The screaming voices of the Compulsories were either muffled by their cocooning shields or rendered tinny and raw by the vox-intercept feeding into the comm systems of the Legiones Astartes. Most of the sounds Aximand registered were the concussive impacts as he chopped and barged and hacked. Mourn-it-allwas running red on its hilt and grip, blood-smoke cooking off the powered blade. Blood had painted Aximand’s sword arm to the elbow and was dripping off the edges of his vambrace. His shield boss was bruised, and splattered with gore and brain matter.

Behind everything, he could hear breathing.

Zenonius moved past him, shield up, ripping through waists and hips and ribcages with broad, horizontal slashes, bisecting bodies, rupturing shields. It was a devastating, mechanical action, almost agricultural rather than martial. He was reaping his way through the enemy to reach the Mausolytic Halls. Like a worker in a field of crops, he was cutting his row, back and forth, swinging his long blade from the shoulders.

To Aximand’s left, Amindaza was treating it more as sport. His blade was shorter, and he toyed with the Compulsories he was rushing, as if trying to engage them in combat and test their skill. He looked for blades to lock with, to deflect. No one met his challenge. They were too busy trying to fall back out of the path of his butcher assault. Amindaza favoured hacking downstrokes, deep, crushing blows coming from over the shoulder that demolished his foes and smashed them onto the ground at his feet. Aximand could hear him calling out his enemies, daring them to fight him. He railed contempt at their attempts to retreat. He killed men whether they were facing him or not.

For his part, Aximand, like Geraddon, preferred a more textbook mass assault form: shield at eye level, used as ram; sword tip-forward at chest level, punching and stabbing like a piston from under the shield rim. It was relentless. It was like rolling a heavy piece of fruit into rows of toy soldiers and watching them knocked down and scattered.

The assault was so fierce that a brown smoke of aerosolised blood was fuming off the fighting line into the sunlight.

Zenonius reached the East Hall entrance, and slaughtered a dozen Compulsories around the ornamental fountain and pool in the deep, sunlit antehall. Larger cohorts of Aximand’s company were on their heels on the colonnade. The lake of blood was so deep and swollen, there was some pressure in it as it grew and spread. Bodies on the smooth, polished floor rotated in its current, end to end, like sticks of driftwood caught by an overspilling river.

Aximand followed Zenonius into the antehall. The walls were sheer, the height of the hall impressive, though the floor plan was a small, square area with a central fountain. The top was open to the sky, so that sunlight could lance down and illuminate the quiet space, the polished floor, the clear water, the calyx and tulip carvings of the fountain’s main figure.

Blood spattered the floor, and pooled around crumpled figures and broken weapons. Bloody handprints marked the edges of the fountain bowl where men had struggled to prop themselves up as their last breaths escaped. On the intricately carved walls, jets of blood had left long, pressure-pattern arcs, huge horsetail fans or fern-frond spatters. Some stretched five or six metres up the sheer walls.

Aximand prowled forward. The place was almost tranquil. The din of fighting outside, muffled by the walls, sounded more like the grumble of a distant storm. Zenonius moved ahead, pausing to finish a wounded Compulsory. Amindaza stepped into the light on the far side of the ante-hall, blade sizzling with frying blood. He had entered via one of the other doorways. Two Compulsories and a Precinct docent rushed him, and he turned to greet them with his sword.

Aximand could hear breathing again. It was close now, closer than ever before, closer than a pulse beat in a man’s brow. The breathing, the sense of presence, had followed him out of his dreams and into his daily life. It had got closer and closer, until it was hovering at his shoulder. Now it sounded as though it were sharing his helmet, as though there were two heads in the one helm. Aximand stopped breathing for a moment to see if it was just some acoustic trick, an echo of his respiration.

Silence.

He was about to breathe again when it started, quiet but close, slow and clam, like the hushing of a gentle sea.

‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘Say again!’ Amindaza crackled over the vox.

‘Specify, sir?’ Geraddon linked.

‘Nothing, nothing!’ Aximand answered. ‘Continue.’

Foolish, so foolish, to let it better him like that. To make him speak of it, to speak out loud. He was only talking to himself, to a trick of his mind. He was only talking to his fear.

And fear, like dreams, was something an Adeptus Astartes was not supposed to have.

He knew fear, and he knew the fear would go the moment he could identify the stranger, the moment the intruder’s face became plain to him. Little Horus Aximand wasn’t afraid of anything except the unknown.

A Compulsory charged him from the brown shadows, a lance in his hands. The blade-tip twinkled with blue light, a photonic edge.

Aximand sidestepped, swung his shield, and put the man on the floor. The blow cracked the Compulsory’s bodyshield and broke his arm. He yelped. Aximand was about to put his foot on him and finish the job when two more came at him. Faster now, more urgent, he rotated, scooping Mourn-it-allaround in a backwards stroke that snipped the blade-heads off the lances stabbing at him. The blunt hafts cracked and bent against his ceramite armour. His sword ripped one man apart, opening his shield and eviscerating the body inside. He kicked the other backwards, crunching man and energy cocoon into the ante-hall wall. The impact grazed the stone, and caused chips to fly out. Stepping in, Aximand put his blade through the man’s chest. Mourn-it-allpunched through the shield shell, the man, and the wall behind him. The Compulsory was pinned there for a second, like an insect specimen on a felt pad, his body-shield flickering and blinking as it shorted out.

Aximand yanked the blade out, and the man collapsed at his feet.

The breathing had drawn so very close.

Aximand stepped forward, through a tall archway, into one of the main Mausolytic Halls. The space was vast, and the air was radiant with yellow light. It was like stepping into heaven. The thin, quiet, shrouded dead of Dwell were suspended all around him in clear glass tubes, supported horizontally in columns of light. A million bodies, framed in light and glass and gravimetric energy, united in cybernation.

Zeb Zenonius of Bale tactical squad lay dead on the floor. He had been split open like a piece of shellfish.

The sight should have put Aximand on guard, on the highest pitch of readiness and alertness. But the breathing was louder than ever and, despite his transhuman instincts, he tried to see where it was coming from.

So the first blow took him by surprise. His attacker struck from the side. Only by fluke did Aximand’s shield take the brunt of it. The attacker’s sword split the shield, and cut into Aximand’s forearm beneath. Aximand staggered backwards, outraged and surprised.

Outraged by his distracted error.

Surprised by the vast strength of the being assaulting him.

Aximand rallied, blocking with his sword. He was face to face with a Legiones Astartes, a flesh-spare brute whose glossy black armour was laced with augmetic systems and stark white insignia: a senior captain of the Tenth Legion, the Iron Hands of Medusa. For a moment, Aximand thought it was Shadrak Meduson himself. The warrior had the stature of a warleader, and bore the sigils of the Sorrgol Clan. But visual tagging via visor display identified his foe as Bion Henricos, Meduson’s favoured lieutenant. Henricos’s sword was a long blade of augmented-function Medusan steel.