The map of the empire was an arrangement of pre-cious stones, torn from the necklaces and earrings of Stratix's wealthy and handed as tributes to the court of Teturact. They were set out on the floor of south-western dock three, which had been appointed as the seat of Teturact's rule. South-western dock three was several layers down into one of Stratix's hive-stacks and was draped in tapestries of gauze torn from infected wounds, their patterns of gore and pus a gift from the legions of grateful plague-ridden. The corners of the cavernous s.p.a.ce, beneath the docking clamps and control towers, were crammed with huddled figures that had made pilgrimages into the very presence of their lord and yet were so awed by him they could not approach. The floor was heaped with the bodies of those who had died of that awe, and pure liquid pestilence wept from the walls and dripped in a fine drizzle from the ceiling.

Teturact leaned forward on his palanquin. The four brute-mutants, so muscular even the features of their faces were obscured by folds of brawn, tilted the platform forward so Teturact could get a better look at the map. Stratix, in the centre like the star in the middle of a system, was a single blood-red ruby the size of a fist. The forge worlds were sapphires, blue as dead lips. The worlds of the front line, where Imperial Guard regiments were pouring into killing grounds swarming with Teturact's followers, were fiery yellow-orange opals. Loyal worlds were diamonds, hard and clear in their devotion to their saviour. There were hundreds of gemstones, each one a major world under Teturact's control, each crammed with souls who owed their lives to him.

Teturact had been dead for several years. His heart was just a knot of dried flesh somewhere in his dusty ribcage. Only his mind was truly alive, pulsing away beneath the tight skin of his skull and behind the rictus face with its horrible dried-out eyeb.a.l.l.s. His body, thin and wizened with jaun-diced yellow skin, was animated by will alone - his muscles had long since wasted away. Teturact was, in a very real sense, a being of pure willpower. He dominated those around him directly. Take the simple bovine minds of the brute-mutant bearers -he barely had to think to control them. Others he controlled by manipulating their circ.u.mstances until they had no choice but to obey his every wish.

The diseases - and there were many, to keep any one cure from harming his cause - were just a part of it.

They were the catalyst. It was the force ofTetu-ract's will that was his real weapon. And that force of will had won him a mighty empire such as the Black Crusades themselves had rarely won.

Many of the worlds on the chart were emeralds, green with potential. They were worlds that had only just begun the traumatic process of bending to Teturact's will. On some, the plague was only just making itself known, spread by Teturact's agents devoted to bringing enlightening disease to gover-nors and hive-sc.u.m alike. Others were nearly ripe, and Teturact would soon leave the seat of his power on Stratix to bestow life upon the infected through the sorcery he could wield over disease.

One emerald caught his eye. It was near the front line, and would provide a great strategic advantage in anchoring a stretch of s.p.a.ce that could easily be turned into a ma.s.sive warzone if he wished it.

Colonel, he spoke to the shadows, his voice a rich psychic boom since he could not speak with his own rotted vocal chords.

A human form shambled towards Teturact, and bowed before the palanquin. It was draped in b.l.o.o.d.y bandages but beneath them tattered crim-sons showed, with the glints of silver bullion trim and a chest full of campaign medals. Colonel Karendin had been little more than a butcher even before the plague had taken him - Teturact had left his mind mostly intact and he served to oversee the military situation in theempire.

What of this world? Teturact pointed a spidery fin-ger at the strategic emerald.

'Eumenix?' replied Karendin, voice hissing thick with spittle. 'It is nearly ready to fall. The governor is dead, they say. The Arbites have fallen. No ship has left for many weeks. A billion have drowned in blood and bile already'

Then I will go there next, said Teturact. .' want this world, and with as little delay as possible.

'If you leave now, saviour, the planet will be ripe when you arrive. I could have your flagship pre-pared at once.'

Do so. Teturact settled back into the upholstery of the palanquin. Our empire grows, colonel. Like the dis-ease, our worlds multiply. Do you see how we infect?

'Oh yes, saviour!' hissed Karendin. A faint gaggle of agreement came from the pilgrims huddled in the shadows. 'Like the plague itself, a plague on the stars!'

See to it that the court can be embarked within the day, said Teturact, losing interest in the colonel's blandishments.

