The depths of the Lost World were silent. Every step Khauri took felt as though he were summoning a thunderclap, his footfalls echoing on through the lightless depths long after he had come to a halt. He stood at the heart of a chamber of natural rock, its jagged floor uneven, the roof high above bristling with stalactites. The tunnel at his back was not the only entrance to the space of shattered rock – seven more branched off to his left and right, a web of passageways through the underworld. Each one ­represented a wrong choice. Every one held a phantom, a psychic spectre attuned specifically to Khauri’s memories. To engage one would be to risk losing oneself forever. Beneath the surface, the Lost World was a warren of caverns, caves and shafts, the planet’s integrity long ago splintered by forces far beyond mankind’s reckoning. To have come so far and delved so deep was rare, even for one of Khauri’s kind. Reaching this point had strained the focus and psychic warding of the young Lexicanium to breaking point.

At least his journey had not been in vain. He felt a surge of satisfaction as his optics picked out the markings on the wall opposite. He quickly suppressed the feeling. Emotions were dangerous to one such as he. That was the first thing he had learned. Left unchecked, they made him a liability or, worse, turned him into prey for things that hunted in places far deeper and darker than the one in which he presently stood.

He refocused, letting his helmet’s auto-senses piece together the image before him. It was a carving, roughly hewn into the very heart of the Lost World, a bestial likeness that took long seconds for his mind to properly comprehend. When he did, his breath caught and his grip on his adamantium stave tightened.

‘Now you truly understand,’ whispered a voice.

Khauri spun, the grating of his armoured boots against the stone underfoot loud in the dark space.

‘Master,’ he breathed, bowing his head hastily.

Te Kahurangi, Chief Librarian of the Carcharodon Astra, mirrored the motion. Unlike Khauri, his helmet was mag-locked to his belt. A dry smile played over his gaunt, pale features, exposing rows of sharpened teeth.

‘You have done well to come this far, brother,’ the Chief Librarian said, stepping past him. Like Khauri, he was clad in ancient power armour that hummed and whirred as he moved. The traditional colours of the Chapter – greys and blacks – had given way to deep blue, though the battleplate was heavily inscribed with swirling white exile markings, honours that Khauri’s equipment did not yet bear. Te Kahurangi also carried a staff, though his was considerably heavier, clad in carved bone and tipped by a shard of green stone that began to glow as he raised it.

How the Chief Librarian had succeeded in following him so closely without his knowledge – let alone entering the chamber unannounced – was something Khauri had learned not to ponder on too closely.

‘Do you know what it is?’ Te Kahurangi asked, his voice a deathly whisper. The green glow from his staff picked out the bestial features Khauri had been straining to identify, and the Lexicanium found himself forced to suppress a shudder.

‘A monster,’ he said after a moment.

Te Kahurangi’s smile widened slightly, the light gleaming from his wicked teeth.

‘It is us,’ he said, lifting his other hand as though to caress the carving. His gauntlet stopped an inch from its surface, hesitated, then withdrew. ‘It is the truth about who we are, Khauri. You understand the crest we bear on our pauldrons?’

‘The great carcharodon,’ Khauri said, glancing at the white, finned predator coiled on the right shoulder of the Chief Librarian.

‘You have seen them during your induction, have you not? Swum with them, meditated upon their nature. They are mighty predators indeed, and our Chapter’s doctrines and philosophies do well to reflect them. And yet, it could be said that the great carcharodon is but a mask we all wear.’

‘This is known to all void brothers?’ Khauri asked slowly, his eyes dragged back to the nightmarish creature that had been hacked into the Lost World’s bedrock millennia before.

‘It is,’ Te Kahurangi confirmed. ‘We do not hide our origins, Khauri, not from our own. We do not hide who we are. We do not hide this.’

Khauri pondered the beast a moment longer before speaking again.

‘It is a creature from ancient Terran myth, is it not?’

Te Kahurangi turned abruptly, the light of his staff falling away from the carving and leaving it in darkness. His features, made even more ghoulish by the contrasting illumination, were suddenly grave.

‘No more words, my apprentice. Your trial is complete. We must make haste, back to the surface. The machine-men have made planetfall, and the Grey Tithe is about to begin.’

