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  ‘He offered without need of request.’

  Thiel nodded, approving.

  ‘Has the traitor been interrogated?’ asked Numeon.

  ‘Vigorously,’ said Thiel, ‘to the point of it no longer being useful.’

  Var’kir laughed as they descended, first steps and then onto an open-caged platform that would ferry them part of the way.

  ‘For an Ultramarine, you are surprisingly… liberated.’

  ‘So I am often told.’

  ‘I imagine it is not always to your benefit.’

  ‘You’d be right.’

  On the way to the lifter, Thiel acknowledged every guard they passed, all of whom saluted in turn. Each was a legionary, for no other warriors could be trusted to secure the prisoners within.

  Once everyone was aboard, Inviglio activated the lifter.

  ‘This will convey us part of the way down,’ he explained, ‘but Barthusa Narek’s cell is subterranean. The rest of the way will be on foot.’

  Numeon didn’t answer. He appeared insular, marshalling his resolve for a reunion with the Vigilator who slew Helon, Uzak, Shaka and Pergellen on Traoris. The last death Numeon could not be sure of, but he quietly murmured the Iron Hands legionary’s name to himself in a mantra just like he did the others.

  ‘Artellus,’ said Thiel as the lifter ground to a clanking halt. Chains rattled and the settling metal groaned as the carriage hit solid ground.

  ‘Artellus,’ he repeated, more firmly.

  Numeon looked at him.

  ‘I made a solemn vow,’ said the Salamander. ‘I won’t break it. I won’t kill him… not yet.’

  Inviglio appeared anxious, glancing at his sergeant for reassurance.

  After a few seconds, Thiel shrugged, yanking back the concertina gate that had closed off the lifter cage during the descent.

  ‘Then that’ll have to be good enough.’

  Inviglio led. They followed.

  A flight of narrow steps took them downwards. Worn stone, flickering firelight reaching from sconces on the walls – it had the grim aspect of the ancient. Perhaps Narek would be tied to the rack or hanging from a gibbet.

  After the second stairwell, Thiel’s vox-feed crackled. He paused, signalling for the others to do the same, then bade the speaker on the other end to report.

  He listened, while the others waited. When Thiel was done, he shut down the feed and drew his bolt pistol.

  So did Inviglio.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Var’kir.

  Numeon unsheathed the Ultramarian gladius at his hip. Neither Thiel nor Inviglio tried to stop him, or protest.

  ‘He’s loose, isn’t he?’

  Thiel scowled. ‘There are six guards below,’ he said. ‘Ultramarines. Our brothers. None have reported in.’

  ‘There’s something else too,’ said Var’kir, unhitching a dragon-headed mace from his belt. ‘Can’t you smell it?’

  He paused a beat for the others to catch up.

  ‘It’s blood.’

  Inviglio found the first body. Slumped against an alcove, outside one of the lower cells, the Ultramarine’s throat had been torn out.

  He knew of only one thing that could inflict such a wound. Kneeling beside the corpse, checking in vain for vital signs, Inviglio turned to Thiel.

  ‘Unburdened.’

  Twice now, Inviglio had fought them. It seemed he was destined to do so a third time.

  ‘Are we to be forever blighted by such creatures?’ he said, uttering the thought aloud.

  Thiel didn’t answer, but looked grim. He holstered his pistol and drew both his close-combat weapons instead. One was a finely wrought longsword, which hummed as he fed power to the blade. The other was a short, stabbing gladius, a replacement for the one he had given to Numeon.

  ‘Is he a daemon?’ Thiel asked the Salamanders flatly. ‘Narek – is his flesh possessed? That is what it means among the Word Bearers to be Unburdened. To be bereft of your soul.’

  Numeon gave a subtle shake of the head.

  ‘I believe some of his allies on Traoris were touched. But him… I don’t know.’

  ‘There’s more,’ said Var’kir, having moved to investigate the open cell. ‘Here.’

  Within lingered a second legionary. Also dead, but clad in dirty white and blue. Like the slain Ultramarine, the World Eater’s end had been messy. Blood and viscera painted the walls.

  Inviglio got to his feet and drew his sword. Thiel’s scowl deepened as he regarded the corpse. He took the lead.

  ‘Stay close.’

