Iron Within

Rob Sanders

                        The iron within. The iron without. Iron everywhere. The galaxy laced with its cold promise. Did you know that Holy Terra is mostly iron? Our Olympian home world, also. Most habitable planets and moons are. The truth is we are an Imperium of iron. Dying stars burn hearts of iron; while the heavy metal cores of burgeoning worlds generate fields that shelter life – sometimes human life – from the razing glare of such stellar ancients.

                        Empires are measured in more than just conquered dirt. Every Iron Warrior knows this. They’re measured in hearts that beat in common purpose, thundering in unison across the void: measured in the blood that spills from our Legiones Astartes bodies, red with iron and defiance. This is the iron within and we can taste its metallic tang when an enemy blade or bullet finds us wanting. Then the iron within becomes the iron without, as it did on what we only now understand to be the first day of the Great Siege of Lesser Damantyne…

                        The Warsmith stepped out onto the observation platform, each of his power-armoured footfalls an assault on the heavy grille. The Iron Warrior’s ceramite shoulders were hunched with responsibility, as though the Space Marine carried much more than the deadweight of his Mark-III plate. He crossed the platform with the determination of a demigod, but the fashion in which his studded gauntlets seized the exterior rail betrayed a belief that he might not make the expanse at all. The juggernaut ground to an irresistible halt.

                        A rasping cough wracked the depths of his armoured chest, his form rising and falling with the exertion of each tortured, uncertain breath. Imperial Army sentries from the Ninth-Ward Angeloi Adamantiphracts watched the Warsmith suffer, uncertain how to act. One even broke ranks and approached, the flared muzzle of his heavy carbine lowered and scalemail glove outstretched.

                        ‘My lord,’ the masked soldier began, ‘can I send for your Apothecary or perhaps the Iron Palatine…’

                        Lord Barabas Dantioch stopped the Adamantiphract with an outstretched gauntlet of his own. As the Warsmith fought the coughing fit and his convulsions, the armoured palm became a single finger.

                        Then, without even looking at the soldier, the huge Legiones Astartes managed: ‘As you were, wardsman.’

                        The soldier retreated and a light breeze rippled through the Iron Warrior’s tattered cloak, the material a shredded mosaic of black and yellow chevrons. It whipped about the statuesque magnificence of his power armour, the dull lustre of his Legion’s plate pitted with rust and premature age, lending the suit a sepia sheen. He wore no helmet. Face and skull were enclosed in an iron mask, crafted by the Warsmith himself. The faceplate was a work of brutal beauty, an interpretation of the Legion’s mark, the iron mask symbol that adorned his shoulder. Lord Dantioch’s mask was a hangdog leer of leaden fortitude with a cage for a mouth and eyes of grim darkness. It was whispered in the arcades and on the battlements that the Warsmith was wearing the mask – pulled glowing from the forge – as he hammered it to shape around his shaven skull. He then plunged head and iron into ice water, fixing the beaten metal in place forever around his equally grim features.

                        Gripping the platform rail, Dantioch drew his eye-slits skywards between his hunched, massive shoulders and drank in the insane genius of his creation. The Schadenhold: an impregnable fortress of unique and deadly design, named in honour of the misery that Dantioch and his Iron Warriors might observe if ever an enemy force was foolish enough to assault the stronghold. During the process of Compliance, as part of the Emperor’s strategy and holy decree, thousands of bastions and citadels had been built on thousands of worlds, so that the architects of the Great Crusade might watch over their conquered domain and the new subjects of an ever expanding Imperium. Many of these galactic redoubts, castles and forts had been designed and built by Dantioch’s Iron Warrior brothers: the IV Legion was peerless in the art of siege warfare, both as besiegers and the besieged. The galaxy had seen nothing like the Schadenhold, however – of that Dantioch was sure.

                        Under his mask the Iron Warrior commander’s pale lips mumbled the Unbreakable Litany. ‘Lord Emperor, make me an instrument of your adamance. Where darkness is legion, bless our walls with cold disdain; where foolish foes are frail, have our ranks advance; where there is mortal doubt, let resolution reign…’

                        The Warsmith had blessed the Schadenhold with every modern structural fortification: concentric hornworks; bunkers; murder zones; drum keeps; artillery emplacements and kill-towers. The fortress was a monstrous study in 30th Millennium siegecraft. For Dantioch, however, location was everything. Without the natural advantages of material, elevation and environment, all other architectural concerns were mere flourish. A stronghold built in a strategically weak location was certain to fall, as many of Dantioch’s kindred in the other Legions had discovered during the early trials of Compliance. Even the Imperial Fists had had their failures.

                        Dantioch had hated Lesser Damantyne from the moment he had set foot on the dread rock and had felt instantly that the planet hated him also. It was as though the world did not want him there and that appealed to the Warsmith’s tactical sensibilities: he could use Damantyne’s environmental hostilities to his advantage. The small planetoid was situated in a crowded debris field of spinning rock, metal and ice that made it seem unfinished and hazardous from the start. The cruisers of the 51st Expedition that had brought the Warsmith and his Iron Warriors there had negotiated the field with difficulty. Although the planet had tolerable gravity and low-lying oxygen that made an outpost possible, the surface was a swirling hellstorm of hurricane winds, lashing lightning and highly corrosive, acid cloud cover. Nothing lived there: nothing could live on the surface. The acidic atmosphere ate armour and ordnance like a hungry beast, rapidly stripping it away layer by layer in an effort to dissolve the flesh and soft tissue of the Legiones Astartes beneath. Even the most heavily armoured could only expect to survive mere minutes on the surface.

                        This made vertical, high-speed insertions by Stormbird the sole way down and that was only if the pilot was skilful enough to punch through the blinding cloud cover and down into one of the narrow, bottomless sinkholes that punctuated the rocky surface. Through some natural perversity of Damantyne’s early evolution, the planetary crust was riddled with air pockets, cavities and vast open spaces: a cavern system of staggering proportion and labyrinthine madness. Dantioch chose the very heart of this madness as the perfect location for his fortress, in a vaulted subterranean space so colossal it had its own primitive weather system.

                        ‘From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron. This is the Unbreakable Litany. May it forever be so. Dominum imperator ac ferrum aeturnum.’

                        The Iron Warriors were not the first to have made Lesser Damantyne their home. Below the surface, the lithic world was rich with life which had evolved in the deep and the dark. The only real threat to the Emperor’s chosen were the megacephalopods: monsters that stalked the caverns with their sinuous tentacles and could collapse their rubbery bulk through the most torturous of cave tunnels, creating new entrances with their titanium beaks. The Legiones Astartes, first few years on Lesser Damantyne comprised a war of extermination on the xenos brutes, who seemed intent on tearing down any structures the IV Legion attempted to erect.

                        With the alien threat hunted to extinction, Dantioch began construction on his greatest work: the Schadenhold. While Iron Warriors had been battling chthonic monstrosities for planetary supremacy, Dantioch had had his Apothecaries and Adeptus Mechanicum advisors hard at work creating the muscle that would build his mega-fortress. Iron Warrior laboratories perfected genestock slave soldiers, colloquially known as the Sons of Dantioch. Although the Warsmith’s face had been hidden for many years behind the iron of his impassive mask, it was plain to see on the gruesome hulks that had built the Schadenhold.

                        Taller and broader than a Space Marine, the genebreeds used the raw power of their monstrous bulk to mine, move and carve the stone from which the fortress was crafted. As well as physical prowess the slave soldiers had also inherited some of their gene-father’s cold, technical skill and the Schadenhold was more than a hastily constructed rock edifice: it was an enormous example of strategic art and siegecraft. With the fortress complete, the Sons of Dantioch found new roles in the maintenance and basic operation of the citadel and as close-quarters shock troops for the concentric kill zones that layered the stronghold. It pleased the ailing Warsmith to be surrounded by brute examples of his own diminished youth and physical supremacy and, in turn, the slave soldiers honoured their gene-father with a simple, unshakable faith and loyalty: a fealty to the Emperor as father of the primarch and the primarch as father of their own.

                        ‘I never tire of looking at it,’ a voice cut through the darkness behind. It was Zygmund Tarrasch, the Schadenhold’s Iron Palatine. Dantioch grunted, bringing an end to his mumbled devotions. Perhaps the Adamantiphract had sent for him; or perhaps the Iron Palatine had news.

                        The Space Marine joined his Warsmith at the rail and peered up at the magnificence of the fortress above. Although Dantioch was Warsmith and ranking Legiones Astartes among the thirty-strong Iron Warrior garrison left behind by the 51st Expeditionary Fleet, his condition had forced him to devolve responsibility for the fortress and its day-to-day defence to another. He’d chosen Tarrasch as Iron Palatine because he was a Space Marine of character and imagination. The cold logic of the IV Legion had served the Iron Warriors well but, even among their number, there were those whose contribution to Compliance was more than just a conqueror’s thirst – those who appreciated the beauty of human endeavour and achievement, not just the tactical satisfaction of victory and the hot delight of battle.

                        ‘Reminds me of the night sky,’ Tarrasch told his Warsmith. The Iron Palatine nodded to himself. ‘I miss the sky.’

                        Dantioch had never really thought of the Schadenhold in that way before. It was certainly a spectacle to behold and the final facet in the Warsmith’s ingenious design, for the two Iron Warriors were standing on a circular observation platform, situated around the steeple-point of the tallest of the Schadenhold’s citadel towers. Only, the tower did not point towards the sky or even at the cavern ceiling: it pointed down at the cavern floor.

                        The Schadenhold had been hewn out of a gigantic, conical rock formation protruding from the roof of the cave. Dantioch had immediately appreciated the rock feature’s potential and committed his troops to the difficult and perilous task of carving out an inverse citadel. This hung upside-down, but all chambers, stairwells and interior architecture were oriented skywards. The communications spires and steeple-scanners at the very bottom of the fortress were hanging several thousand metres above a vast naturally-occurring lake of crude promethium, which bubbled up from the planet depths. At the very top of the stronghold were the dungeons and oubliettes, situated high in the cavern roof.

                        As Dantioch cast his weary eyes up the architecture, he came to appreciate the comparison the Iron Palatine was making. In the bleak darkness of the gargantuan cavern, the bright glare of the fortress searchlamps and soft pinpricks of illumination escaping the embrasure murder holes appeared like a constellation in a deep night sky. This was accentuated further by the phosphorescent patches of bacteria that feasted on the feldspar in the cavern roof and the dull glints reflecting off the shiny, pitch surface of oozing promethium below: each giving the appearance of ever more distant stars and galaxies.

                        ‘You have news?’ Dantioch put to Tarrasch.

