Blood of Asaheim

II

The Wounded Heart





Chapter Nine



Sister Uwe Bajola rose before sunrise, as she always did, and went to the west-facing wall of her cell, as she always did.

In the hour of deep-red shadows, before the full day’s heat properly arrived, her mind was clear and her body was calm. Routine calmed it further. She had always appreciated the familiar rhythms, the mechanical purity of repetition. In times of trial they had a particular value.

She opened the gahlwood door and padded out onto the balcony. She took a deep breath. The air was already warming. It tasted of sand.

Bajola leaned on the balcony and felt the last of the night’s breeze press against the cotton of her shift. That was pleasant, for the short while it lasted. Though raised on a world of unrelenting sun, her melanin-rich skin as black as her battle-armour, she had never quite come to terms with Ras Shakeh’s climate. Something about the sunlight was wrong. It burned, but did not warm; it dazzled, but did not illuminate.

She bowed her head, running a hand absently over her cropped hair. Such thoughts, such ingratitude, were unworthy.

Cleanse my soul, she mouthed, reciting the words in her head, remembering how they’d looked on the parchment when she’d first learned them.

Cleanse my soul;

Clear my mind;

Enable my body.

Grant that my station may serve;

Grant that my strength may suffice;

Grant that my life may give honour;

Grant that my death may earn it.

They were beautiful words. They comforted her; they always had. She closed her eyes for a moment, enjoying the quiet of the pre-dawn. In the distance she heard the erh-erh of klohawks. The scents of the city rose to meet her: gently warming rockcrete, dried spices, burning oil, gahl trees turning their speared leaves to face the rising sun.

Only in the hour before dawn was the city of Hjec Aleja restful. As the flaming orange sunrise tipped over the western horizon, the manufactories would start up again, the dust-crawlers would begin to move, the garrisons would empty and refill as the watches were cycled.

Until then, she could watch the place sleeping, cooled by the long night, the toils and strains and nightmares subdued for a while, if not forgotten.

Her balcony was high up, near the summit of the Third Spire of the Cathedral of Blessed Alexia, so she could see a long way. Her deep brown eyes ran over the cityscape as it unfolded below her.

She saw tight-packed streets with tiled roofs, arranged in a haphazard maze of overhanging eaves. No thoroughfare in Hjec Aleja ever ran straight. When she’d first arrived she’d assumed that was an accident. Only later had she discovered the myriad superstitions of the planet. A straight road let in mirage-spirits, she had been told. Keep the way crooked, and they can’t find the thresholds.

Stupid beliefs they were, probably heretical, but tolerated for so long that opposing them had long ago been abandoned. Bajola knew that de Chatelaine would have loved nothing more than to purge the world of its theological untidiness – it was a shrineworld, after all – but even she had to bend when faced with something ground so deep, so, impervious, like the endless red dust that you could never scrub from your fingernails or keep from caking on your lips.

Besides, the people of Ras Shakeh worshipped the Emperor fervently enough. They could be forgiven their eccentricities, which even the canoness allowed were harmless.

In any case, now that the horror had arrived, such things had ceased to be important. Bajola screwed her eyes up, gazing into the rusty haze of the horizon, wondering when that empty land would first fill with the cloud-blight of marching soldiers.

Soon. All the strategeos told them that, shaking their heads as they looked into their tactical projections. Progress had been astonishing since the landings: unreasonably fast, unreasonably brutal.

When she had been younger, newly inducted into the Orders Famulous and sent out into the void on her first diplomatic missions, Bajola had been troubled by what she saw of the arch-enemy’s work. Why, she had wondered, did the Emperor, the omnipotent Master of Mankind, permit such terror to exist in the universe? He must have been capable of destroying it, just as he had once destroyed the heresy of his greatest son.

The error of that thinking had led to castigation fairly swiftly. Canoness Reich, her first superior in the Order, had been unequivocal.

