The Ultramarines obey.

XXIV.

Hol Beloth watches in horror as the horizon lights up from end to end. He knows what he is seeing, a holocaust of orbital fire concentrated in one place. He has memorised the geography of Calth and knows exactly who the wrath of the Ultramarines guns is striking.

'Fell,' he says.

Maloq Kartho nods.

Hot winds whip around the headless tower, billowing Hol Beloth's cloak and filling his mouth with grey grit. The swaying motion of the tower forces him to keep his stance wide as the ground tilts alarmingly below him. He feels as though he stands upon the deck of a primitive longship. The sensation is not a welcome one.

The devastation of Calth is even more apparent from up here. It is a radiation-lashed death world that will always bear the mark of the Word Bearers. Despite what he is seeing, he takes a moment of pride in that fact, even as his own skin blisters.

More impacts slam into the ground, more fire lights the horizon. The first seismic shocks shake the tower. Glass fragments rain from gaping frames. Structural supports buckle and tumble earthwards. The tower slumps into its splitting foundations.

Collimated lance battery fire strikes the horizon. The hellish radiance it provides illuminates one stark fact.

'You knew this was coming,' says Hol Beloth.

Kartho shrugs and Hol Beloth hates the gesture. It is a gesture of giving up, of not feeling enough to care that something precious is dying. That shrug tells him that Maloq Kartho is no longer truly one of Lorgar's sons, but is becoming something else entirely.

'Fell had the biggest army,' says Kartho, 'and the grandest ambition.'

Hol Beloth tries not to feel slighted, knowing it is absurd in the face of such destruction. He tries to follow Kartho's words to a logical conclusion, but those he reaches make no sense. Only one factor remains constant in his thoughts.

'You engineered this, didn't you?' he says.

'Of course,' replies Kartho.

'Fell and his warriors are gone, aren't they?'

'Not yet,' replies Kartho, struggling with the gorget seals at his neck. 'But soon.'

'Why?' asks Hol Beloth, knowing now that he will have to kill the Dark Apostle. Kartho has crossed a line, though for what purpose, he does not know.

'Service to the Dark Monarchs requires a degree of sacrifice,' says Kartho. 'And the Ultramarines needed a target tempting enough to draw them from their cowardly bolthole.'

Kartho reaches up and removes his helmet. More accurately, he snaps his helmet apart in order to remove it. Zephyrs of dark smoke gust from within and Hol Beloth sees just how far the Dark Apostle has come in his service to Lorgar's vision for the galaxy.

XXV.

An electromagnetic haze hangs over the landscape. Dust swirls like ashen rain and heat blooms ripple the air over terrain that has been boiled to glass by the heat of multiple lance strikes. The Shadowsword crunches through the shattered remains of Foedral Fell's strongpoint. The orbital weapons have destroyed his sheltering walls with horrifying ease.

Ventanus climbs down from the Shadowsword. Its hull is hot to the touch and the reactor ticks over noisily as it cools. Shapes move in the mist, but they are armoured in cobalt-blue and gold. They are Ultramarines, and they are marching alongside him.

His armour's external pickups register a wide spectrum of exotic radiations and a lethal cocktail of poisonous elements in the air. This is only to be expected when such potent energies have been unleashed. Staggered lines of Legion warriors advance into the molten remnants of the enemy fortress, boltguns locked to their shoulders. They are blurred giants moving through a chemical fog that would dissolve the lungs of a mortal man with one breath.

Ventanus has his bolt pistol drawn and his sword unsheathed. He does not expect to use either in the immediate future, but a captain must be seen to be ready to fight. He sees no sign of the Word Bearers, but he knows that they will be here somewhere. They are Legion trained and Legion blooded. They will have survived this bombardment and will even now be readying a counter-attack.

Ventanus leads the Ultramarines deeper into the smoking, debris strewn wasteland. The Shadowsword rolls behind him, its engine a bone-deep rumble that he feels in his marrow. As the circle of Ultramarines tightens on the stronghold's centre, a nagging suspicion takes shape in Ventanus's head. Nebulous and unformed, but insistent.

Scattered groups of brotherhood soldiers have miraculously survived the barrage. They are blind and deaf, burned and desolate. They are slaughtered without mercy. The Ultramarines do not waste mass-reactives on them. Who knows when they will be resupplied? Chain-blades and fists put the enemy down, but there is little satisfaction in such wretched targets.

'This is Ventanus,' he voxes to his force commanders. 'Report any sightings of enemy Legion forces.'

There are no reports of contacts beyond the scalded, crippled forms of the enemy's mortal soldiery, and Ventanus feels a gnawing worry that something here is very wrong.

'Where are the Word Bearers?' he asks himself.

If Foedral Fell is not here, then where is he?

