NINETEEN

Casualties of war
The order is given
The Stormlord rides

The transit was thick with bolter shells. They spanked from projecting stanchions and blasted portions of the walls away. Across from Loken, Qruze ducked back into cover and ejected the magazine from his weapon. The barrel drooled smoke and heat.

Qruze slapped a fresh load into the weapon. He shouted to Loken.

‘Get in the damn fight!’

Loken shook his head. This was all wrong.

More shots filled the corridor leading to the armoury. A security detail of Sons of Horus – together with a number of Mechanicum adepts – were inside, hunkered behind a bulwark designed to prevent an enemy from seizing the stockpile of ammunition, weapons and explosives.

A grenade detonated nearby. Fragments of hot iron pinged from his armour. A few embedded. None penetrated.

‘Loken, for Cthonia’s sake, shoot!’ shouted Qruze.

The bolter in his hands felt like a relic dug up by the Conservatory. Something fascinating to look at, but whose purpose was alien and unknown. He could no more bring the gun to bear than he could understand the mechanisms of the machine that crafted it.

‘Loken!’

The pathfinders had encountered the Sons of Horus en route to mark the armoury for a tertiary torpedo strike. Guiding futharc sigils had been scraped into the wall, warning assault teams away, and they’d paused for Tubal Cayne to divine a path towards a nearby ordnance signum array.

Severian and Karayan were scouting potential routes when the Sons of Horus had marched straight into the radial hub.

The watch sector had been Loken’s, but he’d missed them.

He hadn’t heard them or even been aware of their approach.

Lost in contemplation of a painted Eye of Horus on the opposite bulkhead and trying not to listen to the scratch of voices at the periphery of hearing.

The first he’d known of the enemy was when their sergeant called out, demanding identification. Stupid, he should have shot first.

Mutual surprise was all that saved the pathfinders.

Neither force had expected to encounter the other. The fleeting shock was just enough time for Loken to raise the alarm.

The Sons of Horus regrouped down the radial corridor towards the armoury as Altan Nohai and Bror Tyrfingr had opened fire.

‘Contact!’ reported Cayne.

Qruze leaned out and fired a short burst.

‘Come on, Loken,’ he shouted between bursts. ‘I need you with me to go forward!’

The hard bangs of bolter fire and the chugging beat of an emplaced autocannon filled the transit with a storm of solid rounds. Ricochets bounced madly from the walls. A shell fragment deformed the metal beside Loken’s helmet.

He gripped his bolter, his grip threatening to crush the stock.

This isn’t right.

The Sons of Horus were traitors, the Warmaster the Arch-traitor.

But these are your brothers. You accepted their brotherhood, and swore to return it as a brother.

‘No,’ he hissed, slamming the bolter against the faceplate of his helmet. ‘No, they’re traitors and they deserve to die.’

You are a Son of Horus. So is Iacton. So is Severian. Kill them and kill yourself if you would damn all of Lupercal’s lineage!

Loken fought to keep the voice out.

The vox crackled.

‘Go when you hear us,’ said Severian.

Assaulting an armoury was a sure-fire way to end up facing some extremely potent ordnance, but what choice did they have?

‘Tubal? Only two ways in or out?’ shouted Qruze.

Cayne nodded, sweeping through layers of deck schematics. ‘Yes, according to the extant plans.’

‘Both covered?’

‘Voitek and Rubio are blocking the other one,’ said Varren, not shooting, but ready with his chainaxe.

‘So they’re not getting out,’ said Qruze. ‘But they’ll be voxing for help right now.’

‘Voitek is employing a vox-jammer,’ said Cayne, zooming in on the image of their current location.

‘How long before the adepts burn though it?’ asked Zaven, firing down the transit to the armoury. ‘And is anyone else even slightly concerned that we’re shooting into an armoury?’

‘Eighteen seconds till burn through,’ answered Cayne. ‘So long as you don’t hit anything sensitive in there we should be fine.’

‘Sensitive?’ said Bror. ‘Hjolda! It’s a bloody armoury, everything’s sensitive!’