                        ‘Yes, Warsmith,’ the Iron Palatine reported. The Space Marine was also in full armour and Legion colours, bar gauntlets and helmet, which he clutched in one arm. The vigilance (or paranoia, as some of the other Legions believed) of the Iron Warriors was well known and the Schadenhold and its garrison maintained a constant state of battle readiness. Tarrasch ran a hand across the top of his bald head. His dark eyes and flesh were the primarch’s own, a blessing to his sons. As the Warsmith turned and the light of the observation platform penetrated the slits of his iron mask, Tarrasch caught a glimpse of sallow, bloodshot eyes and wrinkled skin, discoloured with age.

                        ‘And?’

                        ‘The flagshipBenthos hails us, my lord.’

                        ‘So, the 51st Expedition returns,’ Dantioch rasped. ‘We’ve had them on our relay scopes for days. Why the slow approach? Why no contact?’

                        ‘They inform us that they’ve had difficulty traversing the debris field,’ the Iron Palatine reported.

                        ‘And they hail us only now?’ Dantioch returned crabbily.

                        ‘TheBenthos accidentally struck one of our orbital mines,’ Tarrasch informed his master. Dantioch felt something like a smile curl behind the caged mouth of his faceplate.

                        ‘An ominous beginning to their visit,’ the Warsmith said.

                        ‘They’re holding station while they make repairs,’ the Iron Palatine added. ‘And they’re requesting coordinates for a high speed insertion.’

                        ‘Who requests them?’

                        ‘Warsmith Krendl, my lord.’

                        ‘Warsmith Krendl?’

                        Tarrasch nodded: ‘So it would appear.’

                        ‘So Idriss Krendl now commands the 14th Grand Company.’

                        ‘Even under your command,’ Tarrasch said, ‘he was little more than raw ambition in polished ceramite.’

                        ‘You might just get your night sky, my Iron Palatine.’

                        ‘You think we might be rejoining the Legion, sir?’

                        For the longest time, Dantioch did not speak – the Warsmith lost in memory and musing. ‘I sincerely hope not,’ the Warsmith replied.

                        The answer seemed to vex the Iron Palatine. Dantioch laid a gauntleted hand on Tarrasch’s shoulder. ‘Send the Benthos coordinates for the Orphic Gate and have two of our Stormbirds waiting near the surface to escort our guests in.’

                        ‘The Orphic Gate, sir? Surely the–’

                        ‘Let’s treat the new Warsmith to some of the more dramatic depths and cave systems,’ Dantioch said. ‘A scenic route, if you will.’

                        ‘As you wish, my lord.’

                        ‘In the meantime have Chaplain Zhnev, Colonel Kruishank, Venerable Vastopol and the cleric visiting from Greater Damantyne meet us in the Grand Reclusiam: we shall receive our guests there and hear from Olympian lips what our brothers have been doing in our absence…’

                        The Grand Reclusiam rang with both the wretched coughing of the Warsmith and the hammer strokes of his Chaplain. The chamber could easily accommodate the thirty-Iron Warrior garrison of the Schadenhold and their cult ceremonies and rituals. In reality – with the fortress in a state of constant high alert – there were ordinarily never more than ten Legiones Astartes in attendance during any one watch.

                        Dantioch and his Chaplain had not allowed such a restriction to affect the design and impact of the chamber. The Iron Warriors on Lesser Damantyne were few in number but great of heart and they filled their chests with a soaring faith and loyalty to their Emperor. To this end the Grand Reclusiam was the largest chamber in the fortress, able in fact to serve the spiritual needs of ten times their number. From the vaulted stone ceiling hung a black forest of iron rods that dangled in the air above the centrum altar approach. These magnified the cult devotions, rogational and choral chanting of the small garrison to a booming majesty – all supported by the roar of the ceremonial forge at the elevated head of the chamber and the rhythmic strikes of hammer on iron against the anvil-altar.

                        The aisles on either side of the centrum consisted of a sculptured scene that ran the length of the Grand Reclusiam, rising with the flight of altar steps and terminating at the far wall. Towering above the chamber congregation, it depicted a crowded, uphill battle scene crafted from purest ferrum, with Iron Warrior heroes storming a barbaric enemy force that was holding the higher ground. The primitive giants were the titans and personifications of old: the bastions of myth and superstition, smashed upon the armour and IV Legion’s virtues of technology and reason. As well as serving as an inspiring diorama, the sculpture created the illusion that the congregation was at the heart of the battle – and there was nowhere else Dantioch’s men would rather be.

                        Beyond the sculpture on either side, the rocky walls of the chamber had been lined with polished iron sheeting, upon which engraved schematics and structural designs overlapped to create a fresco of the Emperor looking on proudly from the west and the Primarch Perturabo from the east.

                        ‘My lord, they approach,’ Tarrasch announced and with difficulty the Warsmith came up off one devout knee. Shadows and the sound of self-important steps filled the Reclusiam’s grand arch entrance. The Iron Palatine turned and stood by his Warsmith’s side, while Colonel Kruishank of the Ninth-Ward Angeloi Adamantiphracts hovered nearby in full dress uniform. His reverential beatings complete, Chaplain Zhnev uncoupled the relic-hammer from a slender, bionic replacement for his right arm and shoulder. He handed the crozius arcanum attachment to a hulking genestock slave whose responsibility it was to keep the ceremonial forge roaring. Zhnev made his solemn way down the steps, nodding to the only member of the congregation who was not part of the Schadenhold garrison: a cleric dressed in outlandish, hooded robes of sapphire and gold.

                        ‘They come,’ Zhnev murmured as the delegation marched into his Reclusiam and up the long approach to the altar steps.

                        Out front strode Idriss Krendl, the new Warsmith of the 14th Grand Company. The intensity of his Olympian glower was shattered by the scarring that cut up his face. Following, clad in the crimson robes of the Adeptus Mechanicum, was an adept, whose own face was lost to the darkness of his hood. A sickly yellow light emanated from three bionic oculars that rotated like the objective lenses of a microscope. Beside him was a Son of Horus. The eyes on his shoulderplate and chest were unmistakable and his fine armour was of the palest green, framed in a midnight trim. His unsmiling face was swarthy and heavy of brow, as though in constant deliberation. Flanking them, and marching in time, were Krendl’s honour guard: a four-point escort of Legiones Astartes veterans in gleaming, grey Mark-IV Maximus suits lined in gold and gaudiness.

                        ‘Warsmith,’ Krendl greeted his former master coolly, at the foot of the altar steps.

                        A moment passed under the engraved eyes of the Emperor.

                        ‘Krendl,’ Dantioch replied.

                        The Iron Warrior pursed his mangled lips but let the failure to acknowledge his new rank pass. ‘Greetings from the 51st Expedition. May I introduce Adept Grachuss and Captain Hasdrubal Serapis of the Sons of Horus.’

                        Dantioch failed to acknowledge them also. The Warsmith gave a short cough and waved a gauntlet nonchalantly behind him.

                        ‘You know my people,’ Dantioch said. Then added, ‘and yours.’

                        ‘Indeed,’ Krendl said, raising a ragged eyebrow. ‘We bring you new orders from your primarch and your Warmaster.’

                        ‘And what of the Emperor’s orders? You bring nothing across the stars from him?’ Dantioch asked.

                        Krendl stiffened, then seemed to relax. He gave Serapis a glance over his armoured shoulder but the captain’s expression didn’t change.

                        ‘It has long been the Emperor’s wish that his favoured sons – under the supreme leadership of his most favoured, Horus Lupercal – guide the Great Crusade to its inevitable conclusion. Out here, amongst a cosmos conquered, the Warmaster’s word is law. Dantioch, you know this.’

                        ‘Out here, in the darkness of the East, we hear disturbing rumours of this cosmos conquered and the dangers of the direction it is taking,’ Dantioch hissed. ‘Rector, come forth. You may speak.’

                        The cleric in sapphire and gold stepped forwards with apologetic hesitation. ‘This man,’ Dantioch explained, ‘has come to us from Greater Damantyne with grave news.’

                        The priest, at once scrutinised by the supermen, retreated into the depths of his hood. He fumbled his first words, before gaining his confidence.

                        ‘My lords, I am your humble servant,’ the rector began. ‘This system is the terminus of a little-known trade route. Merchants and pirates, both alien and human, run wares between our hinterspace and the galactic core. In the last few months they have brought terrible news of consequence to the Emperor’s Angels here on Lesser Damantyne. A civil war that burns across the Imperium, the loss of entire Legions of Space Marines and the unthinkable – a son of the Emperor slain! This tragic intelligence alone would have been enough to bring me here: the Space Marines of this rock have long been our friends and allies in the battle with the green invader. Then, a dread piece of cognisance came to my ears and made them bleed for my Iron Warrior overlords. Olympia – their home world – the victim of rebellion and retribution. A planet razed to its rocky foundations; mountains aflame and a people enthralled. Olympia, I am heartbroken to report, is now no more than an underworld of chain and darkness, buried in rotten bodies and shame.’

                        ‘I have heard enough of this,’ Serapis warned.

                        Krendl turned on the Warsmith. ‘Your primarch–’

                        Dantioch cut him off. ‘My primarch – I suspect – had a hand in these reported tragedies.’

                        ‘You waste our time, Dantioch,’ Krendl said, his torn lips snarling around the hard consonants of the Warsmith’s name. ‘You and your men have been reassigned. Your custodianship here is ended. Your primarch and the Iron Warriors Legion fight for Horus Lupercal now and all available troops and resources – including those formally under your superintendence – are required for the Warmaster’s march on ancient Terra.’

                        The Grand Reclusiam echoed with Krendl’s fierce honesty. For a moment nobody spoke, the shock of hearing such bold heresy in a holy place overwhelming the chamber.

                        ‘End this madness!’ Chaplain Zhnev implored from the steps, the forge light flashing off his sable-silver plate.

                        ‘Krendl, think about what you’re doing,’ Tarrasch added.

                        ‘I am Warsmith now, Captain Tarrasch!’ Krendl exploded, ‘whatever rank you might hold in this benighted place, you will honour me with my rightful title.’

                        ‘Honour what?’ Dantioch said. ‘The rewards of failure? You command simply because you lack the courage to be loyal.’

                        ‘Don’t talk to me about failure and lack of courage, Dantioch. You excel in both,’ Krendl spat. He bobbed his head at Serapis, the splinters of frag still embedded in his face-flesh glinting in the chamber light. ‘That is how the great Barabas Dantioch came to be left guarding such a worthless deadrock. Lord Perturabo’s favourite here came to lose Krak Fiorina, Stratopolae and the fortress world of Gholghis to the Vulpa Straits hrud migration.’

