of the grail knight and his steed, shoring up the reliquae with copious sticks and borrowed twine.

‘Do not seek to tempt me, peasant!’ Arnaud said, glaring furiously at Reynard. The reek of alcohol was still strong on his breath. ‘But you could lend us a few more of those apples and a couple of flagons of ale to see us on our way.’

‘So where will you go now?’ Reynard asked, once the requested victuals had been scraped together from what was left of the village reserve stores.

Eleven of the original fourteen battle pilgrims remained, but another eight had joined their number since the battle with the spider. As four of them raised the rickety reliquae upon their shoulders once more – Brother Gervase taking up the dead horse’s hooves once more and giving an equine whinny – Arnaud looked back towards the ridge, from where Sir Dagobert’s hunting party has first set eyes on the village of Layon only the day before.

‘Sir Dagobert’s quest is done,’ he said, Reynard uncertain as to whether the man was gazing into the distance or into the future. ‘He desires only to be laid to rest within the shrine that he raised himself from the razed ruins of the Castle Perillus.’

‘Then I bid Sir Dagobert–’

‘The thrice blessed,’ the other interrupted.

‘–and you and your fellow brethren, farewell.’

Ignoring the hand Reynard offered him, Arnaud pointed towards the horizon with his cleaned blade once more and Reynard noticed for the first time how letters etched into the surface of the blade reflected the sun, spelling out a name.

Deliverer.

‘In the name of the Lady of the Lake we march for Holy Well!’ Arnaud declared, taking the first step on the path that would lead the pilgrims back up the escarpment to the ridge above.

Reynard watched until the pilgrims were no more than dark silhouettes against the skyline. Turning his back on the brooding hills, Reynard suddenly stopped and sniffed, catching the smell of something familiar, and yet out of season, on the breeze.

It was the subtle scent of apple blossom.

The Inquisition

++Open vox-net++

My most esteemed Lord Inquisitor,

From the darkest depths of the Eye itself we have returned, bringing with us one accused of craven heresies. We have paid a high price in blood to bring Sarah Cawkwell to face the Emperor’s justice, and now our work can begin.

Interrogator Kerstromm Ordo Malleus

What are you working on at the moment?

I’ve been going through the proofs of The Gildar Rift, and I’ve not long handed in a novella-length Space Marine story, Accursed Eternity. At this particular moment in time, I’m busily revising a short story for a Warhammer anthology due out next year. Then there’s another short story that needs doing. My mind is filled with the delightful sound of metal on metal as a stronghold full of dwarfs meets an invading force of Chaos barbarians head on. That’s bad enough, but the Chaos fellas have an extra ace up their sleeve in the form of someone the dwarfs really aren’t going to want to mess with…

Never a dull moment.

What are you working on next?

I have a couple of short story projects to work on before I throw myself once again into the Old World for another dalliance with the bad guys who dwell there. And if I’m lucky (and don’t get decapitated, or something of that ilk), I will return triumphant, my second novel in hand…

Dalliance is a nice word. I shall remember it.

My poor editor is probably drowning under my emails. Wait, did I say ‘poor editor’? His attempts to indoctrinate me are working…

Are there any areas of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 that you haven’t yet explored that you’d like to in the future?

Everything! Really, I love both worlds, although my heart most assuredly belongs with the Adeptus Astartes. I’d like to have a crack with one of the ‘big boy’ Chapters one day but for now, at least, I’m loving my Silver Skulls. The Star Dragons were nice to flesh out as well and there’s more stories waiting to be told with them, I feel.

I’d also really like to have a go at writing an audio drama. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every single one that I’ve listened to so far and I think that would be a very rewarding project overall.

What are you reading at the moment? Who are your favourite authors?

At the moment, I just re-read The Black Lung Captain by Chris Wooding (very steampunky stuff – highly recommended), ready for the next instalment of his series to come out. I also just emerged from the award-winning Sigvald by Darius Hinks, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Also sitting on the ‘to read’ pile is a seemingly endless stack of other BL works.

In terms of my favourite authors… well, I’m a huge fan of Robin Hobb’s stuff, as well as some of the fantasy staples (David Eddings, David Gemmell, James Barclay, Terry Pratchett). I love pretty much everything BL I’ve read and I like that every author has their own unique style. I’m particularly fond of Graham McNeill’s work, but don’t tell him I said so.

Which book (either BL or non-BL) do you wish you’d written and why?

Outside of the Warhammer universes, I would love to have written The Three Musketeers. It’s probably my favourite book and the one I always come back to for a reminder of just why I love adventure stories and action so much.

Within the frame of the BL-verse… well, I’d love to have been there at the inception of the Horus Heresy series. What a blast it must have been to set the ball rolling on that monster…

PHALANX

Chapter Ten

Ben Counter

Archmagos Voar was surrounded by a cordon of servitors as he hurried through the guest quarters towards the saviour pod array. Beyond the lavish guest rooms, he knew a shuttle could be found, normally used for diplomatic purposes but perfectly suitable for taking him off the Phalanx and onto one of the nearby ships – the Traitorsgrave, perhaps, on which Lord Inquisitor Kolgo had arrived, or a Space Marine ship like the Judgement Upon Garadan.

Voar had betrayed the Soul Drinkers on Selaaca. None of his logic circuits entertained the concept that it might have been the wrong thing to do, either logically or morally. But that did not change the fact that the Soul Drinkers were loose and they might well want Voar, in particular, dead. The Phalanx was not safe for him.

Voar’s motivator units, damaged on Selaaca, had been repaired well enough for him to make good speed through the nests of anterooms and state suites, winding around antique furnishings and artworks whose uselessness accentuated their sense of the lavish. The Imperial Fists were pragmatic in their dealings with the wider Imperium, willing to receive diplomats from the various Adepta in a fashion acceptable to the Imperium’s social elite. The servitors Voar had taken from the Phalanx’s stores wound around the resulting tables, chairs and light sculptures with rather more difficulty than Voar himself.

Voar paused at the infra-red signature that flared against his vision. His sight, like most of the rest of him, had been significantly augmented to bring him away from corruptible flesh and closer to the machine-ideal. He had seen a heat trace, just past one of the archways leading into an audience chamber. Reclining couches and tables with gilt decorations, imported from some far-off world of craftsmen, stood before an ornate throne painted with enamelled scenes of plenty and wealth. Beneath the room’s chandeliers and incense-servitor perches, something had moved, something interested in keeping itself hidden for as long as possible.

Voar drew the inferno pistol, another item liberated from the Phalanx’s armouries. The servitors, responding to the mind-impulse unit built into Voar’s cranium, formed a tighter cordon around him. Their weapons, autoguns linked to the targeting units that filled their eye sockets, tracked as Voar’s vision switched through spectrums. He saw warm traces of footprints on the floor, residual electrical energy dissipating.

Chaplain Iktinos knew he had been seen. There was no use in trying to stay hidden when he was over two-and-a-half metres tall and in full armour. He walked out from behind the dignitary’s throne, crozius arcanum in hand.

‘You have failed, Soul Drinker,’ said Voar. There was no trace of fear in his voice, and not just because of its artificial nature. His emotional repressive surgery had chased such petty concerns like fear from his biological brain. ‘Your escape from the Phalanx is a logical impossibility. You gain nothing from exacting revenge against me.’

‘Logic is a lie,’ came the reply. ‘A prison for small minds. I am here for a purpose beyond revenge.’

Voar waited no longer. Negotiations would not suffice. He dropped back behind an enormous four-poster bed of black hardwood as he gave the impulse for the servitors to open fire.

Eight autoguns hammered out a curtain of fire. Iktinos ran into the storm, faceplate of his helmet tucked behind one shoulder guard as he charged. The armour was chewed away as if by accelerated decay, the skull-faced shoulder guard stripped down through ceramite layers, then down to the bundles of cables and nerve fibres that controlled it.

Iktinos slammed into the servitors. One was crushed under his weight, its reinforced spine snapping and its gun wrenched out of position to spray bullets uselessly into the frescoed ceiling. The crozius slashed through another two, their unarmoured forms coming apart under the shock of the power field, mechanical and once-human parts showering against the walls in a wet steel rain.

Voar ducked out of cover as Iktinos beheaded the last servitor with his free hand. Voar took aim and fired, a lance of superheated energy lashing out and slicing a chunk out of the chaplain’s crozius arm.

Voar’s mind slowed down, logic circuits engaging to examine the tactical possibilities faster than unaugmented thought. He had to keep his distance since, up close, Iktinos was lethal, while Voar’s inferno pistol was the only weapon he had that could hope to fell a Space Marine. The targeting systems built into his eyes would make sure that his second shot would not miss. As long as he saw Iktinos before the fallen Chaplain could kill him, Voar would get one good shot off. The plan fell into place, paths and vectors illuminating in blue-white lines layered over his vision.

Voar jumped out of cover, his motivator units sending him drifting rapidly backwards towards an archway leading into an elaborate stone-lined bath house, with a deep caldarium, a cold-plunge pool and a Space Marine-scaled massage table. Mosaics of Imperial heroes lined the walls and valet-servitors stood ready. Voar’s inferno pistol was out in front of him, ready to fire.

Iktinos was not within his frame of vision. The archmagos’s logic circuits fought to create new tactical scenarios. He should have been feeling panic, but instead his altered mind was generating a burst of useless information, a confused tangle of targeting solutions for a target that suddenly wasn’t there.

Iktinos’s armoured mass slid out from under the enormous massage table, crashing into the lower half of Voar’s body. Voar was thrown against the archway. He fired, but Iktinos was moving too rapidly and the shot grazed him again, carving a molten channel along the side of his helmet. Iktinos slashed at Voar with his heavy powered mace. The archmagos cut his motivator units and dropped to the floor, and the crozius sliced through the stonework of the arch.

Iktinos’s other arm grabbed Voar’s gun wrist, spun the archmagos around and slammed him against the wall, his forearm pinning Voar’s back.

‘I am not here to kill you,’ said Iktinos. ‘Your life means nothing to me. Give me the Soulspear.’

‘Take it,’ said Voar. A small manipulator limb emerged from the collar of his hood. It carried the haft of the Soulspear, a cylinder of metal with a knurled handgrip.

Iktinos took the Soulspear and turned it over in his hand, keeping Voar up against the wall.

‘To think,’ he said. ‘Such a small thing. Even now I wonder if it was this that set us on our path. Many of your tech-priests died over this, archmagos. Many of my brothers, too. It is right that it be delivered into the hands of Daenyathos.’

‘You have what you came for,’ said Voar. ‘Let me go.’

‘I made no promises that you would live,’ said Iktinos.

Emotions that had not been felt for decades clouded Voar’s face. ‘Omnissiah take your soul!’ he snapped. ‘May it burn in His forges! May it be hammered on His anvil!’

Iktinos lifted Voar into the air and slammed the tech-priest down over his knee. Metal vertebrae shattered and components rained out of Voar’s robes. Iktinos plunged the crozius arcanum into Voar’s chest, the power field ripping through layers of metal and bone.

Senior tech-priests could be extremely difficult to kill. Many of them could survive anything up to and including decapitation, trusting in their augmentations to keep their semi-organic brains alive until their remains could be recovered. A few of the most senior, the archmagi ultima who might rule whole clusters of forge worlds, even had archaeotech backup brains where their personalities and memories could be recorded in case of physical destruction. Voar did not have that level of augmentation, but Iktinos had to be thorough nevertheless.

Iktinos tore open Voar’s torso completely and scattered the contents, smashing each organ and component in case Voar’s brain was located there. He finished destroying the spine and finally turned to Voar’s head. He crushed the cranium under his boot, grinding logic circuits and ocular bionics into the floor with his heel. Quite probably, Voar died in that moment, the last sensory inputs gone dark, the final thoughts flashing through sundered circuitry.

Iktinos finished destroying Voar’s body, then took up the Soulspear. It was a relic of the Great Crusade, found by Rogal Dorn himself during the Emperor’s reconquest of the galaxy in the name of humanity. He had given it to the Soul Drinkers at their founding, to symbolise that they were sons of Dorn as surely as the Imperial Fists themselves.

That was the story, of course. In truth, the origin of the Soulspear, like the rest of the Soul Drinkers history, was as murky as anything else in Imperial annals. The Soulspear was gene-activated and would only respond to someone with a Soul Drinker’s genetic code, so whoever had created or found the artefact, it had not been Rogal Dorn. The Soulspear, like the rest of the universe, was a lie.

That did not mean it did not have its uses. Daenyathos understood that. Just like the Imperium, the Soulspear might be founded on lies, but it could still become a part of the plan.

Daenyathos’s transformation of the Imperium would not be a pleasant process. Nothing worth doing ever was. But in spite of the blood, in spite of the suffering and the death, the universe would thank Daenyathos when it was done.

Iktinos left Voar’s remains scattered on the floor of the diplomatic quarters, and headed towards the Predator’s Eye to witness the Imperium’s future unfold.

Gethsemar and Daviks charged into the heart of the library labyrinth at the same time, charging in from two directions to catch Sarpedon off-guard.

Sarpedon was never off-guard. Silhouetted in the flames that ran across the bookcases behind him, he turned to face the Angels Sanguine and Silver Skulls warriors as if he had been expecting them.

Daviks opened fire. Sarpedon’s reactions were so fast that the bolter shots burst against the blade of the Axe of Mercaeno as the mutant flicked it up to defend himself.

Gethsemar erupted towards Sarpedon on a column of fire from his jump pack. Sarpedon’s left-side legs flipped the reading table behind him into Gethsemar’s path and the heavy hardwood slammed into Gethsemar, throwing the Angel Sanguine into a bookcase which buried him in a drift of burning books.

In the middle of the fire and slaughter, it was almost poetry that unfolded as the fight continued. Daviks parried the Axe of Mercaeno with the body of his bolter, only to be thrown to the floor by Sarpedon’s lashing legs. Gethsemar jumped to his feet and lunged with his glaive, Sarpedon ducking the blow with impossible grace and barging the butt of the axe into Gethsemar’s abdomen to throw him off-balance.

Captain Luko vaulted through the flame to crash into Daviks before the siege-captain could join the assault again. The two warriors of the Adeptus Astartes traded blows as fast as a man could see, Luko’s lightning claws lashing in great arcs of blue-white power, batting aside Daviks’s bolter before Daviks could get a shot.

Gethsemar launched himself into the air and dived down out of the flames overhead. Sarpedon reached up and grabbed Gethsemar, hauling him in close where the Angel Sanguine’s blade could not be brought to bear. Gethsemar and Sarpedon wrestled, Sarpedon using his mutated physiology to grapple from unexpected angles and drag Gethsemar to the floor. He forced the Axe of Mercaeno down, the edge of the blade pressing against Gethsemar’s throat. Gethsemar fired his jump pack but Sarpedon was stronger, and his taloned legs dug into the floor to keep himself upright.

‘Fall back!’ came an order over the Imperial Fists vox-channel. It was Lysander’s voice, transmitted to the Howling Griffons, Silver Skulls and Angels Sanguine. ‘All troops, fall back to rally points! Disengage immediately!’

The moment’s confusion this caused was enough for Sarpedon to drive a fist into Gethsemar’s faceplate. The death mask of Sanguinius dented and blood spurted from the carved mouth. Gemstones pinged out of the gilded surface and Gethsemar juddered as the impact ran through his whole body.

Daviks saw that Gethsemar was going to die. He ducked Luko’s swinging claw swipe and charged into the Soul Drinker’s legs, hauling Luko off his feet and ramming him right through the bookcase behind. He threw Luko and, using the moment of distance he had opened up, brought his bolter around and sprayed a volley in Luko’s direction. The Soul Drinker rolled out of the way, putting hardwood shelving and millions of burning pages between him and Daviks’s gunfire, but that was what Daviks needed.

Daviks sprinted to where Gethsemar lay, the shadow of Sarpedon’s axe cast over him by the light of the flames. Daviks grabbed Gethsemar’s wrist and dragged him out of the way as Sarpedon’s axe came down, ripping a deep gash in the deck.

‘We leave, brother!’ gasped Daviks. ‘Lysander has ordered us back!’

‘The fight is not done,’ replied Gethsemar, his voice thick with blood. ‘The enemy still stands.’

‘Lysander has command! We fall back! Muster your brothers and get back to the choristers’ chamber! We will cover you!’

The two Space Marines dropped back through the smoke and wreckage. Sarpedon watched them go, not eager to pursue them when their battle-brothers must surely be just behind them.

Luko emerged smouldering from the wreck of the bookcase he had been thrown through. ‘Damnation, I will have your hide!’ he yelled after Daviks.