‘On the contrary, I think you’ll find–’ began Cayne, but Qruze shut him up.

‘Stow it,’ said Qruze, glancing over at Loken. ‘Everyone keep shooting and be ready.’

‘You said the armoury has only two exits?’ said Zaven.

‘Yes,’ confirmed Cayne.

‘So how’s Severian getting in?’

‘Ready?’ said Severian.

Karayan nodded and Severian set the timer for two seconds.

They rolled aside as the graviton grenade detonated with a pulse of energy that made him sick to his stomach. An orb of anomalous gravitational energy swelled to a diameter of exactly a metre and increased the local mass of steel girders and air-circulation units within the reinforced ceiling void a thousand-fold.

A sphere of ultra-dense material compacted in on itself like the heart of a neutron star and fell into the armoury with the force of an Imperator Titan’s footfall.

Karayan was first through the hole, dropping into the armoury like a weighted shadow. Severian followed him an instant later. He landed at the edge of the crater punched in the deck and brought his bolter up.

The enemy reacted to the intruders in their midst quicker than Severian would have liked. They were Sons of Horus, what else could he expect? Severian put a bolt into the nearest, displacing and ripping a burst through another. Return fire chased him.

Karayan favoured knifework. His non-reflective blade found the gap between a sergeant’s helmet and his gorget. He plunged and twisted. Blood sprayed. He moved on, diving, rolling, using the walls and floor. His knife killed the Mechanicum adepts. Chemical fumes misted the air. Floodstreams painted the walls with brackish, oily fluids.

Severian took a knee and pumped another three shots out.

Two legionaries dropped, the third brought an energised buckler around in time to deflect the bolt. Severian’s surprise almost cost him his life. The warrior was too bulky, had too many arms.

Forge lord. Manipulator harness.

He leapt at Severian, a photonic combat blade on a mechanised limb arcing for his neck. Severian threw up his bolter and the blade carved through it. Slowed enough for his armour to take the hit. A second and third arm snapped at his helm and shoulder. Severian barged forward, elbow cracking into the forge lord’s faceplate.

Company colours said Fifth; Little Horus Aximand’s lot.

They rolled on the deck, grappling. Fighting like the murder-gangs of Cthonia in the pits. Knees, elbows, heads; weapons all. The forge lord had more than him and his were harder. Claws tore chunks from Severian’s battleplate. A plasma cutter seared a fire-lined groove in the deck plate a finger breadth from his head.

Severian rammed his helmet into his opponent’s visor. Lenses cracked. Not his. The blade skittered over the armoury floor, its edge fading without a grip.

He rolled. A boot crashed into his helmet. He rolled again.

Ignition flare. A blur of blue-edged light.

Pain and blood. Lung burping itself empty through his plastron.

Severian hooked an elbow around the forge lord’s flesh and blood arm and twisted. Pain shot through to his spine, but the arm snapped with a satisfying crack of tinder.

The forge lord grunted in momentary pain. A manipulator claw slammed into Severian’s face. He ripped the knife from the broken manipulator arm and hacked the claw from the harness. Black oil and lubricant sprayed him. It tasted of malt vinegar.

The forge lord’s spewing binary made the muscles in his armour spasm. Severian shoulder checked his opponent, stabbing the hissing blade into his neck and chest. He cut connector cables and mind impulse unit links. The servo-arms went limp, dead weight now. A bolter shell impacted on the underside of his shoulder guard. Fired from the floor. He spun around and stamped down on a helmet, crushing it like an ice sculpture.

The forge lord came at him again, but without his threshing, clawed arms he was no match for Severian. Too many hours in the armoury, not enough in the arming cages. Severian spun around the clumsy attack and twisted one of the limp servo-arms. He jammed it in the small of the forge lord’s back and manually triggered the plasma cutter. Blue-hot light exploded from the forge lord’s helm lenses. He screamed as superheated air burned its way out of him.

Severian dropped the smoking corpse in time to take a bolt-round in the chest. Thousands of fiery micro-fragments stabbed into his chest through the wound torn by the energised blade. The impact and explosion hurled him back against a rack of bolters. They clattered around him, fresh-oiled and pristine.

