VERIDIAN MANDEVILLE RELAY STATION TERTIUS,.

ON 7854007.M31 VIA SOTHAN ORBITAL.

Have arrived ahead of schedule.

Forward recon elements currently initiating planetfall.

Orbital augurs confirm presence of greenskin forces though numbers are significantly lower than earlier tactical projections.

Require confirmation of mission parameters for Ghaslakh campaign and have received no reply to previous transmissions.

Awaiting response.

'The bullet that killed a king, and murdered a generation; what was it when it was metal in the ground, when it was one amongst many, clinking in a box, shining like so many others? Was it the death of millions then? Did those that touched it feel blood on their hand? Did they know what it would become?'

from a sealed report to the High Lords of Terra, author unknown If you were alive then I would forgive you for what is to come. Your end seems certain but it is not. If I believed the future could not be changed then I would think everything already lost to darkness and the laughter of atrocity.

How can I forgive what might not be? So instead of forgiveness I will give you truth, I will tell you of how you came to be, and how you passed through the hands of history. You have no eyes to see, so I will see for you, and tell you of yourself of those that held you and how they ended.

I will tell you of things that you cannot know...

First You are only a few minutes old. You came from the loose chalk as a blackened lump, and were formed by a hundred blows of stone on stone. The sun beat down upon you as your shape emerged like a face rising though dark water. You are no more than a black spike of flint, edges tapering to a point like a willow leaf. You are sharp, and the light splinters as it catches your edge.

A shadow falls over you, and your maker looks up to see the stranger standing against the sky at the top of the chalky incline. Your maker has a name, but time will forget it. He is insignificant in all ways but one: he made you.

A cloak of black and grey fur hangs from the stranger's shoulders. Other than the cloak he is naked, his skin smooth, as if the hair has been scraped away, or perhaps never grown at all. Soot tattoos cover his body rows of straight lines marching down his arms and thorny spirals winding over his chest and face. He has come a long way under the hot gaze of the sun and the cold eye of the moon; not eating, never drinking, and always seeking.

His name is Gog, and he knows things that can only be seen in the mirror of still water, or in the dance of shadows upon a cave wall. He has seen many more winters than is his due and he walks without fear of the night.

Your maker's grey eyes meet Gog's bloodshot blue stare. A dry wind blows into the lengthening moment. Sunlight winks on other shards of flint scattered in the pale dust.

Gog's eyes flick from your maker to you. His gaze is fever-hot. Your maker takes a step back and his foot sends a scatter of stones down into the dry stream bed below. He holds Gog's stare.

Gog leaps down the slope. Your maker is ready and jumps backwards. Gog lands on all fours like a beast. You slash out and kiss only the air, as Gog scrabbles down the incline, quick as a lizard. Your maker takes another step back, but his foot turns upon a broken lump of flint and he stumbles. Gog jumps from the ground, his hands extended like claws.

You slice into Gog's arm. Blood falls from your edge as you rip free of skin and muscle.

Blood.

Your edge tastes the salt and iron of life for the first time. Your maker never intended you as a crude weapon. He made you because he is afraid of the red in his spit and the wheezing in his chest. He made you so that he could give the lives of animals back to the earth, so that they could die in his place, that the gods might let him live. You were made for ritual, for sacrifice. You were meant to be more than just a knife.

Your maker hits the ground, and Gog lands on top of him. White dust and rock shards spill from them as they tumble down the slope. Gog has his hands around your maker's throat, and is crooning in the voice of a wild cat. Blood runs down his arm, liquid-red against powder-white. Your maker is on his side, and you are pinned in his fist against the ground. Gog's eyes are wide as he squeezes, his tongue flicking over cracked lips. Your maker tries to strike with his free hand, but his wrist has broken and his fingers are twisted like trodden twigs.

Gog laughs as they slap weakly at his face and for an instant his weight shifts. Your maker twists, you come free. Your point flashes towards Gog's ribs.

You stop.

Gog looks at you. He holds your maker's wrist in both hands. Your maker is gasping, the pressure on his throat gone, but he thrashes with panic. Gog mutters something that sounds like the buzz of insect wings, and then pushes downwards.

You punch under your maker's jaw and up into his skull. Thick, warm lifeblood gushes over you. Your maker twitches for a moment and then lies still.

Your sharpness is a murder's edge now.