It was growing dark on the surface, the weak sunlight hidden by a rising dust cloud that threatened to shroud the length of the Tithe Valley. The bleak, desolate rift in the dead planet’s crust echoed with the ticking of radium carbines, the whir of cybernetics and the metallic thump of thirty sets of bionic limbs as Magos Primary Otte Benedikt’s skitarii vanguard came to attention.

Not his skitarii, Otte corrected himself as he passed between their twin ranks, red robes flapping in the bitter wind that knifed down the valley. They were Magos Domina Kraph’s. The combat-augmented tech-priestess had made it abundantly clear to the primary that, just as she would leave the discourse to him, so he must leave security to her and her rad-troopers. A younger, more flesh-prone member of the Adeptus Mechanicus might have probed her reputation for weakness, thinking her own calculations unstable or her functions not fully settled, but Otte knew better than to waste processing time on such pettiness. He had served alongside Kraph enough to be certain that her security precautions would be faultless to within point one of a per cent.

The truth was, if the beings Otte was about to meet decided to engage in hostilities, the skitarii present would not be enough to significantly increase the likelihood of his survival. Without doubt the combat assets escorting the Adeptus Mechanicus exploration vessels in stasis anchorage above would be enough to cripple the warships with which they shared orbit, perhaps even destroy them. Otte, however, knew that the likelihood of him still being even partly functional by that point was statistically negligible. Those they were about to meet rarely took survivors.

He could see them now, their bulky outlines a few hundred yards ahead, his green optic clusters stripping away the grey, wind-whipped dust that shrouded them. It bit and chafed at the few remaining organic scraps of his body, and befouled the mechanical purity of his metallic form with a million insidious grains. It would take weeks of lubricant salves and auto-benedictions to purge himself of this filthy backwater world.

He deleted such secondary concerns from his consciousness, the brief spike of anger that accompanied them vanishing as he ran an override on all background considerations. Focus. He could not afford a miscalculation, not now. Behind him Explorator Deitrich and his bibliovore logis, Severus, were barely resisting the urge to overtake the magos primary. Deitrich had worked hard to mask his excitement during their long warp transit, but the explorator’s reserve was coming undone now that he was drawing close to so much prized archeotech. It was easier for Otte to suppress his own desires to claim the blessed relics for Mars. Deitrich, after all, wasn’t the one who had to negotiate with their current owners.

Those owners were only twelve in number, and they waited impassively as Otte and his skitarii approached. The magos primary completed his scans as he closed the last few dozen yards, logging every detail as a matter of potential importance. Six of the figures, the ones on the flanks, were clad in Tactical Dreadnought armour, their off-white slabs of plasteel, ceramite and adamantium caked with the valley’s pervasive dust. Otte’s internal processor registered a degree of awe at the presence of such blessed battle suits, even as his analysis moved on to the other six.

They made for a less uniform gathering. All were Space Marines, two in the grey power armour that predominated in this particular Chapter, two in the blue battleplate that Otte’s data files informed him belonged to sanctioned Adeptus Astartes psykers. The fifth wore red ceramite, and bore upon his breastplate the wondrous Machina Opus of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Approval at the presence of the Techmarine barely registered before Otte took in the final figure.

He stood apart from his brethren, alone, a dozen paces behind them. Even by the standards of the Adeptus Astartes the figure was a giant, standing a head above the rest. He too was clad in Tactical Dreadnought armour, and for a moment Otte’s analytics glitched, informing him he was looking at a graven statue. A slight shift in the giant’s stance removed that possibility – dust cascaded from the cliff-like plates of his immense suit and his huge, wickedly barbed gauntlets. Every inch of the warrior was clad and armed with the most hallowed and rare pieces of wargear Otte had ever set his optics upon. It made the Space Marines standing in the giant’s shadow seem like children.

He was not supposed to be here. In three centuries overseeing exchanges such as these, Otte had never once encountered him. Binaric discord filled his thought-algorithms for almost two whole seconds before he regained cognitive control. He misstepped, the slight change in motion enough for Kraph to thought-cant him.

<Is there a problem, primary?>

<Negative. Proceed,> he replied, filing away the shame he felt at his moment of weakness for later analysis.

