Semyon and his threatening-looking servitor led them from the laboratory, through the darkened pa.s.sageway at the far end of the chamber, and into a winding series of tunnels. The gloom soon gave way to a soft light that once again seemed to come from the walls.

The walls here were also smooth, but instead of having the look of fused gla.s.s, these tunnels appeared to be fashioned from purest silver. With purposeful strides, Semyon led them through the twisting labyrinth of the incredible tunnels, apparently taking turns at random, but refusing to answer any questions as to their route.

Zouche jabbed his elbow into Dalia's side. *Wherever this takes us, remember what we talked about on the mag-lev,' he cautioned.

*What was that?' asked Caxton.

*Nothing,' said Dalia. *Just Zouche being paranoid.'

*Paranoid am I?' smiled Zouche. *Remind me of that when this Dragon's devouring you, Dalia. See how paranoid I am then, eh?'

Eventually, Semyon brought them out onto a wide ledge high up in a glittering cavern of blinding silver that put Dalia in mind of the hollow core of the planet, such was its size. It was the largest internal s.p.a.ce any of them had ever seen or could imagine, the uttermost reaches soaring above and below them, and the shimmering walls curving out to either side of them like the largest amphitheatre ever conceived.

*Behold the Dragon!' cried Semyon, moving to stand before a wooden lectern that was incongruous for its very normality. A thick book with a worn leather binding sat atop the lectern, next to a simple quill and inkwell.

Dalia looked out over the vast expanse of silver that was the interior of the cave, half-expecting to see some winged beast launch itself from its lair.

She glanced over at Caxton and Rho-mu 31, who both shrugged, both equally as puzzled as her. Severine shuffled forward to the edge of the jutting promontory they stood on, her eyes with a glazed, faraway look.

*Severine, watch out,' cautioned Zouche, looking over the edge. *It's a long way down.'

*This place feels... strange,' said Severine, a tremor of disquiet in her voice. *Do any of the rest of you feel that?'

Dalia saw Severine looking in confusion at the distant walls of the gargantuan cavern, blinking rapidly and shaking her head as though trying to dislodge a troublesome thought.

*If the Dragon is chained somewhere in here, I expect it's bound to feel a little strange,' said Dalia. She squinted at the far off walls, though their unbroken, reflective sheen made it hard to focus properly.

*No,' insisted Severine, pointing with her good arm at the vast shimmering silver walls and roof. *It's more than that. The angles and the perspective... they're... all... wrong! Look!'

As though Severine's words had unlocked some hidden aspect of the cavern, each of them cried out as the sheer impossibility of its geometry, previously concealed from their frail human senses, was suddenly and horrifyingly revealed.

Dalia blinked in confusion as a sudden wave of vertigo seized her, and she grasped Rho-mu 31's arm to steady herself. Though her eyes told her that the walls of the cavern were impossibly distant, her brain could not mesh what she was seeing and what her mind was processing.

The angles were impossible, the geometry insane. Distance was irrelevant and perspective a lie. Every rule of normality was turned upside down in an instant and the natural order of the universe was overthrown in this new, terrifying vision of distorted reality. The cavern seemed to pulse in every direction at once, compressing and contracting in unfeasible ways, moving as rock was never meant to move.

This was no cavern. Was this entire s.p.a.ce, the walls and floor, the air and every molecule within it, part of some vast intelligence, a being or construct of ancient malice and phenomenal, primeval power? Such a thing had no name; for what use would a being that had brought entire civilisations into existence and then snuffed them out on a whim have of a name? It had been abroad in the galaxy for millions of years before humanity had been a breath in the creator's mouth, had drunk the hearts of stars and been worshipped as a G.o.d in a thousand galaxies.

It was everywhere and nowhere at once. All powerful and trapped at the same time.

The monstrous horror of its very existence threatened to shatter the walls of her mind, and in desperation, Dalia looked down at her feet in an attempt to convince herself that the laws of perspective still held true in relation to her own body. Her existence in the face of this infinite impossibility was meaningless, but she recognised that only by small victories might she hold onto her fracturing reason.

*No,' she whispered, feeling her grip on the three-dimensionality of her surroundings slipping as the distance to her feet seemed to stretch out into infinity. Her vertigo suddenly swamped her and she dropped to her knees as her vision stretched and swelled, the interior of the cavern suddenly seeming to be as vast as the universe and as compressed as a singularity within the same instant.

