CHAPTER TWO

The mound of flesh stank. Even for Xantine, who had stood unbowed in the galaxy’s most depraved charnel houses, the smell made his lurid turquoise eyes water.

For the Exhortation’s mortal crew, it was too much. Most of them clipped their nostrils closed with pincers of gold or silver, breathing through gauze-wrapped mouths. Others had appended nosebags over their faces, each filled with narcotic herbs and pungent spices, giving them the appearance of large flightless birds as they manoeuvred around the cramped bridge.

It impeded the crew’s work, but they were necessary steps. After all, the mound was far more important than any of them. It was called Ghelia, but in truth, it was the Exhortation: the ship’s brain and body, the muscle that gave it the impetus to run, and the imperative to fight. It had the cognition to make careful and complex jumps, allowing the ship and its master to sail the warp without a living Navigator on board.

That wasn’t technically true. It had been a Navigator once, Xantine knew. Ghelia was born the youngest daughter of Resh Irili, one of many scions of Navigator House Irili. The house had long been a solid and dependable source of Navigators for Terra’s small-scale shipping enterprises, but the lady Resh’s epicurean tastes would not be sated by a life considered merely comfortable. Seeking pleasure, she had disguised herself and departed the Throneworld, using her talents to eventually reach the fringes of the Eye of Terror. Xantine had not met Resh Irili – the lady had died in the employ of a long-departed warlord whom he didn’t care to recall – but she had left a crowd of daughters. Ghelia was one of these, more or less baseline in appearance before she had turned her name and her body over to become the pulsing, stinking blob of matter whose tendrils now ran the full length of the Exhortation.

It was a difficult business, maintaining a Navigator on board a vessel of the Emperor’s Children. Some simply went mad, the cacophony of sound and sensation too much for their delicate psychic capabilities. Others became distracted, their minds turned from the minutiae of piloting a vast warship through the eddies and tides of unreality by earthly pains and pleasures.

Xantine had seen this happen first-hand. Deploying his silver tongue – and the gift of a few hundred slaves – he’d once managed to orchestrate an audience with the Dancer-in-Silks, once a brother of the III, and now choirmaster of his own warband: the Souls of Splendour. Conscious of the Dancer’s infamously fickle nature, Xantine had ordered the Exhortation to the rendezvous point with weapons on standby and void shields to full, but of the rival warband, there was no sign.

Weeks later they discovered their ship – the Splendour’s Vision – half embedded in a moon on the outer edge of the system. Investigation of what was left of the stricken craft turned up several dozen transhuman bodies and vox-records that indicated the ship’s Navigator had been inspecting his reflection in a nearby mirror when his talents were called upon to navigate safely out of the warp. Indeed, the records suggested he had been admiring himself in the same mirror for the previous standard month, forcing the recently transferred slaves to feed and bathe him so he would not have to avert his eyes from his own form.

Xantine found it difficult to understand what the Navigator saw in the reflected form that bewitched him so, but then, it had been hard to see much of the man by then: the majority of his face had melded into solid rock.

Even Navigators still enthralled to the Imperium tended to mutate as their careers went on, but those that found themselves in service to warbands like Xantine’s own tended to change more rapidly, in more exotic ways, the currents of the warp colliding and coalescing to make them something truly special.

This was Ghelia. Xantine didn’t remember the woman, in truth. She had been sequestered in her chambers at the heart of the ship, communicating primarily with the warlord Euphoros and his bridge crew. He, in turn, had been but one of Euphoros’ warriors at the time. A trusted and respected warrior, he told himself, but one whose focus was on his own betterment, rather than the vagaries of running a vast voidship. As he took S’janth into himself and wrested control of the warband, and with it the Exhortation, from Euphoros, he found Ghelia already in her flowered state.

He had investigated the possibility of removing Ghelia from the ship, intending a clean break from Euphoros’ previous regime, but the creature was like a tumour that had wormed its way into every vital organ of a body, and it could not be excised without killing the host. Instead, he simply accepted the reality, and in the process discovered the sublime power of the creature.

It did stink, though.

