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The Fall of Cadia – Extract

An Extract from ‘Steel Tread’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

One

Blood and iron.

Iron and blood.

One lay on the other, and within the other. The slick shine of the iron-rich blood – still warm – on the cold surface of the bell. Two related elements, joined in accidental symbolism.

If records were to be believed, the bell had been forged from blood.

It was said that when Saint Gerstahl – the sacred soldier, favoured patron of the Cadian trooper – fell defending the Gate in the centuries after the Great Heresy, acolytes collected his vitae in a crystal reliquary. There it stayed for centuries, a venerated and lucrative relic on the shrine world christened with his name.

Until, one night, Blessed Gerstahl appeared to the cardinal with a message: he must extract the iron from the tarry, coagulated remnants and forge it into a bell.

A bell that would toll when Cadia was in mortal danger.

The cardinal forged the relic as instructed, then took the bell on a tour of the Cadian Gate, purifying world after world with the vibration of its holy resonance. A fortunate choice, since it escaped destruction when the Despoiler immolated the shrine world – and Gerstahl’s incorruptible remains – during the Third Black Crusade.

On Solar Mariatus, two million welcomed the bell. Sobbing crowds parted to make a path for the fifty Battle Sisters of the Order of Our Martyred Lady who formed its vanguard. In the Derades Subsector, it was said that its chime healed the deaf and straightened crooked limbs. And on Laurentix, in the Belis Corona System, the populace wailed in ecstasy when it tolled a dozen times without being touched by human hands.

That was when the Black Legion descended upon it, in the opening raids of the Twelfth Black Crusade.

The vanguard had sworn to die rather than surrender their relic. And they fulfilled that oath. Their bodies now lay beneath the cold iron of the bell, some resting in its shadow. Chest cavities blown open, limbs severed from the impact of traitor bolt-shells, their own vitae splashed onto the blood-forged iron. It ran in frozen rivulets down the engraved surface, turning the scrollwork and decorative psalms into channels of gore.

They had saved it, in a sense.

Their stoic defence had given Trazyn time to lock the bell and its entourage in stasis, then spirit it to the archival vaults of Solemnace.

Now it hung, unmoving and fastened in time, among the relics of Cadia past. Gazed upon by the unseeing eyes of general officers snatched from the battlefield, zigzag trench-lines full of Shock Troops and a rank of Chimera variants bisected to show internal detail.

Overhead, a squad of Night Lords Raptors arced through the vaults above a lit display of human eyes.

All of them, artefacts of the Cadian Gate. The ephemera of Abaddon the Despoiler’s twelve Black Crusades.

Darkened exhibits stretched across twenty-five square miles, a private gallery of humans, exquisitely arranged to please the historical and aesthetic tastes of the alien curator who’d imprisoned them.

Nothing in the gallery apart from maintenance scarabs had moved in over a millennium.

Which is why the soft pat-pat-pat of fluid echoed as far as it did.

It fell from the iron surface of the bell like the first drops of icicles melting on the eaves of a hab. Drip. Drip-drip.

Jewelled drops met the upturned forehead of a slain Battle Sister and stained her pale skin with splashes of crimson.

Pat. Pat-pat.

More drops. Coalescing on her brow, trickling into her open eyes.

Blood moved on the bell’s skin, collecting in beads like rain on a window and falling in defiance of the stasis field.

And the bell, without propulsion or force, began to swing.

A hand’s breadth at first. A sway. Its clapper moving in a soft pendulum arc too weak to do more than scrape the sides.

Then, the arc widened, the violent motion of the bell flinging droplets of blood to either side, spattering the faces of stasis-locked Shock Troopers. Sizzling on the protective fields of lasgun displays. Swaying wider until the bell went fully perpendicular and the clapper inside dropped, its hammer striking the iron of the bell.

Clang.

One.

The blackstone floor vibrated. A rank of medals swayed, its stasis field shorting out. An organic clatter filled the chamber, the sound of ten thousand jaws – held shut by hard-light holograms – shaken so hard that the teeth rattled.