Sarpedon put a hand on Luko’s shoulder. ‘Stay, brother,’ he said. ‘Something is wrong.’

Graevus dared a glance over the barricade. The last volley of bolter fire the Soul Drinkers had kicked out had not been replied. He saw the shapes of the Howling Griffons receding through the smoke, a few kneeling to fire while the majority fell back.

Graevus stood and took aim, firing off a few shots snapped into the half-seen shapes through the smoke. Salk was beside him now, echoing Graevus’s own fire.

‘They’re retreating,’ said Salk as he paused to swap magazines.

‘We haven’t hit them that hard,’ said Graevus. ‘I thought they would be on us.’

‘Then something else has happened,’ said Salk.

‘Don’t be too thankful. They could be mustering for another push.’

‘No,’ replied Salk. ‘Not when they had us pinned in place. Not the Howling Griffons, not here. They would have pushed on until either they or we were all dead. This… this is no plan of theirs.’

‘Maybe logic prevailed,’ said Graevus.

With the gunfire reduced to sporadic shots, the roar of the flames and the clattering of armour became like another form of silence, as if the library were in the eye of a storm that had just passed over and now everything was still. Behind the barricade lay two fallen Soul Drinkers, brought down by bolter fire and shrapnel – one was dead, both Graevus and Salk could see that, his torso split open and blood already congealing in a crystalline mass around the enormous spine-deep wound. The other was still but the wound to his leg, severe though it was, should not kill him.

‘We need Pallas,’ said Graevus.

‘We do not have him,’ replied Salk. ‘Soul Drinkers! Bring the fallen and retreat to Sarpedon’s position! Brother Markis, Thessalon! Cover us!’

Other Soul Drinkers, the survivors of a dozen Howling Griffons assaults, were moving through the smoke. They looked like the ghosts of some long-distant battle hovering just on this side of reality, clinging on as they enacted the same bloodshed night after night. Most had survived with bearable wounds, but there had been no doubt that the numbers and fury of the Howling Griffons would have soon prevailed. But now the Griffons had fallen back, and in their place was surely an unknown enemy no more inclined to give the Soul Drinkers any respite.

‘No,’ said Graevus. ‘On second thoughts, there is no reason here.’

‘Bring me everything you know,’ said Chapter Master Vladimir.

‘Of course,’ replied Castellan Leucrontas. ‘We know little, but I can confirm that the starboard dorsal cargo section has been lost.’

Leucrontas had been summoned to the Forge of Ages, which had become Vladimir’s command post. Pict-feeds from the battle site showed little more than screens full of smoke and the vox-channel was full of barked orders and the confusion that the sudden order to retreat had brought about. In spite of that, the Howling Griffons were falling back in good order and even now mustering around the crew mess. That was not the issue.

‘Lost?’ said Vladimir. He leaned forward on the steel throne from which the Imperial Fists techmarines usually oversaw the work of the forge-crews.

‘It is gone. Full breach and depressurisation. Any crew in the area are dead, no doubt.’

‘Any Adeptus Astartes casualties?’

‘I do not believe so.’

‘What caused it?’

‘The psychic wards built around the librarium contemplative chambers reacted,’ replied Leucrontas. ‘And the readings so far obtained are esoteric.’

‘A psychic attack?’ said Vladimir.

‘If so, my lord, it is a vast and destructive one, well beyond the capacity of an Adeptus Astartes psyker.’

‘Then,’ said Vladimir, his chin on his fist, ‘a moral threat? An assault from the warp?’

‘Librarian Varnica’s testimony did suggest the Soul Drinkers had daemonic allies,’ said Leucrontas. ‘And there is… something… happening to Kravamesh.’

‘Kravamesh? The star? What has the star around which we orbit to do with the Soul Drinkers?’ Vladimir held up his hand before Leucrontas replied. ‘No, Castellan, I ask not for an answer. I merely muse upon it. We must see to the security of the Phalanx before we seek the origin of this new threat. Once the assault on the archives has been withdrawn, we must redeploy our strength around the dorsal cargo bays to keep them contained. A smaller force can maintain the cordon around the archives. Draw up the battle stations and see that Lysander has access to them. Nothing must get in or out of either area without running a gauntlet of bolter fire.’

‘Yes, my lord. And the crew?’

‘Order them to arms. Protect the critical areas of the ship. I had hoped that even after the escape this would be limited to Space Marine versus Space Marine. It seems events have compelled us to think beyond that.’

‘It will be done.’

‘Keep me apprised of everything, and…’

Vladimir’s voice was interrupted by the bleating of an alarm. From the armrest of the throne slid a pict-screen that shuddered in to life.

‘The tech-adepts must have got dorsal security back online,’ said Leucrontas.

The screen showed a view of a corridor, bulkhead doors standing open along its length. Mist clung to the floor and rolled through the doorways.

Shapes were coalescing. Tentacles, eyes, mouths, malformed limbs, writhing masses of entrails that moved with an impossible impression of intelligence and malice. Teeth, blades of bone, tides of filth, all wrapped into dimensions that refused to fit into reality. Like a stain the madness was spreading out, a tide of filth and insanity that warped the fabric of the Phalanx as it advanced.

‘Daemons,’ snarled Vladimir. He looked up at Leucrontas. ‘Bring me the Fangs of Dorn.’

In the smouldering ruins of the archive, Sarpedon and his officers convened. The smoke that still clung to everything made it look as if they were wanderers in dense mist who had come across one another by accident. They gathered around one of the few intact reading tables, where the ground was knee-deep in charred pages and gutted spines.

Graevus and Salk joined Luko, Tyrendian and Sarpedon where they waited. ‘The dead have been counted,’ said Graevus.

‘What is the tally?’ said Sarpedon.

Salk stepped forwards. ‘Fifteen,’ he said. ‘Those who remain number forty-seven.’

‘Was it ever true that there were once a thousand of us?’ said Sarpedon.

‘No,’ replied Tyrendian. ‘The old Chapter boasted a thousand warriors. We are not that Chapter.’

‘Then they died,’ said Sarpedon, ‘as we surely shall. Now is not the time to bar that truth from our souls. Many times a Space Marine facing death refuses to allow it into his mind, for by defying the inevitable we can sometimes rob it of victory. But not here. I think I accepted our deaths here when the Imperial Fists first faced us on Selaaca, but if any of you still rage against our fate then I ask you to abandon it. Take the certainty of death into yourselves, welcome it, and make peace with it. It is not an easy task, but now, it is the right path to take.’

‘If we fight not to survive,’ said Luko, ‘then why? Why not simply present ourselves to the Howling Griffons so they might put a bullet in the back of our heads and be done with it?’

‘Because there are matters unfinished amongst us that our enemy’s retreat has permitted to us to address,’ replied Sarpedon.

‘You mean Daenyathos,’ said Salk, ‘and Iktinos.’

‘We still have no understanding of what they intend here,’ said Tyrendian. Somehow he, as always seemed the case, had come through the battle in the archive with barely any scar or blemish on him. Perhaps his psychic talent was not limited to throwing lightning bolts in battle, but also gave him some kind of inviolability, some ward against the ugliness of war. ‘Presuming it was Iktinos, under Daenyathos’s direction, who brought us to this juncture, there is no indication of what he actually wants to achieve here.’

‘Then we shall find out,’ said Sarpedon. ‘The Howling Griffons will attack again soon, or a cordon will be set up to contain us. Either way, if any of us are to begin the hunt for Iktinos and Daenyathos then we must do so soon. I do not believe our whole force can move through the Phalanx quickly enough. The whole of the Imperial Fists and Howling Griffons will mobilise to stand in our way. But if a smaller force does so while the main force must also be dealt with, we will have a greater chance of breaking through any opposition and finding Daenyathos.’

‘Then who will go?’ said Tyrendian.

‘Sergeant Salk,’ said Sarpedon. ‘I ask that you select a squad and accompany me. I cannot do this alone. Captain Luko, you shall take command of the rest of the Chapter.’

‘You are our chapter master,’ replied Luko. ‘It is to your leadership that our battle-brothers look. Would you deny them that in their final battle? Let one of us go.’

‘No, captain,’ retorted Sarpedon. ‘I am faster than any Space Marine. Foul as they are, my mutations serve me well in that regard. Not to mention, I would send no man to face Iktinos or Daenyathos save myself. And I may be their leader by right, but ask any Soul Drinker what man he would prefer to fight alongside and those who are honest will name Captain Luko.’

Luko did not reply for a long moment. ‘If I was asked that question,’ said Luko levelly, ‘then I would say Chapter Master Sarpedon. Is it my fate that I will be denied that in these, our last moments?’

‘It is,’ said Sarpedon. ‘I promised you peace, captain. It will come soon. I did not promise I would be there when it arrived. Forgive me, but these are my orders.’

Luko said nothing, but saluted by way of reply.

‘Our objectives?’ asked Tyrendian.

‘Draw in our enemies, keep them busy. The fiercer the fight here, the shorter odds you buy for Salk and myself.’

‘I shall round up a squad,’ said Salk. ‘I know who to choose. It will not take long.’

‘Then we must part,’ said Sarpedon. ‘Remember, regardless of whose blood flows in us, we are still sons of Dorn. If there was ever a man who did not know when to give up, it was Rogal Dorn. We are blessed with a battle in which we cannot fail. Think on Dorn, and forget how to lose.’

The assembled Soul Drinkers saluted their commander. Then, to a man, they bowed their heads to pray.

Like a poisoned barb in flesh, like an infection, the warp portal had caused to grow around it a corrupted cyst that ran with blood and pain. From the steel of the Phalanx it had chewed out a great cathedral of gore, its arching ceiling ribbed with clotted veins of filth and its walls of vivid, oozing torn flesh. Blood washed in tides born of Kravamesh’s gravity, like wine swirled in a bowl, and through it slithered all the foul things of the warp.

Every power of the warp wanted its hand played on the Phalanx. So many of their servants had been banished or destroyed by the Imperial Fists and the other Chapters represented there that even their aeons-old hatreds could not stop them from sending their minions to join Abraxes’s own. Brass-skinned soldiers of the Blood God marched from the blood onto the shore of torn metal, their black iron swords at attention and their muscular bodies moving in time as if they were on a parade ground. Flitting snakelike things with long lashing tongues darted here and there, quick as hovering insects, snapping at the morsels of flesh that scudded on the surface of the blood. And a horde of decaying forms hauled on rusted chains as they dragged an enormous thing of rotting flesh out of the mire, a contented smile on its bloated face as it plucked a tiny squealing daemon from the rents in its skin and swallowed it down. It seemed that every shape of the warp’s hatred was emerging from the blood-gate, beyond which vast intelligences gathered to watch this invasion of the Imperial Fists sanctum.

On an island of corroded metal, all that remained of the docking bay deck, stood Daenyathos. He seemed the only solid thing in an arena of flesh that mutated at the whim of the Dark Gods, as if the dreadnought’s chassis anchored the whole scene in realspace and without him it would all collapse into the warp under the weight of its own madness.

‘I brought you here,’ he yelled, voice amplified to maximum. ‘It is at my sufferance that you walk again in the realms of the real. Abraxes the Fair, Abraxes the Magnificent, I call upon you to hear me.’

Abraxes rose from his throne of bodies, twisted and fused together from crewmen whose minds had shattered under the psychic assault of the gate’s opening. The daemon prince’s beauty was not marred by the blood that soaked his garments and ran down his perfect alabaster skin. ‘Abraxes is not summoned,’ he said in a voice like song. ‘He arrives not at the whim of another.’

‘And yet,’ replied Daenyathos, ‘you are here. For who else would I bring forth to have his revenge on Sarpedon of the Soul Drinkers?’

Abraxes leaned forward. ‘Sarpedon? And yet here I thought that Imperial Fists, as delicious as they would be, were the sole morsels I might find here to soothe my hunger. Yet Sarpedon is here… where is he? The gate is opened fully and the daemon army is ready to march. I would march upon him first, and destroy what remains in celebration of my revenge!’

‘I imagine,’ said Daenyathos, ‘that he will come to you. But mere slaughter is too small an objective for one such as Abraxes, is it not? To butcher a starship full of Space Marines is a worthy endeavour for any petty prince or aspiring daemon, but for Abraxes? Surely your dreams are grander than that?’

‘Explain yourself!’ demanded Abraxes. ‘I grow impatient. See! The horrors of Tzeentch march to my tune. A thousand of them emerge from the warp at my whim! I shall lead them forth without delay unless your words are profound indeed.’

‘This is a spaceship,’ said Daenyathos. ‘A spaceship as huge and deadly as any the Imperium has ever fielded. And now it is a spaceship with a warp portal. I have stolen the Predator’s Eye from the star Kravamesh and embedded it in the Phalanx. What could the great Abraxes desire more than a doorway into the warp from which spills all the legions under his command, and that he can take between the stars as he wishes?’

Abraxes clenched a fist, and his thoughts could almost be read on his face. They were not human thoughts – they would not fit in a human mind. ‘I shall extinguish stars,’ he said. ‘I shall weave a pattern across the galaxy, even unto Terra!’

‘I can lead you there,’ continued Daenyathos. ‘For a lifetime I studied the path that will take you beyond the reach of the Imperium’s cumbersome armies and into the orbits of its most populous worlds. It is a path that leads to Terra, I assure you. But it leads also through the very soul of humanity! Imagine world after world falling, drowned in madness, their last sane vision that of the Phalanx appearing like a dread star above them! A thousand times a thousand worlds shall share this fate, so that by the time you reach Terra it shall be to deal the death blow to a species cringing on its knees before you!’

‘And for what reason would a Space Marine lead me on such a dance?’ said Abraxes. ‘You who were born of the Emperor’s will. You who have sworn so many oaths to destroy all such as me. Why do you wish your species to undergo such a tortuous death?’

‘I need no reason,’ said Daenyathos. ‘Hatred is its own justification.’

‘Ah, hatred!’ said Abraxes, jumping to his cloven feet. The blood washed around his ankles, mindless predators slithering from the foam. ‘The human gift to the universe. The greatest work of man. Even your Emperor himself was in thrall to it. There has been no creation to rival it. It builds worlds and brings them down. Aloud it is war, and in silence it is peace. The human race is nothing but a trillion manifestations of hatred! When humanity is gone, I think I shall preserve alone its hatred. From it I shall mould whatever I see fit to succeed them. Hatred alone shall rule among the stars.’

‘And so it shall be,’ said Daenyathos. ‘But first, the Phalanx must become your own.’

‘That,’ replied Abraxes with scorn, ‘is a task worthy of my notice only because Sarpedon’s death shall be a part of it. Sarpedon is the last of the universe I once knew, one in which Abraxes could fail. When he is gone, only victory shall be left. I can see the fates twining out towards destruction. There is no thread that humanity can follow to safety. Sarpedon dies. They all die. Then your universe shall follow!’

With the atonal braying of a hundred pipes, Abraxes’s army gathered on the blood shore. Greater daemons, hateful lumps of the warp’s own will given form, were the generals of a thousands-strong army. Bloodletters of Khorne chanted in their own dark tongue, bodies smouldering as their lust for slaughter grew. Abraxes’s own horrors were a shuddering tide of formless flesh, shifting in and out of solid forms at the speed of thought. Plaguebearers, emissaries of the plague god Nurgle who had once been Abraxes’s sworn enemy, fawned around the enormous drooling avatar of rot that was their leader.

Abraxes strode to the head of his army. In response, the walls of the cyst opened into vast orifices, leading towards the interior of the Phalanx. Lesser daemons scrambled forwards, shrieking and gibbering with the joy of approaching battle. The lords of the daemonic host howled a terrible cacophony of bellowed orders and the army advanced, horrors of Tzeentch following Abraxes like the wake of a battleship.

Daenyathos could see in the army’s advance another thread of fate winding its way towards a conclusion. Even Chaos had to observe the inevitability of fate. Abraxes, a being that had perfected its use of unwitting pawns such as the Soul Drinkers, had been drawn by that same fate to serve Daenyathos’s design. Through Abraxes, Daenyathos’s own will would be done.

It had taken so long and so much to reach this point, but that was merely a prelude. The bloodshed on the Phalanx was the true beginning of Daenyathos’s remaking of the galaxy.

Sarpedon had nothing but raw instinct to go on. He knew a little of Daenyathos and rather more of Iktinos’s ways, but even so it was barely more than guesswork that took him through the cordon of Imperial Fists and into the vast training section of the Phalanx, where sparring circles and shooting galleries were equipped with hundreds of target-servitors and racks of exotic weapons from cultures across the galaxy.