Rhaedron, the statuesque shipmaster, had a more elegant way of dealing with the problem: she had simply removed her nose. New flesh filled the centre of her face where the offending organ had previously stood, puckered and pink against the sallow skin surrounding it. It made her look permanently surprised, Xantine thought, an effect compounded by the large and complex hairpiece that she wore atop her head. Ringlets and curls of shimmering gold were held in place with feathers of magenta and blue-green, their shafts piercing the skin of her scalp to ensure that the whole edifice didn’t move.

She hoisted her silvered cane and prodded the mass of quivering flesh in its flank. It squealed, recoiling from her touch, before settling back with an annoyed harrumph. Rhaedron spoke to the awakened mass.

‘We have suffered an unexpected translation from the warp. The magnificent Xantine demands to know what has brought us back to realspace.’

For a moment, there was no response, and she prodded Ghelia again. Another squeal, and from deep inside the creature’s lumpen form, a vox-grille appeared. A voice followed, its words clipped and precise as a machine’s, but punctuated by wet slurping sounds.

‘Cause – unknown. Warp drive – offline. Navigational course – unplanned.’

‘Bring the warp drive back online, and plot a course to the system’s Mande­ville point,’ Rhaedron snapped.

‘Impossible,’ Ghelia slurped. ‘Complex warp currents circle this region of the void, rendering this system’s Mandeville point unusable.’

Rhaedron sniffed in annoyance. ‘Where are we?’ she asked, directing her question to the bridge crew, who sat close by, partially bonded to ornate cogitators. A flame-haired man turned, eager to provide an answer.

‘Recent Imperial records have no mention of this world, my lady, but older data sources make reference to a planet named Serrine. It was an agri world. The records show that the world produced vital ingredients used in rejuvenat treatments. Population was confined to cities, split between the cloud line.’

‘How old are these records?’ Rhaedron asked.

‘From centuries past, my lady.’

Rhaedron went to continue, but Xantine cut in, his deep voice quieting all other conversation. ‘And that population. Are they still present?’

The flame-haired man’s voice quivered, but he answered the warlord directly. ‘At present, auspex scans show increased concentrations of fyceline and promethium in the local atmosphere.’

Rhaedron took up the explanation, keen for the praise. ‘Telltale signs of explosions, your magnificence. The human population remains, and there appears to be some… unpleasantness among their number,’ she said.

Xantine let a grin play across blackened lips. This world could be a rare prize indeed – juicy, sweet, and ripe with plunder. Certainly, it could offer more than their most recent jaunts.

Xantine and the Adored had been reduced to raiding mining colonies in recent years, and more often than not lately, they came across the carcasses of worlds already picked clean by their fellow renegades – their resources plundered, their weapons purloined, their people slaughtered, sacrificed, or taken into slavery. More than once, they found Imperial worlds that had beaten them to the kill and immolated themselves.

Bax III, where a brave Titan Legio splintered and fought itself to a standstill in the rubble of the only continent’s largest city. Evenly matched and unable to accept defeat, both factions elected to detonate their Titans’ plasma reactors, killing millions and irradiating the settlement far beyond habitable status. The two princeps senioris responsible for the destruction, sisters by birth, had but one fundamental disagreement: whether the Emperor was dead, or had simply forsaken His Imperium.

Horsk, whose planetary governor had sabotaged their void shielding, asphyxiating the world, preferring a quick and silent death to the oblivion promised by the Cicatrix Maledictum. Xantine had kept the governor’s journal, and found it made pleasurable reading to chart the perverse logic that led one man – a mortal one, at that – to take the lives of millions with a single action. The governor’s writings remained level-headed to the last, the man never giving in to the ravings and madnesses that many in his situation might have spewed when presented with such a vision into unreality. Xantine couldn’t fault the man’s argument; he only wished he had been there when he took the shields down to watch the spectacle first-hand.

Each offered a morsel of misery, but for a warband low on the harsh realities of their trade – ammunition, weapons, slaves and narcotics – these were wasted journeys that further depleted their stockpiles.

