These men had been twisted out of shape and pressed into a mould, the functionality of which their bodies could never hope to maintain. To a man, they were dying, but didn’t realise it. Their minds were a crude mesh of aggression, fear and incipient psychosis. On any civilised world, they would have been locked away for the rest of their lives or handed over to the Mechanicum to be wrought into the most basic servitor class.

Yet in the centre of these men was a very different figure, a man whose flesh had likewise been augmented beyond the human norms, but whose body displayed none of the crudity employed in enhancing the others. This man’s physique was a work of genius, in the same way that the printing press had been a work of genius in comparison to handwritten manuscripts. And just as the printing press of old had been superseded by more powerful solutions, so too had this man’s biology…

Atharva briefly touched his mind, and recoiled at the jagged, razor edges he found in its construction. Like volcanic rock formed from the heat and pressure of the deep earth’s forces, it was glassy and scarred, shaped to one purpose and one purpose alone: to conquer a world.

The vitrified scarring on this man’s mind was familiar and it took a moment only for Atharva to recall where he had seen such rude psycho-cognitive engineering.

Within the mind of Kai Zulane.

He pulled back as he sensed the rampant hostility of the man’s unconscious mental defences, all belligerence and vicious barbs – like an attack dog guarding a threshold. There would be no dominating this man with the Athanaean arts. Atharva opened his eyes, looking at the bulky, crudely-armoured form of the man with a new sense of wonder and awe.

‘To destroy you would be to run amok with a flame-lance in a library of priceless tomes.’

‘What did you say?’ growled Tagore.

‘These are no ordinary men,’ said Atharva. ‘Do not underestimate them.’

Tagore shook his head. ‘They will die like ordinary men,’ he spat. ‘Thirty warriors? I will kill them myself and we will be on our way.’

Atharva placed a restraining hand on Tagore’s shoulder and tried not to flinch when the World Eater gave him a ferocious grimace of bared teeth and wild aggression. The implants on the back of his skull hummed with activation, and Atharva saw the danger inherent in the habitual use of such augmetics. Tagore was as much a prisoner of its siren song of violence as Angron had ever been of the slave culture said to have trained him in the arts of slaughter. He wondered if Angron appreciated the irony of enslaving his own men.

‘Antioch!’ shouted the man with the vitrified mindscape. ‘The men in there with you, send them out. Babu Dhakal wants them.’

‘Shitting, bastard hell,’ hissed Antioch. ‘It’s Ghota. Throne help me, we’re dead.’

Atharva spun to face the cowering chirurgeon. ‘Who is he, and who is this Babu Dhakal?’

‘Are you serious?’ said Antioch, crawling on all fours to get beneath the heaviest table in his shack. ‘Babu Dhakal is trouble, like you hadn’t brought enough to my door already!’

‘And Ghota?’

‘The Babu’s attack dog,’ said Antioch, trying to put as much heavy furniture between himself and the open doorway as possible. ‘You don’t mess with Ghota if you know what’s good for you. People who do end up hung from hooks in pieces.’

Asubha hauled the man from his hiding place and said, ‘Who is Dhakal, a local governor? The authority around here?’

Antioch gave a strangled laugh. ‘Sure, you could say he’s the authority around here. He’s a gang lord, one of the last left standing after the blood eagle war. He controls all the territories from the Crow’s Court to the Petitioner’s Arch and south to the Dhakal Gap. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll do as Ghota says.’

‘I’m getting tired of waiting, Antioch!’ shouted Ghota, his voice a gurgling rasp of cruelty.

Tagore and Subha flanked the doorway, and Severian peered through a gap in the ill-formed brickwork. Atharva moved to where Kai lay in a cursive pose of misery, his body a reeking mess of vomit and expelled matter. Thankfully, he was unconscious, though he shivered with micro-tremors as his body purged itself.

Atharva heard the metallic clatter of weapons being readied to fire and swept Kai into a protective embrace as thirty heavy calibre rifles opened fire.

A sawing blitz of gunfire tore into Antioch’s surgery, ripping through the adobe bricks and sheet metal like a las-cutter through flesh. Woodwork splintered, brickwork was pulverised to powder and the air filled with ricochets, flying glass and smoke. The noise was deafening, thunderous and intended to intimidate as much as cause harm.

In a bygone age and against any other targets it might have worked.

Atharva looked up as the barrage ceased, his enhanced sight easily picking out the forms of his fellows. None had been hit by more than a passing sliver of glass or bullet fragment.

Severian grinned and said, ‘What’s your plan, son of Magnus?’

As much as he loathed resorting to violence, Atharva knew this was no time for subtlety or clever words. Only one plan of action would see them through this encounter.

‘Kill them all,’ he said.

Tagore grinned. ‘First sensible thing you’ve said all day.’

THE WORLD EATERS charged from the smoke and dust of gunfire, sprinting with ferocious speed that seemed impossible for such enormous figures. Atharva watched them run with the morbid fascination a man might reserve for watching one alien species destroy another.

Tagore hit first, his fist punching clean through the breastplate of a warrior with twin topknots of black hair and a forked beard. Even as the man fell, Tagore stripped his dead hands of his weapon and turned it on the men standing beside him. The armour Ghota’s men wore looked like Thunder Armour, but that resemblance did not stretch to its protective qualities. Thudding recoil and enormous muzzle flare obscured Atharva’s view for the briefest second, but in its wake he saw three men cut virtually in two by Tagore’s point-blank discharge.

Subha and Asubha charged at his flanks, the energised blades torn from the spears of the dead Custodians flickering with blue light. Subha’s charge was the hammerblow of pure force, scattering men like the detonation of a grenade. Though the blade he bore was more akin to a greenskin’s cleaver, Asubha wielded it with the precision of a skilled dissector of the dead. Two men went down, headless, a third and fourth with their innards tumbling to the square in looping ropes of wet meat. A fifth lost both his arms and collapsed with a gurgling scream of pain.

Atharva emerged from the bullet-riddled remains of Antioch’s surgery with Kai held at his side. He maintained a kine shield around the astropath’s body as he watched his brothers of the Crusader Host take Ghota’s men apart. Argentus Kiron loosed relentless bursts of plasma from a position of cover in the ruined façade, incinerating heads with every shot and taking cover from the desultory return fire coming his way.

Yet for all the initial damage wreaked by the Outcast Dead, these men were not ordinary mortals who would be cowed by such horrific slaughter. They had been engineered by unknown means to disregard fear or compassion, and fought back with instinctive brutality. Tagore took a round to the side and roared in pain as a shower of bright blood erupted from the wound.

The World Eater shouted, ‘In the name of Angron!’ and put a fist through the shooter’s face, spinning on his heel to unleash a hail of fire into his scattering enemies. Two men were punched from their feet by the impacts. A knot of warriors armed with pistols and long, gutting knives surrounded Asubha stabbing and cutting with manic fury. Atharva saw one blade cut deep into the meat of Asubha’s bicep, but the World Eater twisted aside before the blow cut the tendons of his shoulder.