Antalcidas advanced, rotating left and right, blanketing the fane with cannonade fire. Legionaries from all three squads fired rad missiles into the cloud. Nothing could live in the forwards half of the fane. Hierax’s auto-senses tracked the spiking rad levels. The phosphex cloud flowed closer, swallowing the last of the Word Bearers, edging towards the Destroyers. When the leading edge was less than ten yards away, he spoke to the Dreadnought again.

‘Time to cleanse the battlefield, venerable brother. We still have to reach the bridge. All squads, prepare for atmospheric voiding.’

Antalcidas aimed the cannonade towards the ceiling and opened fire, vaporising the armourglass. A gale shrieked upwards. Deprived of oxygen, the phosphex burned itself out. Flames extinguished and smoke rushed into the void. The space of the fane became clear and cold, an irradiated waste of incinerated corpses.

The doors to the bridge were still open. The Ultramarines advanced as an impassable wall of black death. ‘Burn everything that moves,’ Hierax said.

‘Not the controls?’ Kletos asked.

‘No. We have a use for this ship.’

The Destroyers crossed the threshold, and bathed the bridge with flame.

They came at Guilliman with their dark blades.

The Word Bearer in front of Guilliman was an apostle of madness. The grey flesh of his face and clean-shaven skull was covered in a dense inlay of runes. The bones of his head were beginning to distort, sprouting growths that might develop into horns, or into more eyes. Left hand outstretched, he unleashed a blast of warp flame at Guilliman’s face and lunged forwards, bringing the athame up to stab at the seam of the primarch’s armour beneath the arm. At Guilliman’s back, he sensed the other attacker springing to plunge the knife into the back of his neck.

His mind raced ahead of the actions. The ambush was strong. The absolute certainty was injury. The absolute need was to avoid being hit by the athames.

Practical: choose your wound.

Guilliman threw himself into the blast, turning his face to the side. His flesh burned and rippled. His skull rang like a bell. In the depths of the fire, there was a voice, inhuman, knowing, a speaker of blood and ruined fates, a whisperer of bones.

Your path is chosen.

Needle-sharp, precise as doubt, the words sank into his mind, a sliver shooting past his defences as surely as the De Profundis splinters had struck the Samothrace.

Deep in the blaze, moving forwards, half blinded by flames, Guilliman fired the Arbitrator. In the same instant, the rear attacker slashed at his neck. The passage of the athame breathed against his skin, the nature of the blade so powerful, so toxic, he could feel its presence even through the pain of the warp fire. The Apostle’s primitive blade scarred ceramite and cut through layers of ablative armour.