The industrialised sections of the Phalanx, the cargo bays and engineering sections towards the rear of the ship, were the best place for a single Space Marine to hide. Even a dreadnought would find places to hole up there. That was where Sarpedon resolved to look, but first he would have to cross the training sections.

‘We should take the mock battlefield,’ said Sergeant Salk. His squad, picked from the survivors of the battle in the archive, was advancing in a wide formation to give them the widest angles of vision. Ahead, a jumble of deck sections formed a series of slopes, hills and valleys, each section on hydraulics which could move them into a new topography to create a constantly changing battlefield. It was here that Imperial Fists recruits were put through days-long battle simulations, waves of target-servitors and the shifting landscape combining to create a test as much mental as it was physical.

‘Agreed,’ said Sarpedon. ‘We must make good time.’

‘If we find Iktinos, commander, what will we do?’

Sarpedon raised an eyebrow. ‘Kill him,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

The atmosphere of real battlefields clung thickly to the recreation. It was not just the bullet scars from live-fire exercises on the forests, ruined villages, jungles and alien environments wrought from flak-board and steel. It was the echo of all the imaginary wars that had been fought there, battles which had their own echo in the real bloodshed the Imperial Fists trained there later encountered. The skills they learned there served them well, or failed them, in the depths of war on Emperor-forsaken alien worlds, and the traces of those desperate times clung to the mock fortifications like a freezing mist.

‘Contact!’ came a vox from up ahead.

‘Close in!’ ordered Salk. ‘Cover and report targets!’

Ahead was the recreation of a village ruined by shellfire, craters moulded into the floor sections and the blank, broken walls featureless save for the empty eyes of windows and doorways. A building in the shape of a chapel, its walls devoid of sculpture, dominated the centre of the village with its bell tower tailor-made for snipers. Sarpedon scuttled into the shell of a mock house, crouching down on his haunches by a doorway. Sarpedon couldn’t see most of Salk’s squad, spread out and in cover as they were, but he knew they were there.

At the far end of the mock village, Reinez walked into plain view. The Crimson Fist’s armour still had the filth and scorching of battle, and in the quiet he jangled with the many icons and seals hanging from him. He looked just as Sarpedon had left him in the lab, battered and bruised, but with none of his fires dimmed.

‘Sarpedon!’ called Reinez. ‘I know you are here, you and your traitors. I think we left some business undone when last we met!’

‘Orders, commander?’ voxed Salk quietly.

‘Hold,’ replied Sarpedon.

‘We could take him down.’

‘You have my orders. Hold fire.’

Reinez walked forwards to the town square in the shadow of the church. ‘Well?’ he shouted. He had his hammer in his hand, and scowled at the ruins as he searched out the purple of Soul Drinkers armour. ‘Do not tell me you care nothing for the fate of Reinez! You took my standard, you humiliated me, you cast me out from my own Chapter with your treachery! How can you do all this and yet let me live?’

Sarpedon stood up from his cover and walked into the open, his talons clicking on the hard deck sections. Reinez watched him coldly, wordlessly.

Sarpedon took the Axe of Mercaeno in one hand. ‘This need not happen,’ said Sarpedon. ‘We are both Space Marines. For one to shed another’s blood is heresy.’

‘You speak of heresy?’ barked Reinez. ‘You, who have already slain so many of my brothers? There has not been enough Adeptus Astartes blood spilled yet for my liking. A few drops more and then it will be done.’

‘Reinez, I have no quarrel with you here. I seek one of my own, the one who has orchestrated all that you have railed against. It is he who deserves all your hate, just as he deserves mine. If you truly want revenge for what happened to your brothers then let me pass or join me, but please, do not stand in my way.’

‘You knew it would not end any way but the two of us to the death,’ said Reinez. ‘You knew that from the moment a Crimson Fist fell to a Soul Drinker’s hand. Fate will not let us go and it will kill one of us before either walks away.’

Sarpedon let out a long breath. ‘Then that is the way it must be,’ he said. ‘You have argued for a reckoning since you arrived on the Phalanx. You will have it, if that is what you truly want.’

Reinez crouched down into a guard, hammer haft held across his body. He flexed and bounced on his calves, judging distance and winding up for the strike.

Sarpedon knew that Salk’s squad had all their guns trained on Reinez. They would not fire. Perhaps they would if Reinez killed Sarpedon, but by then it would not matter.

Reinez darted forwards, faster than Sarpedon remembered him moving. Sarpedon whirled and swung the Axe of Mercaeno around, slamming the head into Reinez’s side. He discharged a blast of psychic power through the force blade and though Reinez caught the worst of the blow on the haft of his hammer, the explosive force was enough to throw him from his feet and into the flakboard side of the fake church. The wall buckled under his weight, but Reinez rolled to his feet and swung his hammer at ankle height as Sarpedon charged to follow up.

Sarpedon leapt up. He scuttled along the wall, talons clinging to the flakboard.

Reinez tried to get his bearings, unused to fighting an enemy who could climb walls like a spider.

‘Now!’ yelled Reinez. ‘Now! Fire! Fire!’

From every direction, bolters hammered. Muzzle flashes betrayed hidden firing positions around the far side of the mock village. Bullet fire ripped into the flakboard around Sarpedon, and a flash of pain burst through one of his back legs. Sarpedon ran up the wall and onto the roof of the church, volleys of fire chewing through the church all around him. In the lee of the church tower he found a semblance of cover, the flakboard tearing apart and the tower sagging above him.

‘Contacts everywhere,’ voxed Salk. ‘It was a trap. Engage!’

‘Who are they?’ demanded Sarpedon.

‘It’s us,’ came Salk’s shocked reply. ‘It’s Soul Drinkers!’

Sarpedon could glimpse purple armour among the debris and gunsmoke of the firefight erupting across the village. Iktinos’s Flock, the Soul Drinkers who were loyal to the Chaplain first and Sarpedon a distant second, whose allegiance Sarpedon had been too blind to question.

‘You are too honourable, Soul Drinker!’ yelled Reinez from somewhere below. ‘Too quick to give a sworn enemy a fair fight! Now it will be the death of you all!’

Reinez clambered up the wall and vaulted onto the roof. Sarpedon lunged and the two fought, axe and hammer flashing, blows parried and driven aside as bolter fire shrieked around them. Sarpedon hacked a chunk out of Reinez’s shoulder armour. In response, Reinez stamped down on Sarpedon’s wounded leg to pin him in place and crunched the head of his hammer into Sarpedon’s chest. Sarpedon was faster than Reinez but the Crimson Fist had prepared for this fight for many years and this time he had the advantage of numbers. Iktinos’s Flock comprised many more warriors than Salk’s squad and among the Flock were those with good enough aim to pick out Sarpedon from the melee. Bolter fire slammed into the tower behind Sarpedon or sparked from his armour, knocking him back a pace or throwing him off-balance.

Sarpedon powered forwards, a desperate move more suited to a rude brawl than a duel to the death. Forelegs and arms wrapped around Reinez, forcing him down under Sarpedon’s greater weight.

‘What have you done, Reinez?’ growled Sarpedon.

‘Iktinos promised me a chance to kill you,’ replied Reinez, voice strained as he fought to burst Sarpedon’s hold on him. ‘There was nothing else anyone could offer me.’

‘Iktinos is the enemy! He is the source of all this suffering.’

‘Then I will kill him next,’ snarled Reinez.

Sarpedon picked up Reinez and threw him down, putting all his strength into hurling the Crimson Fist off the roof. Reinez landed badly and Salk’s return fire drove him into the cover of a ruined building adjoining the church.

The Flock were moving across the village. More than twenty of them had survived the breakout from the Atoning Halls, double Salk’s numbers. Sarpedon recognised Soul Drinkers he had called brothers, who had been stranded when their officers were killed. Iktinos had taken them in and Sarpedon had been grateful that the Chaplain was willing to give them spiritual leadership. But Iktinos had been warping them, finding their sense of loss and turning it into something else, a devotion to the chaplain alone that meant they followed him instead of Sarpedon. The chapter master had been confronted with many results of his failures as a leader, but none of them had struck him as sharply as the sight of the Flock did then, moving with murderous intent across the town square to batter Salk’s squad into oblivion.

Salk’s Soul Drinkers were falling. They were surrounded and outgunned. Salk himself leaned out from cover to fell one of the Flock, and in response a cluster of shots knocked him out of sight in a shower of blood. Sarpedon’s twin hearts felt like they were tightening in his chest, all the heat squeezed out of his body to be replaced with cold and dust.

Sarpedon leapt down from the church into the centre of the village. He landed in the heart of the advancing Flock. Faces he had known for years, since before the first Chapter war, turned on him and saw nothing but an enemy. Sarpedon saw nothing in them any more, no brotherhood, no hope, none of the principles that had made them turn on the old Chapter’s ways. He was their enemy, and they were his. Suddenly, it seemed simple.

Sarpedon knew the closest Soul Drinker to him was Brother Scarphinal, one of Givrillian’s squad. Givrillian had been Sarpedon’s closest confidant and best friend, and he had died on a nameless planet to the daemon prince Ve’Meth. There was nothing left of Givrillian’s command in Scarphinal now. His eyes were blank and his bolter turned towards Sarpedon without hesitation.

Sarpedon struck Scarphinal’s head from his shoulders with a single shining arc, the Axe of Mercaeno slicing through the Space Marine’s neck so smoothly the blood had not yet begun to flow when Scarphinal’s head hit the floor.

Something dark and prideful, a relic of the old Chapter, awakened in Sarpedon. The love of bloodshed, the exultation of battle. Sometimes, those places locked away in his mind could be useful, and it was with a strange sense of relief that he let the bloodlust take him.

Sarpedon roared with formless anger, and dived into the carnage.

SURVIVOR

Steve Parker

Bas was up and running full tilt before he even knew why. Part of his brain reacted the moment the cry went out, then his legs were moving, pounding the dusty alleyways as he flew from his pursuers.

The first rule was simple: don’t be seen. He’d broken it only a few times since the monsters had come, and never by choice. This time, as before, it wasn’t through clumsiness. It wasn’t carelessness. It was just raw bad luck, plain and simple. He had taken all the usual precautions. He’d stuck to the shadows. He’d moved low and fast. He’d been patient and silent and constantly aware. But the monsters chasing him now, yapping and chittering joyously at the prospect of spilling his blood, had come from below. They had emerged from a sewer grate just a few metres behind him and the day’s quest for clean water was suddenly forgotten in favour of a far more pressing need.

Bullets smacked into the alley walls on either side of him as he fled, blowing out little clouds of dust and stone chips. Some came near to ending his life, their passage close enough to whip at his filth-caked hair. That lent him an extra burst of speed, extra adrenaline to further numb the agony of his aching joints and muscles.

Up ahead, he saw the twisted remains of a fire escape and bolted towards it. The rooftops – those were his domain. In the months since their coming, he had spent hours laying boards and planks between what was left of the town’s roofs. Up there, he moved where he pleased and saw all. He had the advantage. The big ones never went up there, and the smaller ones didn’t know the terrain like he did. The rooftops were his –control your environment and you would always be one step ahead.

The crooked metal stairs shook and groaned as he thundered up them, heart hammering in his ears, skull pounding with accelerated blood flow. He chanced a look down and saw his pursuers, four scrawny green figures with red eyes and needle teeth. They reached the bottom of the fire escape and leapt onto it, clambering up after him.

Bas kept on and made the roof in a few more seconds. For the briefest moment, he took stock of where he was. Here in the town’s south-west quarter, he had a few established hiding places, two of which were close by. But he couldn’t risk leading his enemies to one of his sanctuaries. He had to put some distance between them first. He could go north across the makeshift bridges he had laid weeks ago, or he could head east where the gaps between the tenements were narrow enough to leap.

North, then. The monsters behind him could leap as far as he could. East was a bad gamble.

He sped on across the roof, avoiding the gaps where alien artillery shells had bitten great gaping holes. He was at the far side when the first of the wiry green killers topped the fire escape and resumed shooting wildly at him. The others appeared beside it and, seeing that their guns were missing the mark, they rushed towards him.

Eyes front, Bas told himself as he took his first hurried step out onto the twin planks. Don’t look down.

The gap between the buildings was five metres wide. As he neared the middle, the wood sagged under him, but he knew it would hold. He had tested the strength of the wood before he laid it.

A couple of bullets sang past his ears. He half-ran the last few steps across and leapt the final one. Behind him, his pursuers were halfway across the previous rooftop.

Bas turned to face them. There wasn’t time to pull the planks in like he wanted to, not with his enemies wielding those scrappy, fat barrelled pistols. Instead, he kicked out at the planks and watched them tumble end-over-end to the dark alley below.

His pursuers howled and spat in rage and opened fire. One, perhaps more reckless than the others, or perhaps with a greater bloodlust, refused to be beaten. The creature took a run up to the edge of the roof and leapt out into space. Bas was already sprinting towards the next rooftop. He didn’t see the creature plunge to its death, but he heard the chilling scream. Soon, he had left his hunters far behind, their alien cries of frustration and outrage ringing in his ears.

He was dying.

Maybe. Probably. He couldn’t be sure. Bas was only ten years old, and all the dying he had seen so far in this short life had been the violent, messy kind – and all of that in the last few months.

This was different. This was a loosening of his back teeth. This was a burning in his gut on those increasingly rare occasions when he ate something solid. This was blood in his phlegm when he spat and in his stool when he made his toilet. Pounding headaches came and went, like the sharp cramps that sometimes wracked his weakening muscles.

After his flight across the rooftops, all these symptoms came on him at once. He fought them off until he reached relative safety. Then he lay down, and the pain rolled over him like a landslide.

Had he known any better, he would have recognised the signs of dehydration and malnourishment. As his scavenged supplies dwindled, he was forced to spread them ever thinner. But Bas didn’t know. He could only guess.

How long had he lived like this now? Was it months? It felt like months. What date was it? He couldn’t be sure of anything. Time passed for him not in hours and minutes, but in periods of hiding and running, of light, tormented sleep and the daily business of surviving on a knife edge. He felt like the last rodent in a tower of ravenous felines.

If the green horrors ever caught him, his end would come quickly enough. It would be painful and horrific, but it would be short. Shorter than disease or hunger, anyway. He wondered if a slow, quiet death was any better. Something instinctual made him back away from that train of thought before he formed an answer. For now, he was alive, and here, in one of his many boltholes, he was safe.

He chided himself. No, not safe. Not truly. He was never that.

He heard the old man’s voice in his head, berating him from memory, as sharp and harsh as a rifle’s report.

Safety is an illusion, boy. Never forget that.

Aye, an illusion. How could Bas forget? The words had been beaten into him until he learned to sleep only lightly and wake to a readiness any frontline Guardsman would have envied. While living with the old man, if he wasn’t up and at attention three seconds after first call, that heavy cane would whistle through the air and wake him up the hard way. Now, if a blow ever caught him in his sleep, it wouldn’t be for the sake of a lesson. It would be the bite of a greenskin blade, and his sleep would be the eternal sleep of the dead.

His traps and snares, he knew, wouldn’t protect him forever. One day, maybe soon, one of the savages would get all the way in. Not one of the tusked giants. Bas was careful to bed down only in small, tight spaces where they couldn’t go. But the scrawny, hook-nosed ones could slip into all the places he could, and they were wicked, murderous things, gleeful in their bloodletting. He trusted his defences only as much as he trusted himself, so he was diligent to a fault. He triple-checked every last point of entry before he ever allowed his eyes to close. Simple though they were, his traps had already saved him a dozen times over. The old sod had drilled him relentlessly, and Bas had despised him for it. But those lessons, hard-learned and hated, were the thin line between life and death now, the reason one last ten-year-old boy survived in the remnants of this rotting town where eighteen thousand Imperial citizens had died screaming, crying out to the Emperor for salvation.

Bas lived, and that in itself was spit in the eye of the greenskin nightmare.

He had never thanked the old man. There had been a moment, back when they had parted company for good, in which Bas had almost said the words, but the memories of all the fractured bones and cuts and bruises were still too sharp back then. They had stilled his tongue. The moment had passed, never to come again, and the old man was surely dead. For what it was worth, Bas hoped the old bastard’s soul would take some satisfaction in his grandson’s survival.

Time to rest now. He needed it more than ever. It was blackest night outside. The wind screamed in the shell-holes that pocked the walls of this four-storey tenement. A hard cold rain beat on the remains of the crumbling roof and the cracked skylight above.

Good, thought Bas. The greenskins wouldn’t be abroad tonight. They kept to their cookfires when it rained this hard.

