A long hall stretched in front of me. Embedded in either flanking wall were mechanisms of an esoteric design – great gears and cogs fashioned alongside smaller and more intricate servos. Antiquity met modernity and became a fusion of genius so prevalent in the tech-craft of old Firenza.

Perturabo’s work. I knew it instantly.

Flagstones had been laid along the floor. They were grimy and slick. I suspected that whatever this room’s intended purpose was, Curze had thoroughly tested it before my incarceration. The stone was but a veneer, a grubby falsehood to give this hole a darker, more medieval atmosphere. Sconces set into alcoves along the flanking walls flickered with the torches within. To the naked eye they appeared to be wood, but this too was a lie. They were springs and clockwork, just like every other half-shrouded machine in this dungeon.

The change in surroundings was not the only thing that differed about this particular cell.

Unlike before, this time I was not alone.

At the opposite end of the long hall, huddled together and barred from me by a screen of dirty armourglass, were human captives.

In the gloom I saw Army uniforms, civilian trappings. Men and women both. I was not Curze’s only prisoner in this place and as an unpleasant sensation arose in my gut, a voice uttered beside me, ‘You can see them, but they cannot see you.’

I scowled. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be dead?’

Ferrus chuckled – it was an ugly sound – his ghoulish eyes fixed on the other prisoners.

He extended a bony finger; part of his gauntlet had rusted. Even the miraculous living metal that once coated his arms and hands had sloughed away.

‘Their fate,’ he croaked, jabbing the skeletal digit in the direction of the human prisoners, ‘lies in your hands.’

A dull clunkof metal heard from somewhere deep within the chamber’s unseen artifice heralded the first motion of the machinery embedded in the walls. One of the larger gears creaked, overcoming inertia, and started to move. Others followed, their teeth interlocking, an engine noisily cranking into life before my eyes.

With the action of the gears, the servos started up, too. Pistons exerted pressure as they expanded pneumatically with an unseen hiss of compressed air. Vents opened, momentum built. The exposed clockwork churned and finally there came a louder, heavier clankof metal as some mechanism I could not see disengaged.

Immediately, a savage strain was placed upon my arms as the chains retracted violently into recesses in the walls on either side of me.

I grunted in pain, but my eyes snapped forwards when I heard the cry of terror from the other cell. The prisoners were looking up. Some of the men had got to their feet as the ceiling came down at them. Too heavy for them to bear, the brave men who had stood up were quickly crushed to their knees.

A child screamed. A child. In here.

Above the ceiling line, hidden from the eyes of the other prisoners but clear to me through the dirty glassaic, was an immense weight. And as the chains pulled at my arms, I realised to what they were both attached.

Despite the agony it caused, I heaved and pulled the chains back in.

In the other cell, the ceiling stopped falling.

‘As I said,’ uttered Ferrus, ‘their fate lies in your hands. Quite literally, brother.’

I held on, the muscles in my neck, back, shoulders and arms screaming at me to let go. My teeth were locked together in a grimace of defiance. Sweat drenched my body and trickled through the channels of my bunched muscles.

I screamed and the people who neither saw nor heard me screamed as well. My grip was slipping; the ceiling and the weight bearing down to crush the others was slipping too.

More of the prisoners got to their feet and tried to push back. Their efforts were utterly futile, no strength they possessed would prevail. Through the red rime clouding my vision as capillaries burst in my now bloodshot eyes, I saw those too weak or injured to stand wailing at their fate. Others trembled or clung to each other in the desperate need not to die alone.

One sat by himself. He was calm, accepting of his inevitable death. Though it was hard to tell, I thought I recognised him. I could not be certain but he resembled the remembrancer, Verace. And it appeared as if he were looking at me.

The terrible strain came on anew as the machine exerted even greater pressure.

Legs braced, arms locked, I closed my eyes and held on.

I stayed like that for hours, or so it seemed, my world a prison of constant pain and the plaintive mewling of the men and women I knew I could not save.

When finally it came, the silence was both sweet and bitter.

I was screaming, spitting defiance, half delirious from what I’d been forced to endure.

‘I will not yield,’ I roared. ‘I will never yield to you, Curze! Show yourself, stop hiding behind your victims.’

‘Surrender, Vulkan,’ Ferrus answered. ‘Let go. You can achieve nothing here. There is no victory to be had. Let go.’

‘Not while there is still strength…’

I stopped, realising that I was the only one screaming. The prisoners in the other cell, their voices were silent. Opening my eyes, I saw what had ended their pleas. Through the glass a solid slab of dark iron had filled the cell completely.

I sagged against my bonds, arms upright, my legs buckling beneath me as the last of my strength ebbed from my body.

‘Where are they?’ I asked the apparition beside me, despite the fact I knew he was only a figment of my imagination.

‘Look…’ said Ferrus, a rictus grin enhancing his ghastly features. With each fresh visitation he was becoming more emaciated, more skeletal, as if decaying in my mind’s eye.

Gears churning again, the iron slab slowly rose. It had but to creep a few centimetres before I saw the visceral red that adhered to its underside. Strands of it clung to the deadly weight, stretching and splitting as gravity exerted itself. Fragments of bone and biological matter came unstuck with the resonance fed through the slab by the machine lifting it. They splashed into a lagoon of guts and blood covering the cell floor.

As the chains slackened, my arms fell too, and I with them onto the ground, my face landing hard in the dirt.

Ferrus chuckled, his voice a little reminiscent of Curze, before he sank back into the shadows and left me to my failure and guilt.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Fulgurite

The excavation site had become a pit for ritual sacrifice. A fresh crop of less than willing supplicants brought from the other districts of Ranos surrounded it on their knees, staring into blood-soaked darkness.

As soon as he had first descended into the pit, Elias had felt the significance of this place. A temple to the Pantheon, raised on blessed stone, fashioned into the holy octed.

Eight walls for the eightfold path; eight temple cities erected around the globe.

‘Eight times eight,’ muttered the Dark Apostle, revelling in the divine provenance of it all.

Elias looked down upon his fell works from a pulpit wrought from piled stone. Black robes entwined with the scripture of his lord and primarch overlaid his war-plate, and he had removed his battle-helm so all could see the mark of the faithful upon his patrician face.

Sixty-four men and women knelt before and below him, their faces pressed to the earth. Some wept or shook, others did nothing but stare as if they had perceived their ending and knew there was no averting it.

Behind them, clad in crimson war-plate, were the legionaries of the XVII. They had borne the Word, and the Word was sacrifice.

Not their blood, but the blood of Ranos and all Traoris when Elias’s ritual was fulfilled.

He muttered incantations, invoking the Pantheon, entreating the Neverborn, guiding them with the bright soul-fires of the cattle he was about to harvest. The Word ran thick and heady from his mouth, uttered in ancient Colchisian, every syllable an affirmation to Chaos.