Xantine stood on the dead ground of these worlds and wept, knowing that their spoils had gone to lesser beings. Shrieking lunatic followers of the Blood God; dour, droning devotees of Nurgle; or the endlessly tiresome lackeys of the Changer of the Ways. Worse still, they sometimes found the telltale brands of a Black Legion presence. Abaddon’s gaggle of morons, barbarians, and cowards had been attempting to follow the Adored for decades now – Xantine had lost track exactly how long.

It was a chase that would continue until either Xantine or Abaddon were dead, he knew. The Warmaster of the Black Legion could never forgive the murder of both a lieutenant and a favoured pet, and Xantine’s subsequent flight from the Children of Torment – and the formation of his own warband – rubbed salt in the wound of a being whose subjugation of the galaxy hinged on subjugating his fellow renegade Astartes first. That Abaddon had yet to find the Adored, Xantine took as a confirmation of his own brilliance. The alternative – that the Warmaster simply did not care to look, or even know who Xantine was – did not cross his mind.

Fortunately, Abaddon’s brutes were easy to feint, always moving in straight lines while Xantine allowed the whims and predilections of his crew to guide the movements of the Adored. Vavisk, the Noise Marine, his closest brother, forever chasing the song of Slaanesh. Qaran Tun, the diabolist, once a Word Bearer but now as consumed by his passions as any of Xantine’s gene-brothers, tireless in his search for exotic Neverborn to test and catalogue. Sarquil, the orchestrator, his obsessions more practical than any of his ragged Legion, ensuring that the Adored obtained men and materiel.

And they were low on both. This was a risk, Xantine knew: to invade a world of the Imperium, even one in the midst of an uprising. But Serrine was too tasty a morsel to give up, a chance for the Adored to live on scraps no longer.

I can give you so much more, S’janth purred.

He ignored her, and savoured the moment. A world, a whole unsullied world, with its soft belly exposed. How delicious.

Truly, a boon from the Youngest God.

Xantine traced his long tongue around blackened lips and spoke.

Oh, how Pierod hated running. His knees complained as he pumped legs rendered weak through lack of use, and felt sweat turning the silk of his trousers rough. Elise hadn’t even oiled his dry heels this morning, he remembered, an extra huff of air escaping with the realisation. If he made it out of here alive, he was going to have very cracked skin tomorrow morning.

He missed Rogirre. How could he be expected to run with such abject grief weighing him down? Abject grief, and the multi-course breakfast that his manservant had prepared for him.

The explosions had been coming closer since first light, and as the sun rose in the sky, they had been joined by a chorus of screams. After he served breakfast to the roused Pierod, Rogirre had taken to pacing the polished floor of his master’s chalet, and no attempts to reassure him seemed to salve his frustration.

‘Rogirre,’ Pierod called, sweetly at first. ‘We’re safe here, my friend!’ Like everything in his chalet, the walls were beautiful, rendered in green marble layered with veins of gold. But they were functional, too. A core of ferrocrete kept out the cold of the night high above the ground, and would serve to stop most armaments short of a battle cannon shell. A foundation stone stood above the doorway, an heirloom that his father told him had been brought from Terra itself, mined from the ancient quarries of Franc.

And he had guards. They were tough, small-eyed men who patrolled the perimeter of his chalet, sturdy lasguns held at the ready. He saw them sometimes through the building’s double windows as they completed their rounds, their bald heads bobbing slightly as they walked. It must have been a ritual, that severe hairstyle, or perhaps some kind of challenge. Or maybe it was just the new fashion? Pierod had resolved to check – he never wanted to miss a trend.

But he couldn’t see the guards now, and he was really getting quite worried.

‘Rogirre!’ he called again, injecting a little steel into his voice. His manservant didn’t look up, continuing his pacing. Irritation boiled over into rage in Pierod’s prodigious gut, an ugly emotion stoked by fear and a lifetime of having his own way. ‘Rogirre! Get over here this instant!’ he screeched.

Rogirre looked up, and Pierod was sure, for a moment, that he had reawakened the man’s sense of duty. But for the first time during their long association, his manservant did not obey his order. Instead, Rogirre turned on his heels and flung open the chalet’s ornate hardwood door – a beautiful piece commissioned by Pierod’s father – and prepared to run from his master’s well-appointed domicile.

