‘I don’t need my weapons to break you!’ Arcadese was raging again and stepped towards the iterator.

And there it is. Vorkellen smiled, just for the Ultramarine. You cannot fight nature.

A squad of marshals wielding flash-sabres moved in to intercept him.

IV

ARCADESE KNEW HE could crush them without his weapons, do it so quick and clean he’d be at Vorkellen’s throat before the emergency command be given and the chamber flooded with armed men.

Instead, he put up his hand.

The guards backed off.

Arcadese sagged, feeling the tendrils of defeat tighten around his heart.

Heka’tan, where are you?

Bodies

I

THE LEVELS BELOW the auditorium were vast and labyrinthine. It would take an army of men weeks to find an individual in its depths if it didn’t want to be found. Heka’tan was but one man, and he had a few hours at most.

At least the shaking had ceased. When he’d forced the guard to let him go below and the dark had enveloped him, he’d leant against the wall and closed his eyes. Images of the dropsite massacre had sprung unbidden into his mind. He remembered his last sight of Vulkan, the primarch engulfed in bright magnesium light.

Dead? No one knew. It was a mystery that haunted the Legion. Ferrus Manus was dead. A terrible fate for any Legion to lose their father, but at least the Iron Hands had closure, at least they knew. In many ways, for the Salamanders, it was worse. And what now for them? A bit part in a galactic war where the fate of humanity and Terra was the prize and cost.

Heka’tan put the thoughts from his mind and started to search.

He found Persephia’s body after thirty minutes.

She lay discarded like refuse in one of the archive chambers, her innards pooled in her lap like glossy red ribbons. The artificer’s face was locked in a horror-grimace, flecked by her own dried blood.

She hadn’t died here. There were drag marks on the floor, hastily concealed. Heka’tan held out his hand and detected a tiny prickling sensation on his fingertips. Heat. It was bleeding upwards from below.

Heka’tan looked back to the corpse. The wound in Persephia’s chest was familiar to him. He knew what had caused it. She had been eviscerated by a chainsword. It was a Legion weapon. Arcadese was right, Horus hadsent warriors.

The Salamander followed the source of the heat.

II

THE SHADOW SHIFTED on the balcony. It caressed the rifle in its hands now. The red-eyed one was missing, and it didn’t like that. Made it feel vulnerable, potentially exposed when there was a Legionary unaccounted for. The work below was supposed to be finished, now the second phase began. There were four marshals below, watching the stairways into the lower chambers. Another four stood nearby in the dark. No guns here. No weapons of any sort. How foolish they were. How arrogant.

The high-marshal was alone and pensive as the proceedings went on. He was blind, just like the clave-nobles and the other onlookers were blind. They would see. Everyone would see. But then it would be too late. Then there was the iterator and his cronies, and the other warrior; the broken one, the half-Space Marine. Little did he realise it wasn’t just his body that had been ripped by the greenskin.

It was nearly time. The shadow shifted on the balcony, bringing the rifle sight up to its eye. The target sat snugly in its crosshairs. A second and it would be over. Just one second, the time it takes to squeeze a trigger. Soon.

III

THEY WERE LOSING. Hewas losing. Not a bolt fired, nor a blade drawn and still Arcadese knew the battle was being lost, metre by agonising metre. For a warrior, it was a strange sensation, not how he had pictured his service to his Legion.

The human iterator, despite his outward frailties, had a formidable intelligence; in a fit of pique, Arcadese thought he’d been mind-augmented or hypno-conditioned.

Dagonet was a disaster. Vorkellen painted Horus as victim and the Imperium as dishonourable murderers. A fortunate twist of fate had allowed the Warmaster to escape a heinous assassination attempt; whilst leaving one of his captains and a vaunted Legionary, Luc Sedirae, slain in cold blood. The massacre that followed was retaliatory, an effort to find and execute the perpetrators. Collateral damage was inevitable. The Emperor’s hand had caused this, or the agents acting in his stead.

Prospero was no better. Wolves unleashed on a cultured world and a son that desired only to please his father. The subsequent razing of the Planet of the Sorcerers was made to show the Emperor’s inability to forgive or grant mercy. Was Magnus reallysuch a threat? Leman Russ and his Legion made sure that question could never be answered.

None of it added strength to Arcadese’s cause, and he felt the allegiance of Bastion slipping from his grasp. He had only one argument left, but the one to give it was nowhere to be found.

IV

UNARMED AND WEARING robes, Heka’tan knew he was at a distinct disadvantage against another warrior of the Legiones Astartes.

He could have gone back, raised the alarm, but then Persephia’s murderer might have already escaped and they would never know what was really going on here. He told himself this was the reason but the truth of it was his rage for Isstvan V had been impotent for too long; he needed to vent it.

It didn’t take long to follow the murderer’s trail. It led Heka’tan to a steel gantry looking down on Bastion’s nuclear core. He recognised the figure still toiling in its depths. Memories of fighting a desperate last stand in the Urgall Depression came back to him.

‘Iron Warrior!’

The grey-metal Legionary turned, his helmet lenses glinting coldly in the reflected nuclear light.

He scoffed, a harsh and tinny sound that emanated from his vox-grille. ‘Aren’t your kind all dead?’

Heka’tan roared and threw himself over the gantry. He collided with the Iron Warrior – hitting the ceramite like it was a fortress wall. He didn’t have time to evade the plunging Salamander. He’d only half-drawn his chainblade when Heka’tan knocked it buzzing from his grasp and onto the lower gantry floor.

Instantly the two Legionaries became locked in a fearsome embrace. But with his power armoured battle-plate, the Iron Warrior was stronger.

‘What gave me away?’ he growled, forcing Heka’tan to his knees, the fingers of both combatants laced together in a wrestler’s grappling hold. ‘It was the human, wasn’t it? So like your benevolent, dead Vulkan to come looking for an innocent.’

A surge of anger leant Heka’tan strength. He pushed with his legs, using sheer brute force to draw level and stand face-to-face with the Iron Warrior.

‘Don’t sully his name with your tongue, betrayer,’ he spat.

The Iron Warrior seized Heka’tan’s fingers in his gauntleted grip, causing the Salamander to cry out as he flung him across the gantry and down to the level below.

Pain blurred Heka’tan’s vision but he saw his enemy coming to finish him well enough. He reached over and his shattered fingers found what they sought.

The Iron Warrior raised a massive fist, intent on beating his former brother to death, when he found the buzzing teeth of his own chainsword lodged in his gut. He had charged right onto it.

Heka’tan held onto the hilt as long as he could before struggling to his feet and barging into the flailing, bleeding Iron Warrior. The two of them broke the gantry rail and plunged over the edge.

Heat radiation coming off the nuclear core warmed Heka’tan’s skin. He was hanging one-handed off the twisted railing several levels down, the Iron Warrior doing the same a few metres away. His armour was blistering, the black and yellow painted chevrons flaking away.