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  Pain and numbness ground together with each slow movement. The sceptre lay on the deck where it had fallen from Athanatos’s hand, blood smearing the glowing runes. Crius reached for the device, grasped it and lifted it from the floor. It felt like clutching a lightning bolt.

  Ferrus Manus is dead.

  His eyes would not focus anymore, but his fingers found the runes cut into the sceptre’s length.

  And so are we all.

  He twisted each ring.

  We are wraiths that remain in a dying land.

  His fingers found the trigger stud.

  And all that is left to us is vengeance.

  Behind him, another casket opened with a crack of shattered ice; then another, and another. Figure after shambling figure stepped onto the deck. Crius felt the sceptre pulse, before it slipped from his fingers. The darkness reached up to meet him.

  It felt warm and tasted of iron, like metal taken from a fire, like flesh and blood.

  The last thing he saw, before night closed over him, were his dead kin marching to war, ice falling from their tread.

  The Thetis rolled, her engines clawing the void for control. Close behind her, the enemy vessels closed in upon their prey. The dark mouths of launch bays opened across their hulls, but while their sisters closed into boarding range, the Dawnstar and Death’s Child kept firing. Macro-shells cracked the Thetis’s outer hull, and plasma widened the wounds, preparing the way for the warriors waiting in the Dreadclaw pods and assault craft. They were close now, the whole engagement crammed into a battle sphere no more than a thousand kilometres in diameter. To the Sons of Horus, the Thetis’s death seemed inevitable, but even as they gave the order to board the wounded ship, the situation changed.

  The Oathbound plunged in like a thrown dagger. A sheet of light reached from the Imperial Fists ship and struck the Dawnstar. Void shields collapsed, popping like oily water bubbles. The Oathbound fired again, accelerating hard. Plasma relays within the enemy vessel’s hull burst, flooding compartments with sun-hot energy. In her engine spaces, thousands screamed as their skin burned in the heat.

  The Dawnstar shook. Smearing fire across the dark, she turned to bring her guns to bear. Half drained of power, the Oathbound had one weapon still to fire.

  High in the tower of her bridge, Shipmaster Casterra nodded to a servitor cradled in a knot of cables.

  ‘Launch torpedoes.’

  The missiles slid into the void, their internal thrusters igniting as they met the vacuum, powering them ahead of the Oathbound. Each was the size of a hab-spire, its warhead an artefact gifted to Rogal Dorn by the Adeptus Mechanicum priesthood of Mars.

  A wall of interceptor rounds rose from the stricken Dawnstar. Torpedo after torpedo exploded before they could find their target.

  Then one slipped through and struck the Dawnstar high on her flank, driving deep into the warship’s guts.

  The ship continued to turn, surrounded by a haze of debris and the flicker of failing void shields. Then the torpedo’s vortex warhead detonated in a spiral of neon light and roaring darkness. The Dawnstar practically vanished, her hull fragmenting as unnatural forces pulled her apart from within. In the space where she had been, a glowing wound remained, howling with impossible sound before collapsing to emptiness.

  The remaining XVI Legion ships faltered. The Spear Strike broke from her interception course with the Thetis and turned towards the Oathbound. The others cut their speed as they diverted power to shields and weapons.

  The respite was enough. The Thetis pushed beyond her attackers, curving above them in a burning loop, and plunged back into the inferno-stained void between her enemies.

  From his throne, Phidias watched the enemy ships rise to meet them. The Wolf of Cthonia and the Death’s Child spun as they tried to bring their weapons to bear. The Thetis plunged on. Shards of armour the size of Battle Titans ripped from her flanks, liquid fire and burning gas billowing in her wake. The enemy spun and fired as they came about, peppering the Thetis with explosions.

  On the edge of the engagement, the Oathbound turned as the Spear Strike closed. The Imperial Fists ship came around, lining up with her enemy. Both ships fired, their prows blistering with fire as their shields burst. Then they hurtled past each other, raking with rolling volleys. The Spear Strike’s belly was torn open by macro-cannon shells, ripping away gantries and sensor dishes in a ripple of detonations. The Oathbound took the return fire across her unshielded hull – a blaze of plasma found the yawning barrel of a battery cannon, detonating a shell in the breech, and suddenly explosions were ripping down the ship’s entire flank.

  She began to spiral, her engines pushing her on even as deck fires ate her from within.

  On the Thetis’s bridge, Phidias listened to the Oathbound’s last signals in silence. Around him the servitors and crew bent to their tasks, murmuring in impassive binary and Medusan cant. Deep within the folds of his thoughts, he watched the data from his ship shining clear and bright. Damage indicators were a squall of deep red. Engine output markers flashed insistently.