Rogirre took but a single step before he was bisected by a saw blade the size of a Taurox hatch. It slammed through his midsection and embedded itself deep in the antique wood of the door frame. Pierod saw him die from a position propped up on cushions on a seven-seater couch. He watched as Rogirre’s legs slumped lazily to the floor, separated from a torso that still stood atop the blade, proud and tall like one of the cakes Lady Salomé served at her midnight banquets, and he winced as red blood, thick and wine-dark, leaked from Rogirre’s wet insides. The pool expanded until it soaked against the thick rug that bore Pierod’s family crest. He’d wanted to weep, then – that rug had been woven by the child artisans of Diltyn – but abject panic had forced him from his comfortable couch, his pudgy legs manoeuvring his bulk towards the hatch in his wine cellar that concealed one of the chalet’s multiple escape tunnels.

The whole thing was such a shame, Pierod thought as he waddled past faintly glowing lumen bulbs towards an exit he hoped was closer than it appeared. Though, if he was honest, he did think it rather served Rogirre right for opening the door in the first place, rather than tending to his master.

What was he shouting about, anyway? Pierod wondered for a moment whether the manservant had a family – he’d never thought to ask – but he realised he didn’t really care. All that mattered was that it wasn’t his name, and that his faithful attendant of the last seventeen years had forced Serrine’s esteemed vice treasurer to run.

‘The indignity of it all,’ Pierod blustered to himself, as he stumbled, sweating, to a halt against the tunnel’s exit hatch. His chest heaved, but over the sound of laboured breathing, he could hear the noises of battle. The regular crack of autoguns, the boom of explosions, and screaming, rising and falling in waves. But there was another sound, too, the one he was ­desperately relieved to hear: the whine of engines. Serrine’s void port was close, and still functional. He would make his way to a ship, use his connections, and escape into the comfort of the void while the ­planetary militia dealt with this unpleasantness. He would survive this day, he resolved, cracked heels be damned.

It was never quiet on board the Exhortation. Squeals and moans, shrieks and howls penetrated even its darkest corners: the engine decks, where grinning once-humans danced between arterial cables that pumped viscous and stinking red liquid; the hold. Even the bilges vibrated with sound, as sleek, smooth-skinned creatures swam through centuries of accumulated narcotic run-off, sending ripples and tides through the sloshing effluent. Behind it all, a discordant drone set the metre, the sound of the universe itself, of all the beauty and all the pain it contained within.

To a mortal, these sounds were terror given voice. To Xantine, they were music, and he hummed along as he walked the Exhortation’s thickly carpeted hallways on his way to visit his brother Vavisk.

Why must we converse with your kin? S’janth asked, as Xantine strode towards Vavisk’s chamber.

‘Because they are brothers of the Emperor’s Children, and I desire their counsel.’

Lies. You court their approval because you fear that they will betray you.

Xantine laughed. It was a hollow sound. ‘You share my body, daemon, but you will never understand my kind.’

I know your soul, S’janth said. You seek to turn your brothers to your cause. It is a foolish aim, and a foolish cause. We are so powerful, my love. We need not this world, nor your duplicitous brothers.

‘Not powerful enough,’ Xantine admitted. ‘You wish a return to your former glory? Then we require weapons, supplies and slaves. This world will have each in abundance.’

You are wrong, the daemon said. This world is diseased. I know it.

‘Then I will be its cure. I will hear no more on the matter.’

Xantine turned his attention fully to the artworks displayed on the walls of the Exhortation’s central corridors. Many of the pieces on show were his own: a representation of Canticle City before its destruction by the Black Legion, completed in crystal and bone shards; a careful study of aeldari physiology, created by pressing one of that perfidious race between two panes of transparent plasteel until they were microns apart, presented in a gold-leafed frame.