  Three further cells lay open on the way to where Barthusa Narek was being held, their occupants butchered. One had been ripped apart, his limbs scattered like chaff during a red harvest. Another hung by a noose of entrails. Of the third victim, nothing remained but a pool of congealed blood.

  Guards torn apart and slain worsened the grisly vista. Taken by surprise, some had failed even to draw a weapon. In the lowest subterranean level of the bastion there was evidence of bolter shell damage to the walls and legionaries who had fought and died, instead of being slaughtered at their posts.

  No alarm had been raised, no warning given. The prison massacre had happened quickly.

  ‘There is more to this than we are seeing,’ said Numeon as they neared the last cell and Barthusa Narek.

  ‘Agreed,’ Thiel replied, gesturing to the obvious.

  A long corridor led to the deepest, darkest hole in the keep. It had a mild slope. Spilled blood slowly trickled down it, as if leading them. The air was thick, warm and metallic on the tongue.

  ‘What do you see?’ Numeon asked.

  ‘An end to interrogating prisoners on Macragge,’ said Inviglio.

  Thiel slowed almost imperceptibly, a theoretical forming.

  ‘A trail.’

  ‘That leads to Narek’s cell.’ Numeon jutted his chin towards it.

  They ran. Their heavy boots hammered loudly down the corridor.

  Thiel found the cell already unlocked, and muttered, ‘Every door, a new horror…’

  Then he kicked the door wide open.

  A legionary clad in crimson plate stood before them, obscured by shadows and with his head bowed. The interruption made him straighten, as if ending a conversation more abruptly than he wanted to, but there was no one else in the chamber.

  ‘Believe it or not,’ said the figure, ‘this isn’t how I wanted matters to play out.’

  Thiel took three slow steps inside, checking his flanks for any sign of ambush.

  ‘Narek of the Word,’ he declared calmly to the warrior’s back once he was inside. ‘You will face a reckoning for this.’

  Numeon had moved up to his left, Inviglio his right. Var’kir guarded the door to prevent the traitor’s escape.

  As the Word Bearer lifted his head, Numeon’s grip on the gladius tightened.

  ‘You are not Barthusa Narek,’ he said, as he recognised the traitor’s face. ‘Where is he?’

  The Word Bearer frowned. ‘Isn’t that the very question,’ said Xenut Sul, before he attacked.

  Xenut Sul was fast, faster than any legionary wearing battleplate had a right to be. But he was not a legionary, not in the truest sense. Strictly speaking, he was not even a man.

  Thiel leapt aside as the Unburdened came at them, scattering the warriors and smashing Var’kir through the open cell and back out into the corridor. Xenut Sul then wheeled around, ignoring the prostrate Salamander incapacitated behind him, and turned on the others.

  It was obvious now that escape had never been Xenut Sul’s intention. He had failed in whatever mission he had been given and now it would end in blood.

  A transformation had begun to take place in Xenut Sul. He appeared larger, stronger, his armour straining to contain his bulk. His nails pierced the fingertips of
his gauntlets, protruding in dagger-­length talons. Once-human eyes became fathomless pools of black, glinting like oil in the half-light.

  For a moment, they held the legionaries in thrall…

  …until Thiel cried out.

  ‘Kill it!’

  He hacked off Xenut Sul’s hand at the wrist as it reached to choke him, eliciting a grunt of pain from the Unburdened. Fleshy tendrils spewed eagerly from the stump, thrashing with unnatural vigour. One coiled around Thiel’s outstretched leg and hurled him across the cell. He hit the wall hard, cracking ceramite, and stayed prone. The other two tendrils struck Inviglio hard in the chest like a clenched fist and sent him sprawling.

  Unsheathing Draukoros from his back, with the gladius in his other hand, Numeon stood his ground. His voice echoed around the small chamber.

  ‘Vulkan lives!’

  Xenut Sul laughed, an ugly discordant noise that gnawed at Numeon’s nerves. Mutating rapidly, the tendrils had entwined into a bulbous mace of flesh. The Word Bearer swung it like a wrecking ball, caving in parts of the cell wall, ripping out chunks of stone and filling the air with dust, narrowly missing the Salamander’s head as he ducked.

  Numeon lunged and met unyielding ceramite. Parrying a thrust of Xenut Sul’s claws, but holding position, he lunged again. He found a gap, the straining plate ill-suited to protecting Xenut Sul’s expanding musculature. Skin and dermis parted, releasing a spurt of vitae.