‘What do you want, child?’ she had demanded, fixing her with those biting, ice-blue eyes. ‘A life of comfort? What d’you think would become of us then?’

She’d leaned over to Bajola, jabbing her in the chest with her bronze augmetic finger.

‘We’d become fat. We’d become corrupt. Conflict keeps us lean, fit, pure, the way we were meant to be.’

Bajola had been more easily cowed then. Reich had been a formidable woman.

‘He orders the universe as it should be. Welcome the test, child. Welcome the knowledge that the void harbours terror. Without terror, there are no heroes.’

It had been easy to say, and easy to believe. Now, watching the sun rise over a doomed world, waiting for the ranks of terror to close on the last city, the aphorism felt hollow.

Bajola was not so easily cowed now. She was capable of making her own mind up.

Grant that my life may give honour;

Grant that my death may earn it.

A first sliver of gold broke over the distant ridge of the Djarl peaks. Almost immediately the air began to feel hotter.

She could have stayed there for a long time, gathering her thoughts before the day’s labours began. When her comm-bead disturbed her, buzzing into life as she watched the first amber rays of sunlight angle through the mountains, it was an irritation.

Early, for a summons.

‘Bajola,’ she acknowledged, moving away from the balcony and slapping the railing’s dust from her hands.

‘Sister Palatine,’ came the response. It was Callia, one of de Chatelaine’s aides. ‘The canoness demands your presence. Hall of the Halicon, twenty minutes.’

Bajola smiled. Typically terse.

‘On my way,’ she said. ‘Did the canoness say what it was about?’

The link cut dead. Either Callia was being rude, or she was ferociously busy. The latter was more likely.

Bajola walked back into her cell. Not much to look at – a narrow bed with no covers, a devotional pict of Saint Alexia, a metal-bound chest containing her robes, a bolter hung on the wall from iron brackets and draped in embroidered benedictions.

Her eyes lighted on the weapon. It had an ugly, blunt aspect. Even though she’d long since left the Order Famulous behind and embraced the way of the Wounded Heart, she’d never learned to love the core tool of her adopted trade.

Get over it, she thought to herself, pulling the shift over her head and starting to dress. You’ll be using it again soon.

When she arrived at the Hall of the Halicon, the place was in a frenzy of preparation. That was unusual. Ever since fighting had broken out, the grand ceremonial space had been virtually unused, its marble surfaces surrendered to the drifting, gritty air.

Now hundreds of labourers were at work, polishing statuary, rolling out long crimson carpets, hanging banners with the bloody symbols of the Wounded Heart sewn in crimson and gold thread.

As soon as she saw that work, Bajola’s spirits rose a little. She knew who had been summoned. So perhaps they had made it. Perhaps it would be a whole battle company of them. That would be something worth seeing; it might even turn the tide.

She couldn’t see the canoness. She walked up the wide stairway, feeling the first pricks of sweat at her neck, trying to catch a glimpse of de Chatelaine in the milling crowds.

The Hall was an obscene place, a vulgar display of power and indulgence that sat uneasily with Ras Shakeh’s windswept emptiness. Bajola hated it, the canoness hated it, everyone who worked in it hated it. Unlike the white-walled structures in the rest of the city, the Hall had been constructed from a dark-veined stone that sucked in the sunlight during the day and made the interior shimmer with close, sweaty heat.

Its bulk was out of all proportion to the older buildings around it. Rings of corded pillars supported an ornate panelled ceiling of stuccoed cherubs and milk-faced saints. Incense burners swung from the vaults above, staining the patterned floors with saccharine aromas. Golden statues of heroes stood in ranks down the echoing aisles, their melancholy, smug faces turned to the starry heavens for inspiration.

The Order had not been responsible for the Hall’s construction. Cardinal Tomojo-Kech had built it seven hundred years ago, demolishing a more suitably austere priory that had stood on the site since the Order had first come to Ras Shakeh in the 37th millennium. No one knew how much it had cost to ship such huge quantities of precious commodities to such an isolated place. Perhaps the extravagance had been what had cost Tomojo-Kech his head during the Jericar Purges; perhaps not. It was always hard to know.