His gene-father had been an artist. Xantine felt he reflected his primarch’s talents in the field, but where Fulgrim had worked in traditional media, Xantine yearned for new canvases, new materials. He could rarely predict when inspiration would strike, and so had left his right pauldron unadorned, at odds with the complex and ornate patterns, colours, and images rendered upon the rest of his armour. The pearlescent surface was a blank slate, and he often turned to it during the chemical rush of battle, painting with the raw materials of combat: blood, excrement, and the countless other bodily fluids of the galaxy’s species – fluids of which Xantine had an encyclopaedic knowledge. By now, it was a palimpsest of excess, scrubbed almost clean after each sortie, but redolent with the memories and stink of wars once savoured, of enemies once slaughtered.

His other shoulder bore a trophy from one such foe: the long-snouted skull of some exotic xenos creature, its lower jaw removed, its brightly feathered skin still attached to the white bone in patches. Xantine had broken the Silken Spear on its hide, shattering the ancient aeldari weapon that had once served as the key that locked S’janth in her arcane prison. A shard of that spear now formed the blade of Xantine’s rapier – a weapon he called simply Anguish – set into a guard fashioned from carved aeldari bone.

He often wore his full plate, even while aboard the Exhortation, enjoying the suite of sensations that the ceramite transmitted to his supple skin. It was a show of power, to walk the decks of his own ship so conspicuously armoured – a message to his underlings that he would accept challenges at a moment’s notice. He had wrested the frigate from its previous owner, his former commander, Euphoros, in lethal combat, and S’janth was at least partially correct: there were those among his current crew that undoubtedly eyed a similar line of succession. Keeping them in line required not just raw strength – something that S’janth assisted with – but symbols, too.

This symbology was the reason why Xantine had donned his full armour now. It was an amalgam of parts scavenged from burning battlefields and taken as trophies in single combat, but it was built around the core of his original war plate, earned as a member of the Emperor’s Children under the command of Primarch Fulgrim. He knew the breastplate, even with its winged claw warped so that its talons curved into the symbol of Slaanesh, would spark fealty and honour in the twin hearts of his most trusted brother.

He met Vavisk in the Chamber of Exultation, at the rear of the Exhortation. His brother was choirmaster to the Adored’s host of Noise Marines, and although Xantine could not see the warriors, he could certainly hear them. They were singing louder than he had ever heard them, the secretive clade having raised their volume and tempo since the frigate had arrived in-system. The sound reverberated through the bones and the fluids of his body, exciting the blood in his veins, the acid in his stomach, the humour in his eyes.

They were orchestrated by Vavisk, who conducted the unseen choir from the Organ of Bliss. The vast edifice was a contraption of Vavisk’s own design, requiring the obsessive work of decades to find the most beautiful voices in the galaxy – or at least the most talented singers unfortunate enough to find themselves in the path of the Adored – before bringing them into the fold.

Xantine had seen the organ countless times, had even diverted the Exhortation’s course to help his brother complete his opus, but the device still impressed him. Vavisk stood in the centre, singing into a gently quivering orifice that connected to a forest of golden pipes. These pipes curved up and around each other like bundles of nerves, before plunging deep into the neck of a human mortal. Other tubes burrowed into the humans’ barrel stomachs, passing through enough nutrient paste to keep them well fed and ensure their voices had sufficient power. Larger tubes carried waste away from their lower intestines and bladders, while finer cables connected to wrists and ankles, capturing read-outs on their vital functions. Vavisk was protective, reacting quickly to sickness or other malaise in any of the individual humans that made it up.

The results were quite mesmerising. As Vavisk sang, his voice was amplified a hundredfold, taken up by row upon row of these human instruments. Their jaws worked in perfect time with each other, reproducing the same notes and tempo, but imbuing the composition with their own specific timbre. Xantine lingered a moment, allowing his brother to continue his current overture without disruption.

It was Vavisk who called a halt to the song, quieting the Organ of Bliss and hauling his warp-wracked body to its feet. Xantine greeted him as he rose.

‘Quite the composition, Vavisk,’ he said, inspecting the blades that jutted from his greaves with an air of practised nonchalance. Once, he would have embraced his brother, savouring the touch of a cultured warrior, but even in the relative privacy of the chamber, it wouldn’t do to show such deference to a subordinate.

