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  The walls were alive. Metal, once as inanimate and as cold as ice, had sprung into fluid life. Riveted bracings curled around the base of pillars and crept over the lintels of doorways. As the bracings moved they let out a faint noise – a hiss, punctuated with bubbling pops as the structure flexed and rippled.

  Mesh-steel floors undulated like hide stretched across a drum. Growths punched up through the surface, shiny and phosphorescent. The air shimmered with curtains of gauze, drifting aimlessly as idle currents ran down the winding passageways.

  A heartbeat rang out, long and slow, underpinning the steady chatter of the vaults above. It welled up out of the depths, sonorous and echoing. As it beat, the curtains in the air trembled, spilling tiny points of glistening dust onto the skin-floor.

  Old coolant pipes had burst free of the walls. They gurgled with dark crimson contents. Further along, where the corridor tilted and swivelled round to the right, blood-coloured fluid spilled freely across the floor. It sank into the drum-hide surface in a foam of pink, bubbling as it was devoured.

  It was hot, almost unbearably so. Heat radiated from the living walls, making them drip with moisture. Even so high up, there was no escape from it. What remained of the corridors, the service tunnels, the transit shafts, the meeting chambers, the chapels and pleasure gardens – all of it was soaked in soft, cloying, sticky heat.

  Voices echoed down the corridors, faint and broken. A child sobbed, over and over again, lost in the maze of pulsing, throbbing matter. Women whispered or hissed; men laughed too hard, as if making up for some unutterable, dreaming horror with hollow mockery.

  Valien never saw the owners of those voices. He trod along the soft, fleshy ways, stumbling in half-blindness, trying not to hear them. At every corner he would pause, believing that someone was waiting for him just on the other side. Whenever he staggered around it, though, another foetid artery would await him, empty and seamy and stuffed with spores. The place was at once deserted and full; both empty of bodies and singing with souls.

  The walls closed in on him. Where they had once been dirty, dark and cold they were now glossy, organic and hot to the touch. Breathing remained difficult. Valien’s suit’s systems were giving out – he could feel his atmospheric filters clogging with spores. Sweat had collected in his boots, and his bodyglove was sticky with it. Dehydration had given him a persistent, sick headache, and his dry tongue was swollen in his mouth.

  He knew that he was somewhere very high in the spire of the Capitolis. He had taken the difficult way up, the circuit-ous route. It would have been quicker to have cut across to the vast, roofless chamber that ran up the very centre of the spire, to the colossal spiral stairway carved from marble and lined with steel that curled up and up around the adamantium spine of the Capitolis. That was Shardenus’s glory: the Great Stair, an immense series of gilded steps that climbed for hundreds of metres without break from the filth of the earth to the smog of the heavens.

  That way had been guarded, thronged with mutants, cultists, dead-eyed warp beasts and shuffling spawn, and so he had been forced to find the dank, twisting, hidden ways up, the ones that had been abandoned, forgotten or closed off. His world became a dark procession of cramped, clammy tunnels, each one dripping with fluids like bodily organs. The walls themselves trembled like flaps of skin, and the air stank with the musk of living matter. The dark, gothic majesty of a world’s command centre had been perverted, turned from austere stone and metal into a nightmarish image of flesh, bone and blood.

  Only once did Valien see evidence of what the Capitolis had been like before corruption had come. He stumbled at the end of a long, dizzying climb up a series of tortuous capillary tunnels, falling to his knees from light-headedness as he reached the top and clambered into a tiny, deserted chamber. Ahead of him, only a metre or two away, was a column of carved onyx. The column was surmounted with a statue. A grave, mournful face stared back at him out of the dark, rendered in thick sweeps of a sculptor’s chisel.

  He’d seen the same figure many times before. The likeness was a standard one, propagated by the Ecclesiarchy and sanctioned in the manuals of all the artisan guilds. A near-identical statue had stood in the Talica shrine on Hespera, the one in which he’d undertaken his final training. It was Rogal Dorn; the Lord Protector, Saviour of Terra, master of the Fists, the golden son standing resplendent in his armour at the dawn of Mankind’s eternal reign across the stars.