At the heart of the fortress the Ultramarines find a vast crater, a nightmarish hell of electrical fires and scorched meat. Almost nothing is left standing, and what the barrage did not level in the opening moments, secondary explosions and burning ammunition depots have knocked flat. Here and there, Ventanus sees evidence of retrenchments and redoubts, but it is hard to make out anything for sure any more. Tawren's precision strikes have seen to that.

The Shadowsword's main gun traverses over his head, searching for a target, but finding nothing worthy of its fire. The Burning Cloud is silhouetted in the flames, a great engine of destruction standing over the doom of its foe.

A dust- and grime-coated warrior emerges from the haze and raises a hand.

'I thought there'd be at least someone left alive to fight,' says Sydance.

'So did I,' replies Ventanus, sheathing his sword and mag-locking his pistol to his thigh.

'You think they died in the bombardment?'

'It looks that way,' says Ventanus, though it seems too convenient an explanation.

'Not much of a fortress then,' says Sydance. 'Lord Dorn would have words.'

Ventanus says nothing in reply, his friend's words striking at the nagging suspicion that has been building ever since the first shots were fired. He stops in his tracks as his thoughts cohere on an inherent flaw in what has happened here.

'This fortress could never have stood,' he says. 'It's completely ridiculous.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Why build anything we could level from orbit in moments?' says Ventanus. 'Why build it above ground at all? It doesn't make any sense.'

'Maybe they couldn't find anywhere underground?'

'They could have found somewhere to get underground,' says Ventanus. 'This isn't making any sense. Damn it, what are we missing?'

The winds are clearing the smoke and haze, and Ventanus has something of an answer when he sees the cracked structure at the very heart of the fortress. Like the hardened structure of an aircraft hangar, it has withstood the barrage enough to remain standing. Sections of its roof have caved in where the supporting walls have collapsed. Ventanus can see no defensive works in its construction.

It is a giant dome, embellished with elaborate carvings, a pair of decorative towers and a wide entrance without gates. Its construction is grandiose and Ventanus realises he has seen its like before.

'What do you think that is?' asks Sydance. 'A keep? Somewhere to make a last stand?'

'No,' says Ventanus. 'It's not a keep, but I know what it is now. I've seen buildings like this before.'

'Where?'

'On Monarchia,' says Ventanus. 'It's a temple.'

XXVI.

Ingenium Subiaco does not remember falling asleep, but that is surely what has happened.

It is understandable. Toiling in perpetual twilight, with no rest in the darkness and no respite from the task in hand, no one could remain awake for as long as he has. He is dreaming, of that he is sure, for he travels the same silvered caves of his nightmares.

He has come here night after night, dragged down into horrors that play out in an endless loop. That the experience never changes offers no respite, only dark foreknowledge of the nightmarish flight from the multi-jointed creatures with the polished steel claws that tap, tap, tap upon the rock.

The cave is the same strange silver, glistening with moisture and with the now omnipresent threat lurking just out of sight. He knows the apparently solid walls of the cave are nothing of the sort. He knows what lurks behind the fragile skin of reality and, as much as he wishes to, he cannot unknow it.

Half-glimpsed forms flit around him like darting smoke.

He moves through the caves hurriedly, expecting that at any moment the walls will start peeling back to reveal the corruption beneath. He hears voices, but they are meaningless to him and he cannot answer them. At every step he feels as though he is being guided, but by who or what, he cannot say.

The sense of expectation is almost unendurable, like a guillotine blade suspended a hair's breadth over the back of his neck. Subiaco wills himself to wake, but he has long since learned that he is powerless to control the inevitable progression of this terror.

Sure enough, he hears the faint sound of tapping, like rats in the walls.

Tap, tap, tap...

Subiaco breaks into a run as he hears the clack of claws again and again.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap...

Louder now, coming from all around him. This is new, this is his nightmare moving to a higher level of terror. Then, as though a flame has been taken to the papier-mache backing of the walls, they begin to disintegrate, blackening and spiralling away like dying embers. The walls slough from the familiar rusted lattice supporting them and the terrible void behind is revealed once again.

It churns like the depths of a hideously polluted ocean, saturated with the filth and mire of an entire species. What is in there is not alien. It is not the horrific by-product of some race inimical to mankind. With unasked-for clarity he understands that this ocean of madness belongs to his people. Humanity creates this realm of insanity, and Subiaco runs as he hears the claws of his daemonic pursuers tearing their way through once more.

This time they are not just behind him. They are all around him.

The wall ahead of him bulges as something presses its unnatural bulk against the lath, and Subiaco sees gleaming fangs and amber eyes, each slitted with a dagger slash of onyx. The tear splits wider and a brood of beasts with claws of polished steel spill into the hollow cavern. Their blades gleam with murder and their flesh is fashioned from the skinless bodies of everyone he knows and loves. Screaming faces howl in torment from heaving, animal flanks, and their limbs are the beasts' limbs, fused together in some awful biological abortion. The skulls of the beasts are metallic, gleaming wetly through pasted-on skin. Even stretched out he recognises the faces there, and his scream is one of abject loss.

