He rushed forwards. He was prepared for the breach to be forty feet up a vertical wall. Instead, it opened onto a high gallery. The Word Bearers’ temple was larger than he had expected. His and Aphovos’ squads had entered twenty yards forwards of the main door, and the huge hall extended several yards to Hierax’s right. Its ceiling was another fifty feet up, and was ribbed, stained armourglass. The sick light of the Ruinstorm shone through, refracted into rays that touched on the altar and pews like the blessings of a corrupt god. The wide central aisle sloped upwards until the forward doors, leading to the bridge, were two decks above the aft entrance. The altar stood ten yards from the top of the slope. It was a massive slab of granite, etched deeply with designs that taunted the eye with the suggestion of squirming movement. Dried blood stained the engravings, and a huge, eight-pointed star of iron surmounted the altar. A triforium ran the length of each wall, sloped like the floor. Hierax had to fight off a wave of vertigo as he stepped into the gallery before him. The fane felt more than oddly sloped. Its angles seemed to be adrift from the precepts of architecture, as if the space were floating in its own poisoned reality.

Across from Hierax’s position, melta bombs seared away the shadows of the triforium’s arches and Aphovos’ squad broke through. Aft, a massive explosion blasted the great doors off their hinges and Antalcidas marched into the fane. He was a colossus in black. His sarcophagus bore the same grim colours as the armour of the Destroyers. The blue of the XIII Legion was a splash on the pauldron, a vertical streak down the helm, a mark of honour and allegiance in the midst of the black. The Destroyers were the company of war at its most brutal, the Ultramarines of last resort, and their colours spoke of their grim purpose.

Antalcidas fired straight ahead with his twin-linked hellfire plasma cannonade at first, destroying the central aisle with the flame of suns. Then the Word Bearers retaliated, and he turned his weapons up to the triforia. The traitors had taken up positions in the arches and in the four corners of the fane. Had the Destroyers entered as a single unit, they would have been caught in a withering crossfire. As it was, the Word Bearers outnumbered the Ultramarines two to one, but Hierax and Aphovos’ squads disrupted the cohesion of the ambush.