FOURTEEN

Apollo’s Arrow
Engine kill
Elektra complex

Ophir belonged to the Death Guard. Its refineries, mills and promethium wells were now slaved to the will of Mortarion and the Warmaster’s Mechanicum cohorts. The fires had been contained, the damage repaired, and within ten hours of the XIV Legion’s assault, Ophir’s infrastructure was fully functional.

Squadrons of tankers were assembled, filled with precious fuel for the fleets of Land Raiders, Rhinos and battle tanks rumbling on cracked permacrete aprons. Ten thousand Legion warriors stood ready to march westward to the fields of battle, but there was a problem.

Nine thousand kilometres of dense jungle.

Nine thousand kilometres of rocky crags, undulant hills, ridged spines and plunging river basins. Like the Arduenna Silva of Old Earth, Molech’s generals believed the jungles of Kush to be utterly impenetrable and thus only an ancient curtain-wall warded against assault from that axis. Its local name was the Preceptor Line. Orbital augurs revealed negligible Imperial presence upon it.

But where the generals of Old Earth had been proved wrong, those of Molech were right to believe the jungles an impassable barrier. The terrain was bad enough, but killer beasts dwelled in its steamy interior; roving azhdarchid flocks, territorial mallahgra or predator packs of xenosmilus.

And those were the least of the great monsters rumoured to dwell in the jungle’s dark heart.

A solitary Rhino drove out from the hundreds of Death Guard vehicles rumbling at the jungle’s edge. Unremarkable in appearance, its hull was old and scarred with damage. Its cupola-mounted bolters were missing, and the heraldry of the Death Guard looked to have been burned off in the fighting to seize Ophir. It passed between the high towers raised to keep watch on the jungle and vanished from sight.

The lone vehicle followed the line of an old hunting trail once used by House Nurthen until the last of that line had been slain when a bull mallahgra tore his Knight apart during mating season. Overgrown and unfavourable to anything other than a tracked vehicle, the trail was just about practicable.

The sound and vibration of its engine couldn’t help but attract attention. A pack of spine-backed xenosmilus stalked the Rhino, a muscular blend of sabre-tooth and crocodile, with chameleonic fur and a voracious appetite for flesh.

The pack leader was a monstrous beast with spines like spears and fangs like swords. It matched the Rhino in bulk, and its hide rippled with dappled shadows of the jungle and fleeting shafts of sunlight. As the Rhino followed the trail along the edge of a rocky slope, the pack sprang its trap. Three beasts ran in from the side. They shoulder-barged the Rhino, clawing its hull and gouging the metal with yellowed claws.

The pack leader leapt from hiding and paws like sledgehammers bludgeoned the vehicle from the trail. It tipped onto its side and rolled down the slope into what had once been a river basin.

Now it was a killing floor.

The rest of the pack charged in, tearing at the upturned Rhino and peeling its armour back like paper. Before they could completely wreck the vehicle, an enlarged hatch slammed open in its side and a bulky figure stepped onto the dry basin.

Encased in a fully-sealed exo-suit intended for the internal maintenance of plasma reactors – and which had been the precursor to Terminator armour – the figure was snapped up in the pack leader’s jaws.

Hook-like teeth deep in the beast’s jaws sawed into the layered adamantium and ceramite. Heavy plates groaned, but the monster didn’t taste flesh. Roaring in anger, the xenosmilus swung its head and threw the figure at a tumble of boulders. Rock split, but the armour held firm.

The Rhino’s occupant rose smoothly to his feet as if being flung around like a rag doll by enormous predators was of no consequence to him. The pack abandoned the Rhino and formed a circle. Caustic saliva dripped from their jaws.

The armoured warrior reached up and snapped open a complex series of locking bolts and vacuum seals. He removed his helmet and dropped it to the ground. The revealed face was in constant flux between life and death, the skin rotting to carrion meat and restoring itself between breaths.

‘Pack hunters?’ said Ignatius Grulgor. ‘Disappointing. I was hoping for some of the bigger beasts.’

The xenosmilus didn’t attack. Their spines stood erect as they smelled the corruption on this prey-thing. Bad meat even the scavengers wouldn’t touch.