Otte halted half a dozen paces from the nearest Space Marine. The rest of the Adeptus Mechanicus expedition came to a perfectly synchronised stop behind him. For a moment, there was nothing, nothing but the hissing of the wind in the sand and the flapping of crimson robes.

The wind died. The dust settled with it, and suddenly what lay beyond the Space Marines became visible. A great shard of black rock jutted from the head of the valley, framing the Adeptus Astartes. A crevasse was open in its flank, a jagged, lightning-bolt split in the stone that led to a darkness so complete Otte’s bionics could not penetrate it.

‘H-hail and well met, children of the void,’ the magos said, his external vox-units stuttering slightly as they came online and issued the pre-recorded greeting. ‘I am Magos Primary Otte Benedikt, of Exploration Fleet 2-8-17 Arc Lux. I thank you on behalf of the Omnissiah for this audience. May it serve us both.’

He made the sign of the cog over his breast, silver digits clicking as they interlocked. For a moment, none of the Space Marines spoke. Then one of the grey-armoured warriors took a pace forwards, towering over Otte’s bent frame.

‘Hail and well met, servant of the Machine-God. I am Akamu, Harvester Prime and captain. I bid you welcome to the Lost World on behalf of my void brethren. We are here seeking the beneficence of the Grey Tithe.’

‘All will be as the Omnissiah wills,’ Otte said, giving the ritual response. Both spoke in High Gothic. ‘I call upon you, Harvester Prime Akamu, to deliver a hallowed oath that you will protect me and my binaric congregation for as long as we remain upon this world, and that no harm will befall us while under your stewardship.’

‘I make this oath gladly and freely,’ Akamu responded, the words scraping through his helmet’s vox-grille like a blade over a whetstone. ‘With my void brethren and great Rangu as my witness.’

Otte bowed his cowled head, the motion mirrored by the Space Marine. The magos deactivated his vox recording, ritual observed, and switched to mem-generated audio-cant.

‘Brother Hitaki, it does my processes good to witness you once again.’ The red-armoured Techmarine Otte had addressed nodded his head, but said nothing. Otte spoke to Captain Akamu again.

‘You have a crop for us, Harvester Prime?’

‘We do, magos. The Outer Dark has rendered up a great deal in the past decade. We believe it will more than match your needs.’

‘We can only hope, captain,’ Otte canted, irritably deleting a snap-response to the excited blurt of lingua-technis that Deitrich emitted. The mention of potential archeotech had excited the explorator even further.

Akamu stepped to his left, his brethren parting either side of him. Only the giant in Terminator armour remained between the Adeptus Mechanicus adepts and the black crevasse that led into the heart of the valley beyond. Otte had avoided addressing the hulking warrior, his algorithms calculating that there was insufficient precedent to risk disrupting the Grey Tithe’s ceremonial opening. For a second, as the giant seemed to bar their way, Otte was forced to suppress a series of alarm responses, wondering whether his decision not to honour the figure had been correct. Then, with a deceptively soft whir of servos, the great Carcharodon moved aside. Otte could not delete a relieved scatter of binary before it reached the rest of the expedition’s receptors.

The magos passed between the Space Marines, and in the moment before Akamu fell into step alongside him Otte experienced the full weight of their predatory attention. Though they had hardly moved since his optics first registered them, there seemed to be a constant threat of sudden motion hanging over them, as though the black lenses of their helmets were an oily film covering waters churning with razor-toothed savagery. Bar those consigned to servo-skull plates and cogitator mem-banks, Otte knew that no functioning members of the Priesthood of Mars had encountered this particular Chapter as frequently as he had. He was one of the few who had witnessed just what these silent, grey giants were capable of.

Akamu led him to the jagged crack in the valley’s flank, its darkness drawing them on. Only Deitrich, Severus and the Techmarine, Hitaki, followed. The rest of the magos’ expedition remained facing the Space Marines in silence, the wind the only low, moaning conversation that passed between them.

‘Do you desire a techna-arcanum exchange, Magos Benedikt?’ Hitaki asked as they passed into the rock’s shadow. Otte responded with a blurt of binaric affirmation, offering a similar service in return. As the Harvester Prime led them through the passage out of the valley, the Techmarine and the magos exchanged remote data feeds containing preparatory information on the resources both sides had brought. Otte routed the information on to Deitrich and his bibliovore. Even the magos primary felt a flare of eagerness as he ran through the lists provided by the Space Marine – the harvest this time was bountiful indeed.

