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  ‘She’s our way out,’ said Vairon. ‘Who can stand against her?’

  ‘As long as she doesn’t face us,’ Harvus said.

  They guided the woman to the exit in the aft wall of the hold. Harvus used one of the guards’ keys to unlock it, and they pulled it open. Beyond was an antechamber leading to the next hold. To the right was an iron staircase. The psykers began their climb.

  They went up through more decks of nightmare and riot. They headed down galleries like those that had loomed above the oubliettes. They entered labyrinths of cells, and had to snake through twisting corridors designed to confuse the sensitive minds of psykers. The faceless woman’s screams cut a path for them, a thinning of the herd that made it easier to move through the psychic storms. Vairon tried to look away but the mesmerism of horror held his gaze.

  There were choices of paths to take on every level. The rune shone in Vairon’s mind, showing him the way. He never hesitated, and he grew more and more confident that the call of destiny would lead them through all danger.

  It was the silent women who worried him the most. There was no defence against the psychic void that radiated from them. Several times, he saw them from a distance, just as the rune pulled him another way. There they were, at the end of halls, or on an opposite gallery, cutting down the freed psykers with calm, merciless precision.

  ‘They’ll kill us all if they see us,’ Harvus said as they hurried the faceless woman through another door, onto another staircase. He did not have to specify what he meant by they.

  ‘They won’t see us,’ Vairon said.

  ‘We’re lucky there aren’t more of them,’ said Cassina.

  ‘Whoever has attacked the ship is a greater threat than any of us.’

  They climbed higher, and the sounds of combat grew louder. Signs of damage multiplied, and bodies littered the decks. Most of them were psykers, but there were many dead guards too.

  As the four escapees mounted yet another staircase, Harvus trembled with shock. ‘Why have they done this to us?’ he asked. ‘Why did they imprison us in this place? What did we do?’

  ‘We exist,’ Vairon said, thinking of the fear and the hate he had seen in guards’ eyes during his imprisonment. ‘That’s enough.’

  The woman screamed. The narrow stairwell compressed the sound, turning it into iron claws that smashed at Vairon on all sides. His ears were still ringing, his heart still beating too fast when they pulled open the next door.

  They had left the containment decks behind. They were on one of the main decks now. Smoke filled the dark hall. Lumen strips flickered, giving off no more than a dull, amber glow. Shadowy relief sculpture in the iron walls whispered of discipline and silence.

  The din of combat was much closer now. The corridor ran lengthwise along the hull. There was an explosion somewhere forward of the psykers’ position. A red glow pulsed in the dimness.

  ‘No one around,’ said Harvus. ‘That’s lucky.’

  ‘We won’t be lucky long,’ Cassina said.

  The faceless woman’s groan was building towards another shriek. Their movement was not going to be stealthy.

  ‘So we hurry,’ said Harvus. ‘But which way?’

  The rune blazed in Vairon’s mind’s eye, stronger than ever before. He turned aft and pushed the woman ahead. ‘This way,’ he said.

  The woman’s scream sounded down the seemingly endless length of the corridor.

  As they hurried as best they could, Vairon kept hoping he would see alcoves leading to life pods. But every intersection was with just another hall to other regions of the deck. He moved straight ahead, trusting in the guidance of his fate.

  The smoke grew thicker, and the sounds of battle grew louder in this direction too.

  ‘What are you taking us into?’ Cassina hissed.

  ‘There is no other path for us,’ Vairon insisted. Destiny called. The rune called.

  The combat was terrifyingly close. As they approached the next intersection, they heard booted feet coming down the portside branch. Vairon froze. As the steps closed in, he felt smothering lead close in too. The rune, its terror and its guidance receded from him, dropping out of reach and out of sight.

  One of the silent women thundered into the intersection. Her lower face was covered by her golden armour’s grille, and her eyes were terrible to behold – things of deep, merciless ice. Her head was clean-shaven except for a mane of red hair bound in a tight braid. She was wounded, the left side of her armour ripped open, and blood pouring from her waist, yet she was rushing towards the sound of battle.

