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The din of striking metal grew louder but there were no enemies lurking in the shadows, only a steel-runged

ladder extending into blackened depths.

Tsu’gan made his hand into a flat blade, giving the all-clear, then splayed his fingers and made another fist.

Half of his squad would accompany him into the darkness; the rest would remain on the surface and protect

the exit. Praetor and N’keln would remain too; the Terminator too bulky and cumbersome to fit into the tight

confines suggested below, the captain too valuable to risk on a scouting mission into the unknown.

Extending two fingers, Tsu’gan chopped down twice in rapid succession. Tiberon and Lazarus, waiting at

the periphery, took the ladder one-by-one and plunged below. Once the two Salamanders were down, he

raised one finger, made a fist, and then raised two and chopped down twice again. Tsu’gan descended next,

knowing that Honorious and Iagon would follow as rearguard.

Keeping luminators snuffed, the Salamander combat squad moved slowly down a tight corridor that reeked

of dank and copper. A strange pall pervaded the air: invisible but tangible, as if a second skin was forming

over their battle-plate.

Tsu’gan followed the clamour of metal, still persisting, but seemingly farther away than when he’d first

heard it in the hall above. Though his optical spectra were set to night-vision and then infra-red, the dark was

oddly impenetrable as if subsuming any and all ambient light. Only sound guided him and his squad as they

ranged cautiously through cloying shadows.

“Sire,” hissed Honorious.

Tsu’gan whirled around to face him, incensed that he had broken vox-silence.

The flamer trooper had stopped dead and was aiming his weapon down a sub-corridor branching off from

the one the combat squad was traversing.

“You break vox-silence at my command only, trooper,” Tsu’gan snarled in a low voice.

Honorious turned, nonplussed.

“I didn’t speak, sergeant.”

“Sire,” rasped Tiberon.

The battle-brother was at point, intent on the way ahead and seemingly oblivious to the fact that a large gap

was developing between him and the rest of the squad.

A reprimand formed on Tsu’gan’s lips, but he didn’t give it voice.

“Squad halt,” he said into the comm-feed, instead. Iagon’s auspex blazed into life, multiple signatures

plaguing the hazy screen at once.

“Contacts!” he snapped, swinging his bolter around to aim at shadows.

“I have movement,” hissed Lazarus.

“Over here…” whispered a voice that Tsu’gan didn’t recognise. He trained his combi-bolter in its direction,

finger poised over the jet-release for the weapon’s flamer.

“Sire,” Honorious’ voice came again, far away this time, but the battle-brother was crouched right next to

him in a ready-position. There was no way he could have actually spoken and it sound that distant.

“Sir, multiple contacts closing…” said Iagon, jerking his bolter back and forth as he sought targets.

The reek of dank and copper grew stronger.

Tiberon was still going. He was almost lost from Tsu’gan’s sight altogether. For a moment the brothersergeant

gave in to something approaching fear, filled with a deep knowing that if Tiberon was swallowed

by the darkness, he would never come back and they would never be able to find him.

“Hold, brother. Hold!” Tsu’gan cried, but his shout was smothered by the maddening din of hammered metal

and the warnings of his squad.

“Over here…”

Clank!

That voice again; the one Tsu’gan didn’t know…

“Enemy movement! Engaging!”

Clank!

Tiberon fading into the darkness ahead…

“Contacts closing, no target!”

Clank!

His mind spinning…

“Sire…”

Clank!

The sudden compulsion to make it stop… “Sire, help us…”

Clank!

The bolter in his hands, pressed against his temple, tool of his salvation…

Clank!

The only way to end it…

“Please, make it stop,” Tsu’gan gasped. The muzzle felt cold against his sweat-drenched forehead. The

sound of the slowly squeezing trigger was as deafening as thunder.

“Vulkan’s fire burns in my breast,” a powerful voice intoned, eclipsing the beat of hammered metal. “With

it I shall smite the foes of the Emperor!”

Sensation, vague and indistinct at first, returned to Tsu’gan. He was faintly aware of a reassuring presence

nearby, a lodestone to which he could anchor himself.

“For we are the Angels of the Emperor, servants of the Golden Throne, and we shall know no fear.”

Tsu’gan caught hold of the voice, stentorian and commanding, grasping it like a rope of salvation. A

refulgent figure stood beside him, a crackling stave held in his outstretched hand.

“From the fires of battle are we born.”

No, not a stave — the warrior, sable-armoured with a face of death, held a hammer.

“Upon the anvil of war are we tempered.”

