We are brothers then, of a sort.

‘What do you know of the destruction of this planet?’ he asks.

His voice hasn’t been raised yet. He speaks carefully, keeping the tide of violence in check. It would not take much to break that dam.

‘We were ordered to leave orbit six months ago,’ I say. The truth seems the best policy, at least for now. ‘Some questioned it, but I did not. I never doubted the orders of my primarch. It was only later, when we could not make contact, that we realised something was wrong.’

‘How much later?’

‘Weeks. We’d been in the warp.’

‘Why did you not come back at once?’

Ah, yes. I have asked myself that many times. As the questions come, I remember more of myself. I still cannot recall what led me to this place, though. The blank is complete, like a steel mask over the past. There is an art to making such a mask, and it is not easy to master. I realise the calibre of those who have me captive.

‘I wanted to. Others did not. We made enquiries through astropaths, but our battle-codes were rejected whenever we made contact. Soon after that, our ships were attacked. By you, I presume, or those in league with you.’

Does my guess hit home? Am I nearing the truth? My interrogator gives no sign. He gives nothing away but the smell of blood and the hot, repeated breathing in the dark.

‘Did many of you survive?’

‘I don’t know. Dispersal was the only option.’

‘So your ship came here alone.’

‘Yes.’

Should I be more evasive? I really don’t know. I have no strategy, no objective. None of the information I give him seems important. Perhaps it would do, if I could remember more of the circumstances of my capture.

My mind-sight remains dark. To be confined to the five senses of my birth has become crippling. I realise then that the withdrawal will only get worse. I don’t know whether it’s permanent, or some feature of the chamber I’m in, or a temporary injury. As an Athanaean, I have become used to picking up the mental images of others shimmering beyond their faces, like a candle flickering behind a cotton sheet.

I’m handling its removal badly. It’s making me want to talk, to find some way of filling the gap. And, in any case, I don’t need psychic senses to detect the extremity of my interrogator. He’s cradling some enormous capacity for rage, for physical violence, and it’s barely in check. This is either something I can use, or it places me in terrible danger.

‘Even so, it took you a long time to come back,’ he remarks.

‘Warp storms held us. They were impenetrable for months.’

My interrogator laughs then, a horrifying sound like throat-cords being pulled apart.

‘They were. Surely you know what caused them.’

I sense him leaning forwards. I can see nothing, but the breathing comes closer. I have a mental image of a long, tooth-filled mouth, with a black tongue lolling out, and have no idea how accurate it is.

‘You were either blessed, or cursed, that you made it through,’ he says, and I feel the joy he takes in the control of my fate. ‘I have yet to determine which it will be, but we will come to that soon.’

THERE WERE NO Stormbirds left in the hold, and the Geometrichad never carried Thunderhawks, so the descent had to be in a bulk lander. The destroyer’s crew had been whittled down to a bare skeleton – a couple of hundred mortals, some still in Spireguard livery. In times past they would have looked up at their Legiones Astartes masters in awe as they worked to prepare the lander, but the events of the last few months had shaken that hold. They had seen the ruin of Prospero for themselves, and it had crushed what spirit remained in them.

Many, perhaps, had had family still on the planet when destruction came. Those connections, Kalliston knew, were important to mortals. He himself couldn’t remember what it was like to find such things significant, but he felt the loss in other ways.

After launch, the lander fell through the thickening atmosphere clumsily, responding to the pilot’s controls like an over-enthusiastic steed. The control column had been designed for smaller hands than a Space Marine’s, and the atmosphere was still clogged with clouds of ash, blown across the charred terrain below by the angry remnants of continent-wide storms.

The lander made planetfall hard, jarring the crew against their restraint-cages as the retro-burners struggled against the inertia of the plummet. None of the squad members spoke. The cages slammed up, freeing them to take up their weapons. Kalliston, Arvida and the other battle-brothers in the load-bay mag-locked bolters and power-blades smoothly before the rear doors wheezed open.

The air of Prospero sighed into the load-bay. Kalliston could taste the afterglow of the furnace through his helm’s rebreather. The atmosphere was still warm, still bitter with floating motes of ruin.

Night had fallen. The sky was the dark red of an old scab, broken with patches of messy shadow where the smog-clouds raced. Ruined buildings broke the horizon in all directions, skeletons of libraries and treasure houses, armouries and research stations. There was no sound save the winding-down of the lander’s twin engines and the enervated brush of the hot wind.

Kalliston walked down the ramp first. His boot crunched as he came off the end of it. He looked down. The earth of Prospero glistened. A carpet of glass fragments lay there, as deep and smooth as a dusting of snow.

Everything was glass, once. The pyramids, the libraries, the galleries. Now, it is our dust.

‘Sweep pattern,’ he ordered over the vox. ‘Ranged weapons. Rendezvous point Aleph.’

The remaining Space Marines spread out slowly from the embarkation point. The two who’d piloted the ship during the descent remained to guard it, stationed at the end of the ramp under the shelter of the rear fuselage. The seven others lowered bolters and walked as stealthily as they could across the glittering glass-dust. They organised themselves into a rough semi-circle, each brother heading for a different point in the line of buildings ahead. They stayed within a hundred metres of one another, opening out into a wide net. Steadily, they began to sweep though the devastated streets ahead.

Kalliston blink-clicked a rune to enhance his night vision lens-feed. The terrain around him shimmered into false colour contours. There were no target runes, no life-signs, no proximity warnings. The sterile bones of the shattered buildings loomed up towards him from the heat-hazed dark.

There was no chatter over the comm. The battle-brothers went reverently. They were treading on the tombs of their home world.

Kalliston raised his head fractionally, watching as a tall spur of metal emerged from the dark. It was over a hundred metres tall, but as thin as a burned-out tree-trunk. It had once supported a much bigger construction, but now tottered alone, a rare survivor of the firestorms that had raged through Tizca.

The City of Light. The home of our people.

‘Are you getting anything, brother-captain?’ came Arvida’s voice over a private channel.

Arvida had moved slightly ahead of the others, and his route had taken him out of formation. On another mission, Kalliston might have rebuked him for that.

‘Negative,’ replied Kalliston, keeping any emotion out of his voice. He could sense Arvida’s scepticism even from a hundred metres distant. Back on Prospero, Kalliston’s mind-scrying abilities had returned to their peak, and the moods of his squad were transparent to him.

‘There may be nothing left to get,’ said Arvida.

‘It’s possible.’

‘So how long are we going to look?’

‘I’ll determine that. Reserve your energies for the hunt, brother.’

Kalliston cut the comm-link.

The squad pressed on, passing deeper into the shattered city. Darkness clung to the bases of the ruined walls, squatting in the eaves of plasma-charred doorways that led nowhere.