  She stopped when she saw the psykers, and levelled her boltgun. Vairon shrank back with Cassina and Harvus, instinctively sheltering behind the faceless woman. He could barely breathe. His psychic power was gone completely, so thoroughly shut down it was as if it had never existed. In its place there was emptiness, a vast abyss into which he was falling.

  The mutant screamed. Except she did not. Her mouth was wide open, but the only sound that emerged was a hissing exhalation.

  The silent woman opened fire. Bolt shells cut through the mutant, exploding her body to shreds. Vairon recoiled, jerking to the side and slamming against the starboard wall as blood spewed over him. The mutant vanished in the volley. Cassina and Harvus shuddered, nailed where they stood by the burst of shells. Their bodies disintegrated too, and Vairon was left alone.

  He slumped to the floor, the numbness of despair overtaking him. Why would destiny lead him to die pointlessly here? Why not leave him to perish in the oubliette? That would have been kinder. He would have been spared the poor joke of hope.

  The silent warrior turned the muzzle of the boltgun towards Vairon.

  Before she could pull the trigger, a massive barrage struck from the starboard side of the corridor. She turned into the hail and fired back, but she was dead in seconds. The assault would have ripped apart a tank. The shells smashed craters in the port wall, and the air filled with the stinging smell of spent fyceline.

  The numbness vanished. Vairon felt his mind open wide again, but the rune did not come for him. Instead, he was held by a gigantic sense of imminence. He held his breath. Fate had not lied. Fate was approaching. He heard more boots now, many of them, marching with the unstoppable heaviness of destiny. Vairon stumbled forward around the corner to meet it. He must show his readiness. He must show his gratitude.

  Giants headed his way. They were clad in crimson armour and dark robes. Vairon stared at destiny made flesh. He saw the angular serpent rune on the armour of the lead warrior. He saw what he had been running towards all his life, and he knew that he would at last know what the rune meant.

  Vairon’s relief melted away.

  The giant in the lead turned his helmet to look at Vairon. A legionary. He nodded. ‘Here’s another,’ he said. His voice emerged as an amplified snarl, deep with hideous knowledge.

  I don’t want to know, Vairon thought. I don’t want to know. But knowledge was descending upon him with a raptor’s claws.

  The warrior stepped forward and seized him with one hand. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This one will serve. We’ll put him with the others.’

  The twisted rune on the armour, surrounded by a hundred others, filled Vairon’s vision, and he sobbed. He longed for the mercy of the oubliette. He prayed for the quick death that had been stolen from him.

  Before him, the abyss of life opened wide.

  About the Author

  David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos and the Primarchs novel Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar. He has also written the Yarrick series, several stories involving the Grey Knights, and The Last Wall, The Hunt for Vulkan and Watchers in Death for The Beast Arises. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numero
us short stories set in The Horus Heresy, Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar universes. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

  An extract from Heralds of the Siege.

  The Martian soil trembled. Beneath the Temple-Tarantyne assembly yards, something was rising.

  Once a glorious spectacle of magna-machinery and Titan production, the southern installation had produced the mighty god-machines of the Legio Excruciata. Now its great production temples glowed with the unholy light of corruption. Chittering constructs went to work on towering perversions – looming monstrosities that should have been Warlord Titans but instead were metal monsters of daemonic infestation and heretek weaponry.

  Row upon row of such beasts stood silent in the storage precincts, waiting for the orbital mass conveyers that would take them to bulk freighters destined for the Warmaster’s forces.

  But those mass conveyors would not come.

  With the Forge World Principal blockaded by the VII Legion, nothing was leaving Mars. Like the monstrous tanks, fevered warrior-constructs and ranks of empty battleplate sitting in storage bays across the surface, the Chaos Titans gathered Martian dust.

  Dust that now rained down about the towering abominations as the bedrock quaked beneath them.