                        As Krendl growled his narrative, Dantioch remembered the last, dark days on Gholghis. The hrud xenos filth. The infestation of the unseen. The waiting and the dying, as Dantioch’s garrison turned to dust and bones, their armour rusting, bolters jamming and fortress crumbling about them. Only then, after the intense entropic field created by the migratory hrud swarms had aged stone and flesh to ruin, did the rachidian beasts creep out of every nook and crevice to attack, stabbing and slicing with their venomous claws.

                        Most of all, Dantioch remembered waiting for the Stormbird to lift the survivors out of the remains of Gholghis: Sergeant Zolan, Vastopol the warrior-poet and Techmarine Tavarre. Zolan’s hearts stopped beating aboard the Stormbird, minutes after extraction. Tavarre died of old age in the cruiser infirmary, just before reaching Lesser Damantyne. Vastopol and the Warsmith had considered themselves comparatively fortunate but both had been left crippled with their aged, superhuman bodies.

                        ‘He then thought it wise,’ Krendl continued with acidic disdain, ‘to question his primarch’s prosecution of the hrud extermination campaign. No doubt as a way to excuse his loss of half a Grand Company, rather than laying the blame where it really belonged: the Emperor’s bungled attempt at galactic conquest and his own failed part in that. The IV Legion spread out across the stars. A myriad of tiny garrisons holding a tattered Compliance together in the wake of a blind Crusade. Our once proud Iron Warriors, reduced to planetary turnkeys.’

                        ‘The primarch was wrong,’ Dantioch said, shaking his iron mask. ‘The extermination campaign prompted the migration rather than ending it. Perturabo claims the hrud cleansed from the galaxy but, if that is the case, what is quietly wiping out Compliance worlds on the Koranado Drift?’

                        The new Warsmith ignored him.

                        ‘You disappoint and disgust him,’ Krendl told Dantioch. ‘Your own primarch. Your weakness offends him. Your vulnerability is an affront to his genetic heritage. We all have scars but it is you he cannot bear to look upon. Is that why you adopted the mask?’ Krendl smiled his derision. ‘Pathetic. You’re an insult to nature and the laws that govern the galaxy: the strong survive; the feeble die away. Why did you not crawl off and die, Dantioch? Why hang on, haunting the rest of us like a bad memory?’

                        ‘If I’m so objectionable, what is it that you and the primarch want with me?’

                        ‘Nothing, cripple. I doubt you would live long enough to reach the rendezvous. Perturabo demands his Iron Warriors – all his true sons – for the Warmaster’s offensive. Horus will take us to the very walls of the Imperial Palace, where the Emperor’s fanciful fortifications will be put to the test of our mettle and history will be made.’

                       ‘The Emperor has long grown distracted in his studies on ancient Terra,’ Hasdrubal Serapis insisted with venom. ‘The Imperium has no need of the councils, polity and bureaucracy he has created in his reclusion. We need leadership: a Great Crusade of meaning and purpose. The Emperor is no longer worthy to guide humanity in the next stage of its natural dominion over the galaxy. His son, Horus Lupercal, has proved himself worthy of the task.’

                        ‘Warsmith Krendl,’ Zhnev said, blanking out the Son of Horus and taking several dangerous steps forwards. ‘If you stand by and do nothing, while the Warmaster plots patricide and pours poison in his brother primarch’s ears, then you too plot a patricide of your own. Perturabo is our primarch. We must make our noble lord see the error of his judgement – not reinforce it with our unquestioned compliance.’

                        ‘Lord Perturabo is your primarch, indeed. Is it so difficult to obey your primarch’s order?’ Serapis marvelled at the Iron Warriors. ‘Or does mutinous Olympian blood still burn in your veins? Krendl, to have your home world rebel in your absence is embarrassment enough. I trust you will not allow the same to happen amongst members of your own Legion.’

                        ‘Save it, pontificator,’ Krendl snapped at the Chaplain. ‘I have heard the arguments. Soon the Legion will have little use for you and your kind.’ The Warsmith turned on the silent, seething Dantioch. ‘You will surrender command of this fortress and troops to me immediately.’

                        A moment of cool fury passed between the two Iron Warriors.

                        ‘And if I refuse?’

                        ‘Then you and your men will be treated as traitors to the primarch and his Warmaster,’ Krendl promised.

                        ‘Like you and your Cthonian friend are to his majesty, the Emperor?’

                        ‘Your stronghold will be pounded to dust and traitors with it,’ Krendl told him.

                        Dantioch turned and presented the grim iron of his masked face to Colonel Kruishank, Chaplain Zhnev and his Iron Palatine, Zygmund Tarrasch. Their faces were equally grim. Allowing his eyes to linger for a second on the visiting rector, Barabas Dantioch returned his gaze to his maniacal opposite. Krendl was flushed with fear and fire. Serapis merely watched: a distant observer – the puppet master with strings of his own. Adept Grachuss gurgled rhythmically and rotated his tri-ocular, the lens zeroing in on Dantioch. The Warsmith’s honour guard stood as statues: their bolters ready; their barrels on the custodians of the Schadenhold.

                        ‘Vastopol,’ Dantioch called. ‘What do you think?’

                        A vox-roar boomed around the chamber, causing the iron rods suspended above the Reclusiam to tremble and dance. Something large and ungainly moved amongst the giant, iron sculptures of the aisle diorama. The most primitive of preservation instincts caused Krendl and his honour guard to spin around in shock. One of the sculptures had come to life. Seeming small in the choreographed throng of titan attackers, the assailant’s bulk and breadth swiftly grew as it advanced and towered over the astounded Iron Warriors.

                        The Legiones Astartes were presented with one of their own. A Dreadnought. A brooding, metal monster, as broad as it was tall and squatset with chunky weaponry. The Venerable Vastopol: with his Warsmith, the last surviving Iron Warriors of the Gholghis fortress world. Wracked with horrendous injury and premature age, Dantioch had had the Space Marine entombed in Dreadnought armour, so that the warrior might continue to serve and keep the chronicles of the company alive. The war machine had been hastily sprayed black in order to blend in with the surrounding diorama and with movement the fresh paint left a black drizzle behind the beast.

                        As the wall of ceramite and adamantium came at them, Krendl’s armed escorts tried to bring their bolters to bear. The Venerable Vastopol’s gaping twin-autocannons were already loaded, primed and aimed right at them. The weapons crashed, chugging explosive fire at the two rearguard Space Marines and filling the chamber with the unbearable cacophony of battle. At such close range, the heavy weapon reduced the two Legiones Astartes to thrashing blurs of blood and shattered armour.

                        With more grace and coordination than would have been thought possible in the hulking machine, the charging Dreadnought turned and smashed a third Iron Warrior guard into the opposite aisle with a power claw-appendaged shoulder. The Space Marine’s glorious Maximus suit crumpled and the Legiones Astartes within could be heard screaming as bones snapped and organs ruptured. With Krendl and Serapis backing for cover, silent pistols drawn, and the Mechanicum adept knocked to the Reclusiam floor, the Warsmith’s remaining honour guard flung himself at the Dreadnought. Lifting his bolter above his head, the Iron Warrior blasted the Venerable Vastopol’s armoured womb-tomb with firepower.

                        Sparks showered from the Dreadnought’s adamantium shell. Vastopol gunned the chainfist bayonet that underslung his autocannons. Slashing at the Iron Warrior with the barbed nightmare, the war machine chewed up the Space Marine’s weapon before opening up his armour from the jaw to the navel. With chest cavity and abdomen spilling their contents out through the ragged gash, the honour guard dropped to his knees and died. Having come away from the wall of sculpture, the Dreadnought had allowed the crushed Legiones Astartes he’d pinned to the merciless iron to thunk to the ground. Lifting a huge metal foot, Vastopol stamped down on the Iron Warrior’s helmet, bespattering the polished stone with brain matter and putting the mauled Space marine out of his howling misery.

                        As Dantioch came forwards, flanked by Tarrasch and Zhnev on one side and the rector and colonel on the other, Krendl and the Son of Horus retreated: the rage and horror evident on their contorted faces. Both Legiones Astartes officers were backing step by step towards the Grand Reclusiam entrance, their pistols aimed at the unarmed Warsmith and his heavily-armed Dreadnought. Krendl and Serapis were politicians, however, and knew that their best chance of escaping the fortress alive lay in their threats rather than their pistols.

                        The Venerable Vastopol plucked Grachuss from the floor with the chisel-point digits of his power claw, holding the Mechanicum adept by the temples and hooded crown like an infant’s doll. The sickly yellow lens of the tech-priest’s tri-ocular revolved in panic while his respiratory pipes bubbled furiously.

                        ‘I fear Warsmith Krendl brought you with instructions to catalogue our fortifications,’ Dantioch addressed the suspended Grachuss, ‘so that you might return with stories of our siege capability. A greater Warsmith than he would have done that himself, of course. Vastopol here was the chronicler for our company: he’s not much of a talker now. Vastopol,’ Dantioch called. ‘How does Adept Grachuss’s story end?’

                        The Dreadnought’s power claw attachment began to revolve at the wrist, wrenching the tech-priest’s hooded head clean from his spinning shoulders. His body struck the altar steps, a cocktail of blood and ichor pumping from the ragged neck stump.

                        ‘Insanity!’ Krendl bawled at the advancing Dantioch. ‘You’re dead!’ The threats had begun.

                        ‘Captain Krendl,’ Dantioch hissed. ‘This is an Iron Warrior stronghold. It does not, nor will it ever serve the renegade Warmaster. My garrison and I are loyal to the Emperor: we will not share in your damnation.’ The cold pride that afflicted the Legion, as well as their Iron father, glinted in Dantioch’s cloudy eyes. ‘It seems I have one last opportunity to prove my worthiness to the primarch. I will not fail him this time. The Schadenhold will never fall. Do you hear me, Idriss? This stronghold and the men that defend it will never be yours. The Iron Warriors on Lesser Damantyne fight for their Emperor and they fight for me. You will taste failure and it will be your turn to return to the primarch’s wrath. Now run, you cur. Back to your renegade fleet and take this heretic dog with you.’

                        Stepping back through the archway of the Grand Reclusiam with a wary Serapis, the wide-eyed Krendl thrust his pistol behind him and then back at the Iron Warriors and their Dreadnought.

                        ‘All of this,’ Krendl waved the muzzle of the bolt pistol around, ‘dust in a day. You hear, Dantioch? Dust in a day!’

                        ‘I dare you to try,’ Dantioch roared, but his challenge dissolved into raucous coughing. As the Warsmith fell to his armoured knees with wheezing exertion, Tarrasch grabbed Dantioch’s arm. Patting the Iron Palatine’s ceramite, the Warsmith caught his breath. Tarrasch let him go but the exhausted Iron Warrior commander remained kneeling and head bowed. Slowly he turned to the hooded rector.