He grabbed one. Unloaded, of course. No quartermaster ever stored his weapons fully loaded. Severian tried to stand, but the bolt shell had punched him empty of breath. A traitor legionary swung his bolter to bear while drawing his chainsword.

Efficient, thought Severian as the bolter fired.

Severian was looking down the barrel and even in the moment of seeing the muzzle flare, he knew he should already be dead. Then he saw the spinning round hovering in the air before him. A web of pale lines, like frosted spiderwebs, coated the round.

+Move!+ hissed a voice in his head. Rubio.

Severian dived to the side and the round blew apart the weapon rack behind him. His would-be killer stared in astonishment and took aim again. An explosion lifted him from his feet. Blood misted the air, arcing in a fan from his shattered chest. Gunfire suddenly filled the armoury, multiple sources and directions. The deafening roar of a chainaxe. Severian grabbed a fallen magazine and slammed it hard into his new bolter.

‘Clear!’ shouted a voice. Tyrfingr.

‘Clear!’ Qruze.

‘Grenades, Iacton? Really?’ Tubal Cayne.

Severian grinned. Breath sucked back into his remaining lung and secondary organs. Pain came with it and he pursed his lips.

‘You lot took your bloody time,’ he said as Ares Voitek approached and offered him a hand up. Severian took it and hauled himself to his feet. Gunsmoke fogged the armoury, the stink of bolter propellant. Armoured bodies opened like cracked eggs lent their meaty, metallic, oily odour to the space.

‘Only four seconds from your breach,’ said Ares Voitek.

‘That all?’ said Severian, gratefully putting his arm around the former Iron Hand’s shoulders. ‘Could have sworn it was longer.’

‘That’s combat for you,’ said Voitek. ‘Unless you’re an Iron Hand with internal chrons. Then you know exactly how long has elapsed since the commencement of an engagement.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘Nohai!’ shouted Qruze. ‘Quickly, Zaven and Varren are down!’

They sealed the armoury and carried the wounded from the site of the battle. Nobody would miss the signs of fighting, but at least they could keep the bodies from being discovered for a while. Cayne swiftly navigated forgotten passageways and corridors in search of somewhere isolated and secure.

They tried not to leave a trail of blood.

The chamber Cayne led them to was filled with wrecked tables and chairs, its walls covered in water-damaged murals and obscene graffiti. Some seemed oddly familiar to Loken. The scale of the furnishings and its abandoned nature told him it had once been a retreat for mortals, but he could think of no reason why he might have come to a place like this.

Nohai went to work on Varren and Zaven. Rubio offered his aid, and Nohai gratefully accepted it. Both fallen warriors were badly hurt, but of the two, Zaven’s wounds were the more serious.

‘Will they make it?’ asked Qruze.

‘In the apothecarion, yes. Here, I don’t know,’ said Nohai.

‘Do what you can, Altan.’

Loken sat with his back to a long bar, toying with a set of mildewed cards marked with swords, cups and coins. He’d known someone who’d played an old game of the Franc with such cards, but couldn’t focus on the face. A man? Yes, someone of poetically low character and unexpectedly high morals. The name remained elusive, frustratingly so for a transhuman warrior with a supposedly eidetic memory.

He felt eyes upon him and looked up.

Tubal Cayne stood beneath an obscene mural rendered in anatomically precise detail – thankfully, time and water damage had obscured the offending portions. Cayne sat with one hand on his device, the other resting on the grip of his bolter.

‘What?’ said Loken.

‘You are finding it onerous being here, Loken,’ said Cayne.

‘Is that a question or a statement?’

‘I have not yet decided. Call it a question for now.’

‘It’s strange,’ admitted Loken, slipping the cards into a pouch at his waist. ‘But there’s little left of the ship I knew. This vessel bears the same name, but it’s not the Vengeful Spirit. Not the one I knew. This is a twisted reflection of that proud ship. It’s unpleasant, but no more than I’d expected.’