  Alone among the paraphernalia of the upper spires, that statue remained untouched. Pools of glistening liquid fermented gently at its base. Tendrils crept up the polished surface of the pillar, straining to reach the figure at the top and choke it.

  Valien looked at it for a long time. In the past, in other places, he’d found the selfsame image preposterous. He’d mocked the angular jawline, the narrow eyes, the rigid, clenched expression of resolve. For a cynical man in a cynical profession, such caricatured defiance had always struck him as faintly ludicrous.

  No longer. Valien found himself remembering the stories he’d been forced to memorise in the schola, of Dorn’s tortured progress through the webs of madness spun by the Arch-Traitor in the final battle for Terra, alone and surrounded by the raw stuff of Chaos.

  As he recalled the texts, the legends, the myths, he managed a faint smile.

  So it was for you, so it is for me.

  Valien got back to his feet, trying to ignore the soft sucking sounds his boots made on the trembling floor.

  But you were a primarch, the exemplar son of a living god.

  He started to stumble onwards again. As he did so, his fingers strayed to his chest. He ran his fingers over the indentations just below his heart.

  And I am the lowest of your Father’s servants; a criminal and a blood-drinker and a sinner given the tasks no right-thinking human would undertake.

  The ambient heartbeat echoed in his thick, clammy head. Another tunnel snaked away from him, blurry and lost in heat-haze. He limped down it, following nothing but instinct, remembering almost nothing of the orders Heriat had given him. A drive older than all others, older even than base survival, goaded him on.

  Curiosity. Now, after all this, I will find out what evil has been gestating here. He saw no mortals. He had not seen a living soul since Venmo Kilag, far down in the abyss of tunnels in the Capitolis’s bowels. If he had been feeling less sick, less faint, he might have speculated on the fate of the millions of men and women who had once inhabited such a huge spire and were now nowhere to be seen. He might have wondered what terrible magicks locked their voices in the air, making them speak as if still alive and moving through the corridors. He might have paid a little more attention to the strange faces half-buried in the shifting skeins of the walls and the floors, or the way the ceilings bulged, or the long trails of blood that led to the transit shafts.

  When my curiosity is sated, I will do what I came for.

  Valien crept onwards, wheezing in the thick air, pushing spore-veils aside with his shaking hands.

  I will carry out the order.

  He hardly knew where he was going. He was blind, weak and disorientated, and the last of his mortal strength was ebbing. For all that, he retained a certain confidence. As surely as if the Emperor Himself were guiding him, he knew he was coming to the heart of it. Even at the end, bereft of senses, his faith remained absolute.

  I will accomplish it.

  He crawled on.

  And then, only then, will I die.

  Chapter Seventeen

  For a while at least, the guns had fallen silent. The wasteland between the spires had reverted to a bleak, toxin-infested swamp, untroubled by the grinding passage of tank groups or the tread of Titans. Hot winds blew across the tangle of blasted buildings and roadways, pulling ash across the evidence of fighting. Smouldering wreckage started to coat with a thin layer of coal-black filth.

  The twin Melamar hives had fin
ished burning. Their precipitous outer walls were broken and black, and a thousand columns of smoke rose lazily into the gloomy sky. To the east, the Axis spires still raged with untamed fires. Immense gashes had been cut into the flanks of the conurbations, glowing with fringes of magma-hot metal.

  To the north, the vast structure of the Capitolis stood inviolate, half-lost in the haze of distance. Its mighty walls rose high, pristine and surmounted with ranks of gun batteries. A soaring mass of domes, gothic buttresses and blackened turrets thrust above them, undamaged still, glowing with light from within. Far up, sweeping towards the summit, the lights altered in hue, going from red to purple. The uttermost pinnacle was hidden by drifting shrouds of ash, but the intense and unnatural glow bleeding from it couldn’t be hidden.

  Nethata looked upon the vista on Malevolentia’s bank of pict screens, rotating the angles slowly, marking the destruction his forces had wreaked. Heriat sat opposite him, watching as position runes and scrolling databursts recorded the deployment of the assets under the Guard’s control.