Overhead, the flight of Night Lords Raptors tumbled from the vaults and into a trench display, snapping bones and crushing lasgun barrels. Neither Traitor Space Marines nor Guardsmen reacted.

Clang.

Two.

Trazyn, Overlord of Solemnace, Archaeovist of the Prismatic Galleries and He-Who-Is-Called-Infinite, screamed in rage.

‘Sannet! What is happening?’

‘Unclear,’ answered his chief cryptek, his multijointed fingers dancing across phos-glyph panels. ‘Unknown resonance. Macro-seismic. Cracking the vaults, releasing coolant. We’ve lost the Ooliac sand sculptures.’

‘Call the restoration scarabs.’

‘Not responding,’ Sannet answered, data-chains flashing across his ocular. ‘Our nodal program misinterpreted the vibration as a re-interment signal. The legion has entered radical shutdown. I cannot rouse them.’

Trazyn cursed the very wheel of the cosmos. The interval between shocks had been only seconds apart, and while mental speech between he and Sannet was near instant, they were running out of time before the next tectonic shudder would hit.

‘It’s not tectonic, lord,’ said Sannet. ‘It’s coming from the gallery.’

‘Where?’

‘The Black Crusades wing.’

‘That’s only two levels do–’

Clang.

Three.

The shockwave shook Trazyn apart, his joint servos spasming and dislocating with the intensity of it.

He evacuated the dying body and rushed his spirit-algorithm into the network of data-channels in the walls. Found a waiting lychguard he could use as a surrogate. Melted and reshaped the borrowed body into his accustomed form as he ran towards the gates of the Cadian gallery. Waved a hand at the enormous gates in a gesture of opening.

Clang.

Four.

The doors ahead, twice the size of a monolith, blew off their hinges and toppled down at him. He felt them crumple the necrodermis of his cranium like parchment and burst his central reactor before he transferred to another body, sheltered in the lee of a Baneblade.

He sprinted. Waving hands at display plinths, throwing code-signals from his palm emitters. Trying to restart shielding and repulsors, to protect his delicate artefacts.

‘No, no, no, no, no, no–’

Trazyn saw the bell.

Trazyn saw the blood.

He slowed his chronosense to take in the swinging relic and its sheets of ruby spray. It was far more human vitae than had been splashed on its surface.

Almost as if the relic itself were bleeding from the pockmarks and scratches where bolt-shells had marked it.

‘Sannet,’ Trazyn said, casting his visual senses into the data-stream of Solemnace so his cryptek could run analysis. ‘The stasis field has failed. Hard restart.’

‘The field is active,’ Sannet responded. ‘Movement should be impossible.’

‘Not impossible, warpcraft.’

Trazyn watched in fascinated horror as the bell completed its arc, the blood-forged metal swinging high as the hammer inside dropped like the great mace of a warmaster.

Clang.

Five.

Across the galaxy, past burning stars, teeming worlds and cold expanses of nothing, lay the blasted world of Eriad VI. The Ark Mechanicus vessel Iron Revenant hung in its orbit, casting a cruciform shadow on the surface.

Down, down, through the nuclear-blighted atmosphere and crust overrun with ork ravagers. Down in black tunnels of alien scale and curve, stood Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl.

‘Nearly,’ he said, stretching the word. His eyes squeezed tight, optic nerves rerouted through the visual lenses of the skull probe he’d guided into the bore-hole. The on-off strobe of its ultraviolet lamp – used to map the worming tunnels within the blackstone – was the only illumination. He sensed a data-stream connection. ‘Careful, little one. Rise two skull-lengths. Pivot thirty-five degrees right. Ahead four lengths – now, now, now! All ahead steady and open connection! Op–’

The data flooded in, pasting across his vision, unfamiliar glyphs that slid cold into his mind, chill as the nothing of space.

The servo-skull’s vision blasted to static, its auditory ports howling in Cawl’s augmented brain.

‘Damn it!’ he cursed, yanking the skull-jack free from his temple. ‘Qvo, another probe!’

No response. His programmable servant – cloned from a long-dead companion – was either not listening, or perhaps had reset due to the flood of data.

‘Qvo?’ He turned. ‘Qvo, are you lis–’

He stopped.