‘Truly? I had concluded you were experiencing significant psychological difficulties. Why else would you not take part in the fighting at the armoury?’

Loken was immediately on guard, but forced down an outright denial. He stood and brushed water droplets from his armour.

‘This used to be my home,’ he said, walking slowly towards Cayne. ‘Those Sons of Horus used to be my brothers. It shames me that they are now traitors.’

‘It shames us all,’ added Qruze from a booth across the room where he was cleaning his bolter.

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Severian, who sat on the long bar etching kill-notches into his vambrace with his newly-acquired photonic combat blade. The punctured lung made his words breathy.

‘No,’ said Cayne. ‘That is not it. If it were, I would expect to see the same psychological markers in Iacton Qruze and… wait, what is your full name, Severian?’

‘Severian’s all you need to know, and even that’s too much.’

‘You did not fire a single shot, Loken,’ said Cayne. ‘Why not?’

Loken was angry now. He rose to his feet and crossed the chamber to stand in front of Cayne. ‘What are you saying, that I’m not up to the task? That you can’t rely on me?’

‘Yes, that is exactly what I am saying,’ answered Cayne. ‘You are showing all the hallmarks of severe post-traumatic damage. I have been watching you ever since we boarded the Vengeful Spirit. You’re broken inside, Loken. I urge you to return immediately to the Tarnhelm. Your continued presence is endangering the mission and all our lives.’

‘You need to back off,’ said Severian, spinning his combat blade around to aim its glittering tip at Cayne.

‘Why? You of all people know Loken is unfit for this mission.’

Loken slammed Cayne back against the mural.

He pressed a forearm hard against Cayne’s throat.

‘Say that again and I’ll kill you.’

To his credit, Cayne was unfazed by Loken’s attack.

‘This only further proves my point,’ he said.

Qruze appeared at Loken’s side and put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Put the gun away, lad.’

Loken frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

He looked down and saw he had his bolt pistol pressed against Cayne’s chest. He had no memory of drawing the weapon.

Bror Tyrfingr eased Loken’s arm from Cayne’s throat.

‘Hjolda, Loken,’ said Bror. ‘There’ll be plenty more people trying to kill us soon enough without you doing the job for them.’

‘Do you regret leaving the Sons of Horus?’ asked Cayne. ‘Is that it? Is that why you came on this mission, to return to your former master’s side?’

‘Shut up, Tubal,’ snapped Bror, baring his teeth.

‘I do not understand why you all wilfully ignore Loken’s damage,’ said Cayne. ‘He attacks Qruze at Titan, he fails to fight against his former brothers, potentially costing the lives of two of our team. And now he holds a gun on me. We are at a mission-critical stage of our infiltration, and Loken cannot continue. I am not saying anything the rest of you haven’t thought.’

Loken stepped back from Cayne and holstered his pistol. He looked around at the rest of the pathfinder team.

‘Is he right?’ he demanded. ‘Do you all think I’m unfit to lead this mission.’

Qruze and Severian shared a look, but it was Varren who answered, limping over from where he’d been patched up by Altan Nohai. The former World Eater’s chest was a perforated mass of bolter impacts and bloodstains. Skin packs and sealant grafts were all that kept his innards where they belonged. His skin was oily with sweat as his genhanced body burned hot with healing.

‘We have a leader,’ said Varren. ‘I shed blood with Nathaniel and Tylos to bring Loken back from Isstvan. Any warrior who lived through that slaughter deserves our respect. He deserves your respect, Tubal. Malcador and the Wolf King thought Garviel Loken fit for this mission, and I’ll not gainsay them. Nor should you.’

Cayne said nothing, but gave a curt nod.

‘Is this the will of the group?’

‘It is,’ said Bror Tyrfingr. ‘If any man deserves a chance to strike back at the Warmaster, it’s Loken.’

‘You are making a mistake,’ said Cayne, ‘but I will say no more.’

Altan Nohai appeared at Varren’s side, his arms slathered in blood to the elbows.

‘Zaven?’ asked Qruze.

Nohai shook his head.