A blazing aura roiled from it like a fiery wave, chasing down the darkness and burning back the apparitions

that tried to clench to them like parasites.

“Speak the words!” Brother-Chaplain Elysius snapped. “Speak them and find your courage, Salamanders!”

Tsu’gan and his squad uttered the words as one, and the fog of insanity lifted.

The Chaplain smacked a reassuring hand against Tsu’gan’s pauldron.

“Good enough, brother-sergeant,” he said. “I will take the lead from here. Restore your battle-helm and

follow me.”

Tsu’gan looked down at the battle-helm cradled in his grasp, agog. He hadn’t even realised he’d removed it.

Wiping away the sweat that was very real, he set his helmet back on and obeyed. The rest of his brothers had

come to their senses as well, and followed with weapons ready. Even Tiberon had stopped. He let the

Chaplain catch up to him before falling in behind.

Elysius had secured Vulkan’s Sigil to his belt, though the artefact still glowed faintly with remembered

power. Undoubtedly, the Chaplain had saved their lives. Whatever malfeasance preyed upon these lower

catacombs had very nearly forced Tsu’gan and his squad to turn their guns on themselves. A few moments

more and they would have done.

“Heretics are close,” Elysius rasped, his crozius arcanum igniting like a flaming torch in his mailed fist.

Tsu’gan realised that the heavy metal clank had returned to normal. It was still loud, and emanated from a

sealed hatch ahead of them.

A few steps from the hatch, the Chaplain brought up his bolt pistol.

“Steel yourselves,” he warned.

The strange malaise affecting the tunnel returned but lingered at the periphery of Tsu’gan’s thoughts as if

unwilling to press further. The brother-sergeant gripped his bolter for reassurance, running a gauntleted

finger over the flame icon embossed on the stock. Muttering a litany of warding, Tsu’gan opened his eyes

and saw that the Chaplain had stepped aside from the hatch.

The entrance was locked and barred.

Tsu’gan beckoned Tiberon and Lazarus, who came to the front of the squad with krak grenades primed.

After affixing the explosives with a dull, metallic thunk, the two Salamanders fell back. Honorious moved

ahead of them, but kept low and at a safe distance. Tsu’gan pressed his body against the wall. He noted the

Chaplain did the same on the opposite side, trusting to solid steel rather than his rosarius this time.

Squad in position, spread either side of the tunnel and outside the blast funnel, Tsu’gan drew his hand across

his gorget in a slashing motion.

Aiming down his bolter’s targeter, Iagon fired a single shot into one of the mag-locked krak grenades. A

second later the hatch exploded.

Smoke and fire surged down the corridor in a plume, sending pieces of shrapnel brushing against the

Salamanders’ armour.

Stalking through the dirt cloud, Chaplain Elysius was the first to enter the room beyond the hatch, Tsu’gan

close behind him. They emerged into a metal-bound vault, dimly lit and filled with the stink of copper and

iron. Rust streaked the walls like blood. Barbed hooks embedded in the metal resonated with remembered

agony. Pitted manacles dangled slackly like hanged men.

This was a place of death and horror.

Crunching servos heralded a sudden attack by a quartet of ghoulish drones. Grey-faced, skin webbed by livid

red veins, the automatons were an analogous but twisted variant on the servitors from the Archimedes Rex.

The wretched parodies screamed in agony as they came at the interlopers, as if their bodies were still in pain

from the invasive techno-surgeries employed to fashion them. Pain synapses flared with every motion,

fuelling a terrible rage, only leavened by the shedding of blood and the rending of flesh.

Swollen with grotesque musculature, the monstrous ghoul-drones were the size of ogryn. They barrelled for

the black-armoured warrior suddenly in their midst. Elysius ignored them, bent on an ironclad figure toiling

over some device at the back of the chamber, apparently oblivious to the fight.

Tsu’gan only caught flashes of the mysterious artificer between the gaps in the Chaplain’s body as he

moved: a servo-arm attached to the generator on the figure’s back; the colour of the dirty steel; yellow and

black chevrons framing the armour; gilded greave plates fringed with rust around the bolts; pipes and cables,

serpentine and alive; hydraulic gases venting and spitting like a curse.

Evil emanated from this being. Every blow from its incessant hammering was like the beat of a fell heart.

Even as he closed, Tsu’gan couldn’t tell what the Warsmith laboured at so furiously, smothered as it was by

thick shadows and an even thicker sheet of coal-black plastek.