She felt the threads of her sanity unravelling in the face of this distorted reality, her brain unable to cope with the sensory overload it was failing to process.

A hand grasped the sleeve of her robe, and she looked into the lined, serious face of Zouche. With a gasping snap, her focus returned, as though the squat machinist was an anchor of solidity in an ocean of madness.

*Don't look at it,' advised Zouche. *Keep focused on me!'

Dalia nodded, her senses numbed by the violated angles and utter wrongness of the cavern walls and the thing they cloaked from view. How had she not noticed it before? Had it taken her senses a moment to try to process the sheer impossibility of what she saw?

Even knowing the warped nature of what she was experiencing, she still felt dizzy and disorientated, so she followed Zouche's advice and kept her attention firmly focused on his loyal face.

She took a series of deep breaths with her eyes shut before pushing herself to her feet and turning to face Adept Semyon, who stood beside the lectern. The dark-robed adept and his towering combat servitor were an unwavering slice of reality amid the chaos of her unmade vision, and the more she concentrated on him, the more her brain forced the anarchy of angles and rogue geometry into a semblance of normality.

She could still sense the roiling power and madness behind the thin veil of reality her mind had imposed, but pushed the thought of it to the very back of her skull.

Caxton lay curled in a foetal ball on the ground, his eyes screwed shut and a thin line of foam dribbling from his mouth. Rho-mu 31 was down on one knee as though in prayer, gripping his weapon stave tightly as he fought down the maddening vision in his head.

Severine stood where Dalia remembered her, staring out over the expanse of the cavern at the furthest extent of the ledge.

*I understand,' Dalia told Semyon. *The Dragon... I don't know what it is, but I know where it is.'

*Do you?' asked Semyon. *Tell me.'

*This cavern... everything in it. This is it. Or at least a sliver of it.'

Semyon nodded. *A tomb and prison all in one.'

*How?'

Semyon beckoned her over to the lectern and opened the book. *Look. Know.'

Dalia took halting steps towards him, feeling the strange sense of inevitability that had gripped her when they had travelled on the mag-lev. She had a sudden sense that she was meant to do this, that she had been heading towards this moment all her life.

She reached the lectern and looked down at the book, its pages filled with the tightly knotted scrawl of a madman with too much to say and too little s.p.a.ce to write it. The words made no sense to her, the language archaic, the lettering too small and compressed.

Even as she tried to tell Semyon she couldn't read his words, he reached over the book and took her hands in a grip of iron as its pages turned in a frantic blur of parchment.

*No... please...' she begged. *I don't want it!'

*I said the same thing,' said Semyon. *But he doesn't care what we want. We have a duty.'

Dalia felt the inhuman fire in Semyon's blood through the searing heat of his hands. The pain was excruciating, but it was nothing compared to the terror that filled her at the dreadful truths contained in the immortal depths of his eyes.

She tried to look away, but his gaze held her locked tight.

His skin blazed with a pure golden light. *Look into my eyes and see the Dragon's doom!'

And in one awful rushing flood of knowledge, Dalia saw everything.

AS SIGISMUND'S COMPANIES landed at Mondus Occulum, the rest of the Imperial expeditionary force was fighting all across the surface of Mars. After a rapid deployment under fire in the shadow of Pavonis Mons, thirteen companies of the Saturnine Hoplites advanced on the lines of circ.u.mvallation surrounding the forge of Ipluvien Maximal.

At first, the soldiers of Saturn made good progress, their heavy armour soaking up the fire from the enemy warriors tasked with manning the rearward-facing defences, but within hours, a host of skitarii surged from the ridged landscape of the Gigas Fossae to flank them.

Hundreds died in every surge and clash of arms, nightmarishly augmented warriors tearing through the ranks of the horrified Imperial soldiers before finally being brought down. Beetle-backed servitors with spiked armour and hissing weapon arms bounded forward, unleashing rippling beams of incandescent light that shrieked like banshees and incinerated men and obliterated armoured vehicles with equal ease.

Bizarre tanks scuttled forward on spider-like legs to clamber over the wrecks of destroyed vehicles and slice through armour and flesh with every sweep of their energy-sheathed pincer arms. Within minutes, the Imperial advance was in danger of becoming a rout until a company of super-heavy tanks rolled through the centre of the Imperial lines to tear through the vile horde of the enemy with their enormous guns.