  Malevolentia had come to rest atop a low rise in the centre of a ruined industrial facility in the heart of the wastes. The space around the tank had once been a storage yard for chem-transporters. A few of the old vehicles remained intact, clustered around the edge of a rutted concrete rectangle. They were dwarfed by the gigantic machine standing in their midst. Its engines still laboured, producing a thick pall of smoke from its rear stacks. The ground behind it was shattered where it had crashed through the yard’s perimeter fencing.

  ‘The final groups have reported in,’ said Heriat eventually, concentrating on the screens in front of him.

  ‘And?’

  ‘All squadrons intact. Some losses from counter-attacks during the withdrawal from Axis, but within your predicted parameters. The targets around us can no longer muster significant return fire.’

  Nethata grunted with satisfaction.

  This is the way to wage a war. Careful, judicial, logical.

  ‘We will move again soon,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Heriat. ‘Refuelling and supply are already under way.’

  Nethata was reassured by his progress. He still had formidable forces at his disposal. Taking account of the mobile artillery pieces, the heavy armour and the rapid-reaction troop contingents, he had sole possession of an army in its own right. He was weak in air support since the debacle of the first attack runs, it was true, but then the enemy was deficient in that area too. Despite Rauth’s mismanagement of Territo’s substantial resources, enough remained to give him hope that the campaign could yet be salvaged.

  ‘Has Princeps Lopi made contact?’ Nethata asked.

  ‘He has.’ Heriat’s voice sounded almost grudging. ‘Do you wish to acknowledge?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Nethata. ‘Why didn’t you say? And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to take this alone.’

  Heriat looked surprised at that.

  ‘As you wish,’ he said stiffly, unstrapping himself from his seat and clambering upwards out of the narrow command chamber. The hatch slammed shut behind him, sealing Nethata in.

  Nethata swivelled around to face the chamber’s hololith pillar, keying in the authorisation on a copper-plated panel. He didn’t like giving Heriat orders like that. It felt disloyal, almost impertinent, but the man was a commissar, and the things he had to discuss with Lopi were delicate.

  I shall make it up to him, he thought. I shall make all this up to him when this madness is over, and everything shall go back to the way it was before.

  The hololith column rose up from its base, grinding on old gears. Nethata smoothed his crumpled uniform and adjusted his position. No one looked their best after days cooped up in a Baneblade, but the little things were still important.

  A luminous face laced with cables and metal jack-nodes flickered into being above the pillar, shifting and crackling with interference.

  Nethata bowed.

  ‘Princeps Lopi,’ he said, addressing the lithfeed. ‘I am sorry this is the first time we have spoken face-to-face. We should have done so properly before.’

  The princeps didn’t respond initially. Though it might have been an artefact of the long-range hololith transport, it looked for all the world like he had recently been crying.

  ‘I felt them,’ said Lopi.

  The words left his mouth awkwardly, as if he’d spent so long using binaric that Gothic had become uncomfortable to him.

  Nethata hesitated. He wasn’t sure he’d heard him correctly.

  ‘As I say, I’m sorry if–’

  ‘I felt them.’ Lopi’s voice was broken and halting. As he spoke, his eyes wandered. He hardly seemed to register Nethata’s presence. ‘I felt them go, one by one.’

  Nethata suddenly started to doubt the usefulness of the conversation.

  ‘I can see that your grief is still acute, princeps,’ he said, speaking carefully. ‘Perhaps it would be better if–’

  Suddenly, Lopi’s gaze snapped into focus. He looked at Nethata, and something like embarrassment rippled across his augmented features.

  ‘No, I am sorry.’ His right cheek twitched. ‘I would not expect you to understand. You see, we feel one another. We are one another. You are alone. We are many. Their voices, they linger. But it should not affect my judgement; I apologise.’

  Nethata studied the flickering feed carefully. The princeps was in a bad way. From all the files Nethata had scanned, Lopi was an experienced commander, a veteran of dozens of engagements; he should have been used to death in battle.

