Terra didn't have sky anymore. It had a lid — hammered iron and smoke — pressed so low you could reach up and take a handful of ash and find someone's name in it.
Kael walked through the crater where a trench had been an hour ago and a lake the day before that. The blast had melted the earth into glass in places, and the glass was already powdered under boot and tread. The dead were everywhere.
Armor in yellow, black, red. Flesh that had stopped being a color. He counted without meaning to: shoulder by shoulder, helms by the angle they'd fallen, vox-clips that still crackled with orders no one would obey any longer.
Counting steadied his hands. Veyra had taught him that. Keep accounting. Keep the world to ledger and line.
A servo-skull buzzed past and dipped in a little apology for existing. The Watcher Above muttered across the back of his mind — a distant ache where her portside arrays had torn free during re-entry support — and settled when he acknowledged the pain. She was still in the fight; that was enough. Everything else could be sorrow later.
Malchion trod behind him with that endless economy of motion that never wasted a step, helm under his arm, left pauldron cracked in a network of white fractures.
Joras stalked on the right, his one hand black to the elbow with oil and blood, a detonator brace strapped up his forearm like rosary beads. Around them the Silent Company moved in a loose crescent, shapes cut from deeper dark even in full daylight.
"Water," Kael said, voice low.
The order went out. The company passed canisters hand to hand. They knelt and lifted helms and poured at the edge of seals so men could drink. Imperial Fists with cracked lips and empty eyes swallowed once, twice, and nodded without gratitude.
They were too tired for gratitude. A White Scar leaned back and let the thin stream wash the grit from his teeth. A Blood Angel with half a wing of gold still left on his pauldron took a single mouthful and then pushed the canister toward a mortal artilleryman whose face had forgotten how to be anything but terrified.
Kael squatted beside a fist in yellow who had stopped breathing between one sentence and the next. The man was still warm. Kael put two fingers to the neck, out of habit and respect, and let the hand stay there long enough to be sure.
He lifted the Fist's hand and crossed it to his breast, turned the helm to face the walls. He recorded the serial plate, spoke the numbers aloud, and Joras read them back. It went on the ledger. It went on the wall of his head where names lived.
"Captain," Malchion said softly. "You need to sit."
"I need to keep moving," Kael said.
"You'll fall," Malchion said.
"Then I'll do it in the right direction," Kael answered.
He rose and the world swam. For five seconds the future split like glass under a hammer. He saw the trench ahead empty, full, burning; he saw himself step left and a shell turn him into red fog; he saw Sigismund dying with his sword raised and no witness. He blinked once and found the path that did not end the way the warp wanted.
"Storm coming," he murmured.
"From the sky?" Joras asked.
"Yes," Kael said, and meant the kind you couldn't see.
They passed a Raven Guard burial party in the next cut — black armor streaked white with ash, faces that didn't make sound. One of them brushed past Kael, stopped, and looked back.
He touched the plate-feather tied to Kael's gorget with two fingers and then lowered his head. Respect, not ceremony. Corax's men understood vows that didn't need to be spoken.
Kael's vox clicked. "Sigismund."
"Varan." The First Captain's voice dragged steel along stone. Behind it, artillery and the hiss of medicae injectors. "Your line holds."
"So does yours," Kael said. "For now."
"For now is all I'm paid for," Sigismund said. "We buy minutes. Dorn makes walls from them."
Kael glanced at the distant golden geometry of the Palace, edges blurred by heat and smoke. "And the bill grows."
"Doesn't it," Sigismund said. There was a pause shaped like a breath someone had forgotten to take and remembered at the last moment. "I watched you kill Perturabo's dog."
"Dravak died proud," Kael said. "A poor trade. Pride for breath."
"He made the error of mistaking inevitability for invincibility," Sigismund said. "You corrected him."
"And paid," Kael said.
"We always pay," Sigismund answered, and the line clicked quiet before it could become confession.
They reached what passed for a field station — a depression that used to be a command bunker and now sent signals from a generator that had finally agreed to work again because a Mechanicum adept had offered it a prayer composed entirely of insults.