His legacy had lasted, though. The Halicon citadel, of which the Hall was the major part, dominated the mountain city of Hjec Aleja, squatting atop the rocky outcrop at its heart and gazing out across the plains with overblown grandeur. All roads in the city led there, sooner or later, snaking up the narrow causeways and switchbacks until they emerged at the Plaza of Triumph, two hundred metres above the ochre plains and baking under the sun.

Bajola preferred the cathedral, her own demesne, set outside the inner walls of the city and placed within the teeming outer hab-districts. It was where it ought to be, close to those who needed it, allowing the priests to minister to the faithful rather than sweat away in Tomojo-Kech’s folly up on the mountain.

Bajola pushed her way through the crowds, smelling their odour of sweat and incense, before catching sight of the canoness at last.

Alexis de Chatelaine saw her coming and nodded sharply in what passed for acknowledgement with her.

‘You’re late,’ she said.

‘Forgive me,’ said Bajola, bowing. ‘The streets were clogged.’

De Chatelaine pursed her lips. ‘Word has got out already. I don’t know how. The masses will always find a way. If we could tap that, turn their ferreting curiosity into something useful, I would not fear losing this war.’

The canoness was a clipped, severe figure. Her silver hair, cut into a sheer razor-bob, framed a hard-edged face made old by a lifetime of devotion. Her lips were thin and her flesh was roughened from both the sun and age. De Chatelaine scorned cosmetic treatment and so looked every year of her one hundred and forty-two winters. For all that, her movements gave away her essential vigour. She could still fight, and Bajola knew her will was as starkly unbending as ever. She dominated the space around her, tall and spear-lean in night-black armour-plate, trimmed with pale ermine and decorated by the crimson cracked heart device in pearl and ruby.

‘They heard more than I did,’ admitted Bajola.

‘Then I shall enlighten you, child,’ said de Chatelaine. ‘Emperor be praised, our summons have been answered. I could almost have given up, but that would have been a failure of faith, would it not? The Wolves of Fenris have sent their forces, just as their Great Wolf promised. The timing is propitious. They have already given battle to the enemy and have emerged victorious. Now we are tracking them. They will be here within hours.’

Bajola placed her hands together and bowed her head. A mix of emotions surged through her – she had begun to insulate herself against the possibility that they might not come.

‘How many?’ she asked.

‘I do not know. I fear not many. But recall this: a single warrior of the Adeptus Astartes is worth a hundred Guardsmen. In the cause of morale, his value is even higher. They will kill at a rate that even our Celestians cannot match.’

‘So I have heard. Let us hope the stories are true.’

‘Of course they’re true,’ she snapped. ‘I’ve fought with them before. Watch your thoughts, Palatine.’

Bajola bowed in apology. It was something she’d become used to, when speaking to the canoness.

‘I mean no disrespect,’ she said. ‘But our service has been with the Adulators, who are steeped in our ways and are on close terms with the holy orders of the Ecclesiarchy. These are the Wolves. I have heard… things.’

De Chatelaine’s expression softened a little.

‘So have I,’ she said. ‘Who has not? But these are the instruments the Emperor chooses to make available to us, and so, by necessity, they are the right ones.’

Bajola sometimes found de Chatelaine’s ramrod faith touching, almost juvenile. To admit that, though, even to herself, was dangerous.

‘That is so,’ she said. ‘I look forward to meeting them.’

‘You will do more than that. I wish you to work with them. You will be our conduit. I trust that meets with your approval.’

Bajola felt a brief twinge of surprise. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But, I–’

‘You were of the Famulous before you joined us,’ said de Chatelaine. ‘The diplomats. I take it you have retained some of those skills. We will need them.’