The tall reeds surrounding Grulgor died first, a spreading wave of death that turned the ground black with rotted vegetation. He exhaled toxins, plagues, bacteria and viral strands once banned in an earlier age, but which man’s greed had allowed to endure.

His every breath turned the air into a lethal weapon.

The pack leader collapsed, coughing necrotic wads of dissolving lung matter. The flesh melted from its bones in an instant, a time-lapsed pict-feed of decay run in fast forward. The pack died with it as Grulgor extended the reach of the Life-Eater, growing exponentially stronger with his every breath that wasn’t breath.

The jungle was dying around him. Trees collapsed into decaying mulch in a heartbeat. Rivers curdled to dust and vegetation to gaseous ooze.

He was ground zero, patient zero and every vector imaginable.

His touch was death, his breath was death and his gaze was death. Where he walked, the jungle died and would never know growth again.

Ignatius Grulgor was the Life-Eater given sentience, a walking pandemic. A god of plague to rival the Nosoi of Pandora’s folly or the terrible Morbus of the Romanii.

What had once been impenetrable jungle was dissolving like ice before the flamer. Thousands of hectares sagged and flowed around Mortarion’s reborn son like melting wax.

Ignatius Grulgor retrieved his helmet and returned to the Rhino, which now sat in a morass of cancerous vegetation. His warp-infused flesh was easily able to right the vehicle and its tracks slammed down on a sopping carpet of purulent matter.

Where before he could see barely ten metres in any direction, now the horizon receded into the distance as he spread his rampant corruption to its farthest extent.

Ignatius Grulgor climbed back into the Rhino and continued driving west over a pestilential wasteland of decay.

Fifty kilometres behind, the Death Guard followed.

The floor of Noama Calver’s Galenus was awash with blood, spilling from side to side with every manoeuvre her driver was forced to make. Constructed from an extended Samaritan chassis, the interior of the Galenus was equipped with a full surgical suite and twenty casualty berths.

Every one of those berths was filled twice over. About a third of the soldiers they carried were dead. Kjell kept urging her to ditch the corpses, but Noama would sooner throw herself out the back than abandon her boys like that. Her surgeon-captain’s uniform was supposed to be pale green, but was soaked in blood from the chest down. Ruby droplets dotted lined mahogany skin that was too pale from too little sleep and too many long days in the medicae wards. Eyes that had seen too many boys die were heavy with regret and remembered every one of them.

The Galenus Mobile Medicus was a heavy tracked vehicle as wide and long as a superheavy. But unlike pretty much every other superheavy she knew, it had a decent kick to its engine. That could usually get the wounded out of harm’s way, but there were still plenty of things that could move faster than them.

Nothing she could do about that, so instead she concentrated on the matter in hand.

She and Lieutenant Kjell had pulled the soldier from the wreck of a Baneblade whose engine exploded ninety kilometres south of Avadon. Tags said his name was Nyks, and his youthful eyes reminded her of her son serving off-world in the 24th Molech Firescions.

Those same eyes begged her to save his life, but Noama didn’t know if she could. His belly had been opened by a red-hot shell fragment and promethium burned skin slithered over his chest like wet clay.

But that wasn’t what was going to kill him. That particular honour would go to the nicked coeliac artery in his abdomen.

‘He’s not gonna make it, Noama!’ shouted Kjell over the roar of the engines. ‘I need help over here, and this one might actually live.’

‘Shut up, lieutenant,’ snapped Noama, finally grasping the writhing artery. ‘I’m not losing this one. I can get it.’

The glistening blood vessel squirmed in her grip like a hostile snake. The Galenus rocked and her grip slackened for a fraction of a second.

‘Damn it, Anson!’ she shouted as the artery slid back into the soldier’s body. ‘Keep us level, you Throne-damned idiot! Don’t make me come up there!’

‘Trying, ma’am,’ said Anson over the vox, ‘but it’s kind of hard travelling at this speed and with all this traffic.’

Hundreds of vehicles were fleeing the carnage at Avadon, heading for the armed camp forming six hundred kilometres south around Lupercalia. Regiments from bases along the edges of the Tazkhar Steppes and the hinterlands of the east around the Preceptor Line were already congregating on Lupercalia, with more on the march every day.

All well and good. Assuming they made it that far.

Scuttlebutt from vox-fragments and the lips of wounded men said enemy Titans were pursuing them. Noama put little faith in such talk. More than likely the rumours were typical grunt pessimism.