                        ‘So,’ the cleric said, ‘you hear it for yourself: straight from traitor lips. Our brothers’ hearts steeped in warped treason.’ The rector reached inside the rich material of his robes. The soft whine of the displacer field – all but imperceptible before – died down through the frequencies, unmasking the priest and revealing his true dimensions. As the cleric lowered his hood the reality about the huge figure fell out of focus for a moment before reassuming a searing clarity.

                        Their minds unclouded, the Schadenholders beheld a brother Space Marine: his ornate plate of the deepest blue. He held a plumed helmet under one arm and an ornate gladius sat in a sheath across his thigh. His surcoat robes hung from the resplendent flourishes of his artificer armour, with battle honours and commendations dripping from his glorious plate. The symbol on his right shoulder identified him as an Ultramarine; the bejewelled Crux Aureas crafted into his left as Legionary Champion, Tetrarch of Ultramar and Honour Guard to Roboute Guilliman himself.

                        ‘You played your part well, Tetrarch Nicodemus. Are the Ultramarines usually given to such theatricality?’ Dantioch asked.

                        ‘No, my lord. We are not,’ the champion answered, his cropped hair and fair patrician looks the mark of Ultramar’s warrior elite. ‘But these are uncommon times and they call for tactics uncommon.’

                       ‘Let me be candid, Ultramarine. When you arrived on Lesser Damantyne with your slurs and distant intelligence, I almost had Vastopol blow you from the Schadenhold’s battlements.’ The Warsmith came up from his knees, once again with the help of Tarrasch. The Tetrarch shot him hard eyes: one of which was encircled by a neat tattoo of his chapter symbol.

                        ‘It is not easy for an Iron Warrior to hear of his brothers’ weakness,’ Dantioch continued. ‘In that, even Idriss Krendl and I agree. You slandered my father primarch and besmirched the IV Legion with accusations of rebellion, heresy and murder. We’ve allowed your insults to go unpunished; you’ve allowed us the luxury of hearing kindred treason first hand. Our accord is sealed in truth. What now would Roboute Guilliman have of us?’

                        Tauro Nicodemus looked about the gathering. Tarrasch and Zhnev’s bleak pride matched their Warsmith’s own; the Venerable Vastopol existed only to fight and Colonel Kruishank’s default loyalty was plain to see on his face – allegiance to the Emperor offering him solace in the face of calamity.

                        ‘Nothing you haven’t freely given already,’ Nicodemus insisted. ‘Deny the Warmaster resource and reinforcement. Hold your ground for as long as you can. The efforts of a faithful few could slow the traitor advance. Minutes. Days. Months. Anything, to give the Emperor time to fortify Terra for the coming storm and for my lord to cut through the confusion Horus has sown and prepare a loyalist response.’

                        ‘If we are to give ourselves for this, level Iron Warrior against Iron Warrior, then it would be good to know that Guilliman has a strategy,’ said Dantioch.

                        ‘Yes, my lord. As always, Lord Guilliman has a plan,’ the Ultramarine champion told him evenly.

                        As the congregation went to leave the blood-spattered Grand Reclusiam, Dantioch asked, ‘Nicodemus?’

                        ‘Yes, Warsmith?’

                        ‘Why me?’

                        ‘Lord Guilliman knows of your art and expertise in the field of siegecraft. He suspects these skills will be sorely needed.’

                        ‘He could count on my skill but what of my loyalty?’ Dantioch pressed. ‘After all, my Legion has been found wanting in its faith.’

                        ‘You spoke candidly before, my lord. Might I be allowed to do the same?’

                        Dantioch nodded.

                        ‘The Warmaster could exploit the weakness of your primarch’s pride,’ the Tetrarch explained cautiously. ‘Your history with Perturabo is no secret. Lord Guilliman feels he too can rely on this same weakness in you.’

                        Once again, the Warsmith nodded. To Nicodemus and to himself.

                        I was there. On that tiny world, in a forgotten system, in a distant corner of the galaxy: where a mighty blow was struck against the renegade Warmaster and his alliance of the lost and damned. There, on Lesser Damantyne. I was among the few, who stood against many. The brother who spilled his brothers’ blood. The son who betrayed his wayward father’s word. And that word was… heresy.

                        For a bloody day beyond an Ancient Terran year we fought. Olympians all. Iron Warriors answering the call of their primarch and Emperor. The cold eyes of both watching from afar. Judging. Expecting. Willing their Iron Warriors on like absentee gods drawn to mortal plight by the reek of battle: the unmistakable stench of blood and burning.

                        I was there when Warsmith Krendl visited upon us a swarm of Stormbirds. Disgorged from the fat cruiser Benthos and heavily-laden with troops and ordnance, the aircraft blotted out the stars and fell upon our world like a flock of winged thunderbolts. Blasting through the thick cloud of Damantyne’s hostile surface, the Stormbirds would have rocketed through the cave systems and disgorged their own brand of horror on our readying position. Warsmith Dantioch had ordered the Orphic Gate collapsed mere hours before, however, and all the flock found there was rock and destruction, as, one after another, they struck the planet surface.

                        I was there when the mighty god-machines of the Legio Argentum, denied entrance to the gate also, had to stride through the acid hellstorms of Lesser Damantyne. Like blind, tormented behemoths they tumbled and crashed through the squalls and cyclones, their armoured shells rust-riddled and giant automotive systems eaten away. The infamous Omnia Victrum, the sunderer of a hundred worlds, was one of three flash-flayed war machines that managed to stumble to a sinkhole colossal enough to admit their dimensions. And there the screaming hordes that crewed the god-machines were confronted with the unfathomable labyrinth of the planet’s gargantuan cave system and the reality that they might be lost for eternity in the deep and the dark.

                        I was there when Warsmith Dantioch ordered the giant ground-pumps to life and the lake of crude promethium burst its banks, flooding the floor of our huge cavern-home with a raging, black ichor. I watched as the Nadir-Maru 4th Juntarians and more bombardment cannon than a man could count were drowned in a deluge of oil and death. I roared my dismay as columns of my traitor brethren marched on the pumps through the settling shallows, to sabotage the great machinery. I roared my delight when my Warsmith ordered the slick surface of the crude promethium ignited about them. A blaze so bright that it not only roasted the Iron Warriors within their plate but brought light to the cavern that the depths had never known.

                        I was on the Schadenhold’s battlements as our own cannon and artillery placements reduced Warsmith Krendl’s reserve Stormbirds to fireballs of wreckage. I saw the small armies they landed on our keeps and towers fall to their deaths like rain from our inverse architecture. I fought with the Sons of Dantioch – genebred hulks of monstrous proportion – as they tore Nadir-Maru 4th Juntarians limb from limb in the kill zones and courtyards. I walked amongst Colonel Kruishank’s Ninth-Ward Angeloi Adamantiphracts as their disciplined las-fire lit up the ramparts and cut their traitor opposites to smouldering shreds. I looked down on a fortress swamped in carnage, where you could not walk for bodies and could not breathe for the blood that lay hanging in the air like a murderous fog.

                        Finally, I fought in the tight corridors and dread architecture of the Warsmith’s design. Took life on an obscene scale, face-to-face with my Iron Warrior brethren. Murdered in the Emperor’s name and matched the cold certainty of my brothers’ desire. Killed with the same chill logic and fire in my belly as my enemy had for me. Measured my might in the blood of traitors whose might should have measured my own. I was there. In the Schadenhold. On Lesser Damantyne. Where few stood against many and, amongst the fratricidal nightmare of battle, brothers bled and heresy found its form.

                        The Schadenhold shook.

                       Dust rained from the low ceiling and grit danced on the dungeon floor. The subterranean blockhouse seared with gunfire. Its hoarse boom split the ear and the flash of hot muzzles dazzled the eye. Barabas Dantioch had supreme confidence in his nightmare stronghold’s design. He’d told Idriss Krendl that the Schadenhold would never be his. Even at this stage – three hundred and sixty-six Ancient Terran days into the murderous siege – he could count on the fortress keeping his word. With traitor Titans and Mechanicum war machines haunting the caverns, swarms of Stormbirds strafing the citadel towers and enemy Legiones Astartes storming its helter-skelter battlements, he knew the brute logic of the Schadenhold’s design and the rock from which that inexorability had been crafted would not let him down. Dantioch’s tactical genius extended far beyond the unrelenting architecture of the stronghold exterior: any Warsmith worth their rocksalt, regardless of the boasts they might make, planned for the inevitability of failure. A life lived under siege had taught the Iron Warriors that enemies were not to be underestimated and that all fortresses fall – sooner or later. A Warsmith’s gift was to make this eventuality as late as possible. The blockhouse was a perfect example of the principle in action.

                        Throughout the citadel, on every level and in every quarter, there was a blockhouse chamber. A fallback position for the Iron Warrior garrison within: each bolthole was equipped with its own secreted supplies of food, water and ammunition, as well as rudimentary medical and communications equipment. The chambers themselves were dens of devious geography, every one with its own unique design and layout. No lethal opportunity had been left unexploited and every fire arc and angle had been measured to perfection. In each the Warsmith had created a crenellated deathtrap of chokepoints, hide sites and killspots that doubled as training facilities for the Legiones Astartes warriors during the simpler, silent times of peace.

                        The blockhouses had not only provided Dantioch’s hard-pressed garrison with respite and supplies but had also frustrated any hopes Warsmith Krendl might have had of a swift victory, once his invading force had breached the citadel’s considerable, exterior defences. Fighting inside the Schadenhold had been as bloody as the slaughter on the battlements beyond. The fortress stank of hot metal and swift death. Every wall was a bolt-hammered vista of splatter and gore, every chamber carpeted with armoured bodies.

                        Kneeling down on one rusted knee, Dantioch mused over a crumpled, blood-spotted pile of schematics. The Schadenhold diagrams covered the floor of the embrasure platform and were stained and scratched with ink, Dantioch’s strategic annotations almost obscuring the detail of the stronghold’s grand design. About the Warsmith, armoured feet shuffled and the air sang with the relentless crash of firing mechanisms. Nearby slumped an Angeloi Adamantiphact, breathing through a ragged hole in his chest, while another bled away his life as an Imperial Army chirurgeon fussed over his missing arm. The edges of the schemata vellum soaked up the growing pool, but the Warsmith – feathered quill to the mouth grate of his mask – was so involved in his three-dimensional visualisation of the two-dimensional prints, that he barely noticed.

                        ‘Have Squad Secundus fall back to the hold point on the floor above, they’re about to be cut off,’ Dantioch ordered.