A bolter flare lit up Tsu’gan’s left flank as a ghoul-drone was torn apart in a welter of oil and viscera. His

battle-brothers were covering him as the sergeant shadowed his Chaplain, knowing that he couldn’t leave

Elysius to face the Warsmith alone.

Another ghoul-drone was destroyed, engulfed by Honorious’ flamer. Its biologically unstable frame

collapsed hideously in the intense heat. It muscles cooked and burst in blood-red torrents. A third beast

dragged lengths of saw-toothed chain from the stump of its arm. Hot bile rose in his throat as Tsu’gan

realised the chains were actually part flesh, part sinew and that some of the teeth were human bone. Boltgun

roaring, he sundered the abomination and stamped over the remains. Punching a fourth, he knocked the

creature aside to try and stay in the Chaplain’s wake. Gore and charred meat peppered Tsu’gan’s armour in a

grisly spray. Maintaining momentum, Iagon had punctured the ghoul-drone’s cranium with a bolt round that

exploded it from within and obliterated the eight-pointed star branded onto its face.

The ghouls were all dead, but their hellish master endured still.

At last, the Warsmith seemed to realise his peril and reached for a combination melta-bolter on a work-slab

alongside him. Lightning arcing from his crozius arcanum, Elysius severed the clutch of cables linking the

weapon to the Iron Warrior’s fusion generator. Undeterred, the Warsmith spun about, revealing a reaper

cannon morphing from the constituent parts of his right arm. It glowered evilly as the long-gun

corporealised, a hot yellow line searing from the vision slit in the angular battle-helm encasing his head.

Elysius swung again, but the Warsmith swatted the blow away with his left arm, a bionic limb like one of its

legs — this thing was more machine than man. Pistons heaved, spewing gaseously as power was fed to the

augmetic. The arm ended in a razor-edged claw that the Iron Warrior used to split the Chaplain’s battleplate.

Gasping in pain, Elysius brought up his bolt pistol only for the servo-arm, curled over the Warsmith’s right

pauldron, to snap down viperously. The Chaplain screamed as his wrist was seized and slowly crushed. All

the while, the reaper cannon was slowly resolving. Coagulated flesh and iron blended into solid, dull metal.

Inner mechanisms were forming, the hellish strain of the obliterator virus rapid and pervasive. If fully forged

and allowed to fire, that weapon could shred the Salamanders into flesh and chips of battle-plate.

Determined that wouldn’t happen, Tsu’gan reached Elysius and waded into the melee with a roar.

Unloading a full clip into the Warsmith’s body, he watched between the sporadic flash-bang of explosive

rounds as the Iron Warrior bucked and jerked against the fusillade. The transmutation halted, the need for

self-preservation briefly outweighing the desire to kill.

Elysius staggered, dropping his pistol as his wrist was released. Battered, the Iron Warrior fell back, howling

in pain and fury. The sound resonated metallically around the vault. There was something ancient and

hollow about it, images of jagged metal and age-old rust surfacing in Tsu’gan’s mind. The brother-sergeant

followed up, ramming in a fresh clip as he moved, and was about to issue a lethal head shot when Elysius

stopped him. “Hold!”

Tsu’gan’s blood was up; he wasn’t about to relent. “The traitor must be executed.”

“Hold, I will not be merciful if you disobey,” the Chaplain retorted. Dark fluids were running down a gash in

his plastron, flowing more vigorously as he staggered forwards, and his wrist hung limply at his side.

“Lower your weapon, brother-sergeant.” Though laboured and rasping, Elysius’ tone made it clear this was

an order as he approached the supine Warsmith. The Iron Warrior’s breastplate was wretched with holes and

scorch marks. Inert and unconscious, he was barely alive. “I want to interrogate him first,” the Chaplain

added, “To find out what he knows about this bastion, its purpose and what happened to the garrison.”

Tsu’gan stood down, aware that behind him his squad had the room secured.

Elysius spoke into the comm-feed.

“Brother-captain, have flamers brought down to the vault. We need to scour the taint from its walls,” he said,

spitting the last remark. “And I need my tools,” he added. “The prisoner and I have much to discuss.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

I

Those Who Lived…

There was something strangely familiar about the human settlement under the earth. It was based on a series

of honeycombed chambers of varying height and depth, resembling a shantytown in part, replete with habshacks,

corrugated work sheds and lived-in tubular pipes appended to some of the larger chambers, the

makeshift structures layered upon each other like the strata of some half-developed world. Exposed metal

and plastek peeked out from beneath calcified layers of rock and decades, perhaps centuries, of ingrained