Triage posts to one side: slab, blood, a line of men who looked offended by how long their bodies took to die. A Raven Guard apothecary stitched a Scar's abdomen shut with hands that shook in the middle and went steady where the needle kissed flesh.
Kael stepped past all of it and locked his gaze on a Yellow-clad figure sitting on a munitions crate, helm off, cheeks cut in clean, unhandsome lines, gaze fixed on a map that was mostly fire.
Captain Phoros. The sergeant Kael had dragged to his feet an hour earlier stood at his shoulder and read casualty figures in a voice that wanted to be monotone and kept remembering it belonged to a person.
Phoros looked up as Kael approached. His eyes were the hardest kind of tired. "You bought us breathing room."
"You held it," Kael said.
Phoros considered him for a long half-second and then gave the only thing a Fist gives easily. "Acknowledged."
"We can stay on your flank," Kael said, "until reinforcements arrive."
Phoros's mouth did something like try to smile and decide against it.
"Reinforcements," he said, as if someone had told him a story about a place with clean water and he was trying to decide whether kindness lay in believing. "You make your own, Night's Child."
"I'm trying," Kael said.
He left them their map and their cigarettes and their gods. The ground shook under his boots three times like a heart trying to find a rhythm. The third time, it kept beating.
He drifted to the lip of the crater — you drift when armor weighs as much as a man but your bones weigh more — and sat because Malchion was right and there is a dignity in obeying good advice that people mistake for weakness.
The dust swirled at his feet, pooled, calmed. The shadow lay along the ground like an obedient hound too exhausted to do anything but breathe with him.
He dug a canteen from a pouch, drank a mouthful, swilled the grit from his teeth and spat. The spit hit a piece of glass that had been sand and would be sand again and made a sound like rain.
For a heartbeat the absurdity of everything pressed against his ribs from the inside. He let the pressure sit there like a blade you learn to wear because you cannot remove it without bleeding to death.
The five seconds opened again. They did not show seconds. They showed an angle on the Eternity Gate with bodies stacked like bricks and an angel with his wings on fire.
They showed a corridor beneath the Palace where Word Bearers muttered in a language that had never deserved a mouth. They showed Veyra sitting at her desk on the Watcher Above with her pencil and ledger and lungs that had stopped obeying her a lifetime ago.
She looked up and smiled at him. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, only dust remained.
"Captain," Malchion said softly, as if interrupting a prayer he did not want to admit he could hear. "We've scrounged rations from the Twenty-Seventh. Spoiled. Still better than nothing. Thirteen wounded in our line. Seven we can move. Three we can return to duty with stitches, tape, and lies."
"Names," Kael said.
Malchion recited. Kael repeated. Joras typed with one hand and the other was a fist pressed hard against his thigh until blood stopped threatening to fall out through the old scar that never stopped complaining.
The ledger grew. Somewhere in the data core of a ship that had learned how to love, Veyra's columns adjusted to make room.
A shape loomed like a boundary. Sigismund. He didn't walk so much as be a line that your feet understood and aligned with. His armor was a sunset under soot. The sword on his back looked heavier than forgiveness.
"Your men don't sleep," he said by way of greeting.
"They do," Kael said. "I count their breaths to make sure they start again."
Sigismund stood beside him and watched the earth. "I didn't like you. Years ago. It is easier to hate knives when you live in a fortress."
"And now?" Kael asked.
"Now I appreciate sharp edges," Sigismund said. He turned his face a fraction, just enough to show the side that remembered laughter but had forgotten how to invest in it. "You are bleeding."
"I'll stop," Kael said.
"If you don't, I'll nail you to the gate," Sigismund said, deadpan. "As a warning to ours."
Kael almost smiled. "I'll keep that in mind."
They stood a while without talking. Some men are better at silence than others. These two made it into a trade.
When Sigismund did speak, it was as if continuing a conversation that had not started with words. "Dorn thinks in walls. He is not wrong."
"Walls hold people," Kael said. "But fear moves them. I hold that line."
Sigismund's mouth tightened as if an invisible knife had kissed it. "Fear is treacherous."