The canoness lowered her voice, moving her head closer to Bajola’s.

‘Matters have not always gone well between the Church and the Wolves,’ she said. ‘You know this, and they will not have forgotten it. I am not a fool, Palatine: I am aware of the potential for strife, and I wish to limit it. We will have to find some way of working together if we are not to end our days on this dust-blown rock.’

She placed her gauntlet over Bajola’s hand. It was a strangely protective gesture from a battle-hardened woman.

‘Do not let me down, Uwe,’ she said. ‘You will be the voice of calm that smooths the way between us.’

Bajola swallowed her discomfort. Working with the Wolves directly had not been something she’d considered. Unlike the canoness, she had long since got used to the idea that they weren’t coming. It was a complication, though maybe one she should have forseen.

She bowed. ‘By His will,’ she said.

When she raised her head again, de Chatelaine was no longer looking at her. The commotion in the hall was growing. From the Plaza outside came the noise of Shakeh Guardsmen shouting something in Haljeha, something about an incoming ship on the horizon.

‘Earlier than I expected,’ said de Chatelaine, fixing her green eyes on the ornate entrance gates as if she could peer through them. ‘Perhaps I should not be surprised.’

She took a deep breath, and released Bajola’s hand.

‘Prepare yourself, Palatine,’ she said. ‘The Wolves approach.’

They were, and they weren’t, what she’d imagined.

Seven of them strode through the Hall gates, shaking the dust from their armour as they came. De Chatelaine had used what little time remained to her well, and the audience chamber was as clean and well-ordered as could have been hoped for. Lines of Guardsmen stood to attention along either aisle, their uniforms scrubbed clear of the worst of the grit and bloodstains.

Squads of Battle Sisters stood beside them, far more imposing in their pristine black power armour. Bajola felt a swell of pride just looking at them. Some of her sisters had returned from the front mere days ago, carrying stories of horror with them. They stood to attention in neat ranks, eyes gazing straight ahead, betraying nothing but rigid, silent resolve.

De Chatelaine waited for the Wolves at the far end of the chamber. A marble dais of wide steps led up to a blood-red leather-upholstered throne surmounted by a gaudy tableau of angels and writhing serpents. The canoness had chosen not to make use of that, but stood at the base of the stairs, clad in her regulation battle-plate. A small coterie of aides, including Callia and Bajola, clustered around her.

Bajola watched the Wolves approach. She surprised herself by feeling a faint tremor of unease. Not fear, exactly; more like tension, as if an attack were imminent. The warriors in grey exuded a palpable atmosphere of intimidation. It rose from them as they moved, flowing from their limbs like musk, hanging in the air behind them.

She studied them as they neared, moving her eyes from each one to the next, soaking in as much information as she could and storing it away, just as she had been trained to.

Observe. Retain. Scan for weakness; watch for strength.

Their leader was obvious. He walked with a fighter’s rolling gait. He wore his full armour minus the helm, and it made him massive. His head was bald and marked with tribal tattoos. A matted grey beard tumbled across his breastplate. The hair looked filthy, as if it had been dipped in a bucket of boiling lard and the slops had been left to dry.

They were all dirty. They stank of rotten meat. Their chipped battle-plate was smeared with blood and grease and grime. They were hirsute and grim-faced, save for one: a younger-looking warrior with flame-red hair and a raw weal running crossways the length of his face. That one could almost have passed for human.

She had expected them to look savage. She had expected the grinding whine of power armour, the clanking bone-totems, the back-slung weapons with runes carved finely on the blades.

She hadn’t expected the stench. She hadn’t expected the sheer aura of belligerence, the thick expressions of surly violence in their amber eyes.

They were beasts. They were beasts clad in the rags of humanity, given a veneer of civilisation to mask the deep animal within.

As she was wont to, as she always did, she found herself wondering why the blessed Emperor would have created and given sanction to such things.

The answer came to mind almost immediately.

