The traitors disagreed far more strongly with the worship of the Emperor than Felix did. All the fine architecture made to honour Him had been brought low, and so most of Espandoria Tertio lay in ruins.

Felix had his orders to make directly for the central cathedral. He led his company down the main street, rebuffing calls for aid and avoiding entanglement in the localised battles taking place all over the city. Bombardment damage from the invasion was evident everywhere in the collapsed buildings and broken roads, but there was a state of advanced decay visible that war alone could not explain.

Plascrete rotted on its reinforcement spars. Evil-looking vines coated buildings whose walls were dangerously tilted on sinking foundations. There were bodies everywhere; Felix and his warriors passed stacks of blackened corpses. It looked like whoever had been gathering the dead had given up some time ago, for there were a great many more individuals in the streets, all bearing signs of sickness. A deadened atmosphere stifled the avenues. Bursts of isolated gunfire echoed down empty streets. Aircraft and grav-craft raced overhead. Servo-skull probes bobbed in and out of buildings. Together, the noises of machines and the march of feet as tanks and Space Marines came into the city from the west should have been loud and sharp. But the city soundscape was dull, brittle almost. There was a feeling of something malevolent watching them. Several times they started at the sensation of unseen presences. Some of the Space Marines were all for searching the buildings, but Felix disallowed it.

‘We are not to be sidetracked. We make for the Cathedral Magnifica at the centre of the city as fast as possible,’ he told his men. ‘We must go swiftly. Be on your guard for ambush. Do not engage in any other circumstance.’

Felix soon discovered that there were civilians in Espandoria Tertio.

Amid the filthy ruins of their homes, people survived. They were emaciated where they weren’t bloated by disease. There was not a healthy soul among them, but they lived, and they cheered amid their coughs at the warriors who had saved them. Already medicae teams pressed well into the centre of Espandoria Tertio’s prime civitas, in some cases ranging ahead of the battleforce and putting their lives in danger. Fighting was dying down, and increasingly the sounds of gunfire receded further into the east, changing from those of battle to the single shot reports of the Emperor’s Mercy.

Gaunt faces peered from windows. The civilians were starved and brutalised. But there was defiance in them.

Mankind’s spirit inspired Felix. These people had no special gifts, no enhancements, nothing, and yet they had survived. These ordinary men and women had suffered the worst the galaxy had to throw at them. It humbled him that he would spend his life in service to this species.