"So is love," Kael said. "But men will die for both."
Sigismund's hands flexed on nothing. "I watched Sanguinius on the parapet. He looked at the sky as if he could bargain with it."
"Could he?" Kael asked.
"We'll find out," Sigismund said.
The ground thumped. Once. Twice. Not artillery. A different weight. The vox cracked with a sound like static that had learned to laugh and been punished for it.
Joras lifted his head. "Spore-count rising. Ambient toxins spiking. Winds shifting south by five degrees."
Malchion's tone flattened. "Death Guard."
The smell came before the shapes. Sweet, like fruit gone to rot in the heat. Acrid, like old oil burned in a bowl at the foot of an idol. The fog didn't creep; it settled with entitlement. It poured over the lip of the crater and made lacework of the air, beads of wet forming on armor and refusing to fall.
"Seals," Kael said. There was no need. The company had already made the world into a jar for their breath.
Shapes in the fog: heavy, deliberate. The Death Guard did not run. They arrived. Their armor had remembered that it used to be metal and chosen to forgive the flesh growing from it.
Bells stitched to their pauldrons chimed at stomach-height. Flies paid no attention to gunfire and landed on everything with a democratic enthusiasm that almost made Kael admire them.
A voice came out of the mist the way a boil comes out of skin. "Little night. Little blade. It's all right to rest."
Kael stepped forward because you lead from naked ground and not behind a man who has paid you in faith. His sword hung at his side. The shadow climbed his calves and then decided to be polite and went back where it belonged.
"Not today," he said.
The first volley made a noise like wet applause. Rounds hit the trench line and burst into clots that crawled up whatever they touched and tried to climb into gaps.
The Aegis Tenebris purred cold at Kael's throat and something old and unhuman in the plate flexed and the filth browned and fell off.
On the periphery, a mortal gunner screamed and then made a sound Kael recognized from Nostramo's plague wards — begging someone's mother to come beat the ghosts.
"Flamers," Kael said. Joras's smile was all teeth.
The counter-volley was fire. Promethium painted the fog and the fog tried to be a solvent for flame and failed. Shapes howled as rot sizzled.
A Death Guard champion lurched out of the heat, grinning through a helm that had grown two more mouths for the pleasure. He swung a reaper scythe so slowly it almost felt unthreatening until you noticed that everything it touched forgot how to be one thing and became several smaller worse things.
Kael stepped in at the bottom of the swing and let the scythe's moment carry it past. Veilrender bit under the sternum, angled up, ripped the man open like a bag of grain.
The man laughed and tried to scoop himself back in with gloves that had grown too many fingers. Kael twisted and the laughter stopped.
"Captain," Malchion said through the static of burning air, "right flank. They're laying something."
Kael turned his head. A bulbous mortar glistened with mucous and devotion. Crew with bells for teeth fed it shells like eggs. He raised his hand. The shadow ran from his boots and across the ground, a slick of night that made mortar-men lose their footing and memory at the same time.
Joras put a charge under the thing and the explosion made a soft sound, as if it were ashamed of itself, and then went about the work of making the world simpler.
Fog filled his lungs through filters. For a heartbeat he tasted mushrooms and old wood and his grandmother's kitchen when they had run out of money and supper had been whatever did not fight too hard to be eaten.
He blinked away memory and the five seconds opened, ruined, tattered. Futures came stuttering and wrong. He saw himself cut and the wound sprout flowers that smelled like his first knife.
He saw Malchion rot from the left shoulder inward and still keep firing until his fingerbones showed white in a glove that would not let go of duty. He saw Joras laugh with three mouths and ask for more charges.
He gritted his teeth and killed the visions the way you kill vermin. The present asserted itself with a chain of choices. To the left: a group of Fists hunkered in a shell crater, drowning in their own breath.
He signalled. The company moved and made a corridor through filth. The Fists came out with their eyes on their boots like men ashamed to be alive. He touched one on the shoulder as he passed.
The man looked at him and did that soldier thing where emotion learned how to turn into orders so it didn't embarrass anyone.