  Then again, Shardenus was a strange place. The corrosive, decaying atmosphere had a way of getting to you. The adepts of the Mechanicus were an odd breed, too – perhaps the deaths of their war engines really did affect them.

  ‘You have my deepest condolences,’ Nethata offered, unsure whether anything he could say would make much difference. ‘I believe I understand your position – I have lost men, too. Both our armies have suffered more than is needful. That is why I hoped you would wish to talk, to find some kind of… accommodation.’

  Lopi’s fractured face looked steadily at him.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Nethata cleared his throat awkwardly.

  ‘I mean this,’ he said, embarking straight into the case he had long prepared. ‘The clan commander feels nothing for the souls under his command. I have argued from the start that his pace is too fast, that it risks exhausting our forces before our goal can be achieved. Those arguments have fallen on deaf ears, but now, perhaps, I am not alone in sharing them.’

  Even through the shifting, shimmering layers of the lithfeed, Nethata could see that Lopi was interested. Cautious, but interested.

  ‘Explain exactly what you mean, Lord General,’ Lopi said. ‘I do not have the time for hints.’

  Nethata felt his pulse begin to pick up. He was committed now.

  ‘We have had communication from Rauth,’ he said. ‘He has wasted the forces under his command in an attempt to take the transit corridors quickly. The Warhounds, as you know, have been lost. My Guard regiments fighting with him have been reduced to a fraction of their former numbers. His own Space Marines have taken heavy losses. No satisfactory explanation for this has been forthcoming. Perhaps it is pride, but he will admit no criticism of his tactics.’

  Lopi said nothing, but kept listening.

  ‘He needs us, princeps,’ said Nethata. ‘He needs my armour, and he needs your engines. I have already received orders to bring all my forces into range for immediate assault on the Capitolis. If your sensori has not already received similar requests, he will soon.’

  ‘I have not been taking communications,’ said Lopi.

  ‘Well, when you do,’ said Nethata, ‘that will be the content of them. But here is the thing: we – you and I – we are not subordinates, ripe to be ordered into
whatever massacre is lined up next. We are commanders of noble forces. We deserve consultation. We deserve respect.’

  Lopi’s grainy face looked wary.

  ‘You are under his command, general,’ he said. ‘I am bound by bonds of allegiance. Are you proposing what I think you are?’

  Nethata smiled.

  ‘Mutiny?’ he asked. ‘No, nothing like that.’

  He realised his fists had clenched tightly against the arms of his seat, and gradually relaxed them.

  ‘I propose holding our ground, that is all,’ he said. ‘We wait here, out in the wasteland. We do not advance. We keep our guns – all of them – here in reserve. If he wants them, he will have to come to us. He will be furious, for sure, but what can he do? Only talk. Listen. Compromise.’

  Lopi’s expression was hard to read over the fuzzy lithfeed.

  ‘You seem to have everything worked out,’ he said.

  ‘I do,’ said Nethata. ‘I want the Axis hives taken out. I want raids on the remaining peripheral spires, taking out their long-range weaponry. I want time to resupply and regroup the ground forces, and I want an agreed strategy for the taking of the Capitolis. I will commit no further resources under my authority until I have assurances of their usage.’

  Lopi started to reply, but Nethata kept speaking.

  ‘One more thing, please, before you respond,’ he said. ‘Know that I am no craven, nor am I a traitor. I have fought a lifetime for the Emperor and know the price of warfare. If I thought it necessary for victory, I would sacrifice my regiments, and myself, a thousand times over. But I am also no butcher, and do not throw the Imperium’s finest weapons – its mortal souls – needlessly into the fire. Rauth will listen to us if you join me. He will have to. He will be forced to see the sense of it.’

  Nethata thought then of his meeting with Magos Ys, and remembered what she had told him.

  ‘This is the only way,’ he said. ‘We cannot hope to persuade, except by the withdrawal of what he needs. They are machines, the Iron Hands; they are monsters, and their minds are closed. They only respect strength, and together we will be strong enough.’