With the support of so many colossal armoured fortresses, the Saturnine forces rallied, quickly encircled the enemy counterattack and crushed it utterly. With their flanks secure, the battered and wary Imperial soldiers continued their attempt to relieve the siege of Maximal's forge.

Further south, two companies of Imperial Fists and four regiments of Jovian Grenadiers under the command of Captain Camba-Diaz made planetfall in the Mondus Gamma forge complex, but unlike Sigismund's warriors at Mondus Occulum, they were unwelcome arrivals.

As Sigismund secured vast quant.i.ties of munitions for transport back to Terra, nearly two thousand aircraft a Stormbirds, Thunderhawks and Army drop-ships a swooped on Mondus Gamma under the cover of an ash storm blowing in from the Solis Planum. In the wake of a furious volley of missiles and cannon fire, the a.s.saulters blasted their way into the production facilities of southern sub-hive factorum.

Surprise was total, and led by hundreds of warriors in golden battle plate, over fifteen thousand Imperial soldiers stormed the forge's defences, rapidly seizing the armaments temples before spreading out to secure the armouries in a textbook example of multiple take and hold a.s.saults. With the dropsite secure, wide-bellied supply carriers dropped into the forge, and an army of loader servitors, overseers and quartermasters began the liberation of the vast quant.i.ties of armour and weapons.

As sudden and shocking as the Astartes a.s.sault had been, the unknown quant.i.ty of the defences was quickly and horribly revealed. Within moments of the carriers landing, the monstrosities of Lukas Chrom's forge rose to its defence.

A host of screeching battle robots, their weapons limned with unholy light, attacked and burned and crushed scores of desperate men with blazing fire lances and power maces. Alongside the robots came a tide of blank-faced automatons, each one fighting with deadly ferocity and unbreakable resolve. These monstrous machines slowed, and finally held the merciless advance of the Astartes, giving the forge's mortal defenders the opportunity to launch a ferocious counterattack.

An endless tide of screaming tech-guard, thousands of hideously altered weaponised servitors and yet more battle robots converged on the Astartes and Army units from multiple directions in perfectly coordinated phalanxes. Only the superhuman resolve and tenacity of the Imperial Fists prevented their position from being overrun in the first moments of the counterattack.

Desperate soldiers fought and died as loaders and riggers rushed to evacuate as many suits of armour and crates of weapons as possible from the blazing forge, onto the waiting carriers.

With every second, men were dying, but Camba-Diaz knew that it was a small price to pay in order to secure as many weapons and suits of armour as possible.

Terra would stand or fall depending on what they could achieve here.

DALIA SMELLED THE hot, dry air of another world, the spiced fragrances drifting from lands far away and countries as yet undiscovered. The cavern beneath the Noctis Labyrinthus faded from view, the silver lines that defied rational perception easing into obscurity and replaced with the soft curves of desert dunes and the vast expanse of a breathtakingly beautiful azure sky.

A ferocious heat enveloped her and she gasped as it hit her like an opened blast furnace. The vista was at once strange and familiar to her, and her fear faded as she suddenly understood where and when she was.

She stood on the baking sands of a high dune, looking over a wide river valley where a great city of sun-bleached stone reared up on a plateau of dark rock. From the gates of the city marched a solemn procession of women in white, bearing a silk-veiled litter of gold and jade.

*You know where you are?' said a voice behind her and she turned to see Adept Semyon.

*I think so,' said Dalia. *This is Old Earth. Before Unification.'

Semyon nodded. *Long before Unification. The tribes of men are still divided and know nothing of the glories and perils beyond their world.'

*And what is that city over there?' asked Dalia.

*Still thinking in such literal terms, girl,' chuckled Semyon. *We are still in the cave of the Dragon. All this is a manipulation of your mind's perception centres by the book to show you what needs to be shown. But in answer to your question, the city is called Cyrene and this is a representation of a land once known as Libya. It is an ancient land, though the people you see before you are far from the first to settle here. The Phoenicians came here first, men the Grekans, then the Romans, and finally the Arabii. Well, not finally, but that's who rules now.'

*And when are we?'

*Ah, well, the text isn't clear, though I believe this happened some time in either the eleventh or twelfth century.'

*So long ago.'

*A long time by anyone's reckoning,' agreed Semyon. *Save perhaps his.'

*I don't understand,' said Dalia. *Who are you talking about?'

*Never mind. You'll understand soon enough.'

Dalia fought down her annoyance at Semyon's cryptic answers and said, *So we're not really here and this is just what's in the book?'