                        While Adamantiphracts lanced the long corridor approach to the blockhouse with broad-beam las-fire from the flared barrels of their carbines, the ranking Angeloi Adamantiphact officer in the blockhouse – Lieutenant Cristofori – carried a useless, mangled arm in a sling and doubled as Dantioch’s tactical and communications dispatch. Operating a small but robust vox-bank, set in the embrasure wall, Cristofori was the Warsmith’s eyes and ears about the Schadenhold. While the lieutenant conveyed the order through a bulky vox-receiver, he filtered the flood of reports coming in from the vox-links of individual Iron Warriors and the comms stations of different blockhouses. Replacing the receiver, he put a finger to his headset and nodded.

                        ‘Sir, Nine-Thirteen reports enemy reinforcements on the hangar deck,’ the lieutenant relayed.

                        ‘Legiones Astartes?’ Dantioch asked. It would be hard to believe. If the bodies were anything to go by, Krendl must have committed a full demi-Grand Company by now. The Schadenhold was swarming with Perturabo’s progeny.

                        ‘Imperial Army, my lord. Looks like foot contingents of the Bi-Nyssal Equerries.’

                        Dantioch allowed himself a hidden smile. New blood. It seemed that Krendl had been reinforced. This both pleased and vexed the Warsmith. Krendl had been sent to acquire reinforcements for the primarch and Horus Lupercal, not expend the Warmaster’s valuable manpower. That would be embarrassing enough. The problem with reinforcement was that it meant that Krendl had been outfitted to see the siege through to the end. Horus could not allow word of Lesser Damantyne’s resistance and the loyalty of the Iron Warriors to reach other Legions. The end was near.

                        ‘Nine-Thirteen have been forced back to the fuel depot. Awaiting orders,’ Cristofori added.

                        Dantioch grunted. ‘Tell the ranking wardsman that he has permission to use the Nine-Thirteen’s remaining detonators on the promethium tanks.’ The Warsmith slashed a cross through the Schadenhold’s Stormbird hangars on the floor schematic. ‘We won’t be needing them. Let’s deny our enemy also. Nine-Thirteen can fall back by squads to this maintenance opening,’ he continued, stabbing the quill point through the vellum. ‘Then on to Sergeant Asquetal in the North-IV blockhouse.’

                        ‘Sir, also – blockhouses South-II and East-III report dwindling supplies of ammunition.’

                        ‘Collapse all of our people on levels two and three back to Colonel Kruishank’s hold point in the Hub,’ Dantioch grizzled above the gunfire.

                        ‘The colonel’s dead, sir.’

                        ‘What?’

                        ‘Colonel Kruishank is dead, sir.’

                        ‘Then Captain Galliop, damn it! They still have some limited supplies.’

                        ‘Yes, my lord,’ Cristofori said unfazed and began relating the Warsmith’s orders.

                        This had been the order of things for as long as the Schadenholders could remember: battle coordinated a hair’s breadth under the fury of boltfire. Whereas the elevated embrasure was intended to provide space for such luxury, below on the chamber floor, Iron Warriors, Adamantiphracts and gene-stock ogres fought with adrenaline-fuelled frenzy. Each knew that his life depended upon the relentless taking of others and nowhere was this more evident than at the gauntlet-entrance to the blockhouse. The walls about the opening had lost their angularity and harsh edges. The perpetual assault of bolt-rounds and las-fire had chewed up the stone and returned the entrance to the rocky, cavernous irregularity of the cave system beyond. From the ceiling rained the gore of those who had failed to breach the chamber; the floor underneath was a mound of gunfire-shredded bodies and trampled armour.

                        At the centre of the blockhouse stood the Venerable Vastopol. The Dreadnought was too large to take advantage of much of the architectural cover and instead had stood its ground like a machine possessed, hammering anything advancing with the glowing barrels of its raging autocannons. The war machine had borne the brunt of the blockhouse defence; however, the reinforced plate of its sarcophagus body was a sizzling, bolt-punctured mess. The monstrous machine stood in a pool of its own hydraulic fluid and showered sparks from one of its clunky legs. The muzzle of its lower cannon barrel had been shorn off and the mangled chainfist bayonet below hung in a serrated tangle. About the Dreadnought, firing from loopholes and crescent alcoves in merlon walls, were its superhuman kindred. Experts in the art of encumbrance, the Legiones Astartes prided themselves on their beleaguered worth: every defending Iron Warrior had to slay so many of his traitor brothers in order to satisfy the Warsmith’s equations: algebraic notations calculated in time and blood.

                        ‘Missile launcher!’ Tarrasch yelled from the chamber floor. As Legiones Astartes and Adamantiphracts retracted barrels and slammed their backs into protective scenery, the warhead rocketed up the passage and into the blockhouse. Striking a merlon wall the missile exploded, showering razor frag across the heads of hidden defenders.

                        Angeloi Adamantiphract marksmanship seared the length of the approach, hammering the plate of storming Iron Warriors and cutting up their Imperial Army opposites, las-fodder from the Expeditionary Fleet’s Nadir-Maru 4th Juntarians. Those that made the gauntlet-entrance faced a storm of their own: disciplined, ammunition-conserving blasts from the barrels of garrison battle-brothers. Armoured Legiones Astartes besiegers who breached the chamber dived out of the path of withering autocannon fire and las-streams and peeled off left and right, desperate for cover. Their desire to establish a foothold in the blockhouse took them straight into the reach of the Iron Palatine and his assault troops.

                        The Sons of Dantioch, scarred genebred hulks, pumped to obscenity with hormones and fervent loyalty, came at the interlopers with the mammoth tools of their trade – diamantine-tip hammers, serrated shovels and clawpicks. If that wasn’t enough of a nightmare for the blockhouse breachers, the Iron Palatine, Chaplain Zhnev and the Ultramarine Tauro Nicodemus were leading the charge.

                        An Iron Warrior invader broke from a cannon-mauled throng, a yellow and black-striped blur. With his Mark-IV plate alive with ricochets, the brute pushed himself away from one wall and then the other before tumbling into a messy roll. He was followed by two other traitors who blazed away with their bolters and a trail of opportunistic Nadir-Maru 4th Juntarians.

                        Genebred hulks descended upon the spearheading Space Marine, their picks and shovels sparking off his savaged ceramite. The second turned his wild bolter straight on Nicodemus, the azure glint of the Ultramarine’s armour instantly attracting the warrior’s attention. Zhnev wasted no time with the third, firing the pistons in his replacement shoulder. His hammer-fashioned crozius arcanum swung through the air in an unpredictable, pendula-jointed arc, crashing past the Iron Warrior’s helmet. Cleaving through armour plating and bone where the Space Marine’s neck met his shoulder, the Iron Warrior Chaplain fired his pistons again, swiftly retracting the sacred relic. Spinning with the pendula motion of the crozius, Zhnev howled his fury before striking the heretic’s helmet from his body.

                        Tarrasch plugged the resulting bloodhaze with alternate rounds from each of his bolt pistols, cutting down the Nadir-Maru troopers streaming in through the gauntlet-entrance. Dark, shiny faces beneath extravagant turbans bared bleach-white teeth at the Iron Palatine. The former Iron Warrior captain barked directions to the Angeloi Adamantiphract warriors at the embrasure walls and the Sons of Dantioch below to bring down the Juntarians in their own inimical ways.

                        With an enemy Legiones Astartes pounding across the killing ground at him, Brother Nicodemus of Ultramar took several practice sweeps with the gleaming blade of his gladius. On his other arm he supported the weight of a huge storm shield. The shield was as tall as the Ultramarine – a sub-rectangular plate, the curved, semi-cylindrical surface of which crackled with a protective energy field. The champion clutched it to his side like an airlock bulkhead.

                        Dantioch’s Iron Warriors were savage hand to hand fighters – equals of the unstoppable World Eaters or the Blood Angels’ loyal fervour. The Iron Warriors were deadlier still when they were cornered: cold machines of dread and determination. None had the martial grace or unadulterated skill with a blade that Nicodemus exhibited. Nicodemus batted the Iron Warrior’s bolter aside with the weight of the sizzling shield before shearing through the weapon with a murderous downwards cut of his gladius. Before the dazed Iron Warrior could snatch a hammer from his belt the Ultramarine had flashed the gladius back and forth across his opponent’s armour. The blade sang through the Iron Warrior’s chestplate and helmet, spraying the chamber with Olympian blood.

                        Nearby the Space Marine that had spearheaded the daring assault broke free of the geneslave mob. A chainaxe screamed from the scrum of hulking bodies. The Iron Warrior burst from the prison of muscular flesh, sweeping heads and elephantine limbs from the Sons of Dantioch in his path. Chaplain Zhnev’s crozius sang through the air on its pendula attachment, smashing the motorised axehead into pieces. The Iron Warrior responded immediately by plunging his gauntlet into a holster and drawing a bolt pistol. Before he could end the Chaplain, Tarrasch hammered the heretic with a feverish hail of bolts from his own pistols. The angle was hastily improvised and no one round found its way through the Maximus suit plating. The onslaught had cut the Space Marine’s escape dead, however, and the genestock hulks – hungry for a rematch – seized the Iron Warrior. One monster got a bulging arm around the Legiones Astartes’s armoured neck while two others snatched an arm each. The ogres gave a brutal heave on the traitor’s limbs and with a sickening crack and sudden release, the suit seals and the body within tore apart.

                        On the opposite side of the gauntlet-entrance the ogres’ genestock brothers were murdering Nadir-Maru Juntarians with equal delight. As las-fusillades and dark faces parted, two more armoured figures were revealed. Their armour was busy with chevron designs and yellow striping, and on their backs – either side of their suit packs – were a pair of brass promethium canisters. Stomping up through the Juntarians, the Iron Warriors presented their chunky nozzles, the scorched, dribbling muzzle of each weapon situated at the end of a long firepole.

                        Tarrasch turned to the blockhouse with just two words on his thin lips: ‘Take cover!’

                        The blast wave from the erupting inferno knocked the Iron Palatine from his armoured feet. In the confines of the chamber, the heavy flamers did their worst. Everything became roasting heat and smoke, the ink-blot obscurity punctuated by blinding streams of pressurised promethium. As gouts of destruction felt their fiery way through the defensive architecture, sound and smell dominated. Above the boom of the Iron Warrior firepoles, the chatter of bolters could still be heard. Above this was the strangled shrieking of men aflame: Angeloi, genebreeds and Nadir-Maruvians all. Scorched within their suits, Iron Warriors stumbled through the firestorm, searching for respite.

                        It could have been a bolt-round, fired blindly into the darkness and fury, or perhaps a stream from the flared muzzle of a lascarbine or laspistol. Most likely it was a blast from the Venerable Vastopol’s raging autocannons, but something hit one of the brass fuel canisters. A succession of explosions rippled through the thick smoke, knocking all that still lived in the chamber onto their backs. Flame rolled across ceiling and floor; through the tactical arrangement of the blockhouse; through the gauntlet entrance and down the crowded passage beyond.