Because they are needed.

Bajola noticed that one of them carried himself differently to the others. His eyes were grey, not golden. His exposed face was equally marked by scarification and tribe-marks, but he walked taller, with less swagger. He was contained, wrapped up in himself. The others let their souls spill out in front of them, betraying their essential core of menace, glorying in the dominance they so casually projected.

The grey-eyed one did not.

Once, a very long time ago while serving with her old Order, Bajola had witnessed a squad of Ultramarines accompanying an Inquisitorial retinue. She’d been awe-struck by them – their discipline, their confidence, their reserve. The grey-eyed warrior carried himself a little like they had done. That was strange. She wondered whether anyone else had noticed. She even wondered whether the rest of his pack had noticed – such subtle signals were hard to read and easy to miss.

The leader drew up before de Chatelaine. At close quarters he was immense, a mountain of brutal energy encased in dirty ceramite.

‘I am called Wolf Guard Gunnlaugur,’ he announced. ‘Of the Great Company of Ragnar Blackmane, of the Rout of Fenris.’

His voice was harsh, a grating thrum of pit-deep hazard.

‘You are welcome, Son of Fenris,’ replied de Chatelaine. Her voice was dry and clear. If the canoness felt any uneasiness in his presence, she didn’t show it. ‘We are grateful to the Great Wolf for sending you. We are grateful to you for coming.’

Gunnlaugur grunted. ‘Glad you’re pleased to see us. That ship up there wasn’t.’

‘You destroyed it,’ said de Chatelaine. ‘That was your first great service to us. We shall not forget it, it was a mighty deed.’

‘Mighty? I lost my own. That is a great shame to have hanging on my shoulders. We were not expecting to have to fight our way down.’

The canoness gave him an apologetic look.

‘Yes, I am aware of that,’ she said. ‘If there had been any way of warning you–’

‘There wasn’t?’

‘If we had been able to reach you, to help you, do you not think we would have done it?’

Bajola appreciated de Chatelaine’s skill. The canoness spoke evenly, matching the Wolf’s blunt challenges with calmness. It was not easy to quarrel with one who would not rise to it.

Gunnlaugur fixed her with his black-pinned gaze for a long time, assessing, appraising. Bajola half expected him to start sniffing.

‘Tell me what has happened here,’ he said at last.

‘I fear you will not like it,’ said de Chatelaine. ‘You have landed in the middle of a war, Wolf Guard. Until you had arrived, I would have said it was one we could not win. Even now, I am not sure how long we have left.’

Gunnlaugur didn’t look troubled by that. If anything, Bajola thought she caught the gleam of something like excitement in his eyes.

‘We are here now,’ he said. ‘Anything is possible.’

After that, the conversation moved to the canoness’s private chambers. The troops in the Hall dispersed, sent back to their barracks and bunkers where they could exchange wild theories about what they had just seen. Only de Chatelaine and her entourage – a dozen officers and officials – and the seven members of Gunnlaugur’s pack took their places in the heavily shielded room behind the dais.

The ornamentation was less elaborate there, though the chairs had gilded backs and the polished table was formed of a priceless darkwood that didn’t grow natively on Ras Shakeh. The walls were scrubbed plain and the floor was bare stone. Sunlight angled in from rows of half-blinded windows. Even with screens in place, the glare added to an already uncomfortably hot space.

The two parties took up places on either side of the table. The chamber had been fitted out with the largest, most sturdy set of furniture they had been able to find, but still the Wolves looked almost comically ill at ease when seated. Bajola guessed that they would have preferred to stand, but they didn’t insist.

In their own way, they were making an effort. That was encouraging.