  Xenut Sul roared.

  At least they now knew they could hurt it.

  Leaving his gladius impaled in the Unburdened’s chest, Numeon cleaved into Xenut Sul’s shoulder with Draukoros. It sank deep, greedily chewing flesh, echoing what the teeth would have done during life. Numeon drew the blade back and forth, sawing. His armour was spattered with vile gore. Not blood, nothing so mundane as that, but an ichorous substitute. It stank, threatening to overpower the Salamander with its sheer foulness.

  This was the taint of the warp, the reek of what lay beyond the veil, the corruption in men’s souls and the putrefaction of fell deeds given form and sentience.

  Numeon wished bitterly that he had a flamer to burn this wretched thing back to its hell, but would make do with the sword.

  ‘Bites hard, like my anger,’ he snarled as the serrated teeth met bone and snagged.

  Crazed with agony, Xenut Sul heaved Numeon up off his feet and crushed him against the partially destroyed cell wall, but the Salamander held on grimly. He left Draukoros deeply embedded but wrenched out the gladius with two hands and stabbed down into Xenut Sul’s exposed neck.

  It sank to the hilt, Numeon’s gauntlets slick and dark.

  The Unburdened recoiled, staggering backwards, and Numeon fell as he was released. He caught hold of the serrated sword’s grip, and his momentum dragged it loose, razor teeth clogged with ruddy flesh.

  Inviglio recovered fast and was back on his feet. Numeon caught sight of the Ultramarine in his peripheral vision, but his relief turned to horror as Xenut Sul reacted faster. The Unburdened turned on Inviglio, who stalled momentarily as he recalled Leargus split in two aboard the Dark Sacrament.

  Xenut Sul wrenched every scrap of memory from him.

  ‘It was no way for a warrior to die,’ he hissed and punched the talons of his remaining hand through Inviglio’s undefended chest. The Ultramarine gurgled, small air bubbles of blood bursting through his vox-grille before his blades slipped loose and he sagged, impaled on Xenut Sul’s knife-talons.

  Fuelled by a desire for vengeance, Numeon surged to his feet, but Xenut Sul already had his measure too.

  Choking tendrils whipped viperously around the Salamander’s neck, constricting his throat. Black oblivion crowded his vision before Numeon hacked the tendrils apart with a tired but heavy blow. He gagged, fetching up bile that he spewed down his chin.

  Xenut Sul’s frenzied counter hammered him to his knees. The clattering reply of Draukoros spilling from Numeon’s loose grip was like a death knell.

  They had hurt the Unburdened, wounded it deeply, but it wasn’t dead. That only increased its lethality, a beast cornered and fighting for survival.

  ‘I will not stop until every legionary in this hole is dead,’ it declared in a bestial voice. ‘No amount of death will sate me!’

  Blood flowed from his nose and mouth, and the dull pain of several fractures in his rib shell and right shoulder were burning for his attention, but Numeon looked up into the face of his attacker.

  Xenut Sul’s gaze was pitiless. And though his mass and limbs were grotesque, the warrior’s face still looked much as it had. Not a man at all, Numeon reminded himself. A daemon.

  With one hand braced against the floor to support his weight, Numeon reached for a weapon with his other. He still had Basilysk tucked in its holster, but instead his fingers touched the haft of the sigil and clenched around it as though it were the tether of his mortal thread.

  In the old beliefs, those that pre-dated the Emperor’s age of enlightenment and scientific endeavour, superstition had power. Belief, it was said, could summon the miraculous. Faith in something greater, something pure, when espoused by a pious man could become a sword against Old Night.

  Numeon did not believe in all the myths of ancient Nocturne, but he believed in Vulkan and brandished the primarch’s sigil like a purifying flame.

  The significance of the deed and the moment was not lost on him, and he roared defiantly, ‘Vulkan lives!’

  As he caught sight of the sigil, Xenut Sul froze. Just as it had with poor Inviglio, it proved a crucial hesitation.

  Three hard, percussive bangs echoed thunderously around the cell, jerking Xenut Sul’s malformed body as the mass-reactives embedded within him exploded.

  Snarling from the impacts, the Word Bearer was wrenched from his trance to confront his attackers.

  Zytos, Var’kir and the two Ultramarines from the guardhouse had unslung bolters aimed at the Unburdened.