Eumenix. A fine world to take, a hive world teem-ing with infected who would rise up and worship him when he promised them release. Such a fine world, indeed, that would greet him as a saviour, and die for him as a G.o.d.

Sister Berenice Aescarion was sixty-three years old. She had spent fifty-three of those years consecrated as a daughter of the Emperor, her body conditioned and her mind purified with diligence and atone-ment so she could serve as a soldier of the Emperor's church. She had been taken from the Schola Progenium where orphans of Imperial ser-vants were raised, then brought into the presence of the preachers and confessors of the Adeptus Minis-torum. They had filled her mind with the revelations of the Emperor, but she had not been afraid. She had heard of the horrors of apostasy and unbelief that opened the doors to sin and corrup-tion, but she had not despaired.

The h.e.l.lfire confessors had not reduced the girl to tears. The words of the preachers had left her inspired, not cowed. She had the willpower to join the ranks of the Sisters, and during her novicehood amongst the Orders Famulous it had become apparent that she also had the physical endurance and zeal to join the Orders Militant.

Her faith had never left her. Never, though she had fought across the galaxy, following the banner of the Order of the Ebon Chalice from the abbey on Terra itself to the edge of Imperial s.p.a.ce. In her later years she had tracked down and killed the Daemon Prince Parmenides the Vile, and in doing so had acted in a precarious alliance between the Sisters of Battle and the Inquisition. She had acquired a rep-utation as one of the few Sisters who could navigate the tangled question of church and Inquisitorial authority without losing sight of the ultimate enemy - Chaos, the darkness the Emperor still fought with the strength of his spirit. So when Inquisitor Thaddeus had requested a taskforce of Sisters to be a.s.sembled from a number of Orders Militant, it was Sister Aescarion he had asked to lead it.

Canoness Tasmander had asked Sister Aescarion to take on leadership of the Ebon Chalice, but she had turned down the office of canoness. Aescarion had fought her whole life, and she was too old to do anything other than keep fighting. It was the only way she knew her faith could become something more than mere words - that same faith that had made her a Sister in the first place, that had driven her to vanquish Parmenides and countless other enemies of humanity. It was the same faith that was being sorely tested in the depths of Eumenix.

Eumenix. If ever the Emperor's light had been taken from a world, it was this. She had never seen a world so utterly desolate of hope, and she had seen some terrible things. Eumenix was a grim ill.u.s.tra-tion of what could happen in the absence of faith.

Aescarion watched as Interrogator Shen, his mas-sive bronze carapace armour tarnished by the week-long trek through the filth and horror of Hive Quintus, moved warily down the steep shaft that led deeper into the lower layers of the hive. The air was infernally hot for the geothermal heatsinks were nearby, and everything stank. On the surface Sister Aescarion and her squad had seen moulder-ing mountains of corpses and their diseased reek seemed to permeate the whole planet - sweet and sickening, pure rot and corruption.

Down here, the heat made it worse. For several days Shen and the Sisters had been moving into the depths of the hive and now they were dozens of lev-els down, near the last possible Imperial inst.i.tution in Hive Quintus. The Arbites and the governor's palace had fallen, the cathedral was a burned-out sh.e.l.l and the offices of the Administratum had been the first to fall when the madness began. The Adep-tus Mechanicus geological outpost in the lower reaches of the hive was the last possible nugget of resistance, and last place where the reports of escap-ing Soul Drinkers might be confirmed.That had been weeks ago. Thaddeus had pa.s.sed on the news as quickly as he could, but had entrusted the actual investigation to Interrogator Shen while he himself sifted through the Brokenback and the wreckage of House Jena.s.sis. Both Shen and Aescarion held out little hope for finding anything alive in Hive Quintus - at least, not alive in the nor-mal sense.

The architecture this far down was cramped and twisted: the compressed, distorted relics of the set-tlements on which Hive Quintus had been built. Discoloured moisture ran down the walls, filtered down through a hundred floors of decay. Ruptured power conduits covered everything in a dank mist. Plague-rats the size of attack dogs writhed through the twisted metal. The groaning of the settling city was punctured by the screams of yet another life being snuffed out, one amongst billions on the nightmare of Eumenix.