At least she hoped so.

‘Are we going to make it, captain?’ asked Kjell.

‘Don’t ask me such stupid questions,’ she snapped. ‘I’m busy.’

‘The Sons of Horus are going to catch us, aren’t they?’

‘If they do I’ll be sure to let you know,’ said Noama.

She’d heard a man with no arms and legs claim the Titans of the three Legios were on the march to save them, but didn’t know whether that was a dying man’s fantasy or the truth. Knowing what she knew of the things men and women said in their most pain-filled moments, Noama inclined to the former.

‘Get back here, you slippery little bastard,’ said Noama, pressing her fingers into the soldier’s body. She grasped for the artery. ‘I can feel the little swine, but it’s making me work for it.’

Her fingers closed on the torn blood vessel, and hair-fine suture clamps extruded from her medicae gauntlet to seal it shut.

‘Got you,’ she said, pinning the artery in place with deft twists of her fingertips. Noama stood straight and, satisfied the worst of the boy’s life-threatening injuries was dealt with for now, brought over the implanted nursing servitor with a sub-vocal command.

‘Seal him up and wrap those burns in counterseptic gels,’ she said. ‘I’m not getting the bleeding stopped just for him to die from a damned infection, you understand? Right, now watch his blood pressure too, and let me know if he starts spiking. Clear?’

The servitor acknowledged her orders and set to work.

Noama moved onto the next hideously wounded soldier.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Been in the wars have we?’

The twin Warlords of Legio Fortidus strode from the gloomy caverns of the Zanark Deeps side by side followed by the last of their Legio. Princeps Uta-Dagon’s force numbered two Warlords and four Warhounds. On most battlefields that would be enough firepower to easily carry the day.

Against the force on Uta-Dagon’s threat auspex it would be spitting in the eye of the tempest.

When word had come of the civil war on Mars, Uta-Dagon had assumed his Titanicus brothers would be at the heart of the fighting, standing with those loyal to the Emperor. Only later, as more details emerged of the catastrophe engulfing the Red Planet had the truth emerged.

They were all that remained of Legio Fortidus.

In the end, though, it changed nothing.

Molech was at war, and the architect of his Legio’s doom was before him.

Uta-Dagon floated within his amniotic casket within the head section of Red Vengeance, the Warlord Titan he had piloted for eighty years and whose name he had changed after a vivid waking dream in the Manifold. His sister-princeps, Utu-Lerna had likewise been compelled to rename her engine, a Warlord whose new designation was Bloodgeld.

Uta-Dagon had long since sacrificed his organic eyes to the service of the Legio, but Red Vengeance’s auto-senses interpreted the sky a vivid crimson.

<A good sky to die beneath,> said Utu-Lerna, reading his thoughts through the Manifold as she so often did. Twins whose cords had been cut in the rains of Pax Olympus, their birth was seen as auspicious. And so it had proved when both were taken as babes by the Collegia Titanicus.

<Red Vengeance and a red sky.>

<For the Red Planet,> finished Utu-Lerna.

Burning starships streaked the sky. Had his brothers on Mars seen skies like this before they died? He hoped so, for it had been under such a sky the Legio had been born, fighting in the Dyzan Valley against the resurgent Terrawatt Clan.

<I see them, brother,> said Utu-Lerna. Bloodgeld’s warsight was keener than that of Red Vengeance and Uta-Dagon had learnt to trust his twin’s interpretations of her engine’s senses.

Moments later Uta-Dagon saw them too. Fifteen engines on the static-laced horizon, striding south in pursuit of the survivors of Avadon. A great column of armoured vehicles swarmed the Titan’s feet. Scavengers following apex predators.

In three minutes or less, the enemy Titans would be in range of the retreating Imperial forces. Thousands would die unless the pursuers could be given a more tempting target.

Uta-Dagon heard an intake of breath behind him and twisted his withered form around in the fluid-filled casket. Ur-Nammu had seen them too, her almost human face underlit by the soft glow of the threat auspex. Like Uta-Dagon, the Warmonger was Mechanicum. She was not engine-capable, yet had chosen to die with her brothers and sisters.