The Battle of Lupercalia began, as the industrialised wars heralding the first collapse of Old Earth once had, with a pre-dawn barrage. Fifty-three newly-landed artillery regiments with over twelve hundred guns between them shattered the day with thunderous fire from upraised Basilisks, Griffons and Minotaurs.

Heavier guns waited in artillery depots for the general advance, the Bombards and Colossus, the Medusas and the Bruennhilde. Their guns were unsuited for long range barrages, and would follow the mechanised infantry to pound the Imperial ridge in the moments before the final escalade.

Army regiments sworn to the Warmaster advanced in wide convoys behind a creeping barrage of high explosives and a glittering screen of shroud bombs. Tens of thousands of armoured carriers daubed with the Eye of Horus and bearing icons of unnatural provenance roared towards the enemy. Battle tanks bore hooked trophy racks of corpses, and one glacis in five bore a chained prisoner from Avadon.

Hideous Mechanicum constructs of dark iron, clanking legs, spiked wheels and bulbous, insectile appearance marched with feral packs of skitarii keeping a wary distance.

A tide of armour and flesh roared over the wide expanse of the lowland agri-belts. The continent’s breadbasket of arable land, gold and green from horizon to horizon, was churned to ruin beneath their biting tracks. Totem carriers on flatbed transporters bore beaten iron sigils on swaying poles amidst hundreds of robed brotherhoods.

Self-anointed with bloodthirsting titles, their chants and rhythmic drumbeats were carried on unnatural winds to the waiting Imperial forces.

Perhaps half of the Titan engines of Vulcanum, Mortis and Vulpa followed the dread host. The Interfector engines were nowhere to be seen. The battle with Legio Fortidus had cost the Warmaster dearly. His Legios held the advantage of numbers, but the Imperials had an Imperator Titan and scores of Knights. A Knight was no match for a Titan, but only a fool would ignore their combined strength.

Tyana Kourion watched the advance of the Warmaster’s army from the flattened crescent ridge fifteen kilometres away. She leaned back in the cupola of her Stormhammer superheavy, panning her magnoculars from left to right. Eschewing battle dress, she wore her ceremonial greens. Though they were uncomfortable and hot, her entire regiment had chosen to emulate her defiance to keep her from standing out to enemy snipers.

‘A lot of them, ma’am,’ said Naylor, her executive officer. He sat in the secondary turret at the rear of the vehicle, scrolling through reports coming in from the flanking observation posts.

‘Not enough,’ she said.

‘Ma’am?’ said Naylor. ‘Looks like plenty to me.’

‘Agreed, but where are the Sons of Horus?’

‘Letting the poor bloody mortals take the brunt of it.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Kourion, unconvinced. ‘More than likely getting us to expend munitions on sub-par troops. It galls me to waste quality rounds on turncoat dross.’

‘It’s either that or let them roll over us,’ pointed out Naylor.

Kourion nodded. ‘The Legion forces will show themselves soon enough,’ she said. ‘And until then we’ll make these scum pay for their lack of loyalty.’

‘Is the order given?’

‘The order is given,’ said Kourion. ‘All units, open fire.’

Yade Durso kept the Stormbird low, hugging the mountain rock of the Untar Mesas. Imperial fighters from the mountain aeries of Lupercalia duelled the vulture packs in screaming dogfights at higher altitudes, but nap-of-the-earth fighting was Legion work.

Little Horus Aximand sat alongside Durso in the pilot’s compartment at the head of fifty Sons of Horus. They were oathed to the moment and eager to fight.

Ten Stormbirds held station with Aximand’s craft in a staggered echelon. The drop-ships of Seventh Company flew above, their weapons already in acquisition mode.

‘They’re eager,’ said Aximand.

‘Rightly so,’ answered Durso.

‘Too eager,’ said Aximand. ‘The Seventh Company were mauled at Avadon. They don’t have the numbers to indulge in pointless heroics.’

The threat auspex trilled as it sniffed out the unmistakable emissions of weapons fire. Flickering icons appeared on the slate, too many to process accurately. The Imperial host became a red smear blocking the way onwards to Lupercalia.