‘So, the situation,’ said de Chatelaine, pressing her hands together on the tabletop. ‘The Adulators withdrew their defensive presence from here six months ago. By that time the cover they offered us was little more than token. We frequently went for months with no significant strike force within range. I was unhappy with the situation, as was the Chapter Master, but it became apparent that no easy resolution existed. The Ras subsector contains over thirty-nine inhabited worlds and has a population in excess of ninety billion souls, so merits more than cursory attention. But the Adulators have many concerns, and I believe that garrison work does not greatly appeal to them. Perhaps that is true of other Chapters too.’

Gunnlaugur listened intently. Bajola watched him drink the information in. She’d heard that Space Marines possessed eidetic recall. Then again, she’d heard many things about them, not all of which could possibly be true.

‘You will be aware of plans to use this subsector as a staging post for a new crusade into lost space,’ she went on. ‘When I first learned of the proposals, I knew the process of organising such an undertaking would last decades. Nonetheless, the idea put us on the stellar cartograph, so to speak, and gave me leverage in my quest for more permanent defensive arrangements. Ancient pacts between the Ras subsector and the Fenrisian zone of protection were uncovered. I was informed by my scholiasts that the treaties had no current validity. I responded that anything was worth a try.’

Despite himself, Gunnlaugur smiled. It was a curious gesture. The Wolf Guard had an elongated jawline, crammed with overdeveloped dentition, especially the canines. His smile was more like a dog’s growl, with the lips pulling back and the fangs jutting forwards.

Even their expressions of amusement, it seemed, served as a challenge.

‘My motives were sound,’ said de Chatelaine. ‘We are not immune to the blights of heresy and sedition here. The problem has been growing, and my sisters have been fully occupied over the past few years. We destroy one nest, another emerges. These heretics worship sickness. I have witnessed men expose themselves to crippling disease, revelling in their decay. The appeal of that eludes me, but then we do live, do we not, in a fallen galaxy?’

At the mention of plague-cults, a low murmur of recognition passed among the Wolves.

‘The heretics,’ Gunnlaugur said. ‘They brought the war.’

‘No, not them. They kept us occupied, but we never let them flourish for long. Do not think that my sisters are afraid to use their flamers, Wolf Guard, for they are not.’

Gunnlaugur smiled again. Against all expectation, he and the canoness seemed to be finding each other’s company agreeable.

‘The enemy came from outside the subsector,’ said de Chatelaine. ‘The cults here did nothing more than prepare the ground for them. The ships must have arrived in-system before we sent our request for aid to you, but back then we had no inkling of their presence. It was a large fleet, and our defences were so paltry and undermanned that we stood no chance. We quickly lost what orbital grids we possessed. We prepared our cities for bombardment, assuming that destruction was what they wished for. It was not so. They landed forces – we do not know how many – and the majority of the fleet moved on. The ship you encountered was the only one they left behind. As we speak, dozens more are no doubt ravaging the rest of the subsector.’

Bajola watched de Chatelaine’s expression grow tighter, more self-conscious. The canoness had taken the blame for the war on her own shoulders, and the ruin of her world pressed heavily on her. The fact that she had acted with the utmost propriety at every stage made no difference. De Chatelaine had exacting standards, and did not exempt herself from them.

‘It happened so quickly,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘Too quickly. They have already overrun our industrial heartland. We have lost our population centres, our manufactories. A few hold-outs remain, but we receive word of capitulations every day. This planet is going dark. Two weeks ago I ordered the withdrawal of all remaining forces to this zone. We have succeeded in holding the city since then, but we know they are coming for us. Everyone here knows it.’

She smiled dryly.

‘This is the planet you have landed on. I had hoped to show you an exemplary shrineworld, one from which the legions of the Emperor would march out to fresh conquest. Believe me, I am sorry that I cannot do that.’

Gunnlaugur leaned back in his seat, and the wooden chair creaked alarmingly under him. He hacked up a gobbet of phlegm, leaned over and spat on the floor.

‘War has a way of following us,’ he said. ‘Truth be told, we like it that way. We get bored without it.’

De Chatelaine’s advisers looked disapproving. Bajola could understand why – they had all suffered enormously; the savage in front of them was making light of it.