A number of questions were flagged up on his response units, but he queued them for the moment, unwilling to disturb the dark, dusty quiet of the rock they were passing through. There would be time enough later. Tact and a respect for protocol, he calculated, accounted for over thirty per cent of the reason he was entrusted with these sorts of negotiations. To call them vital was an understatement.

His optics, which had automatically switched to minimal light filters upon entering the crevasse, clicked as they recalibrated for a change in illumination detected around a bend in the tunnel. The dusty, echoing passageway opened before him into a sprawling chamber, its ceiling dominated by a jagged split that admitted the light of the planet’s dying star. Though Otte had entered the chamber on two occasions previously, he still ran a diagnostic of the echoing space, as intrigued as ever by its dimensions. Its rough walls were uneven, the one to Otte’s left sitting lower, creating a slope in the stalactite-studded ceiling. The floor underfoot was similarly rough, the magos’ lobe stabilisers triggering as he compensated for the rocky surface. To a mind not blessed with machine-derived analytics, the cavern would appear natural, and even a newly inducted tech-adept, unused to applying the cold algorithms of the Cult of Mars to everything he came across, would likely not have thought twice about its origins, believing it formed by geological processes and the passage of millennia.

But not Otte. There was something more to it, he was certain, the work of some strange and powerful consciousness. His schematic analysis of the angles around him pinged back with too many ­coincidences of geometry and too many precise measurements for him to believe that the rock had split apart and reformed of its own accord. Something had fashioned this place, and it had done so with a degree of care and detail that his precise mind found both appealing and alarming. Just who, or what, the architect was, though, he had yet to discover. Some of his brethren, when presented with his findings, had hypothesised that it was the work of ancient, all-powerful xenos. Otte gave silent praise-digit cant to the Machine-God that he was not so superstitious. Still, the mystery remained.

Besides the deeper, more easily overlooked precision of the chamber’s structure there were two more blatant signs of intelligent design, ones that Otte was sure had been added later by a hand less subtle than the original architect. At the cavern’s far end what could only be described as a great throne, unadorned by any sort of pattern, had been carved into the rock face, while at its centre, bathed in the jagged scar of light that lanced through the split ceiling, a long dais had been hacked from the planet’s bedrock. On that dais lay their objective, a dozen opened cargo crates, while around them, standing just within the darkness beyond the light, stood another squad of Adeptus Astartes. Otte and his entourage halted before the dais.

‘We may approach, Harvester Prime?’ he asked, his vox-voice echoing weirdly from the strange chamber’s walls.

‘You may,’ Akamu responded, taking post alongside his silent brethren. Otte stepped up onto the dais, accompanied by Deitrich, Severus and Hitaki.

They moved from left to right, inspecting the inside of each crate in turn. Some were locked in stasis fields, a film of blue energy playing over their contents. Deitrich emitted another burst of excited binaric as he bent over the first container. Otte locked into the cant passing between the explorator and his bibliovore, listening in as they assessed the objects delivered to them by the Adeptus Astartes. 

<A computational void cable,> Deitrich said, peering down at a coil of thick, plastek-clad wiring. <Well preserved, Stygies markings.>

<Eighty-nine per cent functional, I estimate,> Severus added, cranial bionics whirring as they magnified sections of the cable. <Application of the blessed lubricants is long overdue, however.> 

<We will apply them as soon as we reach orbit, Omnissiah willing,> Deitrich said, seeking to reassure his shorter, more stooped companion. They moved on to the next crate. 

<A fragment of keel tag,> Deitrich said, logging each item in the expedition’s shared inventory. He turned to Hitaki. ‘What is its providence?’

‘It was salvaged off the Hirath Nebula seven standard years ago,’ the Techmarine replied, his vox-voice deeper and more grating than those of the tech-priests. ‘I believe it to be part of the Third Dawn expedition. I would have investigated further, but had neither the time nor the resources.’