The corridor angled downwards and bent sharply up ahead. Shen drew his inferno pistol from its hol-ster and moved up to the corner, the boots of his carapace armour crunching through the crystallised filth that encrusted the floor. Sister Aescarion fol-lowed, bolt pistol drawn, as did the Seraphim she had chosen to accompany her on the mission. One of them, Sister Mixu, had been at her side for over a decade. The others had been supplied by their own Orders, and all fought with twin bolt pistols in the tradition of the Seraphim squads.

Shen led the way round the corner. The corridor flared out into a ragged cavity, like a hole torn by a bomb blast clean through layers of the warren-like lower levels. Murky water pooled on the uneven floor and pale vapour gouted from ruptured pipelines overhead.

'Geothermal must have gone up.' said Shen as he scanned for targets. His inferno pistol was an exceedingly rare weapon that packed the power of a melta gun into a relatively small pistol, and at short ranges it could carve through anything. 'Without maintenance half the hive is probably ready to explode.'

Sister Mixu pointed up at a symbol, half a stylised metallic skull and half a square-toothed cog, grin-ning lopsidedly down from the ma.s.s of twisted metal. 'The symbol of the Mechanicus. Looks like we're close, sister.'

'Movement!' shouted one of the Seraphim. Sister Aescarion turned to see one of the Sisters opening fire into the shadows. Shen followed her aim, firing a bolt of superheated matter that briefly lit the twisted, sub-humanoid shapes that were ma.s.sing in the gloom.

The enemy weren't bandits, because they didn't steal anything. It was as if they pounced on any-thing living just for the novelty of killing something alive. They were the shambling remnants of the underhivers who had been reduced to walking corpses by the plague, and they had dogged the heels of Shen and the Seraphim for whole h.e.l.lish journey to the underside of Hive Quintus.

In the brief burst of light, Aescarion counted fifty plus of them. The inferno pistol claimed three, scorched to cinders, and bolt pistol fire st.i.tched a b.l.o.o.d.y path through several others.

'Fall back!' called Aescarion and drew her Sisters around her, adding her bolt pistol fire to theirs. The hive-sc.u.m surrounded them, clambering from the ragged walls, moaning their death-rattles. She could see their peeling skin and the runny whites of their eyes, their lolling jaws and the gnarled, blackened fingers that held crude clubs and blades.

If there was proof that Eumenix was cursed by Chaos, it was this. A disease that not only killed, but turned the bodies of its victims into mindless predators to stalk the survivors.

The Seraphim backed off slowly, pumping bolts into the shambling wave of the dead that was pour-ing in ever-greater numbers into the cavity. Shen's inferno pistol was recharged and sent out another hissing lance of fire that tore through a dozen sc.u.m at once.

'We're surrounded.' said Shen with a calm that struck Aescarion as most admirable. He indicated the Mechanicus symbol. We'll have to cut our way out. Head that way and we may hit the outpost, it'll be easier to defend.'

Aescarion nodded in agreement and drew the power axe from its holster on her back. She had fought with that same axe for decades, always refus-ing more refined weapons because the brutality of the axe was a befitting tool to bring down the Emperor's unflinching justice.

The weapon's blade hummed to life and a shim-mering blue power field played around it.

'With me!' yelled Shen and fired his inferno pistol into the knot of plague-sc.u.m beneath the Mechan-icus symbol. He charged into the remainder, barging their rotting bodies aside. The Seraphim behind Shen blew bodies apart with their twin bolt pistols. Sister Aescarion ran past Shen into the underhivers, hacking at the wall of flesh in front of her. Gnarled hands reached towards her and she hacked them off with her axe, punching her gauntleted fist into the mutilated faces behind. She stamped down and felt bodies crunching beneath her feet. Bolt pistol fire raged past her into the plague-dead, thinning them out around her as she and Shen barged their way through their attackers and out of the explosion site.

They plunged deeper into the darkness, snapping off shots at anything that moved. At Shen's lead they keptmoving, knowing that if they stopped, their slower but ma.s.sively more numerous attackers would be able to surround them and cut them off in the narrow, twisting tunnels below.

Age-darkened bra.s.s and heavy gothic mechanical architecture began to surface amongst the grime of the underhive. Ma.s.sive industrial cogs lay here and there and the symbols of the Machine-G.o.d were tooled into every girder. The Adeptus Ministorum were privately wary of the Adeptus Mechanicus -the tech-priests worshipped the Omnissiah, the Machine-G.o.d, which they claimed to be an aspect of Emperor, but the Ministorum had their secret doubts.

