Taking a deep breath, he physically tried to shake his tiredness from himself, and took his first faltering steps along the monolith-strewn path into the bottom of the gaping gorge.

The medicae augurs bleeped quietly in the stillness of Brother Caduceus's apothecarion, informing him that his patient was responding well to the surgery as they monitored not only Gdolkin's primary systems but also the nineteen implanted organs that were what made him one of the genetically super-engineered warriors of the Adeptus Astartes. Their number was few but it was they that held the Emperor's enemies at bay.

The last connections were being made now from the nerve-endings in Gdolkin's wrist to the electro-impulse receptors in the technoartisan-crafted hand. The iron gauntlet that would now forever take the place of the hand that the Iron-Father had been born with, more than two centuries ago. It might look brand new, but it had in fact been in the Chapter for over two thousand years since its initial creation by the legendary Mars-trained Iron-Father Menestus, during the days of the Dark Crusade. The hand, which in some texts was referred to as the Gauntlet of Menestus, or the Fist of Iron, had survived the centuries intact. This was the hand that had felled the arch-heretic priest of Statholos. Since the fall of Brother Telamon at the Battle of Occas Hive, the bionic hand, which was still infallible in its operation, had lain in the armoury of fortress-monastery Weyland, until the day when it had been selected to be bonded to Iron-Father Gdolkin.

When the cybernetica droid had completed its work, the chirurgeon medicae servo-skull would move in again and staple the cauterised flesh of the Iron-Father's lower arm to the gauntlet interface.

For a moment, Brother-Apothecary Caduceus fancied he saw the fingertips of the hand twitch. It must be an automated response to the test electrical impulses being triggered by the servo-skull.

Lost within the dreams of his trance-state, the Iron-Father slept on.

Anatolus stood, staring in awe at the wonders before him. He would have gasped if he still had the strength. He had emerged from the ravine into a new and wondrous place. The wind-sculpted skeletons of once towering edifices projected from the ash-dust covering the ground in great drifts as far as the eye could see under the roiling sulphur-streaked cloud, crackling with incandescent lightning bursts. He could see corroded red-iron towers in the shadow of the looming, ice-crowned mountains.

A gust of wind blew a flurry of grey acid snow into Anatolus's cowled face. He blinked away the stinging, caustic flakes.

He did not know for certain where he was or what he was surveying, but he had his suspicions. In all his sixteen years he had never seen anything bigger than a land-train ore-crawler, other than the ageless mountains, but he could tell that these structures were ruins on a vast scale. A hundred land-trains could have got lost within their crumbling avenues and ash-swathed chasms.

What he did know, however, was that he was weary to the core: it was only his relentless stubbornness, refusing to admit that he was spent, that kept him on his feet.