<You should not be afraid, Ur-Nammu,> said the princeps. <Today we will join our brothers in death.>

‘I do not fear death, my princeps,’ said Ur-Nammu, before correcting herself and presenting her answer in the Manifold. <I fear that I will be of no help to you in the coming fight.>

<Your presence here honours me,> said Uta-Dagon. <You are what others in the Titanicus call an executor fetial, since you can move between the Legios freely. You have no need to die in my engine.>

<Where else would I wish to die?> asked Ur-Nammu and the simple honesty of her cant needed no reply.

The princeps returned his attention to the approaching battlescape, its vector contours and salient features forming in the interface within his skull. Manifold records quickly identified the traitor engines.

Reavers: Dread Wake, Hand of Ruin and Myrmidion Rex of Legio Mortis; Silence of Death and Pax Ascerbus of Legio Interfector, dubbed the Murder Lords after Isstvan III. Nightmaw of Legio Vulcanum.

Warhounds: Kitsune and Kumiho of Legio Vulpa, Venataris Mori and Carnophage of Vulcanum.

And then the Warlords: Mask of Ruin, Talismanik, and Anger’s Reward, also of Vulcanum. Xestor’s Sword and Phantom Lord of Legio Mortis.

Data on the enemy engines flowed around Uta-Dagon, engagements fought, engine kills, maintenance profiles and damage records. In a straight up fight, such details could mean the difference between victory and defeat. Here they were unnecessary. The chance to perhaps do a little more damage before being destroyed.

<They see us, brother,> said Utu-Lerna.

<Flank speed,> ordered Uta-Dagon, and his Mechanicum priests drove the reactor to a higher pitch. Red Vengeance increased its pace, thunderous footfalls cracking the ground and smashing maglevs where there wasn’t enough clearance to avoid them.

Uta-Dagon felt intense heat swell his phantom limbs as his weapon systems spooled up to fire. His right arm was the searing power of a volcano cannon, his left the clenched fist of a hellstorm cannon. He felt the passage of scores of missiles moving through his body of iron and sinew to the launchers at his carapace.

<Warhounds moving to circle us, sister.>

<They think us pitiful, brother.>

<Shall we disabuse them?>

<No, let us play the crippled Legio they think us,> said Utu-Lerna, with what he could hear was a grin on her wraith-like face.

<You always did have the best ideas, sister,> said Uta-Dagon.

It called itself the Teratus, though the Manifold of Red Vengeance had identified it as Pax Ascerbus, a Reaver of Legio Interfector. Blood was its new oil, the sentience of a million warp scraps its marrow and its corrupt machine-spirit was a howling, warp-stitched thing of murder-lust.

With four Warhounds at its feet, it strode with grim purpose towards Legio Fortidus. Talismanik and Phantom Lord marched at its back, and the Teratus dredged power from its every system to keep ahead of the larger engines. They howled at it to slow its advance, to let them dispatch the doomed Legio, but the Teratus ignored them.

The engines of Fortidus were running at barely half power, woken too soon and without the proper consecration. Too long at rest had reduced their reactor fires to embers. Void shields were still sparking from emergency ignition and their walk was the leaden shuffle of a condemned man en route to his execution.

The Warhounds circling the two Warlords were poor specimens. Wary, where they ought to be aggressive. Keeping close to the larger engines where they should be duelling with their opposite numbers.

<Enfeebled half-engines,> it said, and the moderati flesh-things roosting in the weapon compartments flinched at the scrapcode-laced barbs in the cant. <The death of their Legio has broken them. Killing them will be mercy.>

He sent his own Warhounds out to engage the Fortidus Scout Titans with a pulsed order through the Manifold. Warhorns braying, the eager pups surged forward. They wove in and out of each other’s path, eager to claim the first kill.

The Teratus increased its stride, unconsciously trying to match the pace of the smaller engines. The gap between it and the following Warlords grew wider.

Ranging fire snapped between the Scout Titans. The Teratus ignored it. A baring of fangs, nothing more. Warnings shimmered at the edge of its perception. Power surges, fusion warnings. Emission flares. At first they made no sense.

Then, with a sudden pulse of awareness, he realised how it had been misled, its own sense of righteous superiority causing it to see what it wanted to see.