The aeldari standing behind his right shoulder had not triggered a single alert in his sensorium net.

She crouched on a cogitator bank, toes together, knees spread wide – an inverted-triangle pose inhuman in its gravity-defying grace.

‘The skeins of fate wind tight about the gate,’ Veilwalker said, her egg-like mask nothing but a swirl of smoke. The hues of her motley seemed to blaze in the dark cavern. ‘Again, I plea – does thy mind now see?’

‘Your rhymes are impenetrable nonsense,’ he growled. ‘It is a necron world, bombarded by the Despoiler during the Fourth Black Crusade. But why would he bombard an empty planet? I cannot fathom why you insisted I come here.’

‘More excavation,’ the xenos answered, cocking her head, ‘will dispel frustration.’

‘To hells with your childish rhymes. Just tell me what you want me to know!’

She shook her head, mask gleaming blue in apology. ‘You must play your role – the bell does toll.’

‘And what, by the blessed reactor, is that supposed to mean?’

Clang.

Six.

‘It started an hour ago, canoness,’ said Sister Navarette. Even with her daily training regimen, Genevieve could hear that her Seraphim Superior was out of breath climbing the bell-tower stairs.

They should have taken their jump packs.

The Shrine of St Morrican was a large edifice, and the bell-tower one of the tallest buildings in the Kraf Sector – securing the gateway between Cadia Primus and Cadia Secundus.

For nigh a hundred days it had served as a linchpin of the defence, ensuring that the Archenemy forces of the Thirteenth Black Crusade – which had overrun Kasr Myrak to the north – did not break loose into the Kraf Plain.

‘It’s ringing?’ Genevieve asked. ‘Are you certain?’

‘Without being touched.’

Genevieve bolted up the last flight, emerging into the vault of the bell-tower. And saw her own face, tight-lipped, looking back at her.

‘Canoness Genevieve,’ said her twin sister, Eleanor, with a formal bend of her head.

It was every bit like looking in a mirror. Ironic, given how different they were. Twin canonesses in twin suits of armour. Only differing in every other way – and the simple fact that Genevieve’s recent ocular augmetic replaced her left eye rather than the right.

But when they faced each other, that only enhanced the feeling of looking in a glass.

‘I see you are late,’ sneered Arch-Deacon Mendazus. ‘As was ever the case.’

‘If you wanted me here, perhaps either of you could have sent word a miracle was occurring.’

Eleanor opened her mouth to respond.

Then the Bell of St Morrican sounded.

Eleanor crouched under the bell, staring up into the dark interior, and reached out a hand to help the frail Mendazus duck underneath.

The bell moved not, its clapper hung dead at its centre. And yet the great throat reverberated with the thrum of a note struck far away.

Genevieve joined them, the two canonesses and their overseeing priest standing inside the massive enclosure, flesh shaking from the aural assault.

Genevieve touched the curving interior surface. ‘It resonates. It trembles.’

‘Signs and wonders,’ whispered Eleanor, genuflecting. ‘It rings without human hand, like its sister, the Bell of Gerstahl. The one that rang in warning of the Twelfth Black Crusade, then ascended to avoid capture.’

‘A bit late for a warning, isn’t it? We’ve been fighting the Despoiler’s Thirteenth Crusade for nigh three months.’

‘It rings in celebration,’ said Arch-Deacon Mendazus.

‘Celebration of what?’ she asked.

He looked at her, scorn on his features. ‘Victory, of course.’

Clang.

Seven.

‘Cruxis! Cut them down! Do not let the cowards flee!’

On a mound of dead stood Marshal Amalrich of the Black Templars, sword extended in challenge at the traitor drop-ship. The power field of his blade crackled as it cooked off heretic blood.

Castellan Mordlied climbed to the Marshal’s side, hoisting the banner of the Cruxis Crusade. Ahead of him, the engines of the traitor transport ignited, washing his armour with a rolling wall of flash-heated air. The engine discharge immolated two hundred Traitor Guardsmen, who had only a moment before been clawing with desperation towards the craft in hopes of evacuating off Cadia. They disappeared into feathery ash clouds that billowed towards the line of black-armoured Astartes converging on the ship.