Still, part of his body longed for the contact. Vavisk was his oldest friend, so much as that term still had meaning in a Legion of pleasure seekers and hedonists. At the very least, of all the beings in the galaxy, it was Vavisk who had done the most for Xantine. Not the Legion selectors who plucked him from the noble schools of Chemos, nor his sergeants and captains of the Emperor’s Children, nor even his dilettante primarch, the Phoenician’s attentions turned from his own children to pleasures beyond comprehension.

It was Vavisk who was inducted into the Emperor’s Children alongside Xantine, Vavisk who fought alongside him during the Great Crusade. Memories of fighting for the Corpse-Emperor left a taste like ash in Xantine’s mouth, but Vavisk’s bravery and loyalty was a true prize from that conflict.

It was Vavisk who had pulled him from the wreckage of Canticle City as Abaddon hurled the warship Tlaloc down on the world of Harmony. Were it not for his brother’s intervention, Xantine would have been incinerated along with thousands of his fellow Emperor’s Children and millions of mortals, his remains joining the vast field of melted glass, rock, and biological matter that was all that remained of the once-beautiful civilisation on the planet.

It was Vavisk who stood alongside him as Xantine turned on his warlord, using the strength of the daemon sharing his body to decapitate Euphoros – also once of the III Legion, before he’d become Abaddon’s lapdog. Xantine had taken the Exhortation and run from the Black Legion, striking out on his own with his dearest brother at his side.

And that was why it hurt to see Vavisk so addled.

‘Yes, Xantine. They sing because we are close. Closer than ever before to finding our primarch and uniting our Legion once more.’

Xantine fought hard not to roll his turquoise eyes. He revelled in Vavisk’s brotherhood, but the Noise Marine always wanted more. The flight from Abaddon’s band of barbarians and thugs had rekindled the spirit of unification in Vavisk’s breast, and he longed now to bring the disparate and capricious warbands of the Emperor’s Children back together under the patrician gaze of their ascended primarch. Guiding him on this mission was a song that Vavisk claimed to hear: an undulating, primordial rhythm that he desperately attempted to capture in the hope of finding the palace of Slaanesh, whereupon their primarch would be convinced to return to his children. Xantine, for his part, could only hear the random and chaotic howls of a galaxy of pain and pleasure – beautiful to his ears though it was.

Xantine indulged his brother in this fantasy, even facilitated the creation of projects such as the Organ of Bliss, but Xantine was a scholar of culture. He knew the Emperor’s Children could not truly reunite as a Legion: after ten thousand years of indulgence in the Long War, his brothers were far too mercurial and preoccupied for that. More importantly, even if they could somehow be persuaded to put their countless differences aside – the return of an attentive Fulgrim as a catalyst, for example – then it meant a return to subordination for Xantine.

Vavisk continued, warming to his subject. ‘We will be whole, Xantine. A Legion once more, singing together in worship.’ He wheezed as he spoke, the sound like damp air forced through an ancient accordion.

Xantine stepped alongside his oldest friend. ‘We have been presented with a new opportunity, brother – a world upon which we can sate ourselves,’ he said with a forced breeziness. He began pacing the stage, dark wood beams bending slightly with each armoured tread. ‘It is a world unsullied by our cousins, yet cut off from the septic glare of the Corpse-Emperor.’ He turned to the Noise Marine. ‘We can take it and make it ours, Vavisk.’

Vavisk said nothing.

‘Imagine,’ Xantine went on, ‘a cathedral built in your name, with you as the conductor, guiding thousands – millions – of worshippers in song. Join me, support me, and I can give you that.’

‘I need no cathedral, Xantine, and I need no worshippers,’ Vavisk said, still staring out across the chamber. ‘Neither do you, brother. The song leads us on to divine pleasure, and every missed step takes us further from these distractions.’

‘But think of the hall, Vavisk, grander than this meagre hold. Think of the instruments, the voices you could raise…’

‘And what happens while we build this folly? The song keeps its rhythm without us.’

Xantine reoriented his approach. ‘This is a sweet opportunity to refuel, to rearm, to reacquaint ourselves with the tastes of the galaxy. My Adored need sustenance, Vavisk. Pleasure shared is pleasure doubled – do not stand in their way.’