At the thought of cookfires, his stomach growled a protest at long hours of emptiness, but he couldn’t afford to eat again today. Tomorrow, he’d have something from one of the tins, processed grox meat perhaps. He needed protein badly.

Hidden deep at the back of a cramped metal air-vent, the boy drew a filthy, ragged sheet up over his head, closed his eyes, and let a fragile, temporary peace embrace him.

When Bas was just seven years old, his parents died and what he was told of it was a lie. Two officers brought the news. His father’s major-domo, Geddian Arnaust, asked for details, at which point the officers exchanged uncomfortable looks. The taller of the two said something about a bombing at the planetary governor’s summer mansion – an attack by elements of an anti-Imperial cult. But Bas knew half-truth when he heard it. Whatever had really happened, the grim, darkly-uniformed duo in the mansion’s foyer would say no more about it. Bas never found out the real story.

What they did say, however, was that, on behalf of the Imperium of Man and the Almighty God-Emperor Himself, the noble Administratum was taking full possession of the Vaarden estate and all assets attached to it. War raged across the segmentum. Money was needed for the raising of new troops. Imperial Law was clear on the matter. The mansion staff would be kept on, the tall officer assured Arnaust. The new tenant – an Administratum man, cousin of the planetary governor, no less – would engage their services.

‘What will happen to the young master?’ Arnaust had asked with only the mildest concern, less for the boy than for the simple practicality of dispensing with an unwanted duty. He had never held any particular affection for his master’s son.

‘Maternal grandfather,’ said the officer on the left. ‘His last living relative, according to records. Out east, by New Caedon Hive. The boy will be sent there.’

‘There’s a cargo train taking slaves that way this afternoon,’ said the taller. ‘It’s a twenty-hour trip. No stops.’

Arnaust nodded and asked how soon the boy might embark.

‘We’re to take him to Hevas Terminal as soon as he’s ready,’ said the shorter officer. ‘He can bring one bag, enough for a change of clothes. Whatever else he needs, the grandfather will have to provide.’

It was as simple as that. One moment, Bas had been the son of a wealthy investor with mining concerns on a dozen mineral-rich moons, the next he was a seven-year-old orphan stuffed into the smallest, filthiest compartment of a rusting train car with nothing but a tide of cream-coloured lice for company and a bag of clothes for a pillow.

At least he wasn’t put with the others. Among the slaves all chained together in the larger compartments, there were several hunched, scowling men who had eyed him in the strangest manner as he’d walked up the carriage ramp. Their predatory stares, unreadable to one so naive, had nevertheless chilled Bas to the marrow.

Father and mother gone, and him suddenly wrenched from the security and stability of the wealth and comfort they had provided! Curled up in his grimy, closet-sized space, Bas had wept without pause, his body trembling with sobs, until exhaustion finally took over. Asleep at last, he didn’t feel the lice crawling over his arms and legs to feed. When he awoke much later, he was covered in raw, itching bumps. He took vengeance then, the first he had ever known, and crushed all the blood-fat lice he could find. It took only moments, but the satisfaction of killing them for their transgressions lasted well beyond the act itself. When the pleasure of revenge finally subsided, he curled up into a ball and wept once more.

A scream ripped Bas from a dream immediately forgotten, and he came awake at once, throwing off his filthy sheet and rolling to a crouch. His hand went to the hilt of the knife roped around his waist. It sounded again. Not human. Close by.

The traps in the hall! One of the snares!

Bas scrambled to the opening of the air-vent. There, he paused for a dozen thunderous heartbeats while he scanned the room below him.

No movement. They hadn’t gotten this far in, thank the Throne.

He jumped down. Crouching low, he scooted towards the door in the far wall. Beyond the grimy windows to his left, the sky was a dull, murky green. Morning. The sun would rise soon, not that it would be visible. The rain had ceased, but the clouds hung thick and heavy and low.

Bas stopped by the room’s only door just long enough to deactivate the hinged spike trap above it. He stretched up on tip-toes to fix the simple safety lock in place. Then, cautiously, quietly, he opened the door and peered through, eyes wide against the liquid darkness of the hallway beyond.

A mewling sound guided his gaze towards the intruder. There, barely visible among the mounds of fallen concrete and shattered glass that littered the floor, was one of them, distinguishable from the rubble only by the sound it made and the panicked scrabbling of its long-fingered hands as it struggled with the wire that bit into its flesh.

Bas could smell its blood on the dusty air – salty and metallic like human blood, but with strong overtones of something else, something like mould.

He checked for any sign of movement in the shadows beyond the intruder. If the creature wasn’t alone, he would have to flee. There could be no fighting toe-to-toe. Much as he valued the little sanctuary he had worked so hard to create here, he wasn’t fool enough to die for it. He had abandoned other boltholes for less.

Though Bas matched most of the hook-noses in size, they had the physical edge. The hideous creatures were far stronger than they looked. Their long powerful hands and razor-lined mouths made them deadly. Even one so hopelessly entangled in his sharp wire snares could still do him lethal damage if he got careless.

But Bas hadn’t lived this long by being careless.

The old man’s voice rose again in his mind.

No slips, boy. A survivor minds his details. Always.

Satisfied that the monster was alone, Bas acted quickly. He dashed from the doorway, low and silent as ever, and closed on his scrabbling prey. Before the alien knew it had company, Bas was on it, stamping viciously down on its face. Bones snapped. Teeth broke. The vile, misshapen head hammered again and again against the stone floor. With the creature stunned, Bas straddled it, drew his knife and pressed the long blade up under the creature’s breastbone. He threw his whole weight behind the thrust, leaning into it with both hands. The creature’s body heaved under him. It began flailing and bucking wildly, but Bas held on, gripping its skinny torso between his knees. Then, with his knife buried up to the hilt, Bas began to lever the blade roughly back and forward, cleaving the creature’s heart in two.

A wheezing gasp. A wet gurgle. A last violent tremor, and the creature went limp.

Bas rolled off the body, leaving the knife buried in his foe. Withdrawing it now would only mean spillage and he wanted to avoid that as much as he could. Lying in the gloom, catching his breath, he watched his hands for the moment they would stop shaking.

Don’t be afraid, he told himself. This is nothing new. We’ve done this before.

That gravelly voice rasped again from the past.

Adrenaline is your ally, boy. Don’t mistake it for fear. They’re not the same thing.

The shaking subsided far faster than when he’d made his first kill, but Bas knew from experience that the hard work would start in earnest now. He had a body to deal with. If the other savages smelled blood – and they always did – they would come. He had to move the corpse.

Hissing a curse, he kicked out at the thing’s ugly, dead face.

Being abroad in daylight was a constant gamble, much more so with a burden like this one, but he knew he could still save this precious bolthole from discovery if he moved fast. The more time he gave the greenskins to rouse, the more danger he’d be in.

With a grunt, he forced his aching, exhausted body to its feet and set about his grisly business.

The cargo train ground to a slow halt at noon on the day after its journey had begun. The iron walls of Bas’s tiny cabin shuddered so much as the brakes were applied that Bas was sure the train would come apart. Instead, after what seemed an eternity, the screeching of metal against metal ended and the vehicle gave one final lurch.

Bas, unprepared for this, cried out as he was flung against the wall, bumping his head. He sat rubbing his injury, fighting to hold back tears.

A scruffy teenaged boy in the orange overalls of a loader came looking for him a few minutes after the massive vehicle’s engines had powered down.

‘Arco Station,’ he rasped around the thick brown lho-stick he was smoking. ‘It’s yer stop, grub. Up an’ out.’

Bas stood shakily and lifted his bag, then followed the young loader and his trail of choking yellow smoke to the nearest exit ramp. As they walked, he asked meekly, ‘Why did you call me grub?’

Bas wasn’t offended per se. He was unused to insult, sheltered as his life had been until now. He was simply confused. No one had ever called him names before. He had always been the young master.

The loader snorted. Over his left shoulder, he said, ‘Lookit yerself, grub. Small an’ pale an’ fat. Soft an’ squirmy. You got rich written all over you. I ‘eard about you. Serves you right, the likes o’ you. Serves you right, all what happened.’

Bas didn’t understand that. He wasn’t rich. That was his father. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Suddenly, he felt fresh tears rising and a tightness in his throat. This boy hated him, he realised. Why? What had he done? Before he could ask, they reached the train car’s portside personnel ramp. The loader stepped aside and shoved Bas forward. The light outside was blinding in contrast to the dank interior of the huge train. Bas felt the harsh radiance stabbing at his eyes. The sun was glaring, the sky a blue so intense it seemed to throb.

As his eyes adjusted, he squinted down the long ramp, taking in the rockcrete expanse of the loading platform. Beyond it, shimmering in the heat haze way off to the north, stood the shining steel towers of a great city.

New Caedon Hive.

His new home, surely, for one of the Civitas officers had mentioned the place by name. From here, it looked glorious. He had read all about the great hive cities of the Imperium in one of his father’s databooks. Their streets teemed with all manner of people, living and working together in unity to fuel the glorious machine that was the Imperium of Man. He felt a momentary thrill despite his fears. What would it be like to live in such a place, so different from the quiet isolation of the estate? What grand role would he come to play there?

Already, indentured workers and mindless servitors were unloading crates from the other cars on to the sun-baked surface of the platform. Armed men, their faces hidden beneath black visors, pushed and kicked the newly arrived slaves into orderly lines. Someone Bas couldn’t see beyond the rows of slaves was barking out a list of rules which, if broken, would apparently be met with the direst physical punishment.

‘Go on, then,’ spat the loader from behind Bas. ‘Get on about yer business, grub. Someone’s waiting for you, they are.’

Bas scanned the platform again. He had never met his maternal grandfather. His mother, distant at the best of times, had never once mentioned the man. Bas could see no one who stood out from those he had already noted.

A hand on his back started him down the ramp, forcing that first step. Numbly, he let his legs carry him further, step after step, clutching his bag tight, eyes still searching for his grandfather with a growing sense of panic and confusion.

‘Emprah ‘elp you, grub. Thassa mean-lookin’ bastard you got waiting for you.’

Bas turned, but the loader was already tramping back into the carriage’s shadowy interior. Returning his gaze to the platform, he saw it at last, a single figure marked out because it wasn’t moving, wasn’t hefting crates or bags or boxes or bundles. It was a man, and he stood in the shadow of a rusting green cargo container, his back resting against its pitted surface.

Bas couldn’t see him well, not cloaked in such thick, black shadow, but his skin turned to gooseflesh all the same. The cold hand of dread gripped his heart. He slowed. He wanted to turn back, but to what? To a dark metal cabin crawling with lice? He kept moving.

When his feet touched level ground, he gave a start and looked down, surprised that he had descended the whole ramp. There was nothing else to do now. He had to keep on. His numb legs drove him reluctantly towards the green container. When he was five metres from it, a voice as rough as grinding rocks said, ‘Took your blasted time, boy. What are you, soft in the head as well as the body?’

There was no introduction beyond this, no courtesies.

‘Don’t fall behind,’ said the man as he pushed himself upright from the side of the container. ‘And don’t speak.’

As the man stepped into the glaring sunshine, Bas saw him properly for the first time and failed to stifle a whimper. A sudden hot wetness spread from his crotch, soaking his trousers. The old man turned at the lack of following footsteps. He took in the pathetic sight, a scowl of disgust twisting his awful features.

‘Blasted Throne,’ he hissed. ‘If you’ve got any of my blood in you, it’s not much!’

Bas stared back, frozen in place, lip quivering, hands trembling. This man couldn’t be his mother’s sire. There had to be some mistake. His mother had been beautiful and refined. Cold, if he were being honest, but nonetheless a woman he had loved and admired above all others. He searched the stranger in front of him for any sign of his mother’s bloodline.

If it was there at all, it was buried deep beneath leathery skin and scar tissue.

The man before him was old, over seventy standard years if he was a day, but impressively muscled for his age. He carried barely an ounce of fat. Veins stood out on his hard shoulders and arms and snaked up his neck to the temples on either side of his shaved head. He wore a beard of middle length, untidy and uneven, and some kind of silver chain with two small metal plates hanging from it. His clothes were olive green, both the sweat-stained vest and the tattered old pants, and his boots, which could hardly be called black anymore, were scuffed and covered with dirt.

The worst thing about the old man by far, however – the thing that held the boy’s eyes for the longest time – was the huge crater of missing flesh where his right cheek should rightly have been. It was monstrous. The tissue that remained was so thin Bas could make out individual teeth clenched in anger beneath it.

The old man noted where the boy’s eyes had settled.

‘Think I’m a horror, boy?’ he said. ‘One day, I’ll tell you about horrors.’

At this, a strange, far-away look came over him. In that instant, the old man seemed suddenly human, almost vulnerable somehow, a man with his own very real fears. But it was just a moment. It passed, and the hard, cold glare of contempt returned as fierce as before.

‘The sun will dry your trousers,’ said the old man as he turned away, ‘but not your shame, if you’ve any left.’ He started walking again, off towards the southwestern edge of the platform where another broad ramp descended to ground level. It was now that Bas noticed the pronounced limp in the old man’s right leg and the muffled sound of grinding metal that came from it with every step.

‘Keep up, boy,’ the old man shouted back. ‘Keep up or I’ll leave you here, Emperor damn you.’

Bas hurried after him and was just close enough to hear him mumble, ‘I’m all you’ve got, you poor little bastard. Throne help the both of us.’

The alien’s body was heavy despite its size, and Bas laboured hard as he carried it across the roofs to a place he felt was far enough from any of his boltholes. He was glad for the clouds now. The assault of a blazing sun would have made the task that much harder. It might even have finished him off.

Dizziness threatened to topple him twice as he crossed his plank-bridges, but both times he managed to recover, just. There hadn’t been time to eat. Once the body had cooled and the blood inside had congealed, he had withdrawn his knife from the beast’s chest and stuffed the wound with rags. There was almost no spillage at all. He had bound the wrists and ankles with lengths of wire, to make carrying it more manageable, and had wrapped it in an old curtain he had torn from a third-floor window. Even so, as careful as he was, every moment he remained with the corpse was a moment closer to death. Hunger raged like a fire in the pit of his empty stomach and his legs and shoulders burned with lactic acid. As soon as he was done dumping the body, he promised himself, he would eat a whole can of something. Part of him balked at the thought of such excess. Eating well now meant running out of food that much sooner. But it couldn’t be helped. He had felt it yesterday running for his life. He felt it now. He was getting weaker, putting himself at a disadvantage, and he had to sustain himself. One day soon, he would no longer be able to dump the ones he killed. He would be forced to cook their flesh and eat it just to survive. He knew it would come to that. It was inevitable. He’d have cooked and eaten sewer rats first, but they seemed to have disappeared, perhaps eaten by the strange ovoid carnivores the invaders had brought with them. Bas didn’t care about taste, but he suspected alien flesh, cooked or otherwise, would fatally poison him. No matter what he did, one way or another, they would kill him in the end.

But not today. Not while he still had power enough to defy them.

Up ahead he could see the shattered chimney pots of the last standing tenement on the town’s southern edge. There, on that rooftop, he would leave the body. The smell of its decay wouldn’t reach the ground. The winds from the wastelands would carry it off.

He left the carcass near the centre of the roof, burying it in rubble so that any hook-noses that did come up here wouldn’t see anything to get curious about. At least, not from a distance.

With his labours done, Bas was about to turn back and retrace his steps when he heard a great rumble from the plains south of the town. He flattened himself and crawled to the rooftop’s edge. A vast cloud of dust had risen up, at least a mile wide. At first he thought it was a sandstorm, but it was closing on Three Rivers and the wind was blowing against it.

Insistent as it was, Bas forgot his hunger then. This was something new, something unexpected. He had to stay and watch. He had to know what it was and how it would affect his survival. A spark of hope almost lit in his heart. Could it be humans? Could it be Imperial forces come to take back the town? Throne above, let it be so.

But it was just a spark. The darkness inside him swallowed it quickly. He had lived too many days and nights without succour to believe things would change now. For all he knew, he was the last living human on Taos III. Given the unstoppable strength and violent nature of the alien invaders, that didn’t seem unlikely at all.

Thus, he wasn’t disappointed so much as unsurprised when the cloud of dust turned out to be a massive greenskin convoy. The air filled with engine noise that would have rivalled a summer thunderstorm. Vehicles of every possible description raced across the plains towards the town. There were hundreds of them with wheels and treads in every possible configuration. Bas’s eyes could hardly take them all in, such was the variety of strange shapes. Monstrous weapons sprouted at all angles from heavily plated turrets. Radiator grills and glacis plates had been modified to look like grotesque faces. Gaudy banners of red and yellow snapped in the windblown dust, painted with crude skulls and axes rendered with childish simplicity.

