They whirled down the cybernation hall like dancers, trading blows. Henricos represented a greater challenge than all the Compulsories Aximand had doomed that day, combined. The Medusan’s skill was formidable. His augmetic strength far exceeded Aximand’s. His speed was breathtaking.

For a thrilling instant, Aximand wondered if he was, at last, experiencing transhuman dread for himself.

They fought their way towards the centre of the hall, where a great bio-stasis generator stack rose like a temple altar, gilded and covered with angelic figures. The glass-packed bodies radiated out from it, stack upon suspended stack. Huge white statues, demi-gods shrouded in long capes, bright as snow, knelt in obeisance before the central block.

The silvered-black armour of the Iron Hands warrior gleamed like slicked oil in the Precinct’s weird light. His blade moved like a ribbon of light. Aximand got around the expert guard, and delivered a glancing blow with his hilt that cracked the chest plating of Henricos’s wargear. Henricos responded by planting his feet, locking their blades in a rigid cruciform, and shoulder-barging Aximand.

Little Horus lurched backwards and crashed into the nearest row of cybernators. Glass sleeves shattered, and showers of fragments flew up and caught the light like spring petals. Cybernation tubes cannoned into one another, cracking and disintegrating. Some were pushed clear of the gravimetric support fields and fell, smashing on the polished metal floor. Power relays shorted out. Desiccated bodies tumbled out into the air like bundles of roots and twigs.

Bion Henricos crunched over broken glass and dry bones to get at Aximand. He shoved suspended glass sleeves out of his way. There was a bitter stink of resins and preserving spices. Aximand struggled to get up. Flickers of energy, dark and unhealthy, were flaring like troubled synapses out from the disrupted area of the Mausolytic array. The coloured bursts writhed and fired out into the serene, golden layers of the undamaged structure. Odd harmonics, like the low moaning of a thousand voices relayed by a low quality vox signal, filled the hall.

Henricos reached Aximand. Mourn-it-allcut him across the eyes, shattering one lens unit, and raked a gouge down his stomach and hip. Henricos struck with a swing that would have severed Aximand’s head if he had been a hand-span closer. He drove the Medusan warleader back across the carpet of ancient, pulverised glass and mummified scraps. His next blow wounded Henricos in the thigh. Something silvery, like liquid mercury, sobbed out.

Henricos put him on the ground. Aximand wasn’t quite sure how he’d been hit, but the impact rattled his brain inside his skull and filled his mouth and nostrils with blood. He was face down, groping for his fallen sword, concussed and dazed and vulnerable.

He looked up, wondering why Henricos hadn’t finished him. Amindaza of Tithonus was locking swords with his opponent. Amindaza had fought his way into the Hall, and Geraddon wasn’t far behind. The loud and repeated discharge of weapons from outside the entry space suggested that the assault had washed into the main area of the Precinct, and that the Compulsories were in retreat.

Amindaza had been wounded on his way into the Hall, and his arm was slow. His arrival and interception had saved Aximand, but it had also doomed Amindaza. Henricos was a far superior swordsman. Before Aximand, dazed and spitting blood, could get back up, Henricos had delivered a blow that split Amindaza from his left shoulder to his right hip. He was simply bisected, diagonally, in one stroke. The sections of him fell hard, messily, in an apocalyptic release of blood.

Geraddon flew at him, and Henricos knocked him aside. Geraddon smashed into another row of caskets.

Aximand put Mourn-it-allthrough Henricos’s spine so that the tip shattered the aquila on the Medusan’s breastplate.

Henricos fell to one knee, and then onto his face. Aximand knelt on his back and cut his helmet off. Henricos’s pale face was turned to the side, cheek to the floor, the white skin flecked with beads of dark red blood.

‘Pray this death takes you, traitor,’ said Aximand. ‘Other deaths would be less forgiving.’

Henricos gurgled something.

‘What?’ asked Aximand, pressing his blade against the neck of the Iron Hands warleader.

‘You are not the trophy we hoped for,’ Henricos whispered.

‘Trophy?’

‘Knew we couldn’t beat you, wanted to hurt you instead. Thought… thought he would value the Mausolytic Precinct above all, and lead this segment attack personally.’

‘This was supposed to be a trap for