                        Dantioch’s gauntlet grabbed the top of the platform wall like a grapnel. The Warsmith heaved himself to unsteady feet in the swirling smoke, stamping out the small fire that was his burning schematics. Cristofori was dead, as well as the injured Adamantiphract and his chirurgeon. As the smoke began to clear, Dantioch took in the blockhouse floor. There were bodies everywhere, both loyal and traitor: a carpet of scorched armour and charred flesh. Similar destruction extended up the passage to the gauntlet entrance. There was movement, however, and it wouldn’t take their attackers long to organise an assault to capitalise on the inferno.

                        Leaning against the wall for support, the Warsmith came down the embrasure steps.

                        ‘Tarrasch!’ Dantioch called. From the soot and smaze came sudden movement.

                        ‘Sir,’ came the Iron Palatine’s reply. The explosion had knocked the Iron Warrior senseless into a wall. His words were shaky but the Space Marine was alive.

                        ‘It’s over. We are compromised. Enemy forces imminent. Get the living to their feet.’

                        ‘Yes, my lord.’

                        As Tarrasch stumbled through the carnage, searching for survivors, Dantioch ran his gauntlets along the wall. The Warsmith began to knock experimentally against the stone as he slouched along its expanse. Satisfied, the Warsmith stopped and turned on the hulking Dreadnought that still stood sentinel in the middle of the blockhouse, autocannons at the ready.

                        ‘Vastopol, are you still with us, my friend?’ the Warsmith asked.

                        In answer the Dreadnought just burned. The explosions had done little to the machine but scorch its adamantium and set fire to the scrolls, banners and decorative flourishes that adorned the bulky form.

                        ‘Don’t be like that,’ Dantioch said. ‘It’s over. We could fight to the last man but what would that achieve?’

                        Still the Dreadnought stood immobile.

                        ‘This isn’t Gholghis,’ Dantioch told his battle-brother. ‘It is the prerogative of the Warsmith when to war and when not to. We are beaten here. It is time to take the war elsewhere. Now get over here and help me; you may still have a story to tell.’

                        As the Venerable Vastopol dragged its mangled and sparking leg across the bodies of the blockhouse floor, Tarrasch worked his way through the dead and dying. The Angeloi were all dead, as were the remaining Sons of Dantioch. The raging inferno had done for both and only a handful of Legiones Astartes, protected from the worst of the explosion by their battle-plate, had survived the catastrophic accident.

                        ‘Enemy advancing!’ Tarrasch called from the gauntlet entrance.

                        ‘Come on, come on!’ Dantioch urged Space Marines emerging from the smoke and destruction.

                        Tauro Nicodemus was suddenly beside him: his immaculate armour soot-stained and blood-spattered.

                        ‘I thought this was the fallback position,’ the Tetrarch said. The Ultramarine had accepted that he was to die there, taking as many traitor lives with him as he was able.

                        ‘Game’s not over,’ Dantioch said. ‘Gather your weapons.’

                        ‘Where are we going?’

                        ‘Through this wall.’

                        Dantioch knocked on a section of the blockhouse wall. A deliberate, architectural weak point. ‘Vastopol.’

                        The Dreadnought limped at the wall, crashing through the masonry with one of its chunky shoulders. Rock and dust fell about the war machine. Extracting itself from the ragged aperture, Vastopol stood back to admit the surviving Legiones Astartes: the Warsmith, the Iron Palatine, Brother-Sergeant Ingoldt, Brothers Toledo and Baubistra, the Ultramarine Nicodemus and Chaplain Zhnev. Beyond a broad set of steep, rocky stairs extended, running parallel with the wall and reaching up into the Schadenhold’s cavernous ceiling foundations. With the Legiones Astartes striding up ahead, the Venerable Vastopol negotiated the steps with difficulty, its mangled leg a handicap on the shambling ascent.

                        The stairwell rumbled and shook.

                        ‘What was that?’ Tarrasch called. For a moment nobody answered in the darkness. Then a quake rolled through the stone about them. The steps shook under their feet and fractures split the stairwell’s rough roof and walls.

                        ‘It’s the Omnia Victrum,’ Dantioch said. ‘Krendl finally has his Titans in position.’ The Warsmith tried to picture the acid-scarred colossi outside, the remaining war machines of the Legio Argentum. The Omnia Victrum was an Imperator-class Titan. A mountain of rust-eaten armour, striding across the cavern like a vengeful god. At its sides it mounted weaponry of titanic proportion: monstrous instruments of destruction, capable of razing cities and felling enemy god-machines. Upon its hunched back sat a small city of its own: a Titanscape of corroded steeples, towers and platforms. A base of operations and a mobile barracks of waiting reinforcements.

                        ‘She’s softening up the south face of the Schadenhold with her cannons and turbolasers before landing troops.’ The Imperator was huge and certainly tall enough to stand beside and beneath the Iron Warrior citadel. It could disgorge a siege-ending horde of traitor Iron Warriors and reinforcement foot contingents of the Bi-Nyssal Equerries. As fresh blood rampaged through the south section of the Schadenhold, joining Krendl and his depleted forces in the north, loyalist Iron Warrior resistance would be overrun and crushed. Even Dantioch’s ingenious blockhouse fallbacks would not be able to save the Schadenholders from the wall-to-wall carnage that was to come.

                        Tremors swept through the stairwell once more, knocking several Space Marines from their footing. Dantioch fell into Tarrasch, who steadied his Warsmith, but most were staring at the ceiling. Rock and dust rained down on the Iron Warriors and the walls trembled.

                        ‘The passage is collapsing,’ Nicodemus called, holding his storm shield above him.

                        ‘The structure will hold,’ Dantioch assured them. They were in the cavern ceiling foundations of the Schadenhold. The Omnia Victrum’s artillery assault was pummelling the citadel into submission, shaking the fortress to its rocky core. From the bottom of the stairwell came the fresh chatter of weaponry. Bolters and lascarbines, clutched by the traitor Legiones Astartes and Nadir-Maru 4th Juntarians. The enemy that had flooded the empty blockhouse had followed them through the hole in the wall. Firepower came up the stairs at the loyalists with Krendl’s besiegers climbing behind. ‘Come on!’ Dantioch shouted and continued his ascent.

                        ‘Warsmith,’ he heard Tarrasch call and upon turning found his Iron Palatine skidding back down the steps towards the Venerable Vastopol. Although the south wall had held, it had partially collapsed, creating a bottleneck through which the Dreadnought’s broad bulk could not pass. With his armoured shoulders askew but braced between the walls of the stairwell, the war machine was trapped: held fast by the rock and unable to find footing with his mangled leg.

                        Enemy fire hammered into the Dreadnought’s armoured back. Brother-Sergeant Ingoldt and the Iron Palatine grabbed the war machine’s limbs and heaved at the metal monster. With the intensity of firepower beyond growing and casting the Venerable Vastopol in silhouette, the Iron Warriors fought to free their comrade. The Dreadnought’s vox-speakers trembled with the groans of the warrior inside, as the relentless streams of las-fire and bolt-rounds shredded Vastopol’s rear plating.

                        Baubistra and Chaplain Zhnev ran down the steps at the war machine. Brother Baubistra leapt onto the front of the sarcophagus body section and clambered up the chunky weaponry. Between the top of the Dreadnought’s mighty shoulders and the stairwell roof, Baubistra found a gap for his bolter and began answering back with ammo-conserving blasts. Zhnev came straight at Vastopol’s midriff, slamming his battle-plate into the Dreadnought in the hope that his assault might dislodge the war machine. The Chaplain failed. The Venerable Vastopol had become the immovable object. Only the unstoppable force of Krendl’s traitor troops would remove him and until then, the Iron Warrior Dreadnought became a wall of adamantium and ceramite dividing the two.

                        Tarrasch heard a familiar whine.

                        ‘Missile launcher!’ he called.

                        A rocket slammed into the back of the Dreadnought, knocking Baubistra from his perch and drawing from the Venerable Vastopol a vox-roar of agony and anguish. Two more followed, ravaging the armoured shell of the beast. Vastopol’s groans were constant now and the Iron Warrior’s hulking, metal body was failing about him. Dantioch stomped down the steps towards the Dreadnought.

                        ‘Get him out,’ the Warsmith ordered.

                        ‘He’ll die,’ Zhnev replied over the boom of battle beyond.

                        ‘Do it.’

                        Tarrasch looked to Dantioch and his Chaplain. Then up to Tauro Nicodemus, who was waiting further up the stairwell.

                        ‘My lord,’ Tarrasch said, ‘we need specialist tools and Magos Genetor Urqhart for such a procedure.’

                        Dantioch laid his gauntlets on the cold metal of the Venerable Vastopol’s sarcophagus section. The Iron Warrior within continued to moan his agonies through the vox-speakers.

                        ‘Vastopol, listen to me,’ the Warsmith said. ‘We won’t leave you, my friend. We need to get you out. Can you help us?’

                        The Dreadnought’s power claw came up slowly between them. Askew as he was, the war machine still had use of the appendage, but little else. Bringing the clawtips together like a spike, the Dreadnought thrust the weapon through the armour plating of his sarcophagus. Magna-pistons and hydraulics shifted and locked in the appendage, opening the claw within. With a mighty heave the arm retracted. The Dreadnought’s armoured body fought back, resisting the act of self-mutilation, but finally the plate tore away from the machine’s pock-marked shell.

                        Amnio-sarcophagal fluid cascaded from the pod within, splashing the steps and nearby Space Marines. Power arced across the ruined section and the cavity steamed. The stench was overpowering. Small fires had broken out within, while lines and wires smoked and sparked. Interred, like an ancient foetus, lay what remained of the former Brother Vastopol. The warrior-poet was barely alive. His parchment skin was both wrinkled and pruned and his arms skeletal and wasted. He’d long lost his legs and his torso was a scrawny cage of bones, infested with life-support tubes and impulse plugs that ran lines between the aged Legiones Astartes and his metal womb-tomb.

                        ‘Get him out,’ Dantioch ordered.

                        Chaplain Zhnev and Brother Toledo pulled the emaciated Iron Warrior from the sarcophagus, extracting tubes from between his withered lips and yellow teeth and unplugging the pilot from his mind-impulse interface with his shattered Dreadnought body. With his arms draped over ceramite shoulders, the two Iron Warriors carried Vastopol between them, his skullface and wet, threadbare scalp resting against the Chaplain’s plate.

