“Not everything is so black and white, Russ,” retorted Magnus. “If we destroy everything we encounter, what is the point of this crusade?”

“The point is to win it. Once it is over, we will deal with what is left.”

Magnus shook his head, saying, “What is left will be in ruins.”

Leman Russ lowered the ice-limned blade of his sword, his killing fury stilled for now.

“I can live with that,” he said, and without another word, marched from the causeway.

When he reached its end, he turned to face Magnus once more.

“This is not over,” he promised. “Blood of Fenris is on your hands, and there will be a reckoning between us, Magnus. This I swear upon the blade of Mjalnar.”

The Wolf King slashed the blade across his palm, letting brilliant scarlet droplets of blood spill out onto the cracked ground. He threw back his head and howled, and his warriors added their voices to their master’s cry until it seemed the whole mountain was howling.

The mournful cry rose to its tallest spires and echoed in its deepest valleys, a lament for the dead and a grim warning of things to come.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Compliance

WITH THE FALL of Phoenix Crag, the war on Shrike was as good as over, though, as with any conquest of such scale, isolated pockets of fighters remained. The mountains were rife with hidden aeries that not even the divinations of the Corvidae could uncover, and it was certain more blood would be spilled before compliance became complete.

While the Ouranti Draks garrisoned the city, Khalophis led the Prospero Spireguard and Lacunan Lifewatch in the task of hunting down the rogue aeries. The maniples of crystal-joined robots of the 6th proved invaluable in the work, climbing into the highest crags without fear, exhaustion or complaint. The warriors of the 6th Fellowship employed their Tutelaries to channel the fire of the Pyrae into the heart of the mountains, burning out their enemies and setting the peaks ablaze.

Less than ten hours after the Victory Confirmation, Leman Russ led his warriors from Shrike. Russ’ flagship, the Hrafnkel, led the Space Wolf Expeditionary fleet from the Ark Reach Cluster without fanfare or promises of brotherly camaraderie. Nothing more had been said of the confrontation before the Great Library, but the matter was far from settled. Magnus dismissed it as irrelevant, but those closest to him saw that the encounter had shaken him, as though it had confirmed some long-held fear.

Civilians were afforded the opportunity to descend to the surface, and an army of iterators from the 47th Expedition began the long process of inculcating the populace with the enlightened philosophies of the Imperium. The Word Bearers participated in this process with the zeal of missionaries, shipping whole swathes of the populace to vast re-education camps constructed in the long valleys by follow-on teams of Mechanicum Pioneers.

Over the course of the three months since the death of the Phoenix Court, the entire repository of the Great Library was copied via pict scanners or transcribed by thousands of quill-servitors under the supervision of Ankhu Anen. The Primarch of the Thousand Sons devoured each text, digesting every morsel in the library faster than even the most advanced data-savant could process it.

Camille Shivani spent almost every waking minute in the library, poring over the histories of Heliosa and the earliest legends regarding the mythical birth rock of Terra. Immersed in the wealth of information, she studied the texts as any scholar might, but also freely indulged her talent for reading the imprints of past owners. Many of the histories were written by men with no connection to the events they described or by those who had won the wars they wrote about, and were thus of little value beyond subjective descriptions.

Tucked away in a neglected chamber near the top of the pyramid structure, however, Camille found a flaking, ochre-stained book that changed everything. Many of its pages were illegible thanks to moisture damage, but no sooner had she touched it than she knew she wouldn’t need to read the words to unlock its secrets.

This was history written by someone who had lived through it, an authentic account of an alien world as it passed through a turbulent period of change. In an instant, she knew the writer, a young man from the south by the name of Kaleb. She felt his hopes and dreams, his passions and his vices. Through his eyes, Camille lived a lifetime of joys and regrets, learning of his time, nearly two thousand years ago, when the tribal city-states of Heliosa had united under the belief in an ancient thunder god from their earliest days to defeat a marauding race from the stars.

Ankhu Anen was thrilled by Camille’s accounts of Kaleb’s time, and immediately assigned her an Astartes Zealator from the Athanaean cult to skim the thoughts from her mind and transcribe them via a scrivener harness. From that moment on, any book of unknown provenance was brought to Camille for authentication.

In contrast, Lemuel Gaumon was a stranger in the Great Library. His time belonged to Ahriman, who continued his intensive training in the proper use of his abilities and how to shield his presence from the void-predators that swam the shallows of the Great Ocean.

Only once did Lemuel attempt to broach the subject of what had happened to Hastar upon the causeway before the Great Library. The dreadfully transformed body had been returned to the Photepand placed in stasis, but the shadow of his horrific death hung over the Thousand Sons like a guilty secret.

No sooner had he asked than he knew he had touched an exposed nerve.

“He could not control his power,” said Ahriman, with a haunted, reflexive glance towards the silver oakleaf cluster on his shoulder-guard. Lemuel made a mental note to ask about that symbol in quieter times, for it was clear there was a link.

“Could that, what did you call it, flesh change… happen to you?” asked Lemuel, all too aware that he was treading on dangerous ground.

“He promised it would never happen again, to any of us,” said Ahriman, and Lemuel read the hurt betrayal in his aura, its nearness too raw and naked to conceal. Ahriman’s words spoke of the cold dread of prey that can sense the nearness of a stalking predator. To know that Astartes could feel such emotion shocked Lemuel.

Ahriman would be drawn no further, and nothing more was said on the matter as Lemuel’s teachings continued. He was taught how to free his body of light from his body of flesh, and fly the invisible currents and thermals of the aether. Such voyages were short, for his skill had not yet developed enough to allow him any great time apart from his flesh.

Between such instructional times, Lemuel was in his element, travelling from city to city in the company of a squad of Astartes from Ahriman’s First Fellowship to document the reconstruction of a world, first-hand. These warriors were all Philosophus, a rank so far above Lemuel’s provisional one of Neophyte that it made him dizzy to think a man could master the mysteries so completely.

Mechanicum forge-vessels, city-sized monoliths bringing vast builder-machines and billions of tonnes of raw materials, dropped into the lower atmosphere like continents set adrift in the sky. The descent of such enormous cities of metal through the atmosphere set off a butterfly effect of clashing tempests that howled and raged across the world before settling into a continuous downpour that lasted two months.

Campfire scuttlebutt had it that the planet’s inhabitants believed their world was weeping for its conquered people, but no sooner were the iterators made aware of this morsel than it was spun afresh that the rains were the planet washing away the stains of the old days. In conjunction with this, anonymously sourced tales painting the kings of the Phoenix Court as corrupt despots, who exploited the people for their own selfish ends, were subtly fed into the rumour mill.