‘Envy? Is that still it? Is that why I am here?’

‘No, Vulkan. You are here for my amusement. I cannot be jealous of someone who is only as great or weak as I am.’

‘Cut me loose, face me without these games, and we shall see who is weak.’

‘I would slay you where you stand, brother. Have you seen yourself, lately? You aren’t looking so formidable.’

‘Then what is the purpose of all this madness and death? If you want to kill me, just do it. Get it over with. Why won’t you just–’

Shadow-fast, Curze snapped the fork off one of the dead human’s wrists and rammed it deep into my chest.

I felt it pierce the breastbone, the dirty metal driven into my heart to impale it. Crouching over me, Curze proceeded to drag the blunt implement up through my ribcage, tearing through the chest and neck as I jetted blood across his breastplate in arterial black.

‘I tried,’ he told me, snarling through his anger as the fork reached my chin and blackness began to intrude at the edge of my vision. ‘I cut off your head, pierced your heart, crushed your skull, impaled every major organ in your body. I even burned and dismembered you. You came back, brother. Every. Single. Time. You cannot die.’

Aghast, mind reeling with my brother’s confession, I died.

Curze had done as I asked, as I begged, and killed me.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Burned

Though the spearhead felt light in his grasp and cold to the touch, Elias knew the weight of the moment and the weapon’s part in it before him.

He had returned to the pulpit, choosing to be divested of his armour and coming to his altar of sacrifice wearing only his priestly vestments.

Eight fresh supplicants stood ready around the pit, including the one waiting on his knees before Elias on the stone pulpit. Behind them, seven of the Dark Apostle’s most devout disciples loomed. These men and women were not the sacrificial lambs of Ranos – they were adherents to the cult, true believers. They had given themselves willingly, to become part of the Pantheon’s great weft and weave. Not a one amongst them quavered or wept; they merely prayed, and it gave Elias’s heart such joy to hear it.

‘Reveal your devotion!’ he cried to the eight, prompting the cultists to disrobe and expose their carved flesh.

Skin profaned with dark and fell sigils was revealed from under crimson cloth. Using ritual blades, the cultists had marked themselves with a serpent that uncoiled across all of their bodies. Elias’s supplicant was the eighth and his chest bore the serpent’s head, described in his own partially clotted blood.

‘It is good,’ he muttered, becoming lost in reverie.

Hell would come to Traoris and he would be its gatekeeper, admitting it into the mortal plane.

Chanting the names of the Neverborn, Elias began the ritual. He felt the thrum of power in the spearhead, saw its fulgurant glow between raptures and knew that this was the tool of hiselevation. Not Erebus, not even Lorgar, but he would be the one.

Valdrekk Elias would receive what he had always craved. Ascension.

Beseeching the daemons of the aether to hear him, praying for them to be attracted to the spear’s psychic resonance, he felt the heat from the blade begin to intensify. At first it was just uncomfortable, a necessary forbearance to yield the greater prize, but then it became painful. Looking down at the weapon in his grasp, Elias realised it was aflame and his skin with it.

He uttered the cursed verses faster, prompting his disciples to chant with ever greater vigour. Still it burned.

The glow was so bright that it lit up the sacrificial site, chasing back the shadows that had been slowly creeping from the old ruins like spilled ink. They seemed to recoil, as did the supplicants, smoke rising from their mutilated bodies.

One woman cried out, and Elias almost faltered in his well-practiced dogma before a Word Bearer held her steady. Others were showing signs of displeasure too, writhing and coughing as their forms were devoured by cleansing flame. It spread, the burning light, crawling inexorably over the disciples.

The names of the Neverborn, so crucial to the ritual, slipped from Elias’s memory. The agony in his arm was such that he clutched it. Rendered down to blackened flesh, he balked at his sudden dis-figurement and realised that harnessing the power of the spearhead was beyond him. Like a horse that has slipped its reins, it was wild. But it was also vengeful.

‘Kill them!’ Elias cried, with more fear than he intended, but it was too late.

Unfettered, the power contained within the fulgurite broke free of its shackles and coursed out in a flood. It sprang from Elias, a storm seeking to earth itself in a lightning rod.

It found seven.

Sinking to their knees, their ritual daggers now forgotten, the disciples died quickly and in agony. Their battle-plate was no protection.

Furcas clutched at his throat, a death scream issuing from his mouth in a plume of smoke. Dolmaroth, his hands held up to his head, became fused in a solid mass of flesh and metal. Imarek managed to wrench off his helmet before he died, but took half of his face with it as it stuck to the inside. Eligor shuddered and melted like wax through the vents in his armour. The others fell in similar fashion, prompting the Word Bearers watching from behind them to recoil for fear of sharing their brothers’ fate.

The supplicants were already charred meat and bone before the first disciple fell, and they were blasted to ash by an unfurling wave of fire.

Realising his peril, teeth clenched with the pain of his arm, Elias rammed the spearhead into the stone dais of his pulpit and fell back as the fire returned.

The Dark Apostle bounced off one step then another, tumbling into a wretched heap.

Of his pulpit, only a jagged spur of burned rock remained, with the still-glowing spearhead lodged within it.

Breathing hard, acutely aware of the trauma his body had suffered, Elias screamed. Not in pain, but in anger and frustration. He had expected ascension, revelation, not to be thwarted.

Jadrekk was the first of his followers to reach him.

‘Dark Apostle…’ he began, but shrank back at the sight of Elias’s wounds.

His arm was completely burned, all the way from his shoulder to his fingertips. The bones had fused, a crooked and malformed limb in place of what was there before.

‘My armour,’ snapped Elias, standing up unaided, snarling at any attempts at assistance. ‘Bring me my armour.’

Jadrekk obeyed and hurried off into the camp.

Elias didn’t notice. Instead, he glared at the spearhead still embedded in the rock. His gaze went from it to the legionaries, then his flock of cultists and finally the remaining citizens of Ranos.

‘Round them all up,’ he said to his warriors, burning with shame and fury. ‘I want them executed. No knives, no rituals, just kill them.’

Elias turned away, his ruined limb clutched close to his chest as the pronouncement was met first with stunned silence, then fear, as the mortals realised what they were fated for. Shouts and grunts for order competed with wailing protestation and begging.

Elias sneered at the sound. It disgusted him, as did the fact he would now have to go to Erebus and plead for his life.

‘And someone bring me that spear,’ he said, almost as an afterthought, before staggering back to his tent.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The face in the blood

When he blinked, a thin crust of dried blood parted and flaked away off his eyelid.

His back hurt from an hour spent lying in the cold and on this slab. Vaguely aware of remembered pain down his side, he reached over to explore the injury but found only reknit skin and bone.

‘Not again…’ groaned Grammaticus, and heaved himself up.