Neither of the Fortidus engines was as enfeebled as they first appeared. Their reactors surged to life with high-volume plasma injections. A terminally-risky manoeuvre that would end a reactor’s useful life in one final sunburst of searing brilliance. Weapon systems blazed with power and opened fire in the same instant.

Kitsune and Kumiho suffered first. Shrieking salvoes of Hellstorm fire stripped them of their void shields. Pinpoint volcano cannon shots incinerated their princeps’ compartments and left their thrashing limbs pawing the earth. Venataris Mori and Carnophage scattered at the first barrage of shots, but not fast enough. Venataris Mori fell with a leg blown off and Carnophage ploughed a hundred metre furrow with its canopy as its gyros overcompensated for its princeps’ desperate evasive manoeuvres.

<Engine kill!> blared the Manifold with open-vox transmission from Legio Fortidus. The Teratus screamed and its moderati-creatures howled in pain. It bled power from propulsion to the forward void shields. Too little, too late.

While the Warlords of Fortidus were killing the Teratus’s Scouts, theirs were sprinting forward, heads down and weapons blazing. Jackals hoping to bring down a land leviathan. Turbo fire, gatling fire and streaking missiles stripped the Teratus’s void shields in squalling flares of discharge.

But Scout Titans didn’t take on a Battle Titan and live.

The Teratus turned the gatling blaster on its nearest attacker. Warhounds were fast and agile, but nothing could outrun gunfire.

A storm of incendiary shells burst its voids and staggered it in a ferocious cannonade. Stripped of its shields and speed it was dead in the water. A shock-pulse of melta reduced its princeps canopy to subatomic slag.

Self-guiding missiles streaked from the Teratus’s upper carapace and swatted another Warhound into the ground. Its legs flailed as it tried to right itself. The Teratus slammed its vast foot down. The Warlord’s enormous bulk crushed it flat.

The Teratus fed on the death scream of its victim, drawing the binaric energy into its corrupted Manifold. Its horns blasted a triumphal roar. Its shields were failing, peeled back by niggling fire from the two remaining Warhounds. The Reaver took a backward step as a combined barrage of Hellstorm cannon from the advancing Warlords blew out the last of its protection.

Warhounds were consummate lone predators, but they were also superlative pack hunters. They darted in, weapons punishing the Reaver’s vulnerable rear section. The armour on its reactor housing began peeling back.

Warning sigils flashed through its mind. Coolant leaks, plasma venting. It took another backward step, knowing it needed to link with the Warlord Titans it had tried so hard to outpace. Its right leg locked up, fused by repeated fire from the two Warhounds. The joints and servos there were on fire, and no amount of damage control would free it.

The Teratus watched the two Warlords of Legio Fortidus close.

It felt their weapons lock Pax Ascerbus in their sights, felt the power that had infused it in the blood-soaked hangar temples flee its iron flesh.

It locked its own weapons in return.

<Come,> said the Teratus. <We die together.>

The threat of two Warlords in the flank now became too serious to ignore, and the traitor Titans broke off their pursuit of Avadon’s defenders to crush the Imperial engines.

Leaving the blazing corpses of the Teratus and the Warhounds in their wake, Red Vengeance and Bloodgeld limped into the teeth of Talismanik, Phantom Lord, Myrmidion Rex and Mask of Ruin.

In the end, it took another three hours for the last engine of Legio Fortidus to fall.

Red Vengeance and a red sky.

For the Red Planet.

Cebella Devine had long since lost any pleasure she might once have taken in tormenting her stepson. Albard’s hope had died first, then his expectation of death. He knew they could keep him alive indefinitely.

The nightmare of his continued existence eroded his sanity to the point where her icily-constructed barbs fell on deaf ears. She would have killed him long ago, but a firstborn son carried the bloodline. Shargali-Shi’s treatments would only work with the vital fluids of the bloodline.

Cebella dismissed the Sacristans at Albard’s door.

Some intimacies were for a mother alone.

The holographic fire burned in the hearth, casting its fictive heat and illumination around the gloomy chamber. She had come here so often she could pick out individual flame shapes and tell how long remained before the cycle would repeat.

She turned from the phantom light as a line of blood teared in the corner of her eye. Brightness hurt, and only regular injections of complex elastins and glassine meshes within her eyeballs allowed her to see at all. The droplet ran down the drum-tight skin of Cebella’s face, but she didn’t feel it. Her skin had been grafted, stretched and injected so many times it was deadened to virtually all sensation.