Mordlied’s hearts lifted along with the pennant as the artificial wind caught it, the twin-forked banner lashing in the gust like a dragon’s tail. With a two-handed heave, he drove the point of the banner-pole into the top of a wrecked rockcrete bunker and drew his chainsword.

A Traitor Guardsman, his face scarified with a heathen rune, came at him with a meltagun. Mordlied keyed his chainsword and took him at the shoulder, sectioning the heretic like a side of meat.

‘Bring it down!’ Amalrich shouted, pointing at the rising drop-ship. His shaven skull was bare, so the pitiful heretics could see the Templar cross branded on his forehead. A las-bolt flickered off his conversion field. ‘Let none escape!’

A host of missiles rushed towards the lander, crashing into armour panels and clipping off landing struts. Crimson lascannon beams lanced the bottom of the rising craft, leaving orange trails of superheated metal and exploding an external fuel tank.

For a moment it appeared to be rising skyward like a sun, slow and drifting on the burn of the lift-nozzles.

Then the engines stuttered, and the ship – wide as two hab-blocks – dropped back to the surface of Cadia.

The explosion washed over Mordlied like the Emperor’s grace.

He took the snapping cloth banner in his armoured fist, raised it to his lips, and kissed it.

Clang.

Eight.

Visibility: Six miles, minimal cloud cover.

Altitude: 3,500 feet.

Speed: 1,100 miles per hour.

And diving.

1,613 feet per second.

Captain Hanna Keztral swallowed the Gs. Clenched her teeth against the discomfort. Watched her altimeter spiral like a chrono gone mad. Cut the engines.

‘One second,’ warned her armament-operator, Darvus.

Keztral tried not to look at the green-brown of the Cadian moors rising up in her Avenger’s canopy. The grey skyline disappearing above her helmet lip. She angled the ram-thrust engine upward, ready.

‘Two seconds,’ Darvus said, alarm rising faster than the ground. ‘Kez, it’s too…’

Keztral hauled back on the stick, slammed her foot on the ignition. Felt the ram-thruster jackknife their nose to almost horizon level, forward momentum ripping air past their aerofoils in a glorious sensation of lift.

Below, a traitor armoured column streaked towards them like a las-bolt. Just a rust-streak on the blurred green of the passing landscape.

‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’ she ordered, but it was unnecessary, just the drunk head-rush of circulation returning after the dive.

Under her feet, she could already feel the armament spinning, each black eye of the cylinder firing one after the other.

‘Good approach!’ Darvus yelled behind her, eye in his telescopic sight. ‘Keep steady.’

Enemy fire drilled past. Amber whip-tails of tracer rounds. Red las-beams. Something hard, a heavy bolter round, sparked harmlessly off the armour of the tail assembly.

Avenger strike fighters were fast craft, and a kite like Keztral’s Deadeye – stripped for speed – was hard to hit without advanced warning.

Warning that Keztral, diving in steep from fifteen thousand feet, didn’t give them.

‘Spools empty!’ yelled Darvus.

Keztral stamped the right pedal and hauled the stick back, rolling them over into a sunward climb. Leaving the enemy column behind – utterly untouched by fire.

‘Good captures!’ crowed Darvus. ‘Analysts back at Kraf Air Command will be thrilled with this film. Rotary picter especially. You hit the approach perfect, Kez.’

‘Can you tell where they’re headed?’

‘That’s the best part,’ Darvus answered, voice tinny in her helmet vox. ‘They’re retreating.’

Clang.

Nine.

Major Marda Hellsker swallowed and squeezed the grip of her laspistol.

She had to set an example for her troopers. Show stoicism in the face of the enemy. Not betray her feelings.

She failed, and the smile spread across her features.

Her company sergeant, Ravura, caught the look and grinned. Leaned forward so she could hear him over the roar of the Chimera engine.

‘We’re going, sir!’ he said. ‘The front, at long last.’

She looked down the bay at the troopers, swaying in their jump seats with each jostle. Lasguns between their knees. Packs swinging in the overhead netting.