That said, Sister Aescarion was grateful that at least they knew how to build.

The Mechanicus outpost was a solid cube of bra.s.s, its surface knotted with pipes, strong enough to sur-vive the crushing weight of the hive above it. The entrances were ma.s.sive blast doors sealed tight and Shen stepped back warily when he saw the sentry guns and the bullet-riddled bodies of plague-dead that had been unfortunate enough to shamble into range.

The squad scouted around the outpost, finding scores of dead - most of them infected but some in the rust-red coveralls of Mechanicus menials, along with one or two servitors hurriedly refitted for com-bat.

Corpses lay draped over makeshift barricades, set up to funnel the shambling hordes into kill-zones now choked with their bodies. The outpost must have held out for weeks as Hive Quintus slowly turned into h.e.l.l.

One door was not sealed. The underside of the outpost was blackened with scorch marks from a ma.s.sive explosion that had ripped the lower hatch open, lagged metal ringed the opening overhead like torn skin around an open wound.

Shen waded through the knee-deep murky water that filled the tunnels beneath the outpost. The opening overhead was dark and the walls were rid-dled with bullet holes.

'Bolter fire,' said Aescarion. She had seen the results of bolter weapons more often than she could remember. 'Disciplined. Tightly grouped.'

The final reports off Hive Quintus had been of the last shuttle out being stolen by purple-armoured monsters, leaving the wealthy Cartel Polios on the hive to die. Shen and Aescarion had been sent to find out if there was any truth to them, but the out-post was the only place on the planet where Imperial personnel might survive to verify them. Now it seemed that not only had the outpost fallen, but that the Soul Drinkers might have been the ones who attacked it.

Shen reached up and grabbed the edge of the wrecked blast door above him. He hauled himself up through the opening and switched on the light mounted on the collar of his armour.

'Nothing.' he said. There must have been a h.e.l.l of a firefight here. Small arms and grenades. There are bodies everywhere.'

'Follow me.' said Aescarion to her Seraphim, then followed Shen into the body of the outpost. She was reminded of her age as she clambered up beside him - it would have been much easier with the jump packs Seraphim usually fought with, but they had left the packs behind since a hive city was hardly the most appropriate terrain for their use.

Shen was right. The straight, metal-walled corridors of the outpost had seen ferocious fighting. Blade marks on the floor and walls told of hand-to-hand butchery, the bullet-riddled walls of ma.s.sive weight of fire. The corpses of menials lay where they had fallen defending the breached entrance.

The rest of the Seraphim climbed up into the cor-ridor. 'No life signs.' said Sister Mixu, who carried the squad's auspex scanner. 'But there's a lot of interference. This place is pretty solidly built.'

The underhivers didn't do this.' said Shen.' And if the Soul Drinkers didn't then it was somebody capa-ble of bringing down a similar level of firepower. We need to find out what they wanted with this place.'

Agreed.' said Aescarion. 'Could the Mechanicus have been working on something here? A weapon?'

'We'll find out. This outpost will be built along standard template construct lines. There'll be a con-trol post at the centre and a testing bay not far above us. We'll try those first, then scour the rest.'

The outpost was a combination of ma.s.sive indus-trial workings and the sort of oppressive gothic architecture that Aescarion was familiar with from the convent prioris on Terra. Fluted columns sepa-rated banks of cogs like giant clockwork, frozen by the outpost's shutdown. Turbines lay beneath vaulted ceilings.

Shrines to the Machine-G.o.d were everywhere, stained with libations of machine oil, scrawled with prayers in binary. Everything the Mechanicus did needed the correct rites enacted to the Machine-G.o.d - and judging by the abundance of offerings and prayer-tablets in the empty armoury, it seemed that included fighting.

The testing bay held hundreds of geological samples in various stages of examination under powerful bra.s.s-cased microscopes, or lying in chemical baths now dried out. There was nothing there that suggested anything valuable enough for the outpost to be attacked. The control room that overlooked the bay wasempty too, its cogi-tators ritually sealed with runes of inaction to appease the machine-spirits as they were shut down.