‘So many,’ said Durso.

‘We do our job there’ll be a lot less soon,’ said Aximand. ‘Now look for gaps in the line.’

Aximand hooked into the various vox-nets, parsing the hundreds of streams in discreet synaptic pathways, sorting the relevant from the inconsequential. All they needed was for just one enemy commander to let hunger for glory overcome tactical sense.

Company level vox: tank commanders calling in targets, spotters yelling threat warnings and enemy attack vectors.

Command level vox: pained orders to abandon damaged tanks, pick up survivors or overtake laggardly vanguard units.

A screaming wall of encrypted scrapcode howled behind it all. Dark Mechanicum comms screeching between the towering battle-engines. He turned it down, but it kept coming back. The sound was grating on a level Aximand knew was simply wrong.

‘No machine should sound like that,’ he said.

Aximand listened to the streams of vox-traffic long enough to gather the information he needed; unit positionals, vox-strengths and priority enhancements. Taken together it painted a picture as vivid and complete as any sensory simulation. As the Stormbird broke through the clouds, Lupercal’s voice broke through every Legion channel.

‘My captains, my sons,’ he said, ‘Warriors’ discretion. Engage targets of opportunity. Withdraw only on my command.’

‘Take us in, Yade,’ ordered Aximand.

‘Affirmative,’ responded Durso, lifting the golden Eye of Horus he kept wrapped around his wrist and putting it to his lips and eyes. ‘For Horus and the Eye.’

‘Kill for the living and kill for the dead,’ said Aximand.

Durso pushed the Stormbird down.

The pain of his failed Becoming was nothing compared to the agony he suffered now. The neural interface cables implanted in Albard’s scabbed spinal sockets were white-hot lances stabbing into the heart of his brain. They’d never properly healed from the day they’d been cut into him.

Banelash was fighting him. It knew he was an intruder and sought to throw him off like a wild colt. The spirits of its former masters knew that Albard was broken, knew that he had failed once already to bond with a Knight.

The dead riders did not welcome the unworthy into their ranks.

Albard fought them down.

For all their loathing, he had decades of hate on his side. He felt the echo of Raeven’s presence in Banelash’s machine heart, but that only made him more determined. His stepbrother had violated everything that Albard had once held dear.

Now he would return the favour.

The Knight’s systems glitched and continually tried to restart and break his connection. The modifications his Sacristans had made kept them from shutting him out. The heart of the Knight was screaming at him, and Albard screamed right back.

Forty-three years ago, he had sat opposite Raeven and let fear get the better of him. Not this time. Blinded in one eye by a raging mallahgra in his youth, the simian beasts had always held a special terror in Albard’s nightmares. When one had broken free on his day of Becoming, a day that should have been his proudest moment, that terror had consumed him.

His Knight had felt his fear and rejected him as unworthy. Condemned in the eyes of his father, he’d been doomed to a life of torture and mockery at the hands of his stepbrother and sister.

Raeven had killed his father? Good, he’d hated the miserable old bastard. Albard had taken his vengeance with a hunting knife and an intimate knowledge of human anatomy learned on the other side of the blade. His faithless step-siblings were now entwined in an irrigation ditch, bloating with nutrient-rich water and corpse gases. Food for worms.

He winced as a fragment of Raeven’s lingering imprint on the Knight’s core stabbed at him. He felt Raeven’s disgust, but worse, he felt a shred of his pity.

‘Even in death you mock me, brother,’ hissed Albard, guiding the twenty-two Devine Knights through the rear ranks of the Imperial regiments. Hundreds of thousands of men and their armoured vehicles awaited the order to move out. Tyana Kourion wasn’t going to make the same mistakes Edoraki Hakon had made at Avadon.

This would be no passive defence line, but a reactive battle of manoeuvre. Opportunities for advance were to be exploited, gaps plugged. This latter task was the role she had assigned to the Knights of Molech, a glorified reserve force. The indignity of it was galling, the insult a gross stain on the honour of Molech’s knightly Houses.