  He knew what it all meant. He could almost feel it in his body. They were on the verge of death, inside and out. It did not matter now.

  At the edge of his awareness, the voices of the dead rose – some in monotonous flesh-voices, some in mumbled machine code. The dead marched to war, and that was all that now mattered. Hundreds of them poured from the icy heart of the Thetis to fill the ramshackle assault craft and boarding torpedoes.

  Phidias waited, the screams of his ship and the whispers of his brothers washing over him.

  The Thetis cut between the Wolf of Cthonia and the Death’s Child. Fresh volleys of energy sliced out from both ships. The Thetis shook, and binaric screams filled the air, thick with the reek of burning metal.

  In the cable-tangle of his throne, Phidias felt the ship’s systems pulse with rage. He let the feeling rise in him, shutting out all his other sensations. The enemy vessels were so close that if they fired now they would hit each other.

  ‘Launch,’ he said, and his ship answered.

  The Thetis’s engines cut out. Retro thrusters fired, fighting against the ship’s momentum. Void locks opened along her flanks and gut, scattering craft into space on breaths of launch flame. They swarmed across the gap and found the hulls of their foes. Magma blasts boiled through bulkheads, graviton charges cracked armour, and the assault craft clustered around the breaches like flies on a bloody wound.

  The first of the dead Iron Hands met the Sons of Horus on the gun decks of the Wolf of Cthonia. The corpses of gun crew littered the decks beneath the magazines, choked and crushed by explosive decompression. Oily flame-light shivered in the remaining pockets of atmosphere. The Iron Hands advanced, their weapons spitting death. The deck quivered beneath their slow tread.

  Blast-doors down the deck opened with a rush of smoke-filled air. The Sons of Horus came through in tight wedges, heavy infantry shields held in a solid wall. They fired as they charged – bolt-rounds cut the air, slammed into armour and detonated. The first Iron Hands legionary fell, his re-forged body torn apart by multiple explosions. Then his brothers answered in kind. Volkite and plasma beams lit the darkness with neon light. Armoured figures vanished in washes of fire and false sunlight. Shields slammed into armour, sparks flew as chain-teeth scraped across ceramite. Iron Hands fell to blades, to hammers, to point blank blasts of energy and explosives. The dead died again in silence, the sounds of their ending stolen by the airless void.

  And still the dead poured from the Thetis.

  By the time the Iron Hands had taken the gunnery decks, a dozen other beachheads had formed across the Wolf of Cthonia. The Sons of Horus began to dwindle, falling back into close-pressed circles of defiance.

  In the void, both the Death’s Child and the Wolf of Cthonia continued to slide through the vacuum on their original trajectories. Within the Death’s Child, the Iron Hands struck the ship’s command citadel, dozens of them breaking into the towers
and bastions surrounding the domed bridge. The Sons of Horus met the Iron Hands advance with walls of suppressing fire and ground it to a halt before signalling their counter-attack. Terminators waded through spent shell casings and heaped bodies, muzzle flare and the light of power fields reflected from their sea-green armour. For a while it seemed certain that the Death’s Child would throw the dead back into the void.

  Chance ended that hope.

  Crawling with Iron Hands boarders and slewing in the void as she turned back towards the Thetis, the Wolf of Cthonia fired her torpedoes. Perhaps it was a mistake – perhaps panic, or a malfunction in a system on a ship that was being ripped apart from within. Launched blindly, the torpedoes streaked between the spinning vessels. One clipped the upper hull of the Thetis and spilled flame across her ruined towers. The rest hit the Death’s Child just fore of her engines and detonated next to a primary plasma trunking.

  The explosion almost ripped her in two. She began to spiral, her engines pushing her on even as propagating explosions ate her insides. The Iron Hands pressed on as the ship they had conquered broke apart.

  On the Wolf of Cthonia, the Iron Hands finally reached the reactor decks and quenched the warship’s burning heart. The Wolf of Cthonia became dark and silent. Faced with the death of her sisters, the Spear Strike ran for the system’s edge and dived into the warp. Deprived of the total annihilation of her enemies, the Thetis settled to stillness beside the dying vessels like a predator settling to feed upon its kills.

  When their task was done, the dead that still walked withdrew to the Thetis and the waiting embrace of cold oblivion.

  The voice reached Crius through dreams of ice. ‘Waken.’

  The pain came first, as it always did. It began in his chest and spread through his remaining flesh, burning with an acid touch. Then the iron awoke.