'We should take what information they still hold.' said Shen. 'At least we'll have some idea of what work they did here and who was involved. They might even have pict-recordings from the sentry guns, so we could see who attacked them.'

'I am no tech-priest.' said Aescarion. 'Do you know how to operate all this?' She indicated the banks of cogitators that covered the walls of the control room, with blank readout screens.

'We'll just take the memory units.' said Shen. Thaddeus has men who can open them up.'

'Movement.' said Mixu, glancing at the auspex screen. 'Somewhere above us.'

'Probably more underhivers.' said Shen, drawing his pistol.

A hand plunged down through the ceiling of the control room, grabbing Shen by the collar of his armour and dragging him up sharply, slamming him into the metal ceiling. The hand was encased in a gauntlet of purple ceramite.

'Fire!' yelled Aescarion and bolter fire ripped up into the ceiling beside Shen, who was trying to bring his inferno pistol to bear. Before he could get a shot up he was dragged through the ceiling com-pletely the metal tearing as his armoured body disappeared from view.

Sister Aescarion was the first after him. The hole in the ceiling led to what must have been the out-post's main shrine, where ranges of pews carved out of solid carbon faced an altar formed from the cas-ings of a giant cogitator. Pipes and valves knotted the walls so the chapel was contained entirely within the body of the cogitator, and when opera-tional its readouts would have bathed the shrine in a glow of information.

Now it was dark, so the scene in front of her was lit only in the flashes from the light mounted on Shen's armour.

It was a s.p.a.ce Marine. Its armour bore the chalice symbol of the Soul Drinkers on one shoulder pad. It carried no weapons.

Aescarion caught a glimpse of its face. In life the skin had been dark but now it was pasty and mottled grey with disease. The eyes were gone and dark ragged holes stared blindly. The lower part of the face had been gnawed away and the bleached white of jawbone and teeth grinned out. Nothing living could look like that, and nothing dead could stare with such blind madness and hate. Sister Aescarion only had the briefest glimpse by the swinging light on Shen's armour, but in an instant there was no doubt.

A Soul Drinker, claimed by the plague. The bullet scars on its armour suggested that it had been mor-tally wounded in the battle for the outpost, that it had been left behind by its colleagues, and suc-c.u.mbed to the terrible plague that had savaged Hive Quintus. It was the first time Sister Aescarion had actually set eyes on a member of the Chapter.

As she watched, trying to get a clear shot, the dead Soul Drinker tore Interrogator Shen's arm off at the shoulder in a crimson crescent of blood. The arm holding the pistol was flung to one side of the chapel and the rest of him to the other, his armoured body crashing limply into the wall.

Sister Mixu was beside Aescarion, firing her twin pistols. She snapped off two rapid head shots, blowing a hole in the Marine's forehead, but the Soul Drinker seemed not to even notice the mas-sive wound.

Aescarion couldn't claim to know a great deal about fighting the living dead but she hazarded a guess that it would take more than just a killing wound to fell the Soul Drinker - nothing but dismemberment would stop it. And dismem-berment was something at which Aescarion excelled.

She drew the power axe and charged the Marine. It was a full head taller than her but she was much quicker. Her blade flashed down and she hacked deep through the Marine's collar and into his torso, the axe's power field splitting his fused ribcage and carving through dead organs.

The Marine gripped the haft of the axe, pivoted, and flung Aescarion into the bra.s.s-cased altarpiece-machine. The casing buckled beneath the impact and components rained down as Aescarion slid to the floor. Telltales flashed on her armour's retinal display and a brief flash of pain dulled to an ache as painkillers flooded her system.

The Soul Drinker stood above her, staring blindly down with its dried-out eye sockets. Bolt pistol fire ripped into its back from the Seraphim emerging into the chapel behind it, punching through the tar-nished armour and kicking chunks from its skull. Its broken face grinned down as it reached for Aescarion.

Aescarion tried to roll out of its way but her body wouldn't respond - she must have shattered a shoul-der and maybe a hip. The Soul Drinker picked her up by the shoulder joins of her breastplate and began to pull, trying to crack her open like a predator opening up armoured prey to get at the flesh inside.

Aescarion could feel her armour coming apart. Her good arm still held her axe and she felt its power field humming. As the telltales flashed red on her retina she dragged the blade into the waist of the Soul Drinker.