Gog stands. He is smeared and spattered. Blood is seeping from your maker's throat and mouth. It clots and beads in the chalk dust. Gog raises you to his eyes. His breath coils with scents of perfumed smoke. The pattern of blood on your surface has a meaning for him. The wind whispers in his ears, and tells him that it is pleased with his gift. He turns away from the blood soaking into the white ground. Flies are already swarming over your fallen maker, and his flesh is already turning to black ooze under the sun with unnatural speed.

Gog walks away. You go with him, held in his red hand.

Second You age in the passing of seasons and in the blood that you spill. You kill many, and maim many more. You forget your maker's hand, and know only the touch of the tattooed man, of Gog. He carries you close, never out of reach, but never drawn for a mundane cut. You have significance for him.

He ages but does not grow old. Men change, cities rise and fall, and the tattooed man remains. Other men call their gods by many different names, but he has learned all of them and knows that they are false. The truth whispers to him in the shadows cast by fires, and he does not need to give that truth a name. Gog serves kings, betrays saints and steals secrets while bearing faces which are also lies. He travels across mountains and oceans and down the long slope of time. He is hunted but never caught. You go with him, never lost even in flight or defeat. Your edge gains notches; your handle becomes black and polished with blood and endless use.

At last you reach a broken tower in a rain-shrouded land.

Gog wakes from a dream to the sound of thunder and the splash of hooves in mud. He is on his feet even as his eyes snap open. Rain is pouring through the roof of the tower. Time has taken the ragged cloak from his back, and replaced it with scarred leather and black ring-mail. He has a sword in his hand. You wait at his waist, held in a sheath of tanned skin.

His eyes dart between holes in the tower's stone walls. His armour is heavy, sodden and cold against his skin. His breath is ragged. He is afraid. He has never faced an enemy that could harm him; he knows too much, but he can no longer hear the voice of the wind. The storm roars around the tower walls, but it has no voice its sound is silent to his soul. He calls out, but the wind and shadows remain mute.

He is powerless.

A thunderbolt blinks white light through the cracks in the tower walls. Gog can hear the sound of clinking metal even over the drumming of the rain. The tower has only one door, and its wood is rotten. The light of burning torches flickers through the gaps in the door's planks. Gog screams for the night and storm to aid him, but no answer comes.

The rotten door bursts inwards. The dancing light of torches spills into the tower. Gog screams as he lunges at the first figure to come through the door. It is a knight. Polished metal and silver mail cover the man's muscled body and a closed helm hides his face. Gog's first strike staggers the knight, and the second glides through the helm's eye slit. He falls in a clatter of steel. Blood mingles with rain upon the silver of his breastplate.

Gog shouts in triumph and fear. A second knight comes through the door and swings a spiked mace. Gog dodges back and snarls. A third knight follows, carrying a broad-headed spear to stand at his comrade's side. Gog draws you, curling you in his left hand.

The knight lunges with his spear. Gog pivots at the last second, and the spear's tip grazes the mail over his gut. Gog hacks down with his sword, and the knight's right leg crumples, his head arching up to expose his neck. You stab into a gap between plate, leather and mail. You rip out, scattering blood that looks almost black in the gloom. Thunder rolls overhead. The remaining knight shouts a challenge and spins his mace beyond the door wait more metal-clad figures, their pitch torches guttering in the storm.

Gog knows that his masters have deserted him, that he will die here. He laughs. The knight with the mace brings it up to strike.

'Hold.'

The voice is not loud but it rises over the shriek of the wind and the hammer of rain. The knight with the mace freezes, and Gog sees his chance. He stabs at the knight's face, but a sword blade meets Gog's lunge and turns it aside.

Another figure has entered the tower. Gold armour-plates cover the figure from his throat to his feet. A cloak of scarlet and orange ripples at his back. He wears no helm, though a crown of silver leaves and golden feathers circles his dark hair above a lean face. The drawn sword in the figure's hand is flame-touched silver.

Gog looks into the crowned figure's eyes, for a second they are the green of the sea. He knows those eyes, though he has never seen them before. Lightning strikes somewhere close by, and in the eye-blink of brightness the golden figure's eyes turn liquid black.

Only now does Gog hear the wind's voice again; it is faint, as if it is shouting from a great distance. It is screaming with rage, calling out for blood. Gog shivers. He feels pressure building in his skull. He grips you tighter in his off-hand, and mutters a sound that cracks his teeth. The blood on your blade begins to hiss and steam. Gog's shadow is crawling across the floor. The rain begins to fall as hail. The crowned figure is utterly still, his face as unforgiving as carven marble.

Gog's sword slashes for him, but the figure meets the blow as the thunder rolls, and Gog's blade shatters. Sharp fragments of steel spin through the air. Gog turns without pausing you sweep out towards the crowned figure and your edge scores across the gold. Your tip finds a join between two plates and punches forwards. Gog roars with triumph.

