Dan Abnett - Necropolis

We gave it our best, Daur said.

For Vervunhive, Otte agreed, weeping quietly with fatigue.

Intendant Banefail joined them. High Legislator Anophy has just been carried out. A heart attack.

Then he's been spared, Daur said callously.

Otte looked at him reprovingly, but Banefail seemed to agree. This is the end, my brave friends. The Emperor love you for your efforts, but this is the end of all things. Vervunhive is lost. Make your peace.

Daur looked round at Immaculus. The minister stood nearby with his robed clergy.

Begin the mass, sir, Daur told him. The requiem. I want the last sound I hear to be a psalm of loss voiced by the Emperor's own.

Immaculus nodded. He led his brethren into the celebratory and the soft dirge, a haunting melody, began to lift above the baptistry and the high stations of Vervunhive.

In the abandoned hall of her house, high in the Spine, Merity Chass heard the low plainsong welling through the walls. She had put on a long, formal gown and her father's ducal chain and signet ring, which Daur had brought to her.

She had spent an hour putting the House Chass ledgers in order and encrypting all the family documents onto storage crystals. At the sound of the mass, she frowned.

Not yet not yet she murmured. He won't fail us

EIGHTEEN

THE LAIR OF ASPHODEL

A friend of death, a brother of luck and a son of a bitch.

Major Rawne, of his commander

Its sounds amplified by the thick, metal walls around, carnage exploded into the Spike's command level. Savage fighting boiled through the dark, mesh-floored chambers. The strikeforce were engaging crew now as well as troops. The crew members wore loose flak-tunics and work-fatigues, and their heads were generally exposed. Gaunt's troopers could see for themselves the horror that had disturbed Larkin so at Veyveyr Gate. It wasn't the implants fused and sutured into their eyes, ears and scalps, linking their senses and brain patterns to the insidious chatter. It was the fact that they were men and women of all ages: hab workers, parents, guilders, older children, the elderly. The entirety of Zoica's population had mobilised for war, just as Gaunt had assessed. The bald proof was overwhelmingly tragic. With blank expressions, somehow even more lifeless than Sondar's servitor puppets, the people of Ferrozoica threw themselves at the attackers.

Gaunt hacked through a pair of Zoican troopers with his powersword, fighting to cut a route down onto the main bridge area. Through the seething press, the smoke and the flashes of las-fire, he could make out a wide, open platform of polished chrome, surrounded by black towers of control instrumentation. In the centre of the platform, the glowing, pinkish ball of a coherent light field, ten metres in diameter, coalesced up from an emitter ring in the floor. He fought his way to it, channelling his deepest reserves of aggression and determination.

Suddenly, he was on the platform itself, virtually alone, lit by the pink radiance. His last frenzied efforts to break through had been almost too successful. He'd effectively separated himself from the rest of his party, still locked into the mayhem in the adjacent bridge areas.

Gaunt was breathing hard and shaking. He'd lost his cap somewhere, his jacket was torn and he was splattered with blood. An almost painful adrenaline high fizzled through him like electricity glowing through fuse-wire. He had never been pushed to such an extremity of raw fury before in his life. His mind was locked out in a paroxysm of battle-rage. Everything had become distant and incomprehensible. For a moment, he couldn't remember what he was supposed to be doing.

Something flickered behind him and he wheeled, his blade flashing as it made contact. A tall, black figure lurched backwards. It was thin but powerful and much taller than him, dressed in form-fitting, glossy-black armour and a hooded cape of chainmail. The visage under the hood-lip was feral and non-human, like the snarling skull of a great wolf-hound with the skin scraped off. It clutched a sabre-bladed powersword in its metal-gloved hands.

Gaunt had seen its like before, on Balhaut. He'd glimpsed its kind distantly on the fields of war, during the final stage of the battle, and then seen several corpses closer to after the victory. It was one of the Dark-watch, the elite retinue of Chaos champions who had been gifted to the warlord, Asphodel, as his personal bodyguard. The thing flickered again, employing its monstrous, innate control of the warp to shift its location around him. Gaunt yelled and blocked the incoming blade of the repositioned horror. The cold blue energies of Heironymo's powersword clashed against the sparking, blood-red fires of the Darkwatcher's weapon.

It flicker-shifted again, just a few paces to the left, and sliced its sword around at him. Gaunt evaded, stumbling in his haste, rolling and then springing up in time to block the downward swing of the Chaos-tainted blade.

But this was not the same weapon. This was longer, straighter, incandescent with smoking green fire. A second Darkwatcher, shifting in to assist the first.

Without looking, Gaunt threw himself sideways, knowing the original fury was now behind him. Red energy sliced a gouge in the gleaming chrome deck.

He backed as they came at him together, both flickering in and out of reality. One was suddenly to his left, but Gaunt threw all his force behind a blocking strike that bounced the blade away. The other sliced in at him and caught Gaunt's right shoulder.

There was no pain. A cold, nauseating numbness ached into his wounded limb.

Gaunt hurled himself forward in a tuck roll, avoiding two more slashes. He knew he had never been this outmatched before, not even face to face with howling World Eater Chaos Marines in the underworld of Fortis Binary or surrounded by the Iron Men in the crypts of Menazoid Epsilon. He should be dead already.

But something kept him alive. Partly his elevated battle-edge, partly his determination, but also, he was sure, Heironymo's sword. It seemed to smell the shifting creatures and forewarn him by a tingle of their impossible movements.

Their shifting was localised, as if they were moving in and out of corporeal reality. Every time they became solid to strike, the sword twitched in his grip, moving him to block.

He ducked a scything arc of green energy and stabbed upwards, shearing one Darkwatcher's head off in a flurry of blue sparks. Lambent, frosty smoke jetted out of its tall form as it collapsed in upon itself, flickering and fading. A inhuman scream rang around the bridge.

The other lunged at him, flickering into being right in his face, and though the powersword pulled at him, he wasn't quick enough to avoid the deep gouge the red blade sliced in his left thigh.

Gaunt fell.

A spray of autocannon split the air above him. Bragg had made it to the edge of the platform and was blasting at the Darkwatcher on full auto. The thing shuddered under the impacts, flickering in and out of real-space, its chain cloak whipping as it turned to face the new attack. Kolea and Mkoll were there too, heaving up onto the edge of the chrome level, opening fire at the beast. A second later, Neskon, Haller, Flinn, Banda and a Volpone called Tonsk had also reached the edge of the platform. Sustained fire from all of them drove the raging Chaos-thing backwards and targeted the other two that had manifested in the last few moments. Bragg's unrelenting fire-cone gradually disintegrated the red-bladed Darkwatcher, which advanced on him, despite the colossal wash of bullets, before finally exploding a few flicker-steps from him.

One of the others, wielding a pike-axe which smoked with orange lightning, chopped Tonsk in two and severed Neskon's left leg at the knee with one stroke. Haller snatched up the Blueblood's fallen hellgun, pumped the under-barrel launcher and blew the thing's head off with a rocket-grenade.