She used every ounce of her strength to cut through the ceramite power armour, but she had no leverageand her system was strug-gling to cope with the pain.

One of the Seraphim wrapped an arm around the Marine's neck from behind, trying to saw its head off with her combat knife. The Marine turned and drove an elbow into the Sister's midriff, knocking her backwards. It let go of Aescarion with one hand as it did so. She planted one foot onto the floor of the chapel and swivelled on it, ripping the axe blade through the waist of the s.p.a.ce Marine, cutting clean through the ceramite and the Marine's spine., Aescarion slumped to the floor. The upper part of the Soul Drinker's body fell beside her. Its legs stood for a moment, then fell to one side, clattering against the metal of the chapel.

The Seraphim picked herself off the floor and stood over the upper half of the Soul Drinker. It looked up at her, head jerking as the end of its sev-ered spine flopped like a beached fish. Aescarion handed her the axe, and without switching on the power field, the Seraphim cut off the Soul Drinker's head.

Mixu was on the other side of the room, tending to Shen.

'He's dying, sister.' said Mixu. Two of the Seraphim helped Aescarion over to where the inter-rogator lay.

Gore pumped from the torn shoulder socket, forming a thick pool beneath him. His eyes were open but they couldn't focus on anything and though his jaw worked no sound came out. Mixu opened up the breastplate of the carapace armour and Aescarion saw right away that the interrogator was beyond hope. The ribs had been broken and separated by the force of his arm being torn off, and then crushed when he hit the wall. The organs inside must have been torn to shreds.

As Aescarion watched, Shen died.

'He was a soldier of the Emperor.' said Aescarion, grimly aware of her own injuries. 'We cannot let him rise again.'

The Seraphim carried Shen's body down to the turbine floor, where they placed a long-fused krak grenade in his mouth and reduced the corpse to a rain of ash.

Aescarion was no tech-priest and only knew enough of the Machine-G.o.d's dogma to maintain her own battle-gear. She had the Seraphim lever off the casings of cogitators in the control room and remove what she took to be the datacores inside. Aescarion herself removed a plaque on the wall of the control room that recorded all the adepts who had ever worked in the outpost - hundreds of names inscribed in tiny letters on a sheet of bra.s.s. As an afterthought she took the head of the dead Marine, and sealed it in a specimen box from the lab, along with the Marine's bolt pistol that was still in its holster with its golden chalice symbol.

There was nothing else of value in the place. She only hoped that she had found something worth Shen's life. Mixu saw to Aescarion's injuries as best she could and Aescarion gave her the authority to lead the squad out to their extraction point.

It had been difficult for Shen to arrange for a naval salvage craft to pick them up from the wastes outside Hive Quintus - the Officio Medicae had banned all travel and few crews wanted to risk the polluted wastes. Inquisitorial authority had barely cut through the red tape in time to get Shen and the Seraphim onto Eumenix in the first place. If the squad wasn't there for the pick-up, the crew would abandon them there, and they would never escape. It was a good few days' travel to reach the barren inter-hive wastes and with Aescarion injured it would take even longer than she had feared.

Sister Mixu took them off as quickly as she dared, through the darkness and danger of Hive Quintus.

Far above the polluted wastes, a ship from the dockyards of Stratix approached the thinly-stretched quarantine line around Eumenix. Orbital batteries fell silent at its approach, crews suddenly riddled with the most virulent plagues. Officio Medicae craft fled from it like shoals of fish before a shark as their survival instincts set alarms ringing. Plague and madness had come, concentrated into the force of one being.

For the plague-d.a.m.ned of Hive Quintus, their saviour was almost upon them.

FIVE.

A shadow, light years across, was cast like a dark halo around the warzone. The Imperium had quar-antined the tortured worlds under Teturact's rebellion, establishing a firebreak of locked-down star systems. Whole worlds were under house arrest, their fleets grounded, their populations prevented from leaving without permission from the war-zone's military command and the Officio Medicae. Cathedrals of the Imperial Faith offered up prayers for deliverance, begging the Emperor in his wisdom to let victory come to the Imperial war effort before the plague visited their worlds. Dark rumours circu-lated about Teturact, and the horror that would unfold if he ever broke through the Imperial fleets that were ma.s.sing around his rebellious empire.