She stole a glance at the grey-eyed figure sitting at the far end of the pack. As her eyes lighted on him she caught him looking directly at her. She averted her gaze quickly, half embarrassed, half irritated.

He is studying me, just as I am studying him. Do I seem as outlandish to him as he does to me?

‘If war is what you wish for, you will have no shortage of it on Ras Shakeh,’ said de Chatelaine. Her expression had become severe again. The canoness disliked flippancy in most things; in the face of the horror that had come to her world, it bordered on obscenity. ‘Though perhaps I have not adequately conveyed the scale of what faces us.’

She turned to Callia.

‘Replay the footage from Jedaj,’ she said. ‘That may prove instructive.’

Callia nodded, rose from her chair and moved over to a wall-mounted projector. She adjusted the controls and the blinds slid down the windows. At the far end of the chamber, against a bare whitewashed wall, a picter image flickered into life.

‘We retrieved this material six weeks ago,’ explained de Chatelaine. ‘It was taken by a defender of the ore-processing plant at Jedaj, five hundred kilometres south of here. I am not sure why he took it, nor why it survived. Perhaps he wanted a record of what had happened, or perhaps the enemy wished us to see what they are capable of. My first inclination was to destroy it, but I decided against it. It is not easy viewing, but then I am sure you are used to such things.’

As she finished speaking, the footage crackled into life. It was shaky and motion-blurred, as if the images had been shot from a helmet-mounted picter. The first pictures were dark and grainy, indicating night-vision enhancement.

Bajola hadn’t seen the footage before. She’d been offered the chance when it had first come in, and had declined, guessing what was on it. She shifted in her seat, watching the images with a heavy heart. She had no great wish to keep watching.

A few seconds afterwards, an audio track kicked in: a man’s breathing, heavy and panicked. The picter-view leapt around wildly as he moved his head. It showed an industrial complex at night – tangled pipes, rows of generator-coils, huge cooling towers. The dark sky beyond was mottled with smoke, the kind of dense, greasy pall that comes from burning promethium.

The man with the helmet-picter was running, making the picture shake and jerk. Others ran with him, all in Shakeh Guard uniforms, all carrying lasguns two-handed.

‘Holy Emperor,’ the man mumbled, snatching the litany between his ragged breaths. ‘Holy Emperor. Holy Emperor.’

It wasn’t clear where the men were running. Explosions sounded in the background, muffled and tinny on the recording; no doubt deafening to them.

Other shouts intruded – men’s voices, curdled with fear and disbelief.

‘Holy Emperor. Holy Emperor.’

The Guardsmen opened up with their weapons. Bright lines of las-fire scored the night, overloading the pict-stream and blanking the feed. When the images resumed the men were running again, faster this time.

Something flitted across the picter’s lurching visual field, just glimpsed for a second: a bloated face amid the far darkness, pale as corpse-light, grinning, stalking towards them.

‘Holy Emperor. Holy Emperor.’

The man’s panting got more urgent, more uncontrolled. More las-beams flashed off.

The view swept round suddenly. A semi-ruined wall emerged from the smog, gaping with black holes where munitions had exploded. Unidentifiable shapes were moving in the shadows beyond, twitching and rocking and jabbering.

‘Grenade!’ screamed one of the Guardsmen, out of view.

The picter lurched to the floor. A riot of static hissing broke out as explosions maxed-out the audio filters.

Then the man started moving again. Audio resumed. He was whimpering from fear.

‘Holy… Emperor… Holy… Emperor…’

Someone screamed from behind him, a garish sound of animal horror, high-pitched and keening. The Guardsmen all started sprinting, their formation gone, firing off random rounds into the dark, leaping and stumbling over blast craters underfoot. One of them was hit by something. The view jerked over to him for an instant – his face white with terror.

‘Don’t leave me!’ he squealed. Something with spidery limbs was crawling up his leg.