There was nothing childlike about the riders, though. They were hulking brutes, all green muscle, yellow tusks and thick metal armour. They revelled in the noise of their machines, raising their bestial voices to roar along with them. They cavorted on the backs of bastardised trucks and troop transports. Those that fell off were crushed to red smears beneath the wheels and treads of the vehicles behind, drawing cackles of laughter from all that noticed.

They were terrible to behold and Bas felt his bladder clench. If they had come to stay, to reinforce the greenskins that already controlled Three Rivers, his time was surely up. The odds of evading numbers like these were slim at best. He still had to scavenge for old cans of food each day, still had to fill his water-bottles from any source he could find. He still had to venture out from the safety of his boltholes. When he did, he would face a town swarming with savage nightmares. Why had they come? What had driven them here?

It was then, as this question formed in his mind, and as the first of the vehicles roared along the street below him into the town proper, shaking the foundations of the building atop which he rested, that he saw them:

Humans!

At first, he couldn’t believe his eyes. He stopped breathing and his heart beat a frantic tattoo on his ribs. He wasn’t the last after all. He wasn’t alone on this world. There were dozens of them, chained and caged in the back of slaver trucks. Bas ignored the warbikes and heavy armour that rumbled past now. He had eyes only for the cages.

They looked a weak lot, these people. Beaten down, tortured. It wasn’t a criticism. Bas pitied them. He knew what they must have endured. He alone had lived to witness the deaths of the people of Three Rivers. So many deaths. He had seen what the invaders were capable of. Theirs was a brutality wholly reflected in their terrible appearance.

The slaves in the cages wore soiled rags or nothing at all, men and women both. At one time, Bas might have been curious to look on the women, naked as they were. What ten-year old boy wouldn’t be? Not so now. Not like this. Now, he noticed only the wasted muscles, the clotted blood on their faces and scalps, the ribs that protruded from their bruised torsos.

Most of them looked dead already, like they had given up. Perhaps they didn’t have it in them to end their own lives, but from the looks of them, they would welcome the end when it came.

They are not like me, Bas found himself thinking. They are not survivors. And there are no children.

In that last regard, he was wrong. A moment later, as the last slaver truck passed beneath Bas’s rooftop perch and off up the street towards the town centre, he looked at the rear wall of its cage and saw a boy roughly his own age and height. A boy! Unlike the others, the child was standing upright gripping the bars of the cage, his knuckles white.

There was fire in his eyes. Even from this distance, Bas saw it, felt it. Defiance and the will to live burned bright in this one.

A brother, thought Bas. A friend. And suddenly he knew that his months of loneliness and torment had had a purpose after all, a purpose beyond just spitting in the red eye of the foe. He had survived to see this day. He had survived to find this boy, and he would rescue him so that he would never be alone again. Together, they could bring meaning to each other’s lives. They could look out for each other, depend on each other. Between them, the burden of caution could be shared. Life would be better. Bas was certain of it.

His grandfather’s voice snapped at him from the past.

Weigh everything against your survival. Live to fight. Don’t throw everything away on lost causes.

No, Bas argued back. I can’t go on alone. I will save him for my own sake.

If the old man had been alive, he’d have beaten Bas black and blue for that. Not out of anger – never that – but because each man gets only one life, and some mistakes, once made, cannot be undone.

The streets were still trembling with the roar and passage of the convoy as Bas got to his feet. He suppressed his hunger once again and followed the slaver trucks towards the town centre. There, he would stay low, observe, and draw his plans.

It quickly became clear, as his grandfather drove them away from Arco Station, that Bas was not to live in the great hive-city to the north as he had imagined. The road they followed ran south and the rail terminal’s blocky buildings soon fell away behind them, obscured by dust, heat haze and distance. The land on either side of the wide, empty road was flat and largely dry, populated by little else but hardy grasses and shrubs and the tall, strange cattle which plucked at them. Bas was too scared to ask his grandfather where they were going, or anything else for that matter. The old man smelled of sweat, earth and strong alcohol, and he drove his rickety autocar with his jaw clenched, neither looking at nor speaking to his terrified young charge.

After two or three hours in the vehicle’s hot, stuffy interior, Bas saw a town materialise from the wavering line of the horizon. As the old man drove nearer, Bas became depressingly certain that this was his new home. The buildings at the settlement’s north edge were lop-sided, patchwork affairs with rusting, corrugated walls. It was the first slum-housing Bas had ever seen. Beyond them, the structures got taller and more dense, though little more appealing. An oily pall hung over everything. Towering smoke stacks belched thick, dirty smoke into the sky. As they drove deeper into the town, Bas peered through the windows at the scowling, hard-eyed people on the streets. Tenements dominated. The inky alleys between them spilled tides of refuse onto the main thoroughfares.

Who would live like this? Bas asked himself. Who would stay here?

For the second time that day, he felt the desperate urge to turn around, to run to anywhere but here. But there was simply nowhere to go. He was a seven-year old boy, alone in the Imperium but for the man next to him, linked by blood and nothing else.

‘Welcome to Three Rivers,’ grunted his grandfather.

Bas didn’t feel welcome at all.

Ironically, Three Rivers boasted only one. The other two rivers had dried up as the result of a Munitorum hydropower project some two hundred kilometres to the west, and the town, once prosperous, had gone into economic collapse. The agriculture on which it depended struggled to survive. The workhouses began to fill with children whose parents could no longer sustain them. Many turned to alcohol, others to crime. The streets became unsafe, and not just at night.

In this environment, a man like Bas’s grandfather, former Imperial Guard, hardened and honed by decades of war, found work where others could not, despite his age. As Bas would later learn from snippets of hushed conversation on the streets, the old man worked as an occasional fixer, solving problems with violence for those willing to pay the right price. The local public house also paid him to keep troublemakers out, though, if word was to be believed, he caused at least as much trouble as he solved. But on that first night, Bas knew none of this. All he knew was that his former life was over and he had been cast into absolute darkness, a living hell. He had no idea then of just how bad things would get.

The old man’s home was a dingy basement at the bottom of a black tenement in which every window was shielded by wire mesh. The steps down to its entrance were slick with urine and wet garbage. The smell made Bas feel sick for at least the first week. It was better inside, but not by much. A single glowglobe did its best to light a room with no natural illumination whatsoever.

Bas was shown where he would sleep – an old mattress stuffed into a corner near a heater that, in the three years he would live there, would never once be switched on. He was shown the tiny kitchen and told that, in return for food and lodgings, he would be expected to prepare meals for both of them, among a score of other chores. Bas couldn’t even imagine where to start with cooking. His father had employed two private chefs back on the estate. He had never once thought about the effort that went into preparing food.

The lavatory was another shock – little more than a thirty-centimetre hole in the tiled floor with a water pump above it that had to be worked by hand. A steel basin could be filled for washing one’s body, but the water was always ice cold. That first day, Bas held his waste in for hours rather than use that horrid little room, until finally, he thought he would burst. Necessity took him beyond his initial reluctance. He adapted.

They had dinner together an hour after arriving, if it could even be called dinner. His grandfather made that meal. It was a tasteless stew of tinned grox meat and potatoes and, though it smelled awful, Bas was desperately hungry by then and cleared his bowl. His grandfather nodded approvingly, though the hard look never left his eyes. When they had finished, the old man ordered Bas to clear the table. Another first. And so it went, day after day, until Bas learned how to do all the things that were expected of him. When he made mistakes or dared complain, he was punished – a hand as fast as a striking snake would flash out and clip him on the ear. Weeping brought him no sympathy, only contempt.

As hours became days, and days became weeks, Bas discovered he was learning something else he had never known.

He learned to hate.

Salvation Square hadn’t seen this much noise since its construction. Maybe not even then. The ruined buildings shuddered with the ruckus of the greenskin horde and the throaty rumbling of their war engines.

Bas crouched low behind the only intact statue left on the black-tiled roof of the Imperial church that dominated the square’s west side. The sky above was clearing of clouds, beams of bright sunlight slicing through like a hundred burning swords.

He had arrived in time to see the slaver trucks emptied and their occupants whipped and kicked towards the broken double-doors of the administratum building, carrying barrels and sacks. The boy from the last truck had trudged in line with the others, keeping his head down, never meeting the glare of the living nightmares that herded him, but Bas could still feel the boy’s defiant hate radiating from him until he moved out of sight.

The greenskin newcomers began mixing with those that already occupied the town, sizing them up, eyeing their buggies and bikes and tanks. A few fights broke out, bringing hoots of laughter and encouragement that rose to compete with the rumble and stutter of their machines. Losers were butchered without mercy or remorse, to the delight of both groups. Despite the appeal of these fights, however, the alien crowds parted fast when a great red truck roared into the square, cutting down a dozen greenskins with the jagged blades fixed to its radiator grill. There it halted, the arms and legs of the slain sticking out from beneath its dirty red chassis.

From the back of this truck leapt a group of bellowing brutes, each bigger than the last. They glared at all those around them in unspoken challenge, but none dared answer. Their size and bearing made the others step back, creating a circle of open space around the truck. From the vehicle’s rear, their leader stepped down. Bas was sure the statue to which he clung trembled as the huge creature’s iron boots added fresh cracks to the square’s ruined paving.

There could be no doubt that this was an ork of particular status. Size aside, his armour was bright with fresh paint and bore more iconography than any of the others. A pole jutted from the iron plate on his back, rising two metres above his head, seeming to give him even more height than his already daunting three metres. It was strung with helmets and human skulls, some still carrying dry, desiccated flesh. A banner with two crossed hatchets painted in red hung from it, rippling in the warm breeze.

The warboss stomped forwards to the centre of the square where the fountain of St. Ethiope had once stood, roaring and bellowing in what passed for its brutish language. Bas glanced across at the dome of the administratum complex. It had taken a lot of damage in the greenskin invasion. Most of its cobalt-blue tiles had been blasted off, revealing the fractured bare stone beneath. Great gaps had been blown in its surface, making it look like the detritus of a massive cracked egg from which some unimaginable animal had already emerged.

Bas had to see inside. He had to find the boy. He had to find a way to save him.

With a veritable army of orks filling the streets below, he knew he had never been at greater risk than he was now. It was broad daylight. If he moved, one of the beasts might spot him, and it would take only one to alert the others. More than ever, he felt himself balanced on a knife’s edge. But there was no way he could turn back now. His mind was filled with thoughts of companionship. For the first time since he had emerged from hiding into a town held by horrors from another world, he knew purpose and, more importantly, and perhaps more dangerously, he remembered what it was to hope.

He needed to wait. He needed the horde below to become preoccupied with something.

He didn’t have to wait long.

From the doorway of the administratum building, the previously entrenched greenskin leader emerged, roaring and swiping at his subordinates to get them out of his way. In his own right, he was a monster of terrifying proportions, but to Bas’s eye, the newcomer looked bigger and better armoured.

The two bosses locked eyes, both refusing to look down in submission. The horde parted between them, sensing the violence that was about to erupt. The newcomer threw his head back and gave a battle cry, a deafening, blood-freezing challenge. The other howled and foamed with rage, hefted a double-handed chainaxe over his head, and raced down the steps to meet his rival. The greenskin mob roared with delight and bloodlust.

Bas had his opening.

He didn’t hesitate. Crouching low, he slid away from the statue and set off for the gaping wound in the side of the dome, moving roof to roof, careful to keep his distance from the edges lest his silhouette give him away.

He needn’t have worried. Every beady red eye in the area was locked on the battle between the greenskin leaders.

At the end of his first week in Three Rivers, Bas’s grandfather enrolled him in a small scholam owned and operated by the Ecclesiarchy, and the nightmare Bas was living became much, much worse. The other boys who attended were merciless from the start. Bas was a stranger, a newcomer, the easiest and most natural of targets. Furthermore, he had gotten this far in life without ever needing to defend himself, either verbally or physically, and they could smell his weakness like a pack of wild canids smell might smell a wounded beast. It drew them down on him from the first day.

The leader of the pack – the tallest, strongest and most vindictive – was called Kraevin and, at first, he feigned friendship.

‘What’s your name, then?’ he asked Bas in the minutes before the day’s long hours of work, prayer and study began.

Other boys drifting through the wrought iron gates noticed the newcomer and gathered round.

Bas was suddenly uncomfortable with all the attention. It didn’t feel very benign.

‘I’m Bas,’ he answered meekly.

Kraevin laughed at that. ‘Bas the bastard!’ he told the others.

‘Bas the maggot,’ said another.

‘Bas the cave toad!’

The boys laughed. Kraevin folded his arms and squinted down at Bas. ‘I’ve seen you on Lymman Street. You’re livin’ with Old Ironfoot?’

Bas gaped at the other boy, confused. He didn’t know who ‘Ironfoot’ was. His grandfather insisted on being called ‘Sarge’, never grandfather or any variation thereof. Bas had heard others call him the Sarge when they spoke of him, rather than to him. Then it dawned on him and he nodded.

Kraevin grinned. ‘You like that? You know, because of his leg.’

He started walking around Bas with an exaggerated limp, making sounds like a machine. The other boys broke into fits of laughter.

Bas didn’t. He had never asked the Sarge about his leg. He didn’t dare. He knew it caused the old man frequent pain. He had seen that pain scored deep in his face often enough. He knew, too, that the leg made a grinding noise on some days and not on others, though there seemed no particular pattern to it. It didn’t sound anything like the noise Kraevin was making, but that didn’t seem to stop the boys enjoying the joke.

Kraevin stopped in front of Bas. ‘So, what are you to him, eh? You his new boyfriend?’

Again, great fits of laughter from all sides.

‘I… I’m his grandson,’ Bas stuttered. It suddenly dawned on him that every moment spent talking to this boy was a moment spent digging a deeper hole for himself. He needed an escape… and he got it, for all the good it did.

A bronze bell rang out and a portly, stern-looking man with thick spectacles and a hooded robe of rough brown canvas appeared at the broad double doors of the main building. He bellowed at them to get inside.

‘We’ll talk later, maggot,’ said Kraevin as he turned and led the rest of the boys in.

Bas barely made it back to the Sarge’s home that evening. He had stopped screaming by then, but the tears continued to stream down his cheeks. His clothes had been cut with knives. His lip was ragged and bloody. One eye was so swollen he couldn’t see out of it, and two of his fingers would no longer flex.

The Sarge was waiting for him at the rickety dining table in the centre of the room, bandages and salves already laid out.

‘How many hits did you land?’ he asked simply.

Bas couldn’t speak for sobbing.

‘I said how many hits,’ the old man snapped.

‘None,’ Bas wailed. ‘None, alright? I couldn’t do anything!’

The old man cursed angrily, then gestured to the empty chair opposite him at the table. ‘Sit down. Let’s see if I can’t patch you up.’

For half an hour, the Sarge tended his injured grandson. He was not gentle. He didn’t even try to be. Bas cried out in pain a dozen times or more. But, rough as he was, the old man was good with bandages, splints and a needle and thread.

When he was done, he stood up to put away the medical kit. Looking down at Bas, he said, ‘You’re going back tomorrow. They won’t touch you again until you’re healed.’

Bas shook his head. ‘I don’t want to go back. Don’t make me go. I’d rather die!’

The Sarge launched himself forward, getting right in Bas’s face.

‘Never say that!’ he hissed. ‘Don’t you ever back down! Don’t you ever let them win! Do you hear me, boy?’

Bas was frozen in absolute terror, certain the old man was about to rip him apart, such was the vehemence in his voice and on that terrible face.

His grandfather stood up straight again.

‘The hard lessons are the ones that count,’ he said in more subdued tones. ‘You understand? Hard lessons make hard people.’

He turned and walked to a cupboard on the left to put the kit away.

‘When you get sick of being an easy target, you let me know, boy. I mean it.’

He threw on a heavy groxskin coat and made for the door.

‘Rest,’ he said as he opened it. ‘I have to go to work.’

The door slammed behind him.

Bas rested, but he could not sleep. His wounds throbbed, but that was not the worst of it.

Abject fear had settled over him like a wet shroud, clinging to him, smothering him.

Closing his eyes brought back stark memories of fists and feet pummelling him, of the wicked, joyous laughter that had mocked his cries for mercy.

No, there would be no sleep for him that night, nor for many others to come.

Bas found the human slaves already locked in a broad cage of black iron, the bars of which were crudely cast and cruelly barbed. As before, all but one of the slaves – and Bas judged there were over twenty of them – sat or lay like lifeless dolls. There was no talking between them, no sobbing or whimpering. They had no tears left. Bas wondered how long they had endured. As long as he had? Longer?