  More pain came, stabbing through him, shrill and needle-sharp. For a long moment he could feel each piston, servo and fibre of his body but could not move them. He was trapped once more, held by the dead weight of the metal he was bound to. Blood pulsed through his flesh and power through his limbs, beating like a distant drum. Sounds swelled in his ears: the clatter of machines, the scrape of tools, the burbling of servitors as they went about their tasks.

  More pain came, and it did not fade. The instinct to thrash, to shout, to break free of the iron rose in him until it took all of his will to remain still. Then the moment passed.

  His body became his own again. Sight returned. First came a cloud of static falling from the blackness like snow. Then shapes, then colours, then a face that he recognised.

  ‘It is time,’ said Phidias.

  Crius nodded. A stutter of pain ran up his spine.

  Ferrus Manus is dead.

  As always the truth rose in his mind as fresh and raw as the moment he had first heard it. First emptiness, then the sucking blackness of sorrow, then anger redder than blood, then at last the hatred came. Cold, limitless and as dark as quenched iron, the hate took shape and became a need, a drive. He cut away all other emotions and thoughts, disconnecting them from his mind like redundant systems. Only the hatred remained, bathing in the light of his pain.

  He turned from Phidias to look at the ring of Iron Hands that stood before him, their weapons in their hands, their eyes cold when they met his gaze. He looked back to Phidias.

  ‘We are close enough to the Solar System,’ said Phidias.

  Crius said nothing but began to walk, and in his wake the Iron Hands followed in silence.

  Boreas looked up at Crius – the skin over the hard bones of the face was paler and the flesh thinner than when they had left Terra. The templar wore a black robe rather than his ruined armour, and chains linked thick manacles around his wrists and ankles to an adamantium collar which circled his neck. The links of the chains clinked together as he straightened. His wounds clearly pained him, but he would heal and live. Boreas’s face showed no emotion, but Crius caught a flicker in the depths of the eyes. His mind processed possibilities as to what that could signify: anger, pity, resolve, recognition? He dismissed them all as irrelevant.

  The hangar was as silent as when they had arrived all those months ago. The looted carcasses of landing craft and gunships still filled the dark cavern, and the hot air still pressed close. The golden and black hull of Boreas’s Storm Eagle sat ready to launch, her lights creating a pool of light before the open embarkation ramp.

  ‘We are at the edge of the light,’ said Crius. ‘We will send a signal once we have left. Your brothers will find you here.’

  ‘You are… like them,’ said Boreas, his eyes moving from Crius to the rest of the Iron Hands.

  ‘They are my brothers,’ replied Crius.

  ‘There will be no end to this,’ said Boreas quietly. ‘All hope ends down the path you now walk.’

  ‘Hope was lost long ago, Boreas.’ Crius’s voice was a low rasp. In his chest he felt the beating of the machines that had replaced his hearts. ‘It was lost the moment our primarch fell, when our fathers became mortal in our eyes. This war will not end as you think, Boreas, nor as your lord wishes.’ He paused and lifted his hands. The broken chains clinked where they still hung from his wrists. ‘But I will fulfil my promise even though I do not return with you. If you wish this bond, it is yours. When the time comes, then you may summon us.’

  Boreas held Crius’s gaze for a long moment.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Ignarak. The silence of mountains that once burned, and will burn again. Send that message with one word bound to it. If we still endure then we will hear you, and we will answer.’

  Boreas said nothing. His features had closed and hardened again, his expression unreadable. Crius took a step back, and made to leave the chamber. The two Iron Hands bracketing Boreas led him up the ramp of the Storm Eagle, and Crius heard the pilot servitors burble to their craft in the langue of machines.

  At the top of the ramp, Boreas twisted to face Crius again.

  ‘What word?’ he called back. Crius looked up at the templar. ‘In the summons, what word will bring you?’

  The hot air of the hangar billowed as the Storm Eagle’s engines began to keen with power.

  ‘Waken,’ said Crius.

  On the ramp, Boreas stood for a moment in the rising wind and then turned away.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John French is a writer and freelance games designer from Nottingham. His work for Black Library includes a number of short stories, the novellas Fateweaver and The Crimson Fist and the novel Ahriman: Exile. He also works on the Warhammer 40,000 role playing games. When he is not thinking of ways that dark and corrupting beings can destroy reality and space, John enjoys making it so with his own Traitor Legions on the gaming table.

  A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

  Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

  © Games Workshop Limited, 2013. All rights reserved.

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  ISBN: 978-0-85787-965-3

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