Sebaton nodded, and felt his admiration and respect for the ex-Lucifer grow, while his own self-loathing redoubled.

‘I think the Army misses you greatly.’

‘Oh, I doubt that. Just another pair of boots.’

They didn’t shake hands, nothing so trite as that, but a look passed between them and in it Sebaton found some hope that he could be a better man than he was. Perhaps he could be more than a weapon.

‘He’s going?’ asked Gollach, getting agitated again. ‘Where? He’s no soldier. Why is he going? I want to go with him.’ He got to his feet.

Gollach was exhausted, and would only slow Sebaton down. Like an airship struggling for loft, Sebaton needed to drop some ballast. Only in this case, it was the men he had hired.

Holding Gollach by the shoulders, Sebaton spoke clearly and calmly.

‘ Stay here with Varteh. He’ll keep you safe.’

A sort of blankness came over Gollach’s face and he nodded once before sitting back down.

Varteh didn’t look surprised. Sebaton knew the ex-Lucifer had suspected that he was a psyker for a while.

‘You need to go,’ he said. Trio was already breaking out a pair of heavy calibre cannons from a case he’d been hauling all the way from the dig site. With the exception of the servitors that they had since abandoned, it was about all they did take with them. Sebaton counted three weapons in total. Duugan wouldn’t need his.

‘You want one?’ Varteh asked. ‘Might come in handy.’

It wouldn’t, not against them.

‘Keep it. It’ll only slow me down.’

‘Is it worth it?’ Varteh asked. ‘What we took from the hole.’

‘Worth all of mankind.’

Sebaton ran.

Though it was hard to tell from his dour demeanour, Narek relished the hunt. He used to be reconnaissance, a Vigilator, until an injury impeded his scouting abilities and saw him fall behind the others in his unit. He’d given up the squad soon after that, and rejoined the Legion proper as part of Elias’s Chapter.

It was on Isstvan V that he had been wounded. In command of a stealth unit, sent to sabotage Legion forces loyal to the Emperor before the attack began and their betrayal was revealed, his unit met some enemy Scouts who saw at once what they were doing. They killed the fledgeling Raven Guard, but at the cost of Narek’s entire squad and his left leg. A bolt shell had shattered it. He’d finished placing the charges, crawling over the bodies of his dead comrades to do so, and found his way back from the dropsite before the firestorm began.

Bionics replaced his bones and his burned-up muscle and flesh, but he wasn’t the same. That battle had left a mark on Narek that went beyond mere injury. It made him morose, prone to angry self-recrimination, even self-doubt, but he served because he was a soldier and that’s what soldiers did – they followed orders.

Elias needed a huntsman, so Narek took up the post, but never divulged how he really felt about what happened on Isstvan. It sat poorly with him, but he understood its necessity and believed in their cause, perhaps less blindly than some of his brothers.

Catching prey was the only time when his mind felt occupied enough that none of his other concerns mattered. Everything else faded back to grey when Narek was on the hunt.

Using the servitors as decoys was smart. The cyborgs went down quickly, without much fight, but the distraction absorbed precious minutes. Narek had let Dagon do it, content to look on before scouring the area for further signs. He sent Haruk on ahead to close the trap he had so artfully set for his prey.

Narek was looking down on them now as he crouched on a rooftop, obscured by steam venting from ceiling ducts and the shadows of the night. All lights were out in Ranos; the rest of the brothers had seen to that. Only this small act was left to carry out now.

A three-man hunting party. Were he younger, and without the bionic, Narek would have done it alone. As he was, he needed the others.

‘ A last stand.’ Dagon was on the opposite rooftop, about twenty metres away. Ranos was heavily industrialised, providing an abundance of hiding places from which the Word Bearers could observe their prey.

Below them were two armed men, hunkered down in cover, nervously eyeing the dark. A third man sat apart from the others, unarmed, not a fighter.

‘Another distraction,’ Narek answered Dagon through the vox. ‘One is missing.’

‘ Haruk will gut him like the other one he found.’

Such a bloodthirsty warrior was Dagon, perhaps better suited to the VIII than the XVII. But he killed clean and didn’t linger over his prey like some in the XVII were prone to do. Still, Narek knew he wasn’t wrong. Haruk would have silenced the scout. That left these three scalps to him and Dagon.

‘Elias wants that one alive. He has something of value to us.’

‘ Does Haruk know that?’

‘He will if he kills him, Elias will make certain of it.’

‘ Then let’s make this quick and not keep the Dark Apostle waiting.’

Narek cut the vox-link. He unhitched the sniper rifle slung across his back and brought it up into position. This was a singular weapon. A Brontos -pattern rifle was heavy and difficult to wield, but its heft was backed up with sheer stopping power. It took specially crafted bolt-rounds, with an added impeller in the rifle stock to offset the reduced range with a boost of pneumatic propulsion. A racking handle allowed for manual reload, but that was only useful in an emergency. Narek liked to keep his targets at distance and make use of the weapon’s automatic chambering function.

Pressing his right eye to the scope, he adjusted the targeter until its crosshairs lined up squarely over the head of the man on the right. The rifle stock was cold against his cheek, and he felt the roughness of the grooves he’d made in it to celebrate each of his long-range kills. There were many.

Narek muttered an oath, then, waiting three seconds to control his breathing, he fired.

Sebaton paused when he heard the shot. His breath caught in his chest and he had to make a concerted effort to exhale. He was no stranger to gunfire, but the quietude in the city was so absolute, the avenues and buildings so deserted, that the sudden presence of violent noise alarmed him.

He’d taken a similar route to the one Varteh had been leading them down, only more circuitous. Deliberate detours had taken him farther off the main streets, embedded him deeper into the warren. Arriving on Traoris from off-world with Varteh and the others, there had been no time to reconnoitre properly. Besides, the mission was supposed to have been relatively simple. Find the relic, leave and catch an atmospheric craft from the nearest space port, heading corewards. This side of the rift it wouldn’t be easy, but it was straightforward. The other ‘task’ made it slightly more complex, but Sebaton was a pragmatist, so first things first. He had studied maps of his location, but it was no substitute for seeing, getting a feel.

Deep in the heart of Ranos the habs were more like hives, clustered together in dirty colonies. There were warehouses, silos, smoke stacks and manufactorums, all pressing for space, all suffocating on top of and next to one another. But here he was anonymous. Here, he was nothing more than a rat and he hoped that, like all vermin, his passage through Ranos would go largely unnoticed. It would take him longer to reach the shipyard but at least he would reduce the risk of meeting up with whatever had ended Duugan, for the scout was certainly dead.

So too, Varteh and Trio. He hadn’t heard screams, even from Gollach, but the men were gone.

On reflection, Sebaton thought it might have been two shots, fired in such perfect unison that the first masked the second. Neither was silenced, which meant his pursuers had discarded stealth in favour of intimidation. They wanted him to know they were closing and that they had him in their trap.