In that instant, your point catches on flawless silver ring-mail. The crowned figure speaks a single word that rolls with the thunder's echo.

Gog falls to his knees with a crack of shattering bones. You almost fall from his fingers, as his hands grope at the rain-slick flagstones. The figure looks down at him, drops of rain catching in the chalices, feathers and roses engraved upon the golden armour. He turns his sword so that it is pointing down at Gog's neck.

You feel Gog's fingers tighten on your handle. He can still hear the distant screams of the wind the voices are calling for blood, for an offering, for a final payment in exchange for his unnaturally long life. Gog knows that he has only one last blow to land, and that he must give a death to the voices beyond the shadows.

The sword above Gog twitches. You move first, plunging up through Gog's throat and into his brain. He looks up at the crowned figure with cold, dead eyes and then slumps sideways.

The figure lowers his unbloodied blade, as rot spreads across the dead flesh the delayed ruin of a stretched life coming to claim its due. Gog's skull begins to crumble around you. Muscle, blood and brain turns to foul jelly. The crowned man watches the body dissolve. His expression is unreadable. He knows that something has been stolen from his victory, but does not know what.

After a long moment he turns and walks from the broken tower. A circle of knights wait for him, holding wind-rippled torches. One of the knights bows his head.

'We will have to wait for the storm to pass before we set the fires, my liege,' says the knight. The crowned figure shakes his head and walks on.

A pillar of lightning reaches down from the clouds above and strikes the ruined masonry, thunder mingling with the scream of exploding wood and cracking stone. The knights shield their faces, but they will carry the after-image of the thunderbolt in their eyes for many hours.

You feel the touch of the lightning, but it does not break you. You lie serenely in the tower's ruin, as shattered stone and embers bury you and the storm rolls on in the sky above.

Third You sleep beneath the earth. You dream in a bed of ashes. Only poisoned plants grow on the ground above you, and men shun the heap of broken rock that was once a tower. The bone of your handle rots; roots curl around your blade like crooked fingers. Floods spread and drain. Cities rise in wood and stone, and end in fire. Wars churn the ground to mud, and blood soaks down to disturb your fitful slumber. Furnaces and factories darken the sky with smoke: iron and the turning wheel remaking the world. Men discover new truths and forget the old ways.

Kingdoms and empires spread and contract. Seas and oceans drain to basins of dust. The heavens are conquered and the gods found to be absent from the firmament.

Night falls. The fears of the past crawl out once more from the dark. People huddle close around the cooling coals of civilisation. The hoped-for dawn becomes a joke chuckled by the wind as it blows through the bones of dead continents.

Then just when it seems that it was finally an impossibility illumination comes.

The light touches you as fingers scrape away the mud. The light is not the light of the sun but the harsh, white glare of stab-lights. The grubby fingers pause as they expose your hard shape. All trace of blood has long since rotted from your surface; the ring-mail and shattered sword have rusted to almost nothing, and Gog's body dissolved into the earth. Only you remain, a sliver of cold blackness in the filth.

A bare, warm index finger runs down your blade, feeling the ripples and pattern of your making. The finger pauses; it belongs to a man called Jakkil Hakoan. He is young, and thinks that he is clever.

The cavern is ice cold, leeched of heat by the machine towers which feed warmth to the upper hive levels, but Jakkil sweats anyway. His round face and hands are exposed and chapped, but it does not matter to him he needs his hands to feel the earth, and he would be as good as blind if he wore a helmet. His enviro-suit was from the bottom of the pile, and its temperature control is broken. It keeps him warm, true, but too warm; it makes him feel like he is in a tropical jungle rather than four kilometres beneath the hive's surface crust.

He has never seen a jungle, at least not a real one. He has seen pict images, of course. He has reviewed the data, and read all of the accounts of the great jungles of the past. There are jungles on other worlds that lie beyond the sphere of Sol's sun. He hopes he will see them one day. It is a wish that has kept him labouring in the lower ranks of three Conservatory expeditions. The excavation of the Albian sub-caverns is just the latest step on his road of ambition. Jakkil Hakoan wants to go places, to see their pasts, to own something of their mysteries. He does not care for the Conservatory's higher purpose he just cares where it can take him.

He licks his thumb and smears the soil from a spot on your blade. His eyes focus on the mottled grey-black of your form. The pale layers that run through you look like clouds hung against a night sky. Jakkil looks at his thumb, at the dirt smudged across his skin, and then back to you. He shivers despite the cocooning heat of his suit. He feels as if he has made a connection with the past, as if he has reached back through the Long Night to touch the soul of someone dead before men reached the stars. He licks his thin lips, and pulls you from the mud.