He saw the boy standing at the bars, hands clenched tight around them. What was he thinking? Did he always stand like this? Did he ever sleep?

The interior of the building had once been a grand place, even in the years of the town’s decline. Now, though, each corner of the great lobby was heaped with mountains of ork excrement and rotting bodies. The walls were splattered with warlike icons in the same childishly simple style as the greenskin vehicles and banners. The air in here was foul, almost overpowering, even for Bas. Part of his success in remaining undetected for so long had depended on rubbing dried greenskin faeces onto his skin. At first, he had gagged so much he thought he might die. But after that first time, he had adjusted quickly, and the regrettable practice had masked his human scent well. Had it not, he would have been found and slaughtered long ago. Even so, the miasma of filth and decay in the wide lobby was sickening.

Much of the marble cladding which had graced the interior walls here had shattered and fallen to the floor, revealing rough brick and, in many places, twisted steel bars, making a descent fast and easy. Bas did a last visual scan to make sure all the greenskins were outside watching the fight, then dropped quickly to the lobby floor. The falls of his bare feet were silent as he moved around the west wall and closed on the black iron cage. None of the human captives saw or heard him until he was almost standing right in front of the boy. Even then, it seemed that they were too exhausted to register his presence. The boy continued staring straight ahead, eyes still intense, unblinking, and Bas felt a moment of panic. Perhaps the boy was brain-addled.

He took an instant to study him at close range. Like the others, he was skinny to the point of ill health, clearly malnourished, and bore the marks of cuts and bruises that had not healed properly. In the centre of his forehead was a black tattoo about three centimetres across. Bas noted it, but he had never seen its like before. He had no idea what it meant – a single stylised eye set within a triangle. Bas looked down at the boy’s arms and noticed another tattoo on the inside right forearm. It was a bar-code with numbers beneath it. The greenskins had not done this to him. It was far too cleanly rendered for that. Bas couldn’t imagine what these tattoos meant, and right here, right now, he didn’t care.

He reached out and touched the boy’s left hand where it gripped the bar.

Human contact must have pierced the veil over the boy’s senses, because he gave a start and his eyes locked with Bas’s for the first time.

Joy exploded in Bas’s heart. Human contact! A connection! He hadn’t dared hope to experience it ever again, and yet here it was. Damn the bars that stood between them. He might have embraced the boy otherwise for all the joy he felt at that moment.

He opened his mouth and tried to greet the boy, but the sound that emerged was a dry croak. Had he forgotten how to speak already? With concerted effort, he tried again, shaping his lips to form a word so simple and yet so difficult after his long months alone.

‘Hello,’ he grated, then said it again, his second attempt much better.

The boy blinked in surprise and whipped his hands from the bars. He retreated a step into the cage.

Bas couldn’t understand this reaction. Had he done something wrong?

In his head, words formed, and he knew they were not his own. They had a strange quality to them, a sort of accent he did not recognise.

Who are you?

Bas shook his head, unsure of what was happening.

Seeing his confusion, the tattooed boy gingerly returned to the bars.

Who are you? the voice asked again.

‘Is that you?’ Bas returned hoarsely. ‘It that you in my head?’

The boy opened his mouth and pointed inside. Most of his teeth were gone. Those that remained where little more than sharp, broken stubs. But this was not the reason the boy couldn’t vocalise. Where his tongue should have been, only a dark nub of flesh remained. His tongue had been cut from his mouth.

Sounds of movement came suddenly from either side of the boy. Bas looked to left and right and saw that the other captives had roused at last. Barging each other aside, they surged to the walls of the cage, shoving the tattooed, tongueless boy backwards in order to get closer to Bas.

Bas stepped away immediately, warily. He didn’t like the look in their eyes. Such desperation. He felt the sudden burden of their hopes and expectations before anyone gave voice to them.

It was an ugly, shabby, middle-aged woman who did so first. ‘Get us out, child! Free us, quickly!’

Others echoed her urgently. ‘Open the cage, lad! Save us!’

Bas looked for the cage door and found it easily enough. It was to his right, locked and chained with links as thick as his wrist.

A tall, thin man with deeply sunken eyes and cheeks hissed at the others. ‘Shut up, damn you. They’ll hear!’

When he was ignored, he struck the loudest of the prisoners in the jaw, and Bas saw her sink to the cage floor. Another quickly took her place, stepping on the shoulder and arm of the first in her need to get closer to her potential saviour. Bas shrank further from them all. This was not right. He did not want to be responsible for these people. He just needed the boy.

Despite the logic in the words of the gaunt man, the others would not be quiet. They thrust their hands out between the bars, tearing their weak, papery skin on the iron barbs. Pools of blood began forming on the tiled floor, filling cracks there. Bas took another step back, searching the crowd in front of him for sign of the tattooed boy, but he had been pushed entirely from view.

‘Don’t you leave us, son,’ begged a bald man, his right arm docked at the elbow.

‘Emperor curse you if you leave us,’ screeched a filthy woman with only a dark scab where her nose should have been. ‘He will, boy. He’ll curse you if you don’t save us.’

Had the monsters outside not been making such a din of their own, they would surely have heard this commotion. Bas knew he had to go. He couldn’t stay here. But it was hard to leave the boy. How could he open the cage? He had no way of cutting through that chain. Had he found this boy only to be frustrated by his inability to save him? Was the universe truly so cruel?

A mighty roar sounded from Salvation Square, so loud it drowned out even the wailing humans. The fight between the warbosses was over. The entertainment had ended. Three Bridges belonged either to the new leader or the old, it didn’t matter to Bas. What mattered was that, any second now, massive green bodies would pour into the building through the shattered oak doors.

Go, said the tattooed boy’s projected voice. You have to go now.

Bas still couldn’t see him, but he called out, ‘I’ll come back for you!’

Don’t, replied the boy. Don’t come back. You cannot help us. Just run.

Bas scrambled back up the lobby wall like a spider. At the top, crouching on the lip of the great jagged wound in the dome, he paused and turned to look down at the cage one more time. The prisoners were still reaching out towards him despite being twenty metres away. They were still calling to him, howling at him.

Bas frowned.

‘There’s nowhere to run to,’ Bas said quietly, wondering if the boy would pick up his thoughts. ‘I only have you. I have to come back.’

Jabbering greenskins poured into the building then, laughing and grunting and snorting like wild boar.

Bas slid from view and made for the nearest of his boltholes to prepare for his return tonight. He didn’t know how he would set the boy free, but something told him he would find a way. It was all that mattered to him now.

There are two ways to deal with fear, as Bas found out in his first few months in Three Rivers. You can let it corrode you, eat away at your freedom and sanity like a cancer, or you can fight it head on, maybe even overcome it. He didn’t have much choice in the approach he was to take. His grandfather had already decided for him.

Kraevin and his gang of scum did indeed wait until Bas recovered before they brutalised him again. When it came, it was as vicious as the first time. They kicked him repeatedly, savagely, as he lay curled into a ball on the ground, and Bas thought they might never stop. Maybe they would kill him. Part of him wished they would. At least it would be an end.

When no more kicks came, it felt like a blessing from the God Emperor Himself. He opened his eyes to see the gang strolling off down the street, the boys laughing and punching each other playfully on the arm. Two local women walked past and looked down at Bas where he bled on the pavement, but they didn’t stop. There was no sign of pity in their eyes. They looked at him in passing as they might notice a dead rat on their path.

The next passerby did stop, however. Bas didn’t know him. He was a big fat man with skull and sword tattoos on both forearms. ‘Having a bad day, son?’ he asked as he helped Bas to his feet. ‘Let’s get you home, eh? The Sarge will fix you up.’

Bas hobbled along at the man’s side, doing a fair job of stifling his sobs for once.

‘D… do you know the Sarge?’ he stammered.

The man laughed. ‘You could say that,’ he replied. ‘I employ him.’

Bas looked up at him.

‘I’m Sheriddan,’ said the fat man. ‘I own the public house on Megrum Street. You know, where your grandfather works at night.’

It turned out that Sheriddan liked to talk. In the twenty-two minutes Bas spent with him that day, he learned more about his grandfather than he had in the weeks since he had come to this accursed place. And what he learned, he could never have guessed.

According to Sheriddan, the sour old bastard was an Imperial hero.

As he had promised himself, Bas ate a full can of processed grox meat, knowing he would need the strength and energy it would give him. Sitting in the bolthole closest to Salvation Square, he thought hard about how he would get the boy out of the cage. One of the orks had to be carrying a key. Which one? How would Bas get it?

He thought, too, about what to do once the cage door was open. The others… he couldn’t look after them. They’d have to fend for themselves. They were adults. They couldn’t expect him to take the burden of their lives onto his shoulders. Such a thing was well beyond his power. It was too much to ask of him. They’d have to make their own way. He would lead the boy out at speed, climbing up to the rooftops before the orks realised what was going on. Together, they could return to this bolthole without drawing attention.

Bas looked at the few cans of food remaining in the metal box at his feet. There were no labels on them, but he didn’t suppose it mattered. Like himself, the tattooed boy would be glad of whatever food he could get. Together, they would eat well in celebration of their new friendship. Tomorrow, they could search out new supplies as a team.

With these thoughts buoying his spirit, Bas bedded down and tried to sleep, knowing he would need to be well rested for the dangers of the night ahead.

Darkness fell fast in Three Rivers, and this night the sky was clear and bright. Overhead, the planet’s three small moons glowed like spotlit pearls. The stars shone in all their glory. Had Bas deigned to look up, he might have noticed some of them moving inexplicably northwards, but he did not. His eyes were fixed on the scene below.

In the ruined plaza, ork cookfires burned by the dozen, surrounded by massive bodies turned orange by the flames. The majority of the brutes were drinking some kind of stinking, fermented liquid from barrels they had unloaded from their trucks. Others ripped hunks of roasted meat from bodies that turned on their spits. Bas didn’t know what kind of meat the greenskins were cooking, but he could hear the fat pop and sizzle as the baking skin cracked and burned. Others still were barking at each other in their coarse tongue. Fights broke out sporadically, each ending in a fatality as the stronger hacked or bludgeoned the weaker to death.

Bas’s stomach groaned, demanding he act on the savoury smell that wafted up towards his perch, but he ignored it. He needed all his focus, all his attention, to recognise the moment he could slip back inside the dome of the administratum building.

It seemed that a great many hours passed as he hunched there atop the ruins of the old church once more, clinging to the statue that broke up his silhouette. In fact, only two hours had gone by when, with their fill of meat and drink and fighting, most of the orks settled down to sleep. Their communal snoring soon rivalled the noise of their engines from earlier in the day.

It was time to move.

With all his concentration centred on avoiding detection, Bas made his way across his plank-bridges and soon reached the gaping crack in the dome. There, pressing himself close to the exposed stone, he peered inside and scanned the hallway below.

There were fires in here, too, though smaller than the ones outside. Around them slept the biggest of the greenskins, those with the heaviest armour, the largest weapons, the most decoration. There were a few hook-noses, too, sleeping in groups near the fly-covered dung piles. They had not been allowed to bed down near the fires of their giant masters.

Bas watched and waited and decided that the orks within were as sound asleep as those without. He steeled himself for what had to be done, then stepped out from behind the cover of the dome and began his descent. The stars cast his shadow on the tile floor below, but nothing stirred, nothing noticed.

With all the stealth he could muster, Bas descended, his toes and fingers seeking and finding the same holds he had used earlier in the day. But while the daytime descent had taken only moments, this one took minutes. There was too much at stake to rush, and nothing to be gained.

Finally, his bare feet reached the cold tiles and he turned from the wall. He realised that, even had he slipped and made a noise, none of the orks would likely have heard him. Up close, their snoring was preposterously loud. Good. That would work in his favour.

Bas avoided looking directly at any of the fires. His eyes had adjusted well to the shadows over the last few hours of patient observation. He didn’t want to lose that. He had to be able to see into the dark places, for the cage with the human prisoners was flush against the far wall and the marble staircase next to it cast a black cloak over it.

He moved, keeping to pools of deep shadow wherever he could, at the same time careful to steer clear of the huddled hook-noses. Had he not masked his scent with ork filth so often and so diligently, their sensitive noses might well have detected him. But they did not awaken. Bas reached the cage and stood exactly where he had earlier that day.

Gentler sounds of sleep issued from behind the black iron bars.

Good, thought Bas. Most of them are sleeping, too.

He hoped they would stay that way. But where was the boy?

A figure moved to the cage wall. Bas squinted, and was relieved to see the boy standing there before him. Bas smiled and nodded by way of greeting.

The boy did not smile back.

I told you not to come back. Don’t take this risk. Escape with your life.

Bas shook his head and spoke in low tones, unsure if the boy could read thoughts as well as he transmitted his own. ‘How do I open the door? How do I unlock this thing?’

He pointed to the heavy chain and crude cast-iron padlock where they lay at the foot of the cage door. The chain’s coils wrapped around the bars twice.

I ask you one more time, said the boy. Will you not leave me and save yourself?

‘No!’ hissed Bas. ‘I will not go on alone. I’m sick of it. Don’t you understand?’

The boy’s voice was silent in Bas’s mind for a while. Then, it said, There is a key. The head slaver wears it on his belt, tied to it by a piece of thick rope. If you can cut the rope and get the key without waking him…

‘Which one is he?’ Bas whispered.

He lies by the fire closest to your left. His right ear is missing.

Bas stalked off towards the fire, still careful to avoid looking directly at its heart. There were seven orks around it and, as Bas drew close to them – closer than he had ever physically been to one of the tusked giants before – the sheer size of them truly dawned on him for the first time. He had always known they were huge, these savage horrors. But it was only this close, their wide, powerful backs heaving with each breath, that he realised how small he truly was and how fragile. There was nothing he could do against even one of them. If everything went wrong here tonight, he knew it would be the end.

Bas quickly found the slave master and moved around him to find the monster’s key.

The slaver’s barrel chest expanded like some huge bellows each time he took a deep, rumbling breathe and, when he exhaled, strands of thick saliva quivered on his long, curving tusks. The smell of his breath in Bas’s face was foul, like a carcass rotting in the sun.

Against his better judgement, Bas moved between the slave master and the fire. It was the only way to reach the key on the beast’s belt. But, as his shadow passed over the closed eyes of the monster, its huge shoulders twitched.

It stopped snoring.

Bas’s adrenaline, already high, rocketed. He stood rooted to the spot, his hands and knees shaking. If the beast came awake now, he didn’t know what he would do. He simply stood there, and the seconds seemed to stretch out like hours.

But seconds they were, and only a few, before the monster settled again and began to snore even louder than before. Bas’s relief was palpable, but he didn’t want to be near the damned thing any longer than necessary, so he crouched down by the monster’s thickly-muscled belly and, with slow precision, drew his grandfather’s knife from the sheath at his waist.

The rope was thick and the key itself was heavy, but the Sarge’s old knife was razor sharp. It had never lost its edge, despite all the use it had seen. It parted the rope fibres with ease. Bas lifted the key, re-sheathed the knife and made his way back over to the barbed cage.

‘I have it,’ he whispered as he crouched down by the massive padlock.

‘It turns clockwise,’ said a voice from the deep shadows within the cage.

Bas looked up with a start and saw the tall, gaunt man from before standing in front of him on the other side of the cage door.

‘I’ll help you, son,’ said the man, lowering himself into a crouch. ‘You turn the key. I’ll keep the chain and lock from rattling.’

Bas looked for the boy he had come to save and saw him come to crouch silently by the gaunt man’s side.

‘You’ll need both hands to turn it,’ said the man.

Bas fitted the head of the key into the hole and tried to turn it until his fingers hurt.

Nothing.

An act of no effort whatsoever for the aliens was near impossible for Bas. The torque in his wrists just wasn’t enough.

‘Here,’ said the man, handing Bas a smelly rag that had once been clothing. ‘Wrap this around the handle and try again.’

Bas did. With his teeth gritted and the effort raising the veins on his arms and neck, he wrestled with the lock. There was a screech of metal. The lock slid open. Bas turned, certain that he had achieved this feat only to bring death on himself. Every sound seemed so much louder when stealth was paramount. He scanned the hall behind him, not daring to breathe. He sensed the tension on the other side of the cage, too. The orks, however, slumbered on. Perhaps there was little to fear after all. Perhaps the beasts slept so soundly he could have run through here clapping and yelling and not have roused a single one.

Overconfidence kills more men that bullets do, snapped the remembered voice of his grandfather. Stay grounded!

‘This will be tricky,’ said the man in the cage. ‘Lift the lock away from the chains and put it to the side. I’ll try to uncoil this thing without too much racket.’