  A Warlord Titan was a walking fortress of thick plate and powerful shielding. As any who had ever faced such an apocalyptic foe understood, it had few weaknesses. As a former princeps of the Collegia Titanica, Kallistra Lennox had the distinction of both piloting and felling such god-machines. She knew that one of the few vulnerabilities the Mars Alpha-pattern Warlord had was a weak point on its command deck, but the deck was almost impossible to reach for ground troops.

  Standing in the gyroscopic interior compartment of the Mole burrowing transport Archimedex, Lennox felt the adamantium prow drilling a phase-fielded tunnel through the Martian bedrock and soil, then finally breaking the surface into the assembly yards. While the large tunnelling vehicle emerged upright, like a rising tower, the crowded troop compartment maintained its rolling orientation within, which would make disembarkation a smooth affair. The princeps had directed the translithope to rise up next to a Warlord Titan identified as Ajax Abominata. Loyal constructs had been watching the installation for weeks from the scrap-littered sides of the surrounding mountains. The construction of Ajax Abominata was all but complete, although its armoured shell was still covered in a scaffold, complete with mobile gantries.

  It was a target ripe for sabotage – and the princeps knew exactly how to do it.

  Not that she looked very much like an officer of the Collegia Titanica any more. While she still wore her uniform amid scraps of flak and carapace, it was tattered and stained with oil. The black leather of her boots was scuffed and her gloves crudely cut to fingerlessness. She wore an eyepatch where her ocular bionic had been torn out, and a short chainblade sat heavy upon her belt where a ceremonial sabre used to hang. Grenades and hydrogen flasks dangled from a bandolier while in her hands the princeps clutched the chunky shape of a plasma caliver.

  ‘Stand by,’ she said, sternly.

  The loyalist Mechanicum cell to which Lennox belonged had been dubbed the Omnissian Faithful. Like all its adherents, Lennox was a Martian survivor. Left behind in the exodus to Terra, she had become a rebel on her own world. While the scrapcode tore through the Forge World Principal, corrupting everything it touched, there had been some Martians and constructs who had followed their instincts. As part of a disgust response – like a person making themselves sick after ingesting a toxin or poison – some true servants of the Omnissiah had had the strength to mutilate themselves. They tore bionics from their bodies, severed hardlinks and burned out wireless receivers. Ports and interfaces were gouged out, their bodies and minds cut off from the code-streams of the Martian networks. They had saved themselves from the infected data that brought madness, spiritual pollution and the warping of flesh and form.

  It was a corruption that had claimed nearly all who had not escaped the Red Planet, even the Fabricator General himself: Kelbor-Hal, now no more than a withered bundle of polluted workings. Like the magi below him and the constructs below them, he had become a slave to darkness. A puppet controlled by the renegade Warmaster Horus, light years distant.

  In the Mole’s troop compartment stood a motley collection of blank-faced adepts, battle-smashed skitarii, liberated tech-thralls, indentured menials, gun-servitors saved by their masters, vat-engineered work-hulks, harnessed ferals and bastardised battle-automata. All were pledged to the Omnissian Faithful but had needed a leader in the field. Someone of a tactical mind and destructive disposition to help the rebels in a campaign of sabotage and subversion.

  When Lennox had joined them, they had found just such a leader.

  ‘Ten seconds,’ the princeps told the rebel constructs about her. Her seconds, Omnek-70 and Galahax Zarco, waited either side of the bulkhead. Omnek-70 was skitarii – a Ranger who carried the length of a transuranic arquebus. Zarco, meanwhile, was a hulking enginseer who hefted a power axe in the shape of an Omnissian cog. Lennox listened for the sound of the drill and phase fields on different materials. She stamped on the deck.

  ‘Ratchek,’ she called to her former moderatii and the Mole’s goggled operator. ‘Kill the main drive. Open outer doors.’

  The layered bulkheads sighed hydraulically, and slipped aside to reveal the shadowy interior of the scaffold complex.

  Lennox nodded. ‘Go.’

  Click here to buy Heralds of the Siege.

  A Black Library Publication

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

  Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

  Cover illustration by Mharaid Morrison.

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  ISBN: 978-1-78030-776-3

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