‘Once I have broken you across my knee, I will kill all of them too,’ promised Tagore.

‘There are a hundred at least, a Custodian, a clade killer and a man who carries something more deadly than anything any warrior here can face.’

‘A weapon?’ asked Subha.

‘No, the truth.’

‘Who are you?’ demanded Atharva. ‘I know your name to be meaningless. Babu simply means “father” in the ancient tongue of Bharat. And Dhakal? That is simply a region of this part of the mountains. So who are you?’

‘I have had many names over the years,’ said Babu Dhakal, ‘but that is not what you mean, is it? No, you want my true name, the one I bore in the battles to win this world?’

‘Yes,’ said Atharva.

‘Very well, since I am here to trade, I will offer you my name as a gesture of good faith. I no longer remember my mortal name, but when my flesh was reborn into this new form, I was named Arik Taranis.’

The name had a weight all of its own, a silencing quality that stole the anger from the World Eaters and dumbfounded Atharva with its historic resonance. There was not one among them who did not know that name, the battles he had won, the foes he had slain and the great honours he had earned.

‘You are the Lightning Bearer?’ asked Tagore.

‘A title given to me after the Battle of Mount Ararat in the Kingdom of Urartu,’ said Babu Dhakal. ‘I had the honour of raising the Banner of Lightning at the declaration of Unity.’

Atharva could barely believe his eyes. This warrior was history wrought into living form: the Victor of Gaduaré, the Last Rider, the Butcher of Scandia, the Throne-slayer…

These and a hundred other battle-laurels earned by this warrior tumbled through Atharva’s memory, finally culminating in the end of that great warrior’s legendary life atop a once-flooded mountain.

‘History says you are dead,’ said Atharva. ‘You died of your wounds once the banner was raised. You and all your warriors fell in that battle.’

‘You look like a clever man,’ said Babu Dhakal. ‘You should know better than to take what history says literally. Such tales as are told of us come from the mouth of the last man standing, and it would not do for the Emperor to have to share his victory with others. Where is the glory when you conquer a world with an unstoppable army at your back? To begin a legend, you must win that war single-handedly, and there must be no one left alive to contradict your version of events.’

‘Are there others like you?’ said Subha.

Babu Dhakal shrugged. ‘Perhaps others escaped the cull, perhaps not. If they did, they are probably dead by now, victims of their own obsolescence. Our bodies were designed to win a world, not conquer a galaxy like yours.’

Atharva listened to Babu Dhakal’s words, amazed at the lack of bitterness he heard. If what the warrior was saying was true, then he and all his kind had been cast aside by the Emperor in favour of the Legiones Astartes gene-template. Yet Babu Dhakal appeared to bear his creator no ill-will for this monstrous betrayal.

‘So how is it that you are still alive?’ asked Atharva, now beginning to suspect what Babu Dhakal might want from them.

‘I am a clever man,’ said Babu Dhakal. ‘I learned what I could from my creator in the years of war, and I came to know much of his ancient science. Not enough to halt my deterioration, but enough to cling onto life long enough for fortune to smile upon me.’

‘Speak plainly,’ ordered Tagore. ‘What is it you want?’

Babu Dhakal raised his right arm, and Atharva saw a boxy device attached to the armoured plates of his vambrace. It had none of the elegance of the devices employed by the Legion apothecaries, but it was unmistakably a reductor. Alongside the narthecium, it was an essential piece of an apothecary’s battle gear.

The narthecium healed the wounded, but the reductor was for the dead.

Its one and only purpose was to extract a fallen Space Marine’s gene-seed.

‘I want you to help me live,’ said Babu Dhakal.

KAI READ THE shock in Atharva’s aura, but before the Space Marine could answer, the roof of the temple imploded in a series of detonations that sent timber beams and limestone tiles tumbling to the floor in a rain of flaming debris.

‘Watch out!’ shouted Kai as a piece of burning rafter slammed down in front of him, crushing an aged man beneath it. He and Roxanne backed away in panic from the tumbling wreckage as black-armoured soldiers dropped into the temple on ziplines in the wake of booming stun grenades.

The throaty grumble of heavy vehicles and the chatter of automatic gunfire sounded from beyond the temple doors. The hard echoes of heavy calibre shells impacting on the canyon walls were punctuated by the screams of terrified people.

‘Down!’ cried Kai as one of the soldiers loosed a sawing blast of fire from his weapon. Solid rounds tore up benches and chewed the marble walls. Kai pulled Roxanne to the floor and dragged her away from the soldier, but screaming people blocked every avenue of escape through the overturned benches. A man toppled to his knees before Kai, his chest blown out and his head burned by a las-blast.

‘What’s going on?’ cried Roxanne, blinking away the after-effects of the grenade flashes and covering her head as pulverised marble fragments rained down on them.

‘Those are Black Sentinels,’ said Kai. ‘They’re here for me.’

He risked casting his mind-sense beyond his immediate surroundings, flinching with every rattle of gunfire and disorientating thunder of grenade detonations. Smoke and expanding banks of smoke rolled through the temple, but such obstacles to sight were no barrier to an astropath’s blindsight. He saw soldiers fan into the temple, gunning down anyone they encountered with ruthlessly efficient bursts of fire.

A knot of soldiers moving in perfect concert were coming his way, but no sooner had one shouted a warning than a hulking warrior bearing a broken guardian spear was among them. Tagore hacked three men down in as many blows and gutted another two before the others could even react. Two more died with their skulls caved in, and another fell with his neck broken.

Subha fought at his sergeant’s side, killing with artless fury as he strove to imitate Tagore’s furious destruction. Kai shifted his gaze, seeing Asubha moving like a ghost through the clouds of thick smoke. Unlike his brother, Asubha was a methodical killer, picking his targets with a clear precision. A Black Sentinel with an auger was killed first, then another with a plasma-coil weapon. There was clear order to Asubha’s kills, a methodology that was quite at odds with the seemingly random violence of his brother.

Other figures moved through the confusing flares of psychic light. The red of violence filled the air as surely as grenade smoke, and it became harder to pick out individuals amongst the pulsing anger that allowed combat soldiers to function.

A host of figures blazed amid the crimson fog, individuals whose energy and vitality were undimmed and untouched by this unleashed violence. One he knew to be Atharva, another two as Babu Dhakal and his lieutenant. Blinding flares of psychic energy streamed from Atharva, and dozens of soldiers died in the fire he drew forth from the Immaterium. Babu Dhakal moved swifter than any man Kai had ever seen, slipping through the chaos of the fighting as though simply willing himself from one place to the next. Where men came at him, he killed them effortlessly, but where they ignored him, he returned the favour and let them live.

The barrage of gunfire was unrelenting, and the slaughter of the temple’s supplicants was indiscriminate. Kai and Roxanne crawled towards the back of the temple, scrambling over torn up bodies and overturned benches in their desperation to escape. Kai turned to look over his shoulder as a giant in heavy plates of polished armour strode into the temple. Where others were sheathed in crimson or gold, his aura was a pure and lethal silver. Kai felt his entire body flinch as he recognised the baleful, unrelenting purpose of Saturnalia.