                        More missiles struck the barricade of the Dreadnought’s evacuated shell and the Iron Warriors fled up the rocky stairwell. Despite being exhausted from the siege the Space Marines made swift progress, slowed only by the fragility of Vastopol’s failing condition and the hacking cough that paralysed the Warsmith with infuriating regularity. At the top of the stairwell they encountered an iron hatch set in the passage roof. Making his feeble way up the final few steps, Dantioch ordered the hatch unlocked and the Iron Warriors through.

                        The chamber beyond was large and dark. The Warsmith pulled down on a robust handle set in the stone of the wall and lamps began to flicker on. The still air about the Legiones Astartes came to life with the rumble of powerful generators.

                        ‘Seal it,’ Dantioch told Brother Baubistra, indicating the hatch. Striding across the chamber, Dantioch was followed by questions. The chamber was no blockhouse, although it did seem to house a small armoury of its own: bolters on racks, ammunition crates, grenades and several suits of Mark-III plate. The Warsmith ignored his brothers’ enquiries and fell to work at a nearby runebank. ‘Sergeant Ingoldt, Brother Toledo, please be so good as to clad the Venerable Vastopol in one of those suits of spare plate.’

                        ‘That won’t save him,’ Zhnev informed his Warsmith.

                        ‘Chaplain, please. While there’s still time.’

                        ‘Warsmith, I must press you for an explanation,’ Tauro Nicodemus said, after casting his eyes about the chamber. ‘I thought we were falling back to a further hold point.’

                       ‘To what end, Ultramarine?’ Dantioch put to him as his gauntlets glided over the glyphs and runes of the console. ‘The Schadenhold is lost. Those loyalists remaining in the citadel will be overrun by Krendl’s reinforcements and the Omnia Victrum will reduce the rest to rubble. This stronghold has bought the Emperor and Roboute Guilliman three hundred and sixty-six Ancient Terran days. Three hundred and sixty-six days bought with Olympian blood, so that they might formulate a response to the Heresy and better fortify the Imperial Palace – to buy a more favourable outcome than our own.’

                        ‘What is the plan, my lord?’ Tarrasch said, his words giving shape to the thoughts of all in the chamber.

                        Dantioch looked about their cavernous surroundings.

                        ‘This is the last of the Schadenhold’s secret strategies,’ the Warsmith said. ‘A final solution to any siege and an answer to any enemy that might push us this far.’

                        ‘You said the fortress was lost,’ Nicodemus said.

                        ‘There are many moments in a battle, when we can exploit our enemy’s weakness. We have, over the course of this siege, exploited nearly all of them. It is nothing less than irony that an enemy is at its very weakest mere moments before victory: when they are at their most stretched and committed in seeking such success. We are going to capitalise on that now.’

                        ‘How?’ the champion pressed him.

                        ‘In a siege, finalities must come first. We must accept our eventual doom and prepare for its coming. This chamber was one of the first I had constructed when crafting the Schadenhold. It is situated in the cavern ceiling, right in the rocky foundations of the fortress. It houses two important pieces of equipment, linked by a common console: a trigger for both if you will. The first is a small teleportarium with the associated generators required to power such a piece of equipment. The second is a detonator: wired to explosives situated at key weak points in the citadel foundations. Gravity will do the rest.’ Dantioch let the enormity of his plan sink in. ‘Chaplain Zhnev, please begin the rites for teleportation. Our journey will be swift but our destination important.’

                        As the Chaplain approached the transference tablets of the teleporter beyond, Tarrasch helped Ingoldt and Toledo get the barely breathing Vastopol sealed in plate.

                        ‘Where is that destination?’ Nicodemus asked the Warmith. The Ultramarine was unused to being kept in tactical darkness.

                        ‘The enemy has committed everything they have to taking this stronghold, undoubtedly leaving their own weak. We are going to teleport to the Benthos and take the bridge by surprise and by force. Brothers, time is upon us. Take your positions, please.’

                        As Tarrasch and the two Iron Warriors dragged the power armoured form of the Venerable Vastopol over to the transference tablets, Nicodemus hefted his storm shield up onto a shoulder mounting. The Ultramarine followed uncertainly.

                        With his helmet to the hatch, Baubistra said: ‘I think they’ve broken through, Warsmith. The enemy are approaching.’

                        ‘Very good, Brother Baubistra: now join your brethren.’

                        As Baubistra strode by, Dantioch went through the motions of arming the explosives sunk deep in the ceiling rock of the Schadenhold’s foundations. Then he opened channels on all floors and vox-hailers across the citadel.

                        ‘Idriss Krendl,’ Dantioch hissed. ‘Captain, this is your Warsmith. I know that you are there, somewhere in my fortress. I know you keep company with traitors and stand in the shadow of the Collegia Titanica’s god-machines. Faced with such odds, I am speaking to you for the last time. And I say to you again that this fortress will not serve the interests of our unloving father or his renegade Warmaster. But, Captain, I was wrong when I told you that the Schadenhold would never fall. Idriss, it will fall…’

                        With that the Warsmith locked off the channels and initiated the trigger for both teleporter and detonators. Taking his position amongst Nicodemus and the Iron Warriors on the transference tablets, Dantioch straightened his cloak. Sealing his mask, the Warsmith blinked about the darkness within and felt the unnatural pull of the warp on his armour. Somewhere in the distance he fancied he heard the first of the detonations: massive explosions, ripping through the strategic weaknesses of the fortress foundations. With his eyes closed and the horrors of teleportation about him, Dantioch imagined what he had always known he could never see.

                        The fall of the Schadenhold. Its literal fall from the ceiling of the cavern. Trillions of tonnes of rock and devious architecture falling to the rocky floor, taking with it the thousands of traitor Iron Warriors and Imperial soldiers that had secured the Schadenhold’s defeat. The fortress’s final defiance, issued in gravity, fire and stone: falling and crushing beneath it, in a behemothic mountain of blood and rubble, the mighty Omnia Victrum and the colossal god-machines of its undoing.

                        Unsealing his mask, Dantioch cast his eyes across the flight deck of the flagship Benthos. The deck was largely empty; most of the cruiser’s Warhawks and Stormbirds had been involved in deployment and aerial attacks on the Schadenhold. The Stormbird around which the Iron Warriors had materialised was pale green and bore symbols and flourishes marking it out as belonging to the Sons of Horus – Hasdrubal Serapis’s personal transport.

                        Tarrasch marched down the Stormbird’s ramp carrying a teleport homer. Dantioch had ordered the device secretly planted on the vessel during their meeting with Krendl and the Sons of Horus captain in the Grand Reclusiam.

                        ‘How are we going to get to the bridge?’ asked Chaplain Zhnev.

                        ‘With as little bloodshed as possible,’ the Warsmith told him. ‘This is the 51st Expedition’s flagship. Iron Warriors are a common sight among its decks. Let us be that common sight.’

                        ‘What about him?’ Tarrasch asked of Tauro Nicodemus. Despite the soot and gore, the brilliance of the Ultramarine’s armour still shone through.

                        ‘The crew will not question a Legiones Astartes.’

                        Marching out purposefully across the flight deck, Dantioch was followed by his loyalist compatriots. The Space Marines fought their desire to hold their bolters at the ready, opting for more casual or ceremonial poses. Brother Toledo and Sergeant Ingoldt carried the limp plate of the Venerable Vastopol between them, lending the infiltrators even less the appearance of an attacking force.

                        There were virtually no Legiones Astartes left aboard the vessel, almost every Iron Warrior being committed to the depths of the planet below. Largely the Space Marines encountered regimental staff and the cruiser’s multitudinous crew. Few among these mortals allowed their eyes to linger on the demigods – especially under Krendl’s brutal regime – and their passage to the command deck was uneventful. Dantioch’s strategy had been so bold and audaciously executed that none aboard the Benthos, even for a second, entertained thoughts that they were under attack.

                        Their silent, uneasy approach to the bridge was shattered by an unexpected klaxon. Bolters came up and the Iron Warriors fell immediately into defensive positions.

                        ‘As you were,’ Dantioch instructed.

                        The loyalists could hear the thunder of power armoured boots on the deck ahead. ‘We are not discovered. We are not under attack,’ Dantioch said. Fighting natural inclination and the brute vulnerability of their situation, the Iron Warriors let their barrels drift back down to the deck. A small contingent of Krendl’s 14th Grand Company veterans marched across an intersection in the corridor ahead. As their footfalls faded, Dantioch turned to his own veterans. ‘By now,’ he told them, ‘survivors on Lesser Damantyne will have reported the devastation below, the loss of Krendl, the Warmaster’s forces and the Omnia Victrum. Whoever is in command will want visual confirmation of such an impossible report. Five fewer brother Legiones Astartes for us to deal with.’

                        Dantioch turned and marched with confidence up the steps to the bridge, flanked by Brother Baubistra and the Iron Palatine. As the Warsmith reached the top and looked down across the expansive bridge of the Benthos he fell into a coughing fit once more: a spasm of hacking convulsions that turned heads and drew attentions.

                        The bridge of the Benthos was a hive of activity, with petty officers and sickly servitors busy at work amongst the labyrinth of runebanks, cogitators and consoles that dominated the command deck. Two Maximus-plated Iron Warriors stood sentry on the bridge arch-egress and Lord Commander Warsang Gabroon of the Nadir-Maru 4th Juntarians stood at conference with turbaned officers of his tactical staff. The Lord Commander stood as Dantioch remembered him, unconsciously twirling the braids of his beard and launching stabbing glares of jaundiced incredulity and disappointment at his inferiors.

                        At the epicentre of the activity and the destination of all reports, data and information were three Sons of Horus: swarthy Cthonians with superior sneers and knitted brows of insidious cunning. Among their number was one who immediately recognised what all others aboard the Benthos had failed to: the threat before them. The enemy Warsmith, Barabas Dantioch.

                        Baubistra and Tarrasch barged onto the bridge, past their master. Putting the muzzles of their weapons to the temples of the traitor sentries they roared at their Olympian brothers to drop their weapons and fall to their knees. Abandoning their burden, Sergeant Ingoldt and Toledo came forwards with bolters raised and pointed at the Sons of Horus. The two traitors flanking Hasdrubal drew their bolt pistols and activity on the bridge slowed to a raucous stand-off. The traitor captain screamed his disbelief and insistence as Iron Warriors and Sons of Horus held each other in their sights. With the Chaplain kneeling beside the dying Vastopol and Dantioch clutching the archway in his coughing fit, it fell to Tauro Nicodemus to break the deadlock.

                        The Ultramarine champion strode forwards, the only thing moving on the stricken command deck. Undaunted, Nicodemus marched past an apoplectic Lord Commander Gabroon, who was screaming, ‘No shooting on the bridge,’ at the warring demigods. Hasdrubal Serapis’s face screwed up with rage and confusion. The destruction on Lesser Damantyne and the appearance of Dantioch and his Iron Warriors on the bridge had been disturbing enough. Now one of Guilliman’s sons stood before him: a mysterious Ultramarine who had involved himself in the Warmaster’s business and no doubt had something to do with the Iron Warrior resistance on the planet below.