The fog thinned under pressure of fire and hate. The Death Guard did not break. They receded as if time had decided to be kinder in this one place. When they went, they left gifts: puddles, flies, a feeling in the lungs that wanted to keep the world for itself.
Kael kept the flame going until the trench network was a clean line of black glass. He watched it burn. He did not speak. The smoke seemed to carry screams into other men's heads and let them go around his.
He took the feather of black plate on his gorget between thumb and forefinger and rolled its edge across the pads of his glove, not because it comforted him but because tactile truth helped in a world where nothing kept its shape.
"You're quiet," Malchion said at his shoulder.
"There's nothing to say that makes the air better," Kael said.
Malchion nodded and did the thing he had learned to do instead of speaking: he checked the men nearest him for wounds and lies, changed one man's filter, slapped another's hand away from a blister he'd been worrying like a worry would solve it, and went on.
Sigismund reappeared like a standard you had forgotten you'd planted. There was soot in his hair. That surprised Kael. He had expected the man to bully dirt into choosing a different face to land on.
"You held," Sigismund said.
"You did," Kael said.
"Don't steal my lines," Sigismund said, and there was a notch of humor where the mouth of despair had slipped its tooth.
Kael looked up. The lid of the world had not lifted. It had learned to be heavier. Beyond the cloud, he knew the void still writhed with fleets.
The Watcher Above swung a long arc over the palace, bleeding plasma from her wounded side like a pilgrim who had cut herself to make a point to a god and would not staunch it until the point had been made.
She whispered across his nerves — present, loyal, tired. He let a breath out slow and the ship's hearts pulsed once in answer, and the men around him pretended they had not felt it because it was easier that way.
"More minutes," Sigismund said. "We will make a wall of them yet."
Kael nodded. "Until the wall falls," he said.
Sigismund did not flinch. "And then?"
"Then we fight in the rubble," Kael said. "Where the knives are worth more than the battlements."
Sigismund reached out and touched the plate over Kael's heart in a gesture that might have been insult from another man and was benediction from him. "Stay on my left when it comes."
"You won't like my shadow in your light," Kael said.
Sigismund's mouth went thin. "I've learned to share."
They parted without ceremony. The line breathed in, breathed out. Men pretended to eat because their hands told them the ritual mattered and their stomachs had not kept up.
A scarred medicae sang under his breath and stitched too fast and the stitches held anyway because sometimes the universe honored speed as a kind of prayer.
Kael let himself sink to one knee beside a broken bit of parapet. The ash fell in a slow, slanted rain, making the world look like someone had tried to erase it and lost interest halfway.
He rested Veilrender across his thighs and watched the edge. The light reflected from it was honest. He had loved less for worse reasons.
The five seconds came again — not a picture this time but pressure, like hands pushing him toward the south. He followed the inclination of his head until his eyes found the black boil of the horizon in that direction.
The Death Guard were not done. Their plague towers — ungainly and obscene — crawled like ticks across the cratered earth, banners hanging limp in air that had given up. Behind them, something moved like a sermon that had chosen to be a river.
"They'll try the southern districts next," he said. "Through the hives."
"From the lower reaches?" Malchion asked.
"Yes," Kael said. "Where rust remembers the names of men."
Joras cracked his neck. "Good. I'm tired of clean air."
Kael rose. His knees made a small complaint and a smaller promise. He brushed ash from the lip of his eye-lens and it smeared anyway.
"Back to positions," he said. "Resupply. Burn what needs burning. If something grows that shouldn't, cut it. If something moves that shouldn't, shoot it. If someone speaks in a voice that isn't theirs, make them quiet and apologize later."
"Aye," Malchion said, already moving.
Kael stood a moment longer and watched the black line of the south. The lid of the world pressed down, and Terra rumbled like a beast in a cage too small for what it had to carry. He touched the plate-feather once. The edge of it was cold.
"Keep counting," he murmured — a ritual, a discipline, a promise.
The dust took the words and filed them where the world kept things worth finding again. Then the ground shook, and the night — the Emperor's night — stood up and went back to work.