Gaunt, grinning, I recognised the cadaverous features of my brother.

‘Ferrus…’

Placing a finger mockingly to his lips, he beckoned me to follow him into the shadows.

I knew I could not trust my own mind. By manifesting this apparition, here and in my cell, it had already betrayed me.

Weak,he mouthed as I paused before the threshold to the right-hand branch. S o weak.

I took the left branch, trusting my instincts over my mind, and as I turned I saw another figure. Incorporeal, a wraith in form and features, it wore gossamer-thin robes that appeared to float as if they were suspended in water. Its eyes were almond-shaped and the runes crafted about its person were eldritch and alien. The eldar flickered once as if captured on a bad pict-cording and disappeared.

My brother or my enemy; it was not much of a choice. I felt the jaws of the rusty trap closing around me again, their teeth pinching my flesh.

I raced down the left branch, finding its terminus was a bulkhead. It was the first of its kind I had seen since my escape, more robust and inviolable than the doors I had passed through so far. Metres thick, triple bolted, I wasn’t able to just rip it from its hinges.

Pressing my hand against the metal, acutely aware of the shouts of my pursuers getting closer, I felt coldness. Then the light glaring from the bulkhead’s inbuilt access panel went from red to green.

Klaxons sounded as the amber strobes above the door kicked in; I noticed the black-and-yellow chevrons delineating it.

Backing away, too late, far too late, realising now where I was and why this place was so familiar to me, I watched as a jagged crack formed diagonally in the bulkhead and its two halves slid apart to reveal a second emergency door.

The coldness intensified. Tendrils of it touched my skin, freezing me. Knowing it was pointless to run, I waited as the second door split just like the first. Invisible force shields collapsed and I was wrenched up off my feet as the pressure inside the corridor began venting outwards, taking me with it.

I was not on Isstvan. I had never been on Isstvan.

It was a ship, Curze’s ship.

The emergency door opened and I had a few seconds to behold the void of deepspace before I was wrenched out.

CHAPTER FIVE

Blood begets blood

Valdrekk Elias crouched at the bottom of the shaft. Masked by shadows, he surveyed the dig site.

‘What were they looking for?’ asked one of the Word Bearers in the hole with him. His name was Jadrekk, a loyal if unimaginative warrior. He was pacing the edges of the site, bolter locked across his chest.

‘Whatever it was, they found it,’ Elias replied.

Tools lay strewn about the subterranean chamber, and doused phosphor lamps were still suspended from cables bolted into the cave roof. A cup of recaff sat next to an upturned stool and there were scuff marks in the dust made by the hurried passage of booted feet.

In the middle of the chamber – some kind of reliquary if the presence of bones and skulls was any guide – the flagstones had been upheaved. They were cracked apart, blackened at the edges and not by the action of any digging tool. Through careful excavation, through the use of micro-trenchers and the application of debris-thinners to gently extract extraneous layers of dirt and granite, a crater had been revealed. And in its core, half a metre down, was a void.

Elias leaned in to the hole cut into the crater, exploring the unusual cleft in the rock where the fortune hunters, or whatever they were, had been digging.

‘And it was removed from here,’ he added, standing and dusting off his armour.

Amaresh dipped his horned helmet towards the mess surrounding the crater.

‘I’d say they left in a hurry.’

He knelt down to touch the cup of recaff.

‘And not that long ago, either.’

‘Agreed,’ said Elias, activating the arcane-looking flask attached to his belt.

‘ I have their trail,’ Narek reported without having to be asked.

‘How many?’

‘ Not enough.’

‘Don’t kill them all, Narek. Not until we know what they took from the catacombs and why.’

‘ I can’t swear to that.’

Narek ended the communion, allowing Elias to appreciate the primitive architecture of the room. Though much of it had been destroyed, collapsing in on itself as entropy was exerted upon stone and steel, he could still discern the eight-sided structure, the weave and weft of the arcane in its construction. Primitive, centuries old, he felt the latent power in this temple. It was nothing but a shadow, the artefact that had been taken from the crater having destroyed it and robbed it of its potency long ago.

Elias felt the distant touch of the Pantheon on this place and knew that whatever secret it held was worth discovering for himself.

‘Come,’ he told the other two. As he ascended the ramp back to the surface, Elias looked up at the light coming down through the opening and the raindrops caught in its shaft, sparkling like stars. It reminded him of the constellations in the night sky, and how they were changing.

‘Brothers,’ Elias said, ‘I sense there is more to do here than taint the False Emperor’s sacred earth.’ He smiled. ‘A revelation is near.’

Above the pit into the catacombs, Deriok was waiting. He had four other legionaries with him. The rest of the landing party were at large in the city; two were hunting with Narek, the others were silencing comm-stations, killing any resistance and otherwise keeping the Word Bearers’ presence in Ranos concealed. There were seven more cities, and in addition to Ranos, their populations might be needed too. For most important of all Elias’s acolytes’ duties here was the procurement of sacrifices.

‘Eight disciples, one for each of the eight points,’ said Elias, emerging into the light.

Like the statue in Cardinal Square, these ruins were a monument to the Emperor’s dominance and former presence on this world. The potency of the effigy that the natives had erected was nothing compared to this place, however. That had been easy to taint. The Emperor had unleashed his power upon the old temple that had once stood here, and reduced it to rubble. He had broken the strength trapped in its walls and overthrown it. He had literally touchedit with his godhood, and like a fingerprint it remained still. Indelible, enduring.

Here, in Ranos, did the Emperor’s power manifest and here, in Ranos, at the very site of Imperial victory, would Elias taint that power and corrupt it to the will of the Pantheon. It would take time and patience. Most of all it would take blood. As the first stage of the ritual began, he tried not to be distracted with thoughts of what had been hidden in the catacombs, forcing his mind to the matter in hand, but the mystery of it intrigued him.

‘Gather,’ he said to the other seven, the acolytes forming a circle of eight with their master. Ritual daggers glistened in fists of red ceramite. Seized in each zealot’s other hand was a mortal.

‘Blood begets blood,’ Elias uttered. He barely saw them as people any more. The men and women at his brothers’ mercy were just a simple means to an end. ‘Let the galaxy drown in it,’ he concluded and slashed the throat of the woman he was holding, spilling her blood to profane the earth.

They would need more. Much more. But the harvest of Ranos had yielded a plentiful crop. And as he listened to the plaintive cries of the cattle his warriors had herded, Elias smiled and said to Amaresh, ‘Bring forth the others.’

Varteh’s sense of direction was good, but even the ex-Lucifer Black was struggling to keep his bearings in the warren of Ranos City.

‘Are we lost, Varteh?’ Sebaton glanced over his shoulder and saw his worried expression mirrored by the thin-looking man behind him.