                        Hasdrubal backed towards one of the great lancet screens that towered above the bridge: the thick glass was the only thing separating the Space Marine captain from the hostile emptiness outside. His two sentinels held their ground, tracking the advancing Nicodemus with their bolt pistols. Hasdrubal looked at the Iron Warriors, with their weapons aimed up the bridge and at him in front of the huge window. Gabroon continued to screech his alarm. Hasdrubal nodded, confident that the Iron Warriors were not foolish enough to fire and blast out the viewport, dooming all on the bridge to a voidgrave.

                        ‘Kill that damned Ultramarine,’ Hasdrubal seethed.

                        The Sons of Horus fired. Iron Warriors thrust their bolters forwards with an intention to respond in kind.

                        ‘Hold your fire!’ Dantioch managed between torso-wracking convulsions. With his Iron Warriors facing the bridge lancet screens, he could not afford a stray shot to pierce the hull of the ship.

                        Nicodemus hefted the mighty storm shield from its shoulder mounting and brought it around just in time to soak up the first of the traitor Space Marine’s bolt-rounds. As the shots hammered into the cerulean sheen of the plate, the Tetrarch thumbed the shield’s protective field to life. The marksmanship of the Sons of Horus was a beauty to behold. Every bolt-round found its mark, and had Nicodemus not been advancing behind the storm shield he would have been run through by a relentless onslaught of armour-piercing shot.

                        Closing on the traitors, the pistols’ effective range shortened and the storm shield’s energy field was breached. One of the adamatium-core Space Marine killers passed through the armour plating and clipped the Ultramarine’s shoulder. As Guilliman’s champion continued to advance, Hasdrubal’s features contorted further in fury and disbelief. The Sons of Horus ejected spent magazines from their sidearms before slamming home another and repeating the treatment. Nothing would stop Nicodemus, however.

                        As Hasdrubal’s Space Marines emptied their weapons for the second time, Nicodemus took a round through the thigh, one in the chest and another in the shoulder. This time the adamantium slugs found their target and punctured holes through the shield and the Ultramarine’s artificer armour. The energy field sizzled and spat to overload and all Nicodemus had was the bolt-punched plate between him and his enemies. Running the final stretch of command deck, the Ultramarines champion closed with the Sons of Horus.

                        Desperate now, the traitors went for their Cthonian blades. Nicodemus already had a gauntlet on his own gladius. His armoured palm was slippery with the blood that had run down his arm from the grievous wound in his shoulder. Spinning between the two Legiones Astartes, Nicodemus slammed the storm shield into the first. He felt the slash of the enemy blade on the battered plate and hammered the Son of Horus again. Extending his arm and moving the shield aside like an open door, the Ultramarine allowed the traitor a single, wild thrust. The sword stabbed through the open space between the champion’s elbow and hip. Nicodemus swept down with the blade of the gladius, cutting through the Space Marine’s armoured forearm. Gauntlet and blade clattered to the deck.

                        The Ultramarine pressed his advantage: one honour guard to another. He smacked the traitor senseless with the storm shield, the plate edge dashing his helmet this way and that. Dazed, the Son of Horus slipped in his own gore and hit the deck. Nicodemus buried the toe of one power armoured boot in the traitor’s faceplate, rolling him over. Standing over his prone enemy, Nicodemus hovered the bottom edge of the rectangular shield over the Space Marine’s throat. He looked to Hasdrubal and his one remaining sentinel, who stood defiantly between the Ultramarine and his master. Nicodemus brought down the weight of the storm shield with a sickening crack. The seal between helmet and suit cracked and the shield edge cut through the traitor’s neck.

                        The Ultramarine’s armoured chest heaved up and down with exertion as he took a moment to recover, before hoisting the mighty shield around and running straight at the Son of Horus sentinel. Again, Nicodemus felt the pointless slash of the lighter, Cthonian blade on the bolt-shot plate. This time the Ultramarine didn’t stop. He rammed the Son of Horus straight into the thick glass lancet window. Crushed between the observation port and the Ultramarine, the traitor abandoned his weapon and tried to grab the edge of the shield with his ceramite fingertips. Nicodemus smashed him into the glass a second and third time. Finally, the Son of Horus managed to get a grip on the shield – his intention to push the plate aside and get his gauntlets around the Ultramarine’s neck.

                        He never got the chance. Pulling back his gladius, Nicodemus rammed the point of the blade through the back of the storm shield and skewered the Space Marine beyond. There was a gasp. Light. Almost inaudible. Retracting the blade, Nicodemus stepped aside and allowed the shield and Son of Horus to smash to the bridge floor.

                        Hasdrubal had turned away. Like everyone else on the bridge, the captain had thought that the Ultramarine was going to put the Space Marine straight through the window, crashing thick glass about them and inviting the void inside. The captain looked fearfully at Guilliman’s champion. Nicodemus paced up and down in front of him with the gore-smeared gladius held in one gauntlet. He unclipped his helmet and slipped the plumed helm off the back of his head. Gone was the martial grace and patrician calm. Nicodemus spat blood at the deck. A bolt pistol shook in Hasdrubal’s gauntlet. Iron Warriors surrounded them both, bolters gaping at the traitor.

                        ‘It’s over,’ Dantioch called, his grim insistence cutting through the cacophony of a bridge in uproar. Hasdrubal turned from the Ultramarine’s fury to the cold, foreboding of Dantioch’s iron mask. ‘You lost,’ the Warsmith informed his enemy.

                       Hasdrubal’s bolt pistol tumbled from his ceramite fingers. As Toledo and Sergeant Ingoldt secured the prisoner, Nicodemus sheathed his gladius and limped back up the length of the bridge. Lord Commander Gabroon was still shrieking his protestations. The demigod silenced the officer with a slow finger to his lips.

                        Nicodemus joined Dantioch on the deck, next to the Venerable Vastopol. The Warsmith had ordered Tarrasch to take command of the bridge. Ingoldt and Toledo had been tasked with securing the traitor Hasdrubal Serapis and preparing him for interrogation. Chaplain Zhnev and Brother Baubistra were assigned to Warsang Gabroon, to ensure that the Lord Commander’s remaining troops and the crew of the Benthos accepted the swift and relatively bloodless change of regime and the new orders that accompanied it.

                        Standing over the two survivors of the Gholghis fortress world, the Ultramarine asked: ‘Is there anything I can do, Warsmith?’

                        Dantioch didn’t look at the Tetrarch. The Warsmith’s eyes were on the helmetless Vastopol. The ancient lay motionless in battle-plate on the deck, propped up against the wall. The Iron Warrior’s grizzled and aged skull was criss-crossed with wisps of white hair and his face lined with premature centuries. Two milky orbs twitched and wandered between Dantioch, Nicodemus and the bridge.

                        ‘Our honoured brother is taking his leave,’ Dantioch said. His words were hollow and shot through with loneliness and the simple sadness of loss. The Venerable Vastopol had not only survived the dreaded hrud on Gholghis. He’d resisted death’s cold invitation and forged on through the agonies of age to be of use to his brothers once more. Untimely ripped from his metal womb, Vastopol had still clung to life. Until now.

                        ‘He was our chronicler,’ Dantioch said, ‘and carried with him our remembered triumphs. Once, on Gholghis, he told me that such stories of the past ground us in the challenge of the present, like a fortification or citadel built upon foundations of ancient rock. I have none of his skill – crafting in iron and stone what he would in words. I live to tell the tale, however, of the Iron Warriors’ final victory: the last loyal triumph of the IVth Legion. He would want the story to go on. Alas, his story,’ Dantioch said grimly, ‘like that of our Legion, is at an end.’

                       ‘Warsmith,’ Nicodemus began slowly, ‘that need not be the case. I assured you once that my Lord Guilliman had a plan. You have executed your part of that plan flawlessly, Iron Warrior. Lord Guilliman still has need of such ingenuity and skill. The Imperium is frail, Dantioch. An Iron Warrior’s eye could spot such weakness and the good grace of his hand might make it strong once again.’

                        ‘What more would you ask of me?’ the Warsmith said.

                        ‘To stand shoulder to ceramite shoulder with my Lord Guilliman and help him fortify the Imperial Palace.’

                        ‘Fortify the Palace…’ Dantioch repeated.

                        ‘Yes, Iron Warrior.’

                        ‘Perturabo will make us pay for such fantasies.’

                        ‘Perhaps,’ Nicodemus said solemnly. ‘But I believe the genius of your victory today lay in your acceptance that the Schadenhold – for all its indomitable art – would fall. Lord Guilliman shares your vision. Humanity’s future lies in such contingency.’ The Ultramarine let the enormity of the idea linger.

                       Dantioch didn’t answer. Instead he watched the remaining vestiges of life leave the body of his friend and battle-brother. Vastopol’s crusted eyes fluttered before rolling and gently closing, the dry whisper of a dying breath escaping the warrior-poet’s lips.

                        As the Venerable Vastopol faded and left them, he heard Dantioch tell the Ultramarine: ‘You talk of the arts of destruction. Perturabo’s progeny are unrivalled in these arts: indomitable in battle and peerless in the science of siegecraft. Show me a palace and I’ll show you how an Iron Warrior would take it. Then I’ll show you how you would stop me. I don’t know how long I am for this Imperium, but I promise you this: whatever iron is left within this aged plate, is yours…’

                        The iron within. The iron without. Iron everywhere. Empires rise and they fall. I have fought the ancient species of the galaxy and my Legiones Astartes brothers will fight on, meeting new threats in dangers as yet unrealised. We are an Imperium of iron and iron is forever. When our flesh is long forgotten, whether victim to the enemy within or the enemy without, iron will live on. Our hives will tumble and our mighty fleets decay. Long after our polished bones have faded to dust on a gentle breeze, our weapons and armour will remain. Remnants of a warlike race: the iron of loyalist and traitor both. In them our story will be told – a cautionary tale to those that follow. Iron cares not for faith or heresy. Iron is forever.

                        And as our battle-plate, our blades and bolters rot in the sand of some distant world, they will pit and tarnish. Their dull sheen will corrode and crumble. Grey will turn to brown and brown to red. In the quietly rusting scrap of our fallen empire, iron will return to its primordial state, perhaps to be used again by some other foolish race. And though the weakness of my flesh fails me, as the weakness of my brothers’ flesh will ultimately fail them, our iron shall live on. For iron is eternal.

                        From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron. This is the Unbreakable Litany. And may it forever be so.