That made sense to Bas. The chain looked particularly heavy, and so it was. In the end, it took all three of them – the gaunt man, Bas and the tattooed boy together – to remove it quietly. Remove it they did, but before the gaunt man could try to open the door, Bas raised a hand. ‘Wait,’ he whispered. ‘We should spit on the hinges.’

The man cocked an eyebrow, his face just visible in the gloom. ‘Good thinking, boy.’

Bas was surprised by the compliment. His grandfather would never have handed one out so easily.

Regardless of how good the idea was, it proved difficult for the man and the tattooed boy to generate enough saliva for the task. Too long without adequate food and water had made their throats itchy, their mouths bone dry. After a few failed attempts, however, the man had an idea. Instructing the tattooed boy to do the same, he put a corner of his ragged clothing in his mouth and began to chew it.

Soon enough, the door’s two large iron hinges gleamed wetly with fresh lubrication. Awakened by the sound of spitting, other prisoners rose and shuffled forward to see what was going on. That made Bas uncomfortable. He was sure they would give him away and bring the whole rescue down about his head. He was wrong. They had learned early in their captivity not to awaken their captors if they didn’t want to be tortured and beaten, or worse.

‘Stay quiet, everyone,’ the gaunt man told them. ‘The lad has freed us, but getting out will be no easy matter. You must stay quiet. Exercise patience or we’ll all die here tonight.’

‘We’re with you, Klein,’ whispered someone at the back. Others nodded assent.

Assured of their compliance, the gaunt man, Klein, turned back to the cage door and gently eased it open. The hinges grated in complaint, but only a little. At last, the cage stood open.

Bas stepped back.

Klein put a hand on the tattooed boy’s shoulder and ushered him through first. He stopped just in front of Bas, who couldn’t prevent himself from reaching out and embracing the boy.

‘I told you I’d get you out,’ Bas whispered, then stepped back, abruptly self-conscious.

Klein led the others out now, until they stood together outside the cage, a silent, terrified gaggle of wretches, all looking at Bas expectantly.

‘What’s your plan for getting us away from here, son?’ Klein asked now. ‘How will you get us to safety?’

Bas almost blurted, ‘I only came for him,’ but he stopped himself. Looking at these people, each hanging on to life and hope by the thinnest of threads, he knew he couldn’t just turn his back on them. He had come into their lives, a light in the dark, and he could no more extinguish it now than he could abandon the boy who would give new meaning to his survival.

He turned and pointed to the broad crack in the dome up above. The closest of Taos III’s moons, Amaral, was just peaking from the eastern edge of the gap, casting its silver light down into the hall, revealing just how many of the huge greenskin brutes lay sleeping there.

Bas’s gut clenched. It could still go so wrong. One slip would bring slaughter down on them, and yet he was so close, so close to getting himself and the tattooed boy away from here.

Klein followed Bas’s finger, his eyes roving from the gap in the dome, down the rough wall to the cold marble floor. He frowned, perhaps doubtful that some of his group would manage the climb. Nevertheless, he nodded and told Bas, ‘Lead us out, son. We will follow.’

Thus, with the utmost care, the group picked its way between the ork fires, freezing in terror every time one of the beasts shifted or grunted loudly in its sleep. Crossing the hall seemed to Bas to take forever. This was foolish. Even if these people did get out, how slowly would they have to cross the bridges he had laid between the rooftops? It would take forever for them to…

To get where? Where was he going to lead them?

He couldn’t take them to any of his boltholes. Those had been chosen for the difficulty of their access, for their small size. They were meant to be inconspicuous, but there was nothing inconspicuous about a group of clumsy adults struggling to pack their bodies into such a tiny space. And the smell of these people! They smelled so human. Bas hadn’t realised until now, standing there among them, just how strong people smelled. The greenskins would track them like hounds when they awoke. No doubt these people thought Bas smelled foul, standing there with dried ork feces rubbed into his skin, clothes and hair. But they would learn to do the same or they would die.

At the wall, the group huddled together and Klein spoke to them again.

‘The boy will go first,’ he said. ‘All of you, watch him carefully. Watch how he ascends and try to remember the handholds he uses. We have to do this quickly, but not so quick as to cause any mishaps. Syrric,’ he said, addressing the tattooed boy, ‘you will go second. Once you and – I’m sorry, son, I don’t know your name.’

‘Bas,’ said Bas.

Klein put a fatherly hand on Bas’s head. ‘Bas. And now we know the name of our saviour.’ He smiled, and Bas saw that he, too, had had his teeth broken, no doubt by a blow from one of the greenskins. ‘Bas, when you reach the top, you and Syrric will help the rest climb up, okay?’

For an instant, Bas imagined just taking Syrric and running. The duo would have far better odds alone. But no sooner had the thought come to him than he felt the beginnings of a sickening guilt. What would his grandfather have done? There had been no lessons about this. No tests. How he wished there had been. Had the Sarge ever made such a decision? Had Bas’s education simply never gotten that far?

What should I do, grandfather? Bas silently asked the old man in his memories.

No sharp voice rose from the past to answer him.

He looked over at Syrric, and the boy nodded back at him in support.

‘Right,’ whispered the Klein. ‘Up you go, son. Show us the way.’

Bas started climbing, not looking down, letting his hands and feet find the holds he knew were there. He scaled the wall without noise or incident and, at the top, turned to find Syrric only a few metres below him. As the boy neared the top of the wall where the dome opened to the air, Bas reached down and helped him up.

Below, Klein was helping the first of the adults, a woman with short hair, to begin her climb.

How frail they all looked. How shaky. Could they really manage it?

Bas heard a shout in his head.

No! Dara, no!

It was Syrric. He had seen or sensed something about to happen. From the desperate tone of his thoughts, Bas knew it was bad.

Surging from the back of the group, a woman began shouldering others roughly out of her way, screeching hysterically, ‘I have to get out! I have to get out of here! Me first! Let me up first!’

Her mad cries echoed in the great hall, bouncing from the domed ceiling back down to the ears of the sleeping greenskins. With grunts and snarls, they started to wake.

Klein tried to stop her as she surged forward, but panic had given her strength and he reeled backwards as she barged him aside. Then, from the bottom, she reached up and tore the short-haired woman from the wall, flinging her backwards to land with a sickening crack on the marble floor.

The short-haired woman didn’t rise. Her eyes didn’t open.

Bas saw the orks rising now, vast furious shapes given a doubly hellish appearance by the light of their fires. The first to stand scanned the hall for the source of the noise that had awoken it. Baleful red eyes soon picked out the pitiful human escapees.

Roars filled the air. Blades were drawn. Guns were raised.

Bas loosed a string of curses. There on the lip of the crack in the dome, he and Syrric could see it all play out below them. It would have been wise to flee then, and deep down, Bas knew that. But there was something about the inevitable horror to come that kept him there, kept him watching. He had to bear witness to this.

Was this his fault? Were they all to die so he could assuage his loneliness?

Dara scrabbled at the wall, desperately trying to ascend at speed, ignorant of the imminent slaughter her foolishness had initiated. Though she hadn’t been composed enough to map Bas’s path in her head, she made progress by virtue of the frantic nature with which she attacked the task.

She was halfway up when the others began to scream. The first orks had reached them. Heavy blades rose and fell, hacking their victims to quivering pieces. Fountains of blood, black in the moonlight, geysered into the air, drenching the greenskins’ leering faces. Deep, booming cries of savage joy sounded from a dozen tusk-filled maws. Bestial laughter ricocheted from the walls.

Bas saw Klein looking straight up at him, the last of the escapees still standing, hemmed in on all sides, nowhere to run. The orks closed on him, red eyes mad with the joy of killing. Klein didn’t scream like the others. He seemed resigned to his fate. Bas saw him mouth some words, but he never knew what they were. They might have been good luck. They might have been something else.

A dozen ork blades fell at once. Wet pieces hit the floor. Klein was gone.

Outside Government Hall, the commotion spread to the rest of the horde. Those asleep in Salvation Square came awake, confused at first, then eager to join whatever fracas was taking place within the building. They began streaming inside, fighting with each other to be first. Perhaps they could smell human blood. It was thick and salty on the air. Bas could smell it, too.

Dara was almost at the gap in the dome now, still scrabbling manically for every protruding stone or steel bar that might get her closer to freedom. She was within reach. Bas looked down at her. He could have reached out then, could have gripped her arms and helped her up the last metre, but he hesitated. This madwoman had sealed the fate of the others. She had killed them as surely as the orks had. If he tried to bring her with him, she would get him killed, too. He was sure of it, and the darkest part of him considered kicking her from the wall to plunge backwards, joining those she had condemned. It would be justice, he thought. A fitting revenge for the others.

But he didn’t kick her. Instead, without conscious decision, he found himself reaching out for her, committed to helping her up.

Even as he did, he became aware of a strange whistling noise in the sky.

He didn’t have time to wonder what it was. The stone beneath him bucked violently and he grabbed at the wall for support. There was a blinding flash of light that turned the world red behind his eyelids. Blazing heat flooded over him, burning away his filth-caked hair.

Dara’s scream filled his ears, merging now with more strange sounds from the sky. Bas opened his eyes in time to watch her plunge towards the bellowing greenskins below. He didn’t see her hacked to pieces. Syrric grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.

Look at the square, he told Bas.

From the stone ledge around the dome, the two boys could see everything. The night had been turned to sudden day by great pillars of fire that burst upwards. Buildings on all sides, half-shattered in the original invasion, were toppled now as massive artillery shells slammed into them, blowing chunks of stone and cement out in great flaming clouds.

Bas watched with wide eyes. Again and again, high-explosive death fell screaming from the sky.

The orks were arming themselves and racing for their machines. Bas saw half a dozen armoured fuel trucks blown apart like cheap toys when a shell struck the ground between them. Burning, screaming greenskins scattered in every direction, their arms pinwheeling as the flames gorged on their flesh.

The whistling stopped to be replaced by a roar of turbine engines. Black shapes ripped through the sky above Bas’s head, fast and low. They were too fast to see properly, but the stutter and flare of their guns tore up the square, churning ork bodies into chunks of wet meat. Greenskin vehicles returned fire, filling the air with a fusillade of solid slugs and bright las-blasts. Missiles screamed into the air on smoky trails as the aliens brought their vehicle-mounted launchers to bear. One of the black shapes in the sky was struck hard in the tail and began a mad spiral towards the ground. It struck an old municipal building not two hundred metres from Bas and Syrric. Both the building and the aircraft tumbled into the square in a cloud of smoke, flame and spinning shrapnel.

Bas grabbed Syrric’s hand. ‘We have to go!’ he yelled over the noise.

He didn’t wait for an answer. He pulled Syrric to the planks connecting the dome of their perch to the nearest roof and they crossed quickly, Bas first, then Syrric. Screeches from behind made Bas turn. Some of the hook-noses had scaled the wall inside the dome. They spotted the boys and gave chase, firing their oversized pistols as they came.

As soon as Syrric was over the first gap, Bas kicked the planks away. Then, grabbing Syrric’s hand again, he ran.

Anti-aircraft fire poured into the sky, lighting their way across the rooftops. The shadowy shapes assaulting the orks from above were forced to pull out. Moments after they did, the artillery strikes started again. Bas was halfway across one of his makeshift bridges when a shell plunged into the building he was crossing towards. It punched through the tenement roof and a number of upper floors before it exploded somewhere deep within the structure. Bas watched in horror as the building in front of him began to disintegrate, turning to little more than loose stone. He turned and leapt back towards the edge of the roof where Syrric stared in horror, just as the planks beneath his feet fell away.

His fingers missed the lip of the roof. He felt his dizzying plunge begin. But small hands reached for him just as he fell, gripping his wrists and hauling him in towards the building. Bas struck the stone wall hard, winding himself, but the small hands didn’t let go. He looked up and saw Syrric stretching over the edge, face twisted in pain, grunting and sweating with the effort of keeping Bas from plummeting to his death.

Bas scrabbled for a foothold and found a thin ledge, not enough to support his full weight, but enough to take some of the strain off Syrric.

Can you climb up?

Bas stretched and gripped the lip of the roof. Then, with Syrric pulling, he heaved himself up and rolled over the edge. There, with death averted once more, he lay panting, adrenaline racing through his veins. Syrric crouched over him.

We can’t stay up here. Isn’t there some other way?

The ground shook. More explosions rocked the town, striking just to the north of their position. Bas didn’t have time to wait for the shaking to stop. As soon as he had his breath, he got up.

‘The greenskins will be everywhere at ground level,’ he said miserably, but, looking at the empty space where the next building had been only moments ago, he knew that staying high would be just as dangerous. Besides, that building had been the only one linked to this. It looked like there was little choice. If they couldn’t travel above ground, and they couldn’t travel on the ground…

‘There’s one more way,’ said Bas. ‘Let’s go.’

Bas began training under his grandfather after the fourth time Kraevin’s gang beat him up. It was the worst beating yet. One of the smaller boys – an ugly, rat-faced lad called Sarkam – had actually stabbed Bas in the belly with a box-cutter. It was the sight of so much blood that brought the beating to an early end this time. Instead of strolling off in casual satisfaction, Kraevin and his gang ran, knowing this level of violence would mean serious trouble for them if they were caught.

Bas staggered home, both hands pressed to his abdomen, drawing sharp looks from everyone he passed. A rough-looking woman in a filthy apron called out, ‘You need help, boy?’

Bas ignored her and kept on. He knew the Sarge would be waiting at the table with the medical kit laid out. He had warned Bas that the other boys might attack him today. He had just about healed from the last beating, after all.

But this time was different, in more ways than one.

Bas wasn’t crying.

More important than that, he had actually fought back.

True, his unpractised attempts to retaliate had met with dismal failure, but they had caught the other boys off guard. For the first time, Bas saw an instant of doubt in their eyes. They knew fear, too, he realised. They loved to dish out pain, but they didn’t want any coming their way.

That was when he knew his grandfather was the answer.

This time, while the old man stitched the wound in Bas’s belly, Bas glared at him.

‘Something you want to say to me, boy?’ said the Sarge.

Bas’s words came out as a growl that surprised even him.

‘I know who you are,’ he told the old man. ‘I know what you did, how you fought. Sherridan told me. He called you an Imperial hero!’

A sudden scowl twisted those terrifying features. ‘You think Imperial heroes live like this, you fool?’ the Sarge snapped back. He gestured at the dank, water-stained walls of their home. ‘Sherridan had no business saying anything. I’ll bet he didn’t tell you I was stripped of my medals. I’ll bet he didn’t mention that I was dishonourably discharged after forty bloody lashes! Sherridan sees what he wants to see. You hear me?’

‘I don’t care about that,’ Bas shot back. He would not be denied. Not this time. ‘You could teach me. You could help me, make me stronger. Make it so I could kill them if I wanted to.’

His grandfather held his gaze. For what seemed an eternity, neither blinked.

‘I can teach you,’ the old man said at last with a solemn nod. ‘But it’ll hurt more than everything you’ve endured so far. And there’s no going back once we start, so you’d better be damned sure.’

‘It will be worth it,’ hissed Bas, ‘to smash those bastards even just once.’

The old man’s eyes bored into his. Again, he nodded. ‘We’ll begin when you’re able,’ he told Bas.

And so they did.

It started simply enough. Bas drilled footwork for hours around the old dead tree at the back of the tenement. Slowly, the number of push-ups, chin-ups and sit-ups he could do increased from single digits to double. Within a month and a half, the old man had him into triple digits. Then they began training with weights, anything they could find whether it be rocks or old tyres or bags of cement.

Bas learned to wield sticks, knives, broken bottles, anything that could be used as a weapon. He became lean and hard like the grox meat they ate at every meal. He became faster, stronger, better than he had ever believed possible, and every bit of it was bought with sweat and blood, but never tears.

Tears were forbidden.

His grandfather was a brutal, relentless instructor. Every day was harder, more painful, more severe than the last. But Bas endured, his hatred burning within him, spurring him on. It wasn’t just hatred for Kraevin and his schoolhouse thugs. It was hatred against all the wrongs he had known. Even as his grandfather forged him into something new, something tough and independent, Bas learned a fresher, deeper hate for the old man. His mistakes, fewer and fewer as time went by, were exploited with merciless brutality, until Bas wondered who was worse: Kraevin, or the Sarge himself.

It hardly mattered. He saw the results. And others saw them, too.

Kraevin’s gang spent less time taunting him as the days passed. Sometimes, he saw them glancing nervously in his direction from the corner of his eye. He recognised that doubt he had seen before. The weeks since they had attacked him stretched into months. Bas started to wonder if they had given up for good.