The stench within Albard’s chambers was undoubtedly noisome, but like her tactile perceptions, her olfactory senses had also atrophied. Shargali-Shi had promised to restore and enhance her faculties, and each procedure brought her closer to the perfection she had once possessed.

The silver of her exo-skeleton glittered in the firelight, and Albard looked up from his chair of furs and putrescence. Saliva leaked from the side of his mouth and matted his unkempt beard, but his organic eye was clearer than it had been for a long time.

Raeven’s visit had galvanised him.

Good. She had need to vent the pain of her grief upon another.

A blunt, wedge-shaped head rose from behind Albard’s chair and a forked tongue tasted the air. Shesha, her former husband’s naga. It hissed and sank back to its slumbers, as decrepit and useless as its current master.

‘Hello, Cebella,’ said Albard. ‘Is it that time already?’

‘It is,’ she replied, kneeling beside him and placing her augmetic-sheathed hands on his lap. The encrusted filth on his coverlet revolted her. It looked like he’d soiled himself, and for once she was glad she could no longer smell things.

‘Where’s Lyx?’ he asked, his voice cracked and brittle. ‘It’s normally her that plays the vampire.’

‘She is not here,’ said Cebella.

Albard gave a dry, hacking cough that turned into snorts of laughter.

‘Standing at her husband’s side as he fights for Molech?’

‘Something like that,’ said Cebella, producing a trio of amethyst vials and a hollow naga fang from the folds of her dress.

Albard’s wheezing laughter died at the sight of the vials, and had it not carried the risk of ripping the skin all the way to her ears, Cebella would have smiled.

She moved the coverlet aside to reveal Albard’s scrawny, wasted legs. Pressure sores and puncture marks ran the length of his inner thigh, the skin around them scabbed and raw.

‘Are the Sacristans cleaning these?’ she asked.

‘Scared I might get an infection and poison you?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The bloodline must be pure.’

‘Even the word pure sounds dirty in your mouth.’

Cebella lifted the naga fang and pressed it to what little meat remained in Albard’s leg. The skin dimpled like cured vellum, and purpled veins stood out like roads on a map.

Albard leaned forward, and the movement was so unexpected that Cebella flinched in surprise. It had been years since she’d seen her stepson move more than the muscles of his face. She hadn’t been sure that he could move at all.

‘Lyx usually taunts me with Raeven’s exploits,’ said Albard, and there was a mocking edge to his tone that made Cebella want to cut his throat here and now. ‘Aren’t you going to do the same?’

‘You said it yourself, your brother fights for Molech,’ she said, her voice flat.

‘No, no, no,’ sniggered Albard. ‘The way I hear it, my stepbrother left two of his sons dead at Avadon. Terrible shame.’

Cebella surged forward, scattering the jars. Blood or no blood, she was going to kill him. She’d drain him dry from the jugular.

‘My grandsons are dead!’ she yelled, blood-laced spittle flying as the skin at the corners of her mouth split. Her hand snatched for his neck.

‘Wait,’ said Albard, staring over her shoulder. ‘Look.’

Cebella turned her head as Albard’s hand pressed something beneath his coverlet. The holographic fire exploded with blinding radiance, and Cebella screamed as the light stabbed into her delicate eyes like hot needles.

‘Shesha here doesn’t have any venom left to blind you,’ hissed Albard. ‘So this will have to do.’

Cebella clawed at her face. Red tears streaked her cheeks and she tried to rise. She had to get away, had to have her Sacristans take her to Shargali-Shi’s hidden valley.

Albard’s hand rose from his coverlet and gripped hers.

Cebella looked down in surprise, seeing Albard through a gauzy veil of red. His grip was firm, unyielding. Her flesh cracked, and stinking blood oozed between his fingers.

‘Your grandchildren?’ continued Albard. ‘The midwife should have strangled those inbred freaks with their still-wet cords. They’re no better than the beasts we once hunted… you’re all monsters!’

She struggled in his grip. The taut skin ripped along her forearm. Anger overcame her shock and she remembered the naga fang in her other hand. She brought it around and stabbed for where she thought his neck would be.