*Now you begin to understand.'

*So who are those women?' asked Dalia, pointing towards the procession as it made its way down a road of hard-packed earth towards a long scar in the ground from which drifted a mephitic fog.

*They are the handmaidens of the King of Cyrene's daughter, Cleodolinda, and they are taking her to her death. Within that wound in the earth dwells the Dragon, a fearsome creature recently awoken after a great war with its kin, which seeks refuge on this world to feed and regain its strength.'

*The Dragon.'

*Yes, the Dragon,' agreed Semyon. *It has slain all the knights of the city and demands the sacrifice of a beautiful maiden every day. It feasts on their terror, growing stronger with each feeding, but all the young girls of Cyrene are dead. The king's daughter alone remains, and now she goes to her death.'

*Can't we do anything?'

Semyon sighed. *Can you not grasp that this has already happened, girl? This is ancient history we are watching, the birth of a legend that will echo down through the ages in one form or another for all time. Look!'

Dalia followed Semyon's pointing digit and saw a lone warrior knight in golden armour and a scarlet-plumed helmet riding towards the procession of women on a mighty charger of midnight black. He carried a tall lance of purest silver, from which flew a long red and white banner depicting a soaring eagle grasping a bolt of lightning.

*Who is that?' asked Dalia, though she already knew.

*At this point in time, he is known as a soldier of the Emperor Diocletian, one who has risen to high honour in the army and who is pa.s.sing through Libya to join his men.'

Dalia almost wept at the sight of the knight, a being of a fairer presence than any she had seen and one whose wondrous power was undimmed by the pa.s.sage of years.

The knight spurred his horse and swiftly overtook the procession, riding towards the dark scar in the earth. No sooner had he halted his mount and set his shield upon his arm than the Dragon surged from its lair, roaring with a sound louder than thunder.

Dalia's hands flew to her mouth and she cried out as she saw the Dragon's monstrous form. In shape it was half crawling beast, half loathsome bird, its scaled head immense and its tail twenty metres long. Its terrible winged body was covered with scales, so strong and bright and smooth that they were like a knight's armour.

The light of devoured stars shone at its breast and malignant fire burned in its eyes.

The warrior knight leapt to meet the Dragon, striking the monster with his lance, but its scales were so hard that the weapon broke into a thousand pieces. From the back of his rearing horse, the warrior smote the dragon with his sword, but the beast struck at him with talons like scythe blades. The warrior's armour split open and Dalia saw blood pouring down his leg in a bright stream.

The Dragon towered over its foe, dealing him fearful blows, but the knight caught them upon his shield and thrust his sword against the Dragon's belly. The scales of the beast were like steel plates, rippling like liquid mercury as they withstood the knight's every attack. Then the Dragon, infuriated by the thrust, lashed itself against the knight and his horse, and cast lightning upon him from its eyes. The knight's helmet was torn from him and Dalia saw his face shine out from the battle, pale, lit by some radiance that shone from within. As he thrust at the Dragon, that radiance grew in power, so that at last it was like the light of a newborn sun.

The Dragon looped itself around the knight, clawing and biting at his armour and roaring in triumph. Then, as though the thought had come from the warrior, Dalia saw that, no matter how the Dragon writhed, it sought always to protect one place in its body, a place beneath its left wing.

*Strike, warrior, strike!' she urged.

As if hearing her words, the knight bent downward and lunged forward, thrusting his sword with a mighty bellow into the Dragon's body.

The creature gave out a deafening roar that shook stones from the city walls and the burning radiance in its breast was extinguished. Its grasp upon the knight loosened and the lightning faded from its eyes as the great beast fell to the ground.

Perceiving that the Dragon was helpless, though not dead, the knight untied the long white banner from his shattered lance and bound it around the neck of the monster.

With the Dragon subdued, the knight turned to the astounded handmaidens and the people of the city, who streamed from its gates in a riot of adulation. The knight raised a hand to quiet them, and such was his presence and radiance that all who beheld him fell silent.

*The Dragon is defeated!' cried the warrior. *But it is beyond even my power to destroy, so I shall drag it in fetters from this place and bind it deep in the darkness, where it will remain until the end of all things.'

So saying, the knight rode off with the Dragon bound behind him, leaving the scene behind him as immobile as a painting.

The image of the city and the desert were frozen in time, and Dalia turned to Semyon. *Is that all of it?'