Then, as he was walking home three days before Emperor’s Day, Kraevin and his gang ambushed him from an alley and dragged him in.

Bas lashed out immediately without pausing for thought and smashed one boy’s nose to a pulp.

The boy yowled and broke from the fight, hands held up to his crimson-smeared face.

Kraevin shouted something and the whole gang backed off, forming a semi-circle around their target. Bas watched as they all drew knives. If they expected him to piss his pants, however, they were gravely mistaken.

‘Let’s have it!’ Bas hissed at them. ‘All of you!’

Reaching into the waistband of his trousers, he pulled his own blade free.

The Sarge didn’t know about this. Bas hadn’t told him he was now carrying a weapon. He had found it on the tenement stairwell one morning, a small kitchen knife stained with a stranger’s blood. After washing it and sharpening it while the Sarge was at work, Bas had started to carry it with him. Now he was glad of that. It was his equalizer, though the odds he faced here were still far from equal.

Kraevin didn’t look so smug right then, but he motioned and the boys lunged in.

Bas read their movements, just as the old man had taught him. The closest boy was going for a thrust to his midsection. Bas slipped it. His hand flashed out and cut the tendons in the boy’s wrist.

Screaming filled the alley and the boy dropped to his knees, clutching his bleeding arm.

Bas kicked him hard in the face. ‘Come on, bastards!’ he roared at the others. Again, he kicked the wounded boy.

This display was unlike anything the others were prepared for. They didn’t want any of it.

The gang broke, boys bolting from the alley in both directions, knives abandoned, thrown to the ground. Only Kraevin remained. He had never run from anything. If he ran now, he’d be giving up all his status, all his power, and he knew it. Even so, Bas could see it in his eyes: the terroriser had become the terrified.

Bas rounded on him, knife up, stance loose, light on his feet.

‘Bas the bastard,’ said Bas, mimicking Kraevin’s voice. ‘You’ve no idea how right you were, you piece of filth.’

He closed in, angling himself for a lightning slash to the other boy’s face. Something in Kraevin snapped. He dropped his knife and backed up against the alley wall, hands raised in desperate placation.

‘Bas, please,’ he begged. ‘It wasn’t me. It was never me. Honestly.’

Bas drew closer, ready to deliver a flurry of nasty cuts.

‘He said never to tell you,’ cried Kraevin. ‘Said he’d see us right for money and lho-sticks. I swear it!’

‘Groxshit!’ snarled Bas. ‘Who? Who said that?’

He didn’t believe Kraevin for a moment. The boy was just buying time, spinning desperate lies.

‘The Sarge,’ Kraevin gasped. ‘Old Ironfoot. He came to us after the first time we beat you. Honest, I thought he was going to murder us, but he didn’t. He said he wanted us to keep on you, keep beating you down. Told us to wait until you were healed each time.’

Bas halted his advance. That couldn’t be true. No.

But… could it? Was the old man that twisted? Why would he do such a thing?

‘Talk,’ he ordered Kraevin, urging him on with a mock thrust of his knife.

‘Th... that’s it,’ stammered the boy. ‘Two days ago, he found us and told us to ambush you. Said to use knives this time. I told him he was crazy. No way. But he tripled the money he was offering. My old man’s got lung-rot. Can’t work no more. I need the money, Bas. I didn’t want to, but I had to. But it’s over now, okay? Throne above, it’s over.’

Bas thought about that for a second, then he rammed his right boot up between Kraevin’s legs. As the bully doubled over, Bas kicked him again, a blistering shot straight to the jaw. Teeth and blood flew from Kraevin’s mouth. He dropped to the ground, unconscious.

Bas sheathed his little knife in his waistband and looked down at the boy who had taught him the meaning of fear.

‘Yes,’ he told the crumpled figure, ‘it is over.’

At home, he found the Sarge at the back of the tenement, leaning against the old dead tree, smoking a lho-stick in the sunlight.

‘No medical kit this time?’ Bas asked as he stopped a few metres from the old man.

The Sarge grinned at him. ‘Knew you wouldn’t need it.’

‘You paid them to do it, didn’t you?’ said Bas.

The old man exhaled a thick cloud of yellow smoke.

‘You’ve done well,’ he told his grandson. It was all the confirmation needed.

Bas said nothing. He felt numb.

‘Stay grounded, boy,’ rumbled the Sarge. ‘Stay focused. We’re just getting started, you and I. You think you’ve bested your daemons, and maybe you have, for now. But there are worse things than childhood bullies out there. Never forget the fear and anger that brought you this far.’

Bas didn’t answer. He stared at the dirt between his feet, feeling utterly hollow, consumed by a raw emptiness he hadn’t known was possible.

‘There’s more to learn, boy,’ the Sarge told him. ‘We’re not done here. Remember the chubby runt you used to be. Think of how you’ve changed, what you’ve achieved. I gave you that. Keep training, boy. Keep learning. Don’t stop now. As much as you hate me, you know I’m right. Let’s see how far you can take it.’

The old man paused, his brows drawing down, and added in a voice suddenly harsh and hateful, ‘If you want to stop, you know where the damned door is. I won’t give bed and board to an Emperor-damned quitter.’

Bas looked at his hands. They were clenched into fists. His forearms rippled with taut muscle. He wanted to lash out at the Sarge, to bloody him, maybe even kill him for what he’d done. But, for all he’d changed, all he’d learned, his hands were still a child’s hands. He was still only seven years old, and he had nowhere else to go. Besting other boys was one thing, but the old man was right about greater foes. Bas had seen big, barrel-chested men from the refineries beating their wives and children in the street. No one ever stopped them. No one dared, despite how sick it made them to turn away. Bas always wished he was big enough and tough enough to intervene. The impotence inherent in his age and stature angered him. More than any daydreams of dispensing justice, however, he knew that training had brought focus and purpose to his life. His newfound strength, speed and skill had burned away that clinging shroud of fear he’d lived with for so long. Every technique he mastered brought him a fresh confidence his former weakness had always denied. He saw it, saw that he needed to keep growing, keep developing, to master every skill the old man offered and more. No. He didn’t just need it. He wanted it. Right then and there, it was all he wanted.

There was nothing else.

He locked eyes with his grandfather, his gaze boring into him with cold fire.

‘All right,’ he spat. ‘Show me. Teach me. I want all of it.’

A grin twisted the Sarge’s scarred face. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good.’

He ground his lho-stick out in the dirt at the base of the tree.

‘Go change your clothes and warm up. We’ll work on nerve destructions today.’

Two and a half years later, in the shadow of that same dead tree, a slightly taller, harder Bas – now ten years old – was working through a series of double-knife patterns while his grandfather barked out orders from a wooden bench on the right.

The sun was high and bright, baking the dusty earth under Bas’s feet.

‘Work the left blade harder!’ the Sarge snapped. ‘Watch your timing. Don’t make me come over there!’

A deep rumble sounded over the tenement rooftops, throaty and rhythmic. It must have meant something to the old man, because the Sarge stood bolt upright and stared up at the azure sky, muscles tensed, veins throbbing in his neck.

Bas, surprised by the intensity of the old man’s reaction, stopped mid-pattern and followed the Sarge’s gaze.

Seven black shapes crossed directly overhead.

‘Marauder bombers,’ said the old man. ‘And a Lightning escort out of Red Sands. Something’s wrong.’

Despite their altitude, the noise of the aircraft engines made the air vibrate. Bas had never seen craft like these before. They had the air of huge predatory birds about them. They had barely disappeared below the line of tenement roofs on the far side before another similar formation appeared, then another and another.

The old man cursed.

‘It was just a matter of time,’ he said to himself. ‘This planet was always going to get hit sooner or later.’

He limped past Bas, iron leg grinding, heading towards the tenement’s back door. But he stopped halfway and turned.

‘They’ll be coming for me,’ he said, and there was something in his eye Bas had never seen before. It was the closest thing to fondness the old man had ever managed, though it still fell far short. ‘They always call on the veterans first,’ he told Bas. ‘No one ever truly retires from the Guard. I’ve done the best I could with you, boy. You hate me, and that’s only proper, but I did what I had to do. The Imperium is not what you think. I’ve seen it, by the Throne. Terrors by the billion, all clamouring to slaughter or enslave us. And now it looks like they’re here. Only the strongest survive, boy. And you’re my blood, mark you. My last living blood! I’ve done my best to make sure you’re one of the survivors.’

He paused to look up as more bombers crossed the sky.

‘Come on inside,’ he told Bas. ‘There’s something I want to give you before I go. May it serve you well in what’s to come.’

They went inside.

A few days later, just as the old man had predicted, the Imperium came to call on him, and he answered.

It was the last time Bas ever saw him.

The shelling from the sky had opened great craters in the streets below. Through choking clouds of smoke and dust, over hills of flaming debris, the boys searched for a way into the sewers. Many of the massive holes were filled with rubble and alien bodies, but Bas quickly found one which offered access to the dark, round tunnels that laced the town’s foundations. He had mostly avoided these tunnels during his time alone. Those times he had come down here looking for sources of potable water, he had encountered bands of scavenging hook-noses. Each time, he had barely escaped with his life.

There didn’t seem to be any of the disgusting creatures here now, however. In the utter darkness, he and Syrric held hands tightly, using their free hands to guide themselves along the tunnel walls. They couldn’t see a damned thing. Bas had no idea how or when they would find a way out, but he couldn’t let that stop him. The tunnel ceiling rumbled with the sound of war machines on the move and explosive detonations. If he and Syrric were to survive the journey to one of his boltholes, they would have to travel down here in the dark.

As they moved, Bas became sharply aware of the comfort he was drawing from Syrric’s hand. He wondered if that made him weak. His grandfather had used that word like a curse, as if weakness was the worst thing in the universe, and perhaps it was. Bas hadn’t lived this long by being weak. He knew that. But he wasn’t so sure it was weak to want the company of your own kind. Syrric’s presence made him feel stronger. His body seemed to ache less. The other boy was following his lead, depending on him. Here was the sense of purpose Bas had so desperately missed. Alone, his survival had been nothing more than an act of waiting, waiting for a time in which he’d find something to live for, to fight for. Now he had it: someone to share the darkness with, to watch his back. He had gotten Syrric out, just as he had intended. Despite the deaths of the others, it still felt like the greatest victory of his young life, better even than beating Kraevin.

Kraevin!

Bas hadn’t thought of the former bully in quite a while. What kind of death had he suffered the day the orks came? Had he been hacked to pieces like Klein and the prisoners? Had he been shot? Eaten?

As Bas was wondering this, he spotted light up ahead.

‘There,’ he whispered, and together he and Syrric made for the distant glow.

It was moonlight, and it poured through a gap in the tunnel ceiling. An explosive shell had caused the rockcrete road above to collapse, forming a steep ramp. The boys waited and listened until Bas decided that the sound of alien battle cries and gunfire was far enough away that they could risk the surface again. He and Syrric scrambled up the slope to stand on a street shrouded in thick grey smoke.

Which way? Syrric asked.

Bas wasn’t sure. He had to have a bolthole somewhere near here, but with all the smoke, he couldn’t find a landmark to navigate by. It seemed prudent to move in the opposite direction from the noise of battle.

‘Let’s keep on this way,’ said Bas, ‘at least for now.’ But, just as they started walking, a hoarse shout sounded from up ahead.

‘Contact front!’

The veils of smoke were suddenly pierced by a score of blinding, pencil thin beams, all aimed straight at the two boys.

‘Down!’ yelled Bas.

He and Syrric dropped to the ground hard and stayed there while the las-beams carved the air just above their heads. The barrage lasted a second before a different voice, sharp with authority, called out, ‘Cease fire!’

That voice made Bas shiver. It sounded so much like the Sarge. Could it be the old man? Had he survived? Had he come back for his grandson after all this time?

Shadowy shapes emerged from the smoke. Human shapes.

Nervously, Bas got to his knees. He was still holding Syrric’s hand. Looking down, he tugged the other boy’s arm. ‘They’re human!’

Syrric didn’t move.

Bas tugged again. ‘Syrric, get up. Come on.’

Then he saw it. Syrric was leaking thick fluid onto the surface of the road. Arterial blood.

Bas felt cold panic race through his veins, spinning him, sickening him. His stomach lurched. He squeezed Syrric’s hand, but it was limp. There was no pressure in the boy’s grip. There was no reassuring voice in Bas’s head. There was only emptiness, an aching gap where, moments before, the joy of companionship had filled him.

Bas stood frozen. His mind reeled, unable to accept what his senses told him.

Boots ground to a halt on the rockcrete a metre away.

‘Children!’ growled a man’s voice. ‘Two boys. Looks like we hit one o’ them.’

A black boot extended, slid under Syrric’s right shoulder, and turned him over.

Bas saw Syrric’s lifeless eyes staring at the sky, that defiant glimmer gone forever.

‘Aye,’ continued the rough voice. ‘We hit one all right. Fatality.’ The trooper must have seen the tattoo on Syrric’s head, because he added, ‘He was a witch, though,’ and he snorted like there was something humorous about it.

Bas sprung. Before he realised what he’d done, his grandfather’s knife was buried in the belly of the trooper standing over him.

‘You killed him,’ Bas screamed into the man’s shocked face. ‘He was mine, you bastard! He was my friend and you killed him!’

Bas yanked his knife out of the trooper’s belly and was about to stab again when something hit him in the side of the head. He saw the stars wheeling above him and collapsed, landing on Syrric’s cooling body.

‘Little bastard stabbed me!’ snarled the wounded trooper as he fell back onto his arse, hands pressed tight to his wound to stem the flow of blood.

‘Medic,’ said the commanding voice from before. ‘Man down, here.’

A shadow cast by the bright moonlight fell over Bas, and he looked up into a pair of twinkling black eyes. ‘Tough one, aren’t you?’ said the figure.

Bas’s heart sank. It wasn’t his grandfather. Of course it wasn’t. The Sarge was surely dead. Bas had never really believed otherwise. But this man was cast from the same steel. He had the same aura, as hard, as cold. Razor sharp like a living blade. He wore a black greatcoat and a peaked cap, and on that peak, a golden skull with eagle’s wings gleamed. A gloved hand extended towards Bas.

Bas looked at it.

‘Up,’ the man ordered.

Bas found himself obeying automatically. The hand was strong. As soon as he took it, it hauled him to his feet. The man looked down at him and sniffed the air.

‘Ork shit,’ he said. ‘So you’re smart as well as tough.’

Other figures wearing combat helmets and carapace armour came to stand beside the tall, greatcoated man. They looked at Bas with a mix of anger, curiosity and surprise. Their wounded comrade was already being attended by another soldier with a white field-kit.

‘Gentlemen,’ said the tall man. ‘Unexpected as it may be, we have a survivor here. Child or not, I’ll need to debrief him. You, however, will press on into the town as planned. Sergeant Hemlund, keep channel six open. I’ll want regular updates.’

‘You’ll have ‘em, commissar,’ grunted a particularly broad-shouldered trooper.

Bas didn’t know what a commissar was, but he guessed that it was a military rank. The soldiers fanned out, leaving him and the tall man standing beside Syrric’s body.

‘Regrettable,’ said the man, gesturing at the dead boy. ‘Psyker or not. Were you two alone here? Any other survivors?’

Bas didn’t know what a psyker was. He said nothing. The commissar took silence as an affirmation.

‘What’s your name?’

Bas found it hard to talk. His throat hurt so much from fighting back his sorrow. With an effort, he managed to croak, ‘Bas.’

The commissar raised an eyebrow, unsure he had heard correctly. ‘Bas?’

‘Short for Sebastian… sir,’ Bas added. He almost gave his family name then – Vaarden, his father’s name – but something made him stop. He looked down at the blood-slick knife in his right hand. His grandfather’s knife. The old man’s name was acid-etched on the blade, and he knew at that moment that it was right. It felt right. The old man had made him everything he was, and he would carry that name for the rest of his life.

‘Sebastian Yarrick,’ he said.

The commissar nodded.

‘Well, Yarrick. Let’s get you back to base. We have a lot to cover, you and I.’

He turned and began walking back down the street the way he had come, boots clicking sharply on the cobbles, knowing the boy would follow. In the other direction, fresh sounds of battle echoed from the dark tenement walls.

Bas sheathed the knife, bent over Syrric’s body and closed the boy’s eyelids.

He whispered a promise in the dead boy’s ear, a promise he would spend his whole life trying to keep.

Then, solemnly, he rose and followed the commissar, taking his first steps on a path that would one day become legend.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Jon Sullivan

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