<He is correct,> Severus canted, drawing an acutor-wand over the blackened shard of adamantium. <I am getting point seven… No, point eight returns. How magnificent.>

<This will give us an indication of the Third Dawn’s location or fate?> Otte asked.

Deitrich gave an affirmative screed of lingua-technis, shot through with unhappy discord at the magos primary’s interruption of his analysis. After a moment more he dragged himself away from the previous shard of void-scarred metal and on to the next crate. 

So they continued, the explorator and his bibliovore logging and scanning each new piece of salvage, occasionally addressing a question to Hitaki, all the while watched by both Otte and the squad of Adeptus Astartes guarding the cavern. Eventually they reached the final crate. Deitrich’s excitement, already palpable across Otte’s readouts, spiked.

<Can it be?> Severus said. 

‘Where was this retrieved?’ Deitrich asked Hitaki. 

‘The moon of Terax Nine,’ the Techmarine said. ‘Six Terran years ago.’

‘You have possessed it ever since?’ 

‘We have, locked in stasis,’ Hitaki confirmed.

Otte leaned forwards on his adamantium cane, peering into the crate’s bottom. There, nestled in the cables and fixing prongs of the stasis field’s heart, was a red stone. It was smaller than Otte’s palm, similar to a ruby, the light coming through the shaft in the cavern’s ceiling glittering from its rough edges.

Otte didn’t need Deitrich or Severus to tell him the identity of this particular piece of archeotech. The explorator magi of half a dozen forge worlds had spent millennia searching for it. It was the Red Periapt, and it had been thought long lost by the adepts of Mars.

‘We will have to conduct additional scans,’ Deitrich said, struggling to delete the scattering of extra binary that laced his vox-speech. ‘And we will need a full transcript of exactly where and how it was reclaimed.’

‘I have one ready to upload to your noosphere the moment you provide me with the activation hymnal,’ Hitaki responded. ‘I trust you are pleased with the harvest, Magos Benedikt?’

It took a second for Otte’s analysis to register the half-joke. The periapt alone was worth all the materiel the explorator fleet had brought to the Lysia System. 

‘I am pleased,’ Otte agreed, his secondary systems failing to find a more organic response to the Space Marine’s dry humour. ‘My masters will likewise rejoice at these reclamations.’

‘I am sure they will, Magos Benedikt,’ Akamu said from the shadows beyond the light-bathed dais. ‘I hope this ensures the continuation of our ancient pact. There is much in the Outer Dark that can benefit the Adeptus Mechanicus. Much that only the Carcharodon Astra can reach, let alone recover.’ 

‘This is true,’ Otte allowed. ‘I have no doubt that those who approve these transactions between us will permit them to continue. For the glory of the Omnissiah, of course.’

‘And the Imperium, magos primary.’

<My servitor haulers will move in immediately,> Deitrich canted, crooning over the crate containing the periapt. <And a detail of your skitarii vanguard to help protect it, magos primary?>

Otte transmitted a binaric affirmative. He was already sending a signal to the Arc Lux, anchored in low orbit above. The communications marker on his optics display flashed green, the preset message acknowledged.

‘I have authorised the landing of our cargo shuttles,’ he told Akamu. ‘Will you allow me the honour of showing you just what the Omnissiah has provided to further your war efforts?’

‘I am not the one who will be inspecting the iron harvest this time, Magos Benedikt,’ Akamu said, the black lenses of his helm glittering in the darkness beyond the light. ‘The Red Wake will review this Grey Tithe personally.’

It took almost half of the Lost World’s rotational cycle to complete the transaction. Fat-bellied lighters the colour of rust descended ponderously from orbit, their thrusters kicking up wild eddies of dust from the valley floor. Their contents, laid out on unfolding auto-racks before their open cargo bays, gleamed in the weak light – bolters, power armour, munitions, even two Land Raiders and a trio of Rhinos, their hulls gleaming silver.

Akamu moved from one suit of power armour to the next, inspecting each greave and joint socket, rivet and ceramite plate. Hitaki was present to ask additional questions of Otte as he followed them from one rack to another, probing the magos on servo running times and auto-sense responsiveness. Particular attention was paid to the ten sets of Tactical Dreadnought armour, sheathed in plastek wrap to shield their unpainted surfaces from the wind and dust.

The Red Wake oversaw it all. The giant remained silent, following Akamu and Hitaki. Occasionally he would pause of his own accord, assessing a particular suit of battleplate or a weapon. Then, wordlessly, he would move on. Otte, unable to compute whether or not he was permitted to address the figure, kept his focus on Akamu and Hitaki.

While the inspection continued Akamu permitted the magos’ entourage to pore over the archeotech they had brought out into the valley, rigging scanning units and analysis drones around the crates and their precious contents. Much like the other Space Marines present, their skitarii guards watched on impassively, metal-clad frames unmoving as the wind snatched at their red robes and piled dust around their feet. 

As darkness fell the machine-men departed, their shuttles ­stabbing the darkening sky with points of light. Bail Sharr, Reaper Prime and commander of the Carcharodon Astra’s Third Company, stood on the valley’s edge and watched the winking of pilot lumens and plasma thrusters high above, until his vox-unit clicked with the message he had been waiting for.

He had been ordered to attend Akamu and the Second Company in their voyage to the Lost World, but he had not been told why. It was a break from the rigours of preparing his own brethren for their campaign on Kolch Secundus, and not a welcome one at that. With the rising of the Great Devourer from the galaxy’s depths, time had become a precious commodity for every company in the Chapter, and Sharr had little desire to spend his overseeing another Prime’s tithing.

Then he had received word that the Red Wake would be with the expedition. That had changed everything.

Sharr passed into the jagged, black tunnel that wound its way through the valley’s bedrock, emerging into the cavern where the Adeptus Mechanicus had first inspected their half of the tithe. The chamber, which had held only one of Akamu’s tactical squads along with the cargo crates, was now full. Much of the equipment provided by the Adeptus Mechanicus – bar the heavy armour – had been transferred into the subterranean space, where it was being subjected to the checks and rituals of the Chapter, ensuring nothing dangerous or unworthy was brought to the Nomad Predation Fleet. Hundreds of serfs, from overseers to magnicled slave-hands, were undertaking the packing and preparation of the dozens of suits of armour and weapons, observed by fussing artisans and machine-savants, as well as Techmarine Hitaki’s unblinking bionic optics. A dozen Red Brethren – veterans of the Carcharodons First Company – observed the bustle from the chamber’s edges, as silent and unmoving as the rough-clad rock surrounding them. 

Sharr passed between serfs struggling to auto-clamp plastrons and armoury-devotants counting out bolt-rounds. He was alone – his command squad had remained aboard his strike cruiser, the White Maw, in high anchorage above Kolch Secundus, as had the rest of his company. Being separated from them for the first time in many decades had created a curiously hollow, dislocated feeling. Those around Sharr were not of his shiver, not part of his void brotherhood. He had spoken only briefly with Akamu during their journey to the Lost World. Intruding on another Prime’s tithing felt unnatural, perverse even. He would have complained were it not for the commands of the great warrior who occupied the stone-cut throne he now approached.

Tyberos, the Red Wake, Reaper Lord of the Void, Master of the Carcharodon Astra. Even seated, he seemed to dwarf those around him, utterly immovable, a vast, silent judge whose pronouncements were always final. The armour he wore was a Tactical Dreadnought pattern, but heavily modified to suit his stature. Dozens of brass bonding studs gleamed atop slab-plates of grey ceramite, layered over blocks of plasteel reinforced with rods of adamantium. A skull, the bone yellowing and ancient, dangled from a chain at the giant’s waist, its eye sockets as dead and soulless as the black lenses of the Red Wake’s boar-snouted helm. More terrible yet were the two great gauntlets he wore. Named Hunger and Slake, the ancient fists combined wicked power talons with twin-linked underbite chainblades. The carnage they could unleash had to be seen to be believed. The entire suit of ancient battleplate throbbed with the vast power necessary to keep its thick servo bundles active, and the very air around Sharr felt alive with the potency of the supreme predator seated before him.

The Red Wake was not alone. Two Red Brethren flanked his throne, their armour heavily inscribed with exile markings. Another two Carcharodons stood slightly to one side, observing Sharr’s approach. One the Reaper Prime knew well – the Chapter’s Chief Librarian, the Pale Nomad, Te Kahurangi. The other was Khauri, Te Kahurangi’s Lexicanium apprentice.

Sharr halted before the Red Wake’s throne and went down on one knee, ceramite scraping bedrock. He stayed there, head down, until Tyberos spoke.

‘Rise.’

The voice that issued from the helm’s vox-unit was at odds with the figure it belonged to – dry, rasping, dead. It was a voice that sounded as though it issued from an ancient Administratum savant or data-scribe, bent double and weary with a lifetime’s toil. There was a coldness there though, a chill in the irregular vox-crackle that accompanied it, a hardness like ice. Sharr obeyed it and stood, though he did not raise his own helm to directly face his master.

‘You are suffering, Bail Sharr,’ Tyberos said. It was not a question.

‘I do your bidding, lord,’ Sharr replied.

‘It is not easy to be drawn from your brotherhood while they are on a war footing,’ the Red Wake continued. ‘You are eager to spill xenos blood, rather than parley with machine-men.’

‘This is not my place,’ Sharr admitted. ‘I am unsure as to why my presence is required.’

‘This Grey Tithe has been a bountiful one for the Chapter,’ Tyberos said. ‘It was necessary. The War in the Deeps has cost the Chapter dearly in terms of materiel. In terms of flesh also.’

‘It has,’ Sharr agreed, sensing the giant’s helm shift slightly as Tyberos surveyed the activity filling the chamber behind him.

‘It was necessary that I oversee this particular tithing in person,’ the Red Wake went on. ‘It has fallen at a crucial juncture. It is ­necessary too that I impart your new orders to you in person. The future of the Chapter will rest upon your abilities, Reaper Prime.’

‘What is it that my lord wills?’

Tyberos was silent. Sharr risked a glance at Te Kahurangi. Unlike most void brethren, the Chief Librarian had a habit of only rarely donning his helmet. His features were pale and drawn in the cavern’s shadows, the patches of flesh around his eyes, jaw and neck blotched with the dark denticle scabbing that afflicted the oldest members of the Chapter. He sensed Sharr’s attention, and a ghost of a smile parted his thin lips, revealing teeth sharpened to wicked points. His Lexicanium, Khauri, remained inscrutable behind his own blue helm.

‘Our numbers are grown thin,’ Tyberos’ voice rasped, and there was a whir of servos and a scrape of metal against stone as he shifted slightly. ‘Too thin, now, to be replenished by the Red Tithes. Our casualties from the War in the Deeps mount at a rate that cannot be replaced, not without compromising the induction processes or dedicating extra companies to the tithes. Those are companies that we cannot afford to redeploy. Without intervention, we face extinction.’

‘I have failed the Chapter–’ Sharr began.

‘You have not, Reaper Prime,’ Tyberos said before he could continue. ‘The void brotherhood has entered a period of conflict more intense than any in the past five centuries. Our genetic difficulties have ensured that our combat operations have become unsustainable. That, rather than your abilities as master of the Red Tithe, is the primary cause of the danger we now face.’

There was no comfort in the cold words, no condemnation either. Such things did not concern the Red Wake. Sharr remained silent. He had held the role of Third Company captain for a decade – not long in the context of most Primes’ service – and had overseen two Red Tithes, the expeditions mounted by the nomadic Chapter to replenish their stock of both void brethren recruits and serf-slaves. While not outright failures, neither had matched Akamu’s Grey Tithes – conducted to replenish the Chapter’s stocks of materiel – and nor were they enough to replenish ranks flayed by incessant deep-void actions against the hive fleets.

‘You will conduct a new reaping, Bail Sharr,’ Tyberos said. ‘But this one will be unlike the last two you have embarked upon. Korro and a squad from the First Company will accompany you, as will Te Kahurangi and his novice.’

‘As you wish, lord,’ Sharr said, casting a glance at one of the two Red Brethren Terminators – Korro – who flanked the throne. ‘Where would you have the Third Company go?’

‘These times require measures we would not normally countenance,’ Tyberos said. ‘The Chapter’s need for fresh, worthy recruits demands we exploit every resource. You will take your fleet and your company, Reaper Prime, and chart a course for the Ghoul Stars. You will return to the world of Atargatis Prime, and once there you will renew the Carcharodon Astra’s pact with the Ashen Claws.’

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