Despite the shadow of their helmet lips, she could see the sparkle of teeth in every trooper down the bay.

‘Let’s hear you roar, Twenty-Four!’ she shouted.

‘Twenty-Four, in the war!’ they barked as one, then dissolved into a chorus of hoots, howls and cheers.

‘Frekkin’ finally!’ added Corporal Lek.

‘Belay that,’ bellowed Ravura, without much force. ‘Someone needed to keep Kasr Kraf secure. And they gave it to us – because they knew the Despoiler wouldn’t dare hit Kraf with the Twenty-Fourth on the gates.’

More cheers, louder this time. Drowning out a message crackling in Hellsker’s micro-bead. Good on Ravura, flipping the script on Lek’s undermining bullshit.

Spending the war at Kraf had been hard. Not a shot fired in anger. More killed by commissars than enemy rounds. Discipline fraying with the inability to prove themselves.

And the 24th Interior Guard wanted, so badly, to prove themselves. To be able to look the other Cadians – those who had deployed to warfronts across the galaxy – in the eye. Show that even though they’d drawn the unlucky lot of remaining on-world as a garrison force, they were still soldiers of Cadia.

The buzzing in her ear continued, escalated. Hellsker frowned and pushed it deeper with a finger, waving for quiet.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Ravura.

‘We’ve stopped,’ said Hellsker. ‘The engine’s cut.’

She banged on the communication hatch until the driver slid it open. Told her what was coming over the vox.

Hellsker bit her lips. Took a moment to compose her face before turning to deliver the news. Keep it short, she told herself. Be stoic.

They were looking at her, expectant, when she turned. Smiles still gleaming under their helmets.

‘Message from the front. Enemy is in full retreat. Pulling back to landing fields. The Thirteenth Black Crusade is over. We are victorious. Our orders are to pull back to Kraf. Eject your powercells, make weapons safe.’

They slumped back into their seats, popped cells and stowed them. Pulled helmets down to cover their eyes and crossed arms over lasrifle barrels. Trooper Keska’s shoulders trembled, and Hellsker knew he was weeping. Corporal Lek dropped his head back against the bulkhead and snorted an ironic laugh. Udza, her vox-operator, dropped any façade of toughness and leaned forward, burying her eyes in the palms of her hands.

Even Ravura had nothing to say.

Marda Hellsker focused on her breathing, maintaining her neutral expression. Sat down, buckled herself back in her safety harness, and stared at the rear hatch of the Chimera.

For a moment, just a moment, she had thought she’d become a real Shock Trooper.

Through the armour of the hull, she could hear a reverberation.

She realised it was cheering, and slammed a fist on the armoured bulkhead beside her.

Clang.

Ten.

Trazyn could hear the bell’s echo even within the hyperspace oubliette.

A thing that should not be possible, but impossibilities seemed to be getting increasingly common.

‘I am obliged for the rescue, Huntmaster. But was it quite necessary to drag your planetary overlord?’

‘My apologies, lord.’ The Huntmaster released his grip on Trazyn’s clavicle collar. The deathmark’s single ocular gleamed. ‘The bellow of the beast was approaching. It cannot find us in here.’

‘Yes, well.’ Trazyn brushed his necrodermis off with his metal hands. The Huntmaster had once been the greatest game warden in the dynasties, but like most necrons, the deathmark was now quite mad. ‘I see you picked up Sannet as well. What is the gallery’s status?’

‘Major damage, lord, cascade failures.’

‘When the ringing stops, I want that relic out of here – cast it through the webway portal, let it bedevil the aeldari. But before that, prepare the Lord of Antiquity for sail.’

‘You,’ stuttered Sannet, ‘you are leaving Solemnace, lord archaeovist? In such a state?’

‘If that bell foretells what I think it does, it means a cataclysm of historic proportions – one that would be most fascinating to observe up close.’ He paused, reading damage glyphs. ‘The legions are inactivated, I see. What about the galleries?’

‘Only the closed collection remains untouched,’ answered Sannet. ‘Its enfolded dimension seems less affected. The Horus Heresy exhibit, the Terran artefacts, and of course the special acquisition.’