Subiaco runs, and the beasts are hard on his heels, stalking him, toying with him.

They could catch and kill him any time they want, but there is too much pleasure to be taken in the hunt. He feels their hot breath upon him, rancid and empty.

Subiaco knows there is only one way out and he races onwards, hoping with every breathless stride that he will reach the great cyclopean gateway with its golden seal.

Only the gateway offers sanctuary.

Subiaco wakes, the cries of the daemons ringing in his ears.

And nothing has changed.

XXVII.

The interior of the temple is a slaughterhouse, and Ventanus can make no sense of it.

It is cold inside, freezing even. The heat from the dying star and the bombardment does not penetrate here, and steam rises from every legionary's backpack. Columns of light stab down from the cracked roof and the poisonous fumes of burning war materiel linger at the openings in the wall, as though unwilling to enter.

Ventanus smelled the blood before he took one step within, and now he has an answer as to what has become of the Word Bearers.

They are in the temple and they are all dead.

Their bodies are arranged in what is clearly a pattern, each one apparently still standing.

This is an illusion created by the fact that each enemy legionary is held upright by a sharpened spar of blackened iron. Several thousand Word Bearers have been impaled here, their bodies arranged in a form that clearly has some significance. What that might be is a mystery to Ventanus.

Eikos Lamiad and Kiuz Selaton lead their warriors through the columns of dead Word Bearers. Selaton carries the Fourth Company standard, that glorious, dented reminder of all they have lost and all they fight to keep.

The Contemptor, Telemechrus, keeps pace with Lamiad, as though he is the tetrarch's personal bodyguard. The spinning barrels of his assault cannon whine as the weapon sweeps left and right in search of a living target.

Sydance stays at Ventanus's side. His expression is unreadable behind his helm's visor, but his body language is unambiguous.

'Who did this?' he asks. He doesn't understand yet, but Ventanus does.

'They did it to themselves.'

Sydance's head snaps around. Ventanus does't know whether the other captain is more horrified at the idea of warriors doing this to themselves or that Ventanus has understanding enough to know it. He shakes his head and moves on. Nearly a thousand Ultramarines stand within the temple, shocked beyond words at this latest atrocity. None of them can make sense of what they are seeing. It is too alien to their understanding and fits no model of war they have been taught.

Ventanus approaches the nearest Word Bearer and lifts his head. The dead man wears no helmet and his face has been cut open with hard slashes from a sharp blade. His features are contorted with a mixture of horror and devotion. The symbols are oddly geometric and unpleasant to look at in ways beyond the obvious.

The pattern of impaled bodies becomes clearer the closer Ventanus gets to the centre of the temple. The groups of Ultramarines are naturally funnelled together as they approach the middle of the vaulted chamber. Ventanus feels the temperature drop still further.

'They are arranged in equidistant columns,' says Lamiad, his half flesh, half cracked ceramic face managing to convey the disgust they all feel. 'They radiate outwards from a central point.'

'Suggesting that what's at the centre is important,' says Ventanus.

'A fane's nave is designed to lead to a central altar,' agrees Lamiad. 'The place of worship.'

'Worship?' Sydance spits the word. 'I thought we'd cured them of that half a century ago.'

'Clearly the lesson did not take,' says Lamiad, gesturing with his one good arm to the sacrificial massacre around them. The limb he lost early in the conflict could be restored, his face repaired. The technology and the craftsmen required are available, but Lamiad has chosen to remain as he is. His mythology has become important to Calth and it is a sacrifice he bears willingly.

Ventanus has the utmost admiration for Eikos Lamiad, and hopes he will be as strong as the tetrarch when the time comes for him to make such a sacrifice.

'So what's at the centre?' asks Selaton, holding the standard at his side. 'I don't see an altar.'

Selaton is right. There is no altar, merely a sunken pit, from which issue tendrils of drifting mist. Ventanus leads the way, his fingers closing over the hilt of his sword. Everyone here is already dead, but the reassurance of a weapon in his hand is always welcome.

As Ventanus approaches the pit, he sees that it goes down for three metres, and at its centre is another impaled body. A Word Bearer, one clad in crimson armour bedecked with fluttering oath paper and stamped with golden scriptwork.

This is no line warrior. Every plate and edge has been crafted by hand, shaped by a master artificer and polished with the devotion that only a high-ranking war leader could earn.

The parchment-white face is that of a cannibal ghoul, a lipless horror of gaunt cheekbones, sunken eyes and a hairless scalp. More of the geometric symbols have been cut into the bone of his exposed skull where the skin has been peeled away. A ragged hole has been smashed through into the empty void of his brainpan.

'Foedral Fell, I presume,' says Ventanus.