When they were fifty feet off the Mordians stopped as one, fitted their bayonets and then charged.

A wall of steel swarming as one towards them. Many Swabians lost their nerve and threw down their weapons. Those around Conoe held firm.

Von Horne came straight for them. Like the Cadians, his was an orphaned regiment and tradition, and he carried that loss like a rod of steel through his will. In his hand was a bolt pistol that bucked over and over, each shot striking a traitor down.

He saw Conoe and called out his name.

As he strode up the rubble parapet, a traitor priest, dressed in a long robe embroidered with an embossed golden skull, and a breastplate and shoulder guards of battered carapace, stepped between von Horne and his prey.

‘Step aside,’ the Mordian ordered.

‘You do not order me!’ the priest answered. ‘I am Father Bellona, the Bringer of the Word!’

‘You are a traitor,’ von Horne hissed.

Father Bellona thumbed the power stud of his eviscerator and shouted, ‘For the Emperor!’ as he charged.

Von Horne did not give an inch. His own chainsword was a plain field model, but while it lacked finesse, it was heavy, ­vicious and brutally effective.

The two weapons struck with a spray of sparks. They juddered against each other as both men put their own weight behind the blow. The Mordian met the eyes of the other man and saw fierce defiance there. A weighty conviction that he was in the right.

‘The Emperor has abandoned you all! Your leaders have betrayed you!’ the heretic priest cried. ‘You will all die in darkness, away from the love of the Emperor! You and all your kind! Where is Mordia now?’

The words enflamed von Horne. He thrust the priest back but the wild man came again, blades sparking off each other.

‘You are doomed!’ Bellona roared with every great swing of his eviscerator. ‘You have betrayed the Emperor! There is no hope. You have all been led astray.’

Von Horne had kept his tongue, and now he was on the attack and the priest was parrying desperately. The Mordian was by far the better swordsman. He strode forward, shouting, ‘For Mordia! For the Emperor!’

The priest stumbled on the body of a dead Mordian. In a moment von Horne was upon him.

‘For Mordia!’ he spat as he plunged his chainblade into Father Bellona’s belly. The priest twisted like a fish caught upon a barb.

Von Horne relished his pain before he thumbed the power stud and the churning teeth of his chainsword opened the priest up from navel to neck.

Fighting echoed along every corridor as Minka led her squad down the long narrow staircase past level after level. ‘Unless it changed, the munitions store is on level fifty-two,’ she said.