‘It will have to do. Get me a complement of mindshackle scarabs. Come, Huntmaster. I daresay there will be game big enough for even you.’

Clang.

Eleven.

‘That price,’ the captain said, ‘is murder.’

‘That price,’ Salvar Ghent responded, mirroring his pause, ‘is final.’

The captain was a Mordian. Off-worlder. Slab-like features with a sharp little moustache. Ghent didn’t like him, but Ghent didn’t like people in general.

‘We have defended this world. You could show some appreciation.’

‘I could, I suppose.’ Ghent leaned back in his chair, looking at the equipment of the bomb-shattered manufactorum. The building had no roof, casting the desk he’d ordered dragged onto the factory floor in gauzy sunlight. A flight of Lightning fighters darted by overhead, rattling the autopistol he’d laid on the desk. ‘How about I show my appreciation by selling you the last ten cases of leolac in Kasr Kraf, so your troopers can celebrate?’

‘But the price…’

‘If you don’t pay it, Cadians will. Leolac is the local favourite. A premium liquor. And a premium liquor demands a premium price.’

The adjunct standing behind the captain sneered. ‘Don’t play with us, gutter-trash. You’re talking to soldiers, not some grubby ganger boss.’

‘Sergeant Jollan, let’s be civil.’

Ghent, back when he was low enough in the underworld to have such a disrespectful nickname, had occasionally been known as Slide-Eye for the way his gaze seemed to wander like a searchlight, never looking at who he was speaking to. Now, the purple eyes settled on the subaltern.

‘So much for Mordian discipline.’

‘Keep pushing and I’ll show you Mordian discipline.’ Jollan laid a white-gloved hand on her glossy leather holster.

‘Lass, I know the commissars tell you your life’s worth nothing, but don’t throw it away over catering expenses.’

‘My apologies, sir,’ continued the captain. ‘Sergeant Jollan is a proud daughter of Mordian. But she is correct – you are trying to cheat us. And I do not appreciate the implicit threat of the pistol in front of you.’

‘I see,’ said Ghent, raising two fingers.

Four gangers stepped out from the rusting equipment, drum-fed autoguns held at waist height as they advanced.

‘Then let’s make the threat explicit. Just so you can appreciate it.’

‘Don’t,’ warned the captain, as Jollan’s hand curled around her laspistol.

‘Listen to the captain, lass, you won’t win this one,’ said Ghent. ‘See, we might not wear the skull-and-wings, but we’re still Cadians. By the time an intake sergeant spat in your face and told you to stand up straight, we’d been doing live-fire drills from age nine.’

Ghent reached down under the desk, pulled up a blue ceramic bottle of leolac and pulled the cork.

‘Now,’ said Ghent. ‘Shall we toast your victory, and return to the question of price?’

Clang.

Twelve.

Corks popped, bouncing off the ceiling and landing on the long table. A group of artillery staff officers were trying to hit the chandelier. They cheered as one missile lodged in the hanging strands of crystal, and the lieutenant who’d fired it celebrated by pulling directly off the bottle.

To Colour Sergeant Jarran Kell, it sounded like the hollow pop of mortar tubes.

He walked down the table, passing a group of Vostroyans snare-drumming the wooden surface with their fists. In their centre, a lieutenant worked her way along a line of blue-glowing shot glasses. The Vostroyans burst into a cheer as she finished the last, triumphantly crushing the glass in her bionic fist.

A captain of the Eighth approached Kell singing ‘Flower of Cadia’, and pushed a flute of sparkling vin into his hand. Kell took it and raised it in a toast, then discreetly ditched it on a sideboard. He picked a cap off the table and deposited it on the head of an intelligence corporal – someone’s aide – who lay face down on the table with his arm wrapped around a leolac bottle. His fellows had kindly decorated him with a collection of flatware.

Kell took a right turn and put a hand on the double door-knob, but stopped when he heard the call of, ‘Creed! Where’s Creed?’

He turned and waved them off.

‘We want the Lord Castellan!’ shouted another. ‘Speech!’

It became a chant then: ‘Speech! Speech! Speech!’