The fang stabbed into his shoulder, but so swathed was he in furs that she doubted it pierced his husked flesh. She fought to pull away, but madness gave Albard strength. Shocking, unfamiliar pain bloomed as the skin of her arm split all the way to her shoulder. It sloughed from the muscle beneath, like a débutante consort slipping off an opera glove.

Horror pinned her in place as Albard dropped the sheath of skin he’d torn from her arm. He gripped her by the skeletal frame of the exo-suit – using her weight for leverage, he hauled himself to the edge of his chair with a grimace of ferocious effort.

The fire dimmed and she saw something glitter in his other hand.

A blade of some kind. A scalpel? She couldn’t tell.

Where had Albard obtained a scalpel?

‘Lyx enjoys my pain,’ said Albard as if she’d asked the question out loud. ‘She knows just how to hurt me, but she’s not too thorough in gathering up her little toys.’

The scalpel sliced down in two quick slashes.

‘I learned a lot about suffering from my bitch wife,’ said Albard. ‘But I don’t much care about your suffering. I just want you to die. Can you do that for me, whore-mother? Can you just please die?’

She tried to reply, to curse him to an eternity of pain, but her mouth was full of liquid. Bitter, rich, metallic liquid. She lifted the naga fang as if she might yet slay her murderer.

‘Actually, I lied,’ said Albard, slicing the scalpel neatly through the tendons of her wrist. The fang clattered to the floor as her hand went limp. ‘I do care about you suffering.’

Cebella Devine slumped back onto her knees, convulsing as her arteries pumped litres of blood into Albard’s lap. The exo-suit twitched and spasmed as it struggled to interpret the signals coming from her dying brain.

Eventually it stopped trying.

Albard watched the life flee Cebella’s blood-limned eyes and let out a dusty sigh that he had been keeping inside for over forty years. He pushed his stepmother’s corpse from his lap and gathered his strength. It had almost been too much to fight her. He was little better than a cripple, and only hatred had given him the strength to kill her.

Looking down at the dead body, he blinked as – just for a moment – he saw the carcass of a mallahgra. Steel struts of armature became bone, furred robes became animal hide. Cebella’s too-tight skinmask was the scarab maw of the mountain predator that had taken his eye and cursed him to this augmetic that filled his skull with constant static burr.

Then she was Cebella again, the bitch who had murdered his own mother and replaced her. Who had birthed two unwanted siblings and poisoned them both against him with talk of old gods and destiny. He should have killed her the moment she first came to Lupercalia and insinuated herself into House Devine.

His lap was sticky with her blood. It smelled awful, like bad meat or milk left to curdle in the sun. It was the smell of her soul, he decided. It had made her a monster, and once again it seemed as though her outline blurred, becoming the mallahgra of his nightmares.

Albard dropped the scalpel onto his stepmother’s body and cleared his throat. He spat phlegm and brown lung gunk.

‘Get in here!’ he shouted, as loudly as he could. ‘Sacristans! Dawn Guard! Get in here now!’

He kept shouting until the door opened and his mother’s pet Sacristans warily pushed open the door. Their half-human, half-mechanised faces were not yet incapable of registering surprise, and their eyes widened at the sight of their mistress lying dead before the fire.

Two armed soldiers of the Dawn Guard stood at the doorway. Their expressions were very different to those of the Sacristans.

He saw relief and knew why.

‘You two,’ said Albard waving a hand at the Sacristans. ‘Kneel.’

Ingrained obedience routines saw them instantly obey, and Albard nodded to the two soldiers behind them. In the instant before he spoke, he saw them not as mortals, but as towering knights of House Devine. Armoured in crimson and bearing glorious pennants from their segmented carapaces, he saw himself reflected in the glassy canopy.

Not as the half-man he was, but as a strong, powerful warrior.

A god amongst men, slayer of beasts.

Albard pointed at the kneeling Sacristans.

‘Kill them,’ he ordered.

The Sacristans raised hands in supplication, but twin las-bolts cored their skulls before they could speak. Their headless bodies slumped onto the stone-flagged floor next to Cebella.

Albard waved the two soldiers – or were they heroic knights? – forwards. It seemed that their steps were surely too heavy to be those of mortals.

‘Strip that witch of her exo-suit,’ said Albard. ‘I’m going to need it.’