  ‘Down!’ shouted Zytos.

  With what little strength he still had, Numeon hurled his body aside as a storm of shells struck Xenut Sul. Chunks of flesh, bone and armour plate were blasted off the Unburdened. Xenut Sul staggered against the intense fusillade but survived.

  Thronged with smoke and the reek of cordite, the air carried Xenut Sul’s mocking laughter as his flesh began to reknit.

  Zytos wasn’t done. ‘Reload!’

  Bracing himself for another salvo, Xenut Sul shaped to charge the warriors laying down fire from the corridor.

  Thiel was back on his feet.

  The electromagnetic longsword crackled in his fist.

  ‘Let’s try that again,’ he told the abomination, ‘for Inviglio,’ and jammed the blade right where Xenut Sul’s heart should be.

  A second hail of shells struck the Unburdened. Xenut Sul thrashed and spat, cursing as he was slowly torn asunder.

  As the shell storm abated, Numeon staggered to his feet. He was hurt, but had enough strength left to finish it.

  ‘You are weak,’ he said, wielding Draukoros again, ‘because you are impure. You just don’t have the wit to see it. I will show you…’

  He swung the sword.

  Xenut Sul’s eyes widened, his all too human face contorted with fear as Numeon decapitated him.

  Headless, Xenut Sul’s corpse slumped to its knees and fell forwards.

  ‘Throne, he was an ugly bastard,’ spat Thiel, wiping the gory blade of his deactivated longsword. He spared a glance for Inviglio. Not the first of the Red-marked he had lost, but every one hurt like a knife in his own flesh.

  ‘We have to lock down the Eastern Keep,’ said Numeon.

  ‘For what good it will do,’ said Thiel, but nodded to the two Ultramarines from the guardhouse to do just that.

  Numeon uttered aloud what they were all thinking.

  ‘Barthusa Narek is gone, and
not by the hand of the enemy.’

  Fourteen

  Closing ranks

  Magna Macragge Civitas, ‘Ash Quarter’

  Darkness filled the sword hall, abject but for tiny islands of quietly crackling firelight. Grey ash gathered at the foot of braziers, both mere flakes of wood and a burnt offering. Even the air was black, thronged with soot and the sharp reek of cinder. Heat thickened the atmosphere, haze vibrated the shadows and a stifling pall lay over the gathering.

  There were sixty-six of them, huddled together in the gloom. Shoulders hunched, hulking in their deep green plate, their eyes burned with ember-like brightness. Skin blacker than sackcloth, enduring as onyx, they looked diabolic and the citizens of the Civitas had wisely stayed away.

  Formerly part of a district, the sword hall and some of its surroundings now belonged to those born of fire. They had claimed it, the sixty-six, not through violence or direct intimidation, merely by occupancy and the strange nature of their customs. Some amongst the natives of Macragge now called it the ‘Ash Quarter’.

  Rek’or Xathen took a long pull of his rhaga pipe, exhaling clinker-redolent smoke as he asked, ‘Do we even have a ship?’

  ‘The Charybdis awaits in dock.’

  Xathen’s hard eyes found Gargo amongst the other Salamanders. He scowled, unintentionally emphasising the facial scar that ran diagonally across his face. Xathen was a Pyroclast, one of the few. He was volatile before the massacre; now he always bordered on eruption, or so Var’kir had often remarked.

  ‘That piece of sked? It’s a wonder it made it back from Isstvan V. How’s it going to get us through the Ruinstorm?’

  Igen Gargo had a fine salting of alabaster-white hair. His thin beard ran in a stripe down his chin. Short, he was nonetheless strong, with the heavy shoulders of a black-smiter. Folding his arms, he looked even more compact and formidable.

  ‘Ship’s sound,’ he said, ‘and has a strong master. Adyssian says it’ll endure. I believe him.’

  Xathen snorted, unimpressed. ‘You spend overlong with the humans.’

  ‘They’re our kin, Xathen,’ warned Var’kir, mildly remonstrating the veteran. ‘And we must trust them, or trust no one.’ His black armour blended almost seamlessly with his flesh, so that he was nearly invisible but for the burning coals of his fire-red sclera and the white crest of hair that bifurcated his skull. He looked tired after his recent encounter with the Unburdened Xenut Sul.