‘Soon,’ he shouted back, knowing that in an hour, most would be so drunk they wouldn’t remember to ask again. ‘After the night’s work is done – someone has to manage the victory.’

As the cheer rose, he disappeared through the blast-proof doors before it became quiet enough for more demands.

‘Those idiots are still at it, I see,’ said Ursarkar Creed.

The commander of the Cadian Eighth, saviour of Tyrok Fields, and Lord Castellan of Cadia bent over a desk collaged with documents and maps. Empty sacra tumblers served as paperweights, and an ashtray fashioned from an Earthshaker shell smouldered with half a dozen cigar-butts. The room – so pristine when Creed had moved into it – reeked of tobacco.

‘The Archenemy is in retreat, pulling off-world,’ Kell answered. ‘You told them to enjoy themselves.’

‘I said to enjoy it while it lasts, there’s a difference.’ Creed turned red-rimmed eyes back to the charts. ‘I know Shock Troopers can’t do anything in moderation, but I didn’t mean for them to undermine readiness. This isn’t over.’

‘So a night of venting heat will be good for morale, especially if this isn’t over.’

Creed grunted. ‘Still, move reveille up an hour tomorrow morning. They can have their fun tonight, but I want them to feel it.’

Kell smirked, the closest he got to a smile, and handed over the data-slate tucked under his arm. ‘Report from South Primus. The Volscani are holding on. They don’t seem to be running with the mutants and irregular cultist militias.’

‘Under all the spikes and blood runes, they’re still Guardsmen,’ mused Creed. ‘That’s what makes them dangerous. Any word from Admiral Quarren and the picket fleet?’

‘No, sir. But he should have established his blockade at the Eye of Terror by now.’

‘Let’s hope that I’m being paranoid.’ Creed leaned backwards with his hands on the small of his back.

‘It’s true what the war council says, you know. The forces that hit us were commensurate with previous Black Crusades. Larger, even.’

‘Not you too, Jarran.’ Creed shook his head.

‘It is possible he was killed in the Eye, fighting some other warlord.’ He saw Creed’s look and added: ‘It’s happened before.’

‘You can’t believe that.’

‘We picked up signals saying so. Good quality intercepts. Hard decryptions, definitely look authentic.’

‘Tell me this, if this was the main Archenemy attack, where are the Terminators? Where’re the waves of Black Legion, the warp engines? We’ve had cultists and mutants, Traitor Astartes in tactical roles, but you’re telling me the Archenemy leadership spent centuries building this force then never landed here in person?’

Through the door, a drunken chorus was singing ‘Flower of Cadia’ again, and Creed had to shout to make himself heard over the din.

‘No one can explain that to me. Not any of them. Not the Navy, not the Aeronautica, not Militarum intelligence or the Scholastica Psykana or the demigods of the Adeptus Astartes. None of them can tell me the one Throne-damned thing I want to know.’

He threw his cigar-butt on the desk in frustration, smearing a debris field of ash across a chart of the Rossvar Mountains. Then he slammed both fists onto the desktop and shouted the last three words:

‘Where is Abaddon?’

Clang.

Thirteen.

The ship emerged from the immaterium with a noise like a child being torn from the womb. A moment of blood, a primal experience of a creature first feeling the cold air and pull of gravity – sucking atmosphere into its lungs before screaming it out in pain and confusion.

Except in this case it was not the ship that screamed, it was the material world around it. The very atoms rent apart, bleeding indescribable colours.

Dravura Morkath watched through the crystal windows as the vessel she had tamed for her master spilled forth into realspace.

The sudden shock of translation hit the bridge crew, already overtaxed in serving the ancient vessel. Beastmen vomited. One opened its mouth and bit down on its own arm hard enough to fracture it.

A Mechanicum adept at a fire-control station suffered a compounding error in his synthetic brain. His logic chains – rerouted so drastically to make sense of the pandemonium of the Eye – jammed as it encountered the silent order of realspace.

He collapsed to the deck, the smoke of frying neural circuits wafting from his tear-ducts.

Morkath saw his thoughts as he died, his stream of consciousness surrounding his augmented cranium like the halo on the fresco of an Imperial saint.