‘H-holy… Emp… eror!’

The men kept running. They stumbled through what looked like a bombed-out manufactorium. Huge machines were still running inside it, clanking and spinning and roiling in the darkness. Screaming started up again, a whole chorus of it. It seemed to come from all directions, from the mouths of all of them, echoing from the jagged wall-remains.

Objects hung from the roof, twisting in the grainy gloom. The view briefly slewed upwards, exposing a shaky snapshot of man-shaped bundles suspended on corroding meathooks, some shuddering like marionettes, some glistening wetly.

‘H-h-ho… Hol…’

Bloated, grinning horrors crept up out of the shadows. Las-fire downed some of them, knocking them back to the ground with gurgling pops. Others kept on coming. They had swollen faces in the flickering light, the skin stretched tight and held in place by iron pins. They laughed as they scampered, a low, throaty hurr hurr hurr.

The picter was shaking badly now, shuddering so hard it was hard to make out what was going on. The horrors must have got in amongst them. Everything dissolved into a jumbled succession of sickening images – flesh being cut, eyes being pulled, stomachs bursting.

In a brief flash of clarity, a devilish face reared up dead centre, laughing so hard its lips split open. Its eyes stared wildly, cat-yellow and weeping with pus. It reached out with needle-tipped fingers. The whine of a circular saw started up somewhere close by.

‘Ho–! Hol–! Empe–! Ach! Nnngh!’

The Guardsman’s frenzied litany collapsed into a jerking, frothing shriek. Blood splashed across the picter’s lens, coating the image with a splash of red. It shook violently, rocked back and forth by its bearer’s spasms.

Then it went dead, replaced by a fizzing wall of white noise.

A few seconds later it resumed.

The image was swinging back and forth like a lazy pendulum. The sound had gone. Blood on the lens made everything smeary and indistinct. The viewpoint was higher up, as if the picter were suspended a long way above the floor.

It showed a manufactorium crawling with movement. Hundreds of enemy troops scuttled between machines like swarms of roaches, clambering over one another, chittering and cavorting. Huge, distorted creatures stalked among them, stomachs ballooning and flesh glimmering with corpse-light.

Something else approached the lens. A single, glowing eye peered up, lodged in the centre of a rusting, tusk-jowled helm. Massive pauldrons rose up out of the murk, each one studded with gleaming entrail-loops. The edges of twin cleavers could be made out, glistening, steadily dripping.

For a moment the armour-clad titan just stared at the picter. Then it reached up. The last image was of a gore-splattered gauntlet closing over the lens.

After that, static.

Callia cut off the feed. The window-blinds slid up, letting sunlight flood back into the chamber.

Bajola looked down at her hands. They were damp with sweat.

‘That is what our troops have been fighting, Wolf Guard,’ said de Chatelaine. ‘They were heroes just to stand their ground, do you not think?’

Gunnlaugur gazed back at her steadily. He didn’t look entirely unmoved by what he had seen. That was to his credit, Bajola thought.

‘They were,’ he said.

The atmosphere in the chamber was subdued. One of de Chatelaine’s counsellors, a scholarly man named Arvian Nomu, looked faint, and gripped the edge of the table tightly.

‘That thing at the end,’ Gunnlaugur said. ‘You know what it was?’

‘I do,’ said the canoness.

‘How many of them have landed?’

‘That is our only confirmed sighting.’

Gunnlaugur snorted, his nostrils flaring. He looked pensive. ‘Your troops can’t kill it,’ he said.

De Chatelaine nodded. ‘I know. I hope yours can.’

Gunnlaugur didn’t smile that time, which surprised Bajola. Until then, his casual confidence had seemed inexhaustible.

‘We can kill anything,’ he said. ‘That’s what we do.’

He turned towards one of his warriors, a lean-faced killer with a longsword strapped to his back. They exchanged a brief, significant glance.

‘Just depends how many there are,’ he said bleakly.