Knights from House Tazkhar marched past, weapons dipped in respect. Many mocked the sand-dwelling savages, but they knew their place – not like the uppity bastards of House Mamaragon, whose strutting Paladins jostled for position in the vanguard. As if they could ever rise to be First House of Molech. House Indra’s southern Knights bore banners of gold and green, and Albard suspected that they flew fractionally higher than his.

A blatant attempt to eclipse House Molech in glory.

Such temerity would not go unanswered, and Albard felt Banelash’s weapon systems react to his belligerent thoughts. Anger, insecurity and paranoia blended within his psyche, goaded into a towering narcissism by a lingering presence, an infection newly acquired within the sensorium.

Something serpentine and voluptuous, hideous yet seductive, lurked in Banelash’s heart. Albard longed to know it and brushed his mind-touch over it.

The combined fury of the Knight’s former pilots surged in response. A reaction of fear. Albard gasped as the sensorium swam with static, phantom images and violent echoes of past wars. A system purge, but it was too little too late. The infection within the sensorium bled into Banelash’s memories, twisting them with unremembered indignities and delusions of grandeur.

Albard heard sibilant laughter as his damaged mind tried to parse the now from the remembered, but those regions of the brain required for a full interface had been irreparably damaged forty-three years ago. His own memories poured into the sensorium, mingling with long-ended wars and imagined kills. He drew the venomous infection into himself, drinking it down like fine wine.

The sensory rendition of the battlefield around him blurred and twisted like a slowly retuning pict-feed, one image fading and another swimming into focus.

What had once been an ordered Imperial camp of machine fabricated shelters, supply depots, ammunition stockpiles, fuel silos and rally points became something else entirely. Men in boiled leather jerkins and iron sallets marched to and fro. Some wore gleaming hauberks of iron scale. They carried long iron-bladed swords and axes across their shoulders. They marched in dreary lockstep. Hundreds of hunting hounds snapped at their heels, goaded forward by whip-bearing packmasters.

A crash of thunder belched from the vast, dragon-mouthed carronades fringing the hillsides in their thousands. Entrenched in wicker gabions and earthen ramparts, the gunnery academies of Roxcia and Kyrtro had brought their finest culverin and mortars to punish the enemy with shot and shell. Colourful flags snapped in the conflicting thermals above the powder-hungry weapons.

Gunners sweated and heaved, running their iron behemoths back into firing positions. The barrels were swabbed out and fresh powder charges rammed down. Heavy stone spheres were lifted by barrel-chested Tazkhar slaves.

As impressive as the guns were, they were nothing compared to the splendour of the knightly host.

Incredible warriors in all-enclosing plate rode powerful destriers with fantastical caparisons depicting rearing beasts such as had not been seen on Molech for generations.

Albard turned to see the knights riding alongside him.

Cousins, nephews and distant relations, all of the Devine Blood. They rode into battle on wide-chested warsteeds, but not one of their mounts could match the golden stallion upon which he rode, a beast with a mane of fire and wide, powerful shoulders. A king among horsekind.

‘My brothers!’ cried Albard, letting the blissful serpentine venom spread to each of them. ‘See what I see, feel what I feel!’

Some struggled, some almost resisted, but every one of them surrendered in the end. Their secret desires and ambitions were fuel to the infection and it took their every scrap of lust, guilt and bitterness and twisted into something worse.

He turned in the saddle, looking over at the twin lightning bolt emblem streaming from his vexillary’s banner pole. The ancient heraldry of the Stormlord himself blazed in the noonday sun, an icon of such brilliance that it illuminated the battlefield for hundreds of metres in all directions.

This was his banner.

He was the Stormlord, and these knights were the same vajras who had ridden the Fulgurine Path with him all those centuries ago. A towering sense of self-importance filled him, and he raked back his spurs. Banelash ploughed through regiments of infantry as the Stormlord saw a vast and monstrous creature through the billowing clouds of cannon fire.

A titanic beast, a giant of inhuman scale.

Scaled in black and white, it bellowed with the sound of thunder. A world devourer.

This was the foe he had been summoned to slay.