All beings thought differently. Some of the beastmen on the bridge projected impressionistic swirls of ink around their heads, full of despair. Others expressed their conscious with jagged-edged panic.

This adept, in his death throes, still thought in the blinking typeface of a cathode screen as his brain ticked down like a dying chrono.

Back to station. I can get back to station, lord. I can…

Pain, so much…

Do I live?

I can…

…still…

…serve…

‘Children of the Eye,’ growled a voice behind her. ‘Not meant for realspace.’

Morkath turned to look upon her Warmaster, ensuring her mind did not search the cloud of thoughts swirling around him like an aura of flame. Her master did not always want her to see what resided there, and neither did she.

Morkath bowed to her lord.

Abaddon. The Warmaster of Chaos, right hand of Horus, Master of the Black Legion and the being fated to kill the False Emperor. The man who had pulled Morkath out of the dark as a child, and made her what she was – though what that was, exactly, remained a subject of whispers.

The Warmaster sat in an ebony throne too large for his enormous frame. What manner of creature required such a seat – one large enough to dwarf the Warmaster, even in his battle plate – was, like so much aboard the Blackstone Fortress Will of Eternity, beyond Morkath’s understanding.

Yet the space around the Warmaster was not empty. Daemon-things flitted there, darting and howling. Folding in upon themselves in geometric shapes or bursting into flames that devoured their essence as some stray emotion set them ablaze.

Morkath closed her eyes and willed herself not to see the motes of warp-things. To screen them out, and see only the revered face of the being she was lucky to call father.

‘The stars are different this time,’ he said.

‘Different, my lord?’ Morkath asked, opening her eyes to see the Warmaster without his shroud of parasitic spirits.

‘I remember.’ Abaddon’s head, twice as large as that of a mortal, did not regard her as he spoke, yet even so, the low rumble of his voice rattled through her. ‘I recall how the stars looked when we exited the Eye last time.’

‘During the Gothic War,’ Morkath said.

‘Yes, before we took you in, foundling. I remember where every star was fixed, then. It was the same. The same constellations, unchanging from the first time we exited the Eye to the last. Twelve times, the same starscape.’

‘But now they have changed?’

‘New stars,’ growled Abaddon. ‘Different stars. Moving… a fleet.’

‘Contacts! Contacts!’ bleated a Mechanicum sensory officer. She stood permanently wired into a pit, slick organic cables – bunching and relaxing like the tentacles of an undersea octopod – connecting her exposed cranium with eight psykers floating in fluid sacs. ‘Imperial fleet! Bearing eight-two-six. Two thousand five hundred miles distance. Emperor class! Mars class! Vengeance class!’

‘Reading ship silhouettes,’ intoned Cacadius Siron. He was a former Alpha Legionnaire – now Abaddon’s intelligence chief. Before him, projection lasers danced in the air, sketching wire-frame outlines of Imperial vessels. ‘Tentative identifications: Might of the Faithful, Emperor class. Final Blow, Mars class. Duke Lurstophan, Dauntless class. Abridal’s Glory, Gothic class. They are from multiple battlefleets – Scarus, Agrippina, Corona.’

‘A combined fleet,’ said Abaddon. ‘Consolidated due to casualties.’

‘Our opening moves must have damaged their fleet assets even more heavily than we estimated,’ Morkath said.

‘With the remnants split chasing the Vengeful Spirit away from Cadia,’ added Siron. He seemed ready to speak again, but the Warmaster cut him off.

‘Meaning, the Gate is open.’

‘To Cadia!’ roared a beastman, raising its clenched fists. Across the command deck, crew howled, crowed, bellowed, gurgled, ululated. A thousand mutant throats screaming the elation that came with an achievement millennia in the making. Feet and hooves stamped the decking. ‘To Cadia! To Cadia!’

Under the noise, only Morkath heard the Warmaster growl.

‘A step,’ he said. ‘It is only a step. The Crimson Path awaits.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2023.
This eBook edition published in 2023 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.

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ISBN: 978-1-80407-505-0

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For Dustin and Mike,
the only friends I’d want when exploring a Blackstone Fortress.

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