Your edge draws a bead of blood from his palm. He hisses with surprise.

A voice shouts across the cavern floor. 'Found something, Hakoan?'

Jakkil swears silently to himself, and folds you into the pouch on his thigh. He glances to his right Magritte is working in the trench ten metres away. She seems intent on the small patch of ground before her. He turns to his left to see two figures standing at the lip of the trench. Their enviro-suits are a dull grey with gloss-black heat pipes and clear crystal visors. They are the seniors, the overseers of the excavation. Both have an earnest intensity to their faces which Jakkil despises. A cluster of juniors hang behind them like birds waiting for a farmer to drop a grain of corn from his hand.

'Well?' says the one who calls himself Navid Murza.

'Nothing,' says Jakkil. 'I thought I saw something in the burn-layer, but it was just a stone.' He holds up an irregular grey fragment he has just taken from the trench wall. He waits, and for once he is glad that the suit is making him sweat.

Murza's eyes flick over the stone. Jakkil does not like the cleverness in that look.

'You yelped,' says the other one. Hawser is his name. Kasper Hawser. Some of the juniors say that there is something funny about it, like it's a joke. Jakkil does not get the joke, and does not like Hawser. 'We thought that you had found something note-worthy,' he continues.

Jakkil grins, and holds up his palm to show the cut and thin smear of blood.

'Cut my hand on a rock splinter.'

Hawser looks at the hand, frowns, and then turns away. Murza pauses for a moment longer, still looking at the stone in Jakkil's hand. Then he shrugs and follows Hawser without a word. Jakkil lets out a breath and looks around at Magritte. She looks away before their eyes meet.

Unconsciously his hand goes to the pouch where you sit.

Magritte comes to him later, when he is in his quarters, rolling some cheap spirit around his mouth and staring at the rusted ceiling. The room is small, the smallest in the hab unit hung by cables from the hive cavern's roof, a gridiron of closed corridors and block-shaped wings there is not much space and Jakkil has the smallest portion of it.

He is sitting on a narrow bunk with his back to the condensation-covered wall. He has some books and a couple of battered dataslates on a small shelf. A small bird made of pink alabaster sits on a low table of pressed metal beside another half-empty bottle. Clothes lie in grubby heaps on the floor. The room smells of sweat, alcohol, and a lack of care.

Magritte knocks twice, and waits for Jakkil to grunt in response before pushing the door open. Cropped orange-red hair hangs lankly to the base of her neck; her face narrows to a sharp nose and small chin. Some might think her pretty in a gaunt, pale sort of way, but there is also something that puts most people off without them knowing why. Like Jakkil, she is wearing an ochre one-piece overall.

Jakkil nods a greeting. Magritte closes the door and stands with her back resting against it. She looks at him in silence. He glances up at her face and away gain. Her eyes are hard grey, like stone. Like clouded flint.

'Where is it?' she says.

'What?' he says, and shrugs.

'The find you took from the site. Where is it?'

'I don'

'I watched you pick it up, Jak. I saw you palm it.' She is still staring at him. He does not know whether she is angry or not. 'I'm not going to say anything. Trust me. I just want to see it.'

He pauses, and then takes another gulp of spirit from his chipped cup.

'Why?'

She laughs.

'You're kidding right? It's something real after six months of sifting dirt, and finding just variation in the soil structure.' The tone of her voice changes and she emphasises the pronunciation of her words. 'Remarkable indications of pre-astral ascent agricultural cycles are as dull as the rest of the damned mud.'

Jakkil laughs, half in relief and half because it is a rather good imitation of Navid Murza at his most patronising. He reaches under the pile of clothes. You emerge into the light.

Magritte goes still as you glint in Jakkil's hand. He does not see the flash of hunger in her eyes; he is too busy staring at you himself.

Magritte reaches out towards you. Jakkil flinches and she pauses.

'Please?' she says, and opens her palm towards you. Jakkil hesitates, and then places you in Magritte's hand. Her touch is gentle, like the touch of your maker.

'A killing blade,' she says softly.

'What?' says Jakkil.

'This was not made as a tool. The blade is too narrow, the edge too fine.' Magritte holds you up so that the dirty light catches on your edge. 'It was made to slice and stab, not to butcher meat or trim wood. It was made to murder. That is its essence, its significance.'

'Significance? It's just an artefact.'