‘I have spoken with Sarquil. I know we have sufficient wargear, consum­ables, and slaves to last until we reach the Eye and rejoin with our brothers.’

Another angle.

‘How many battles have you joined with me, Vavisk? What is one more, for the sake of our brotherhood? Our blades flashing, together, in glorious combat!’ Xantine waited a beat in the hope that this cut would land.

‘I am no fool, Xantine,’ Vavisk said, his blood-red eyes flashing with a moment of anger. ‘I understand well enough your machinations. This is no courtesy – you need my support to convince our brothers to prosecute this attack. If you have chosen to speak to me now, ahead of the vote, then you suspect that we may not win. We are Emperor’s Children, we do not fight if we cannot win.’

‘We can always triumph, brother! With you at my side, we can win any day.’

Vavisk turned then, finally, and stared back at his warlord, his millennia of strained experience worn hard on a wreckage of a face.

He had never been beautiful. Where so many of the Emperor’s Children had taken their rarefied features from their gene-sire – their high cheekbones, their narrow nose, their violet eyes – Vavisk had a squarer jaw that betrayed his birth in one of Chemos’ factory families. He had always looked, Xantine thought after first serving alongside the Iron Hands during the Great Crusade, like one of Ferrus Manus’ brood.

That resemblance had been noted by their brothers in the Emperor’s Children – jealous of their bond, no doubt – who had teased them for their similarity to Fulgrim and Ferrus: Xantine, with his delicate features and shoulder-length hair, and Vavisk, with his pugnacious mien and straightforward attitude.

The good nature had evaporated from that teasing when Fulgrim lopped his brother’s head off on Isstvan V, but still it persisted as brothers became rivals in the warbands that metastasised from the stricken body of his Legion.

It had only stopped for good in recent years, now that Vavisk looked like he did.

The resemblance was long gone now. He barely resembled a human. His once-square jaw had collapsed, subsumed into a vox-grille that made up the lower part of his face. Xantine was not sure whether the grille was a relic of Vavisk’s Mark IV helmet, or whether it had simply sprouted unbidden from inside the legionary’s lumpen form, but after millennia spent plying the tides of the warp, he knew better than to try to obtain a solid answer.

The skin above it hung loose, falling from buried cheekbones like tallow from a burning candle. Sparse tufts of desiccated white hair grew in clumps on a liver-spotted head, framing engorged ears that had grown fluted to better catch sound, and eyes so bloodshot that the irises were stained red. They were always so tired, those eyes.

‘Why do you think I follow you, Xantine?’ Vavisk asked.

‘Because I am powerful,’ Xantine replied, the self-evidence of the statement obvious.

Vavisk sighed. ‘You could be the greatest of us, Xantine,’ he said, his tone suddenly as tired as his eyes. ‘But you have shackled yourself to this thing that wears your skin. This form of command doesn’t suit you.’

It was Xantine’s turn to anger. ‘Watch your tongue, brother, lest I pull it from that ruin of a throat and watch it myself,’ he warned.

He felt S’janth rouse in his breast at the spike of rage he had inadvertently fed her, circling his consciousness like a sea beast that had tasted a drop of blood in the water.

He is insolent, my sweet, she purred as she coiled herself around him. He will turn against us.

No, Xantine shot back. Not him.

‘I ask for your counsel, Vavisk, because you have shown yourself to be wise. But wisdom comes in many forms. The wisdom to know when to fight, and the wisdom to know when to retreat, when to acquiesce to the desires of your betters.’ Xantine felt S’janth’s presence pulse in his body as his anger blossomed. ‘This is my ship, and the Adored are my warriors. You are my warrior. When I call on you, I expect you to answer me, or else I will return you to Abaddon myself to answer for your crimes.’

Vavisk, for the first time in millennia, was silent. Even the mouths on his neck had ceased their incessant whispering. Red eyes stared in hooded sockets, the gloom rendering them almost black.

Strike him, S’janth whispered. No one can stand against us.

Xantine turned and strode from the room. His right hand was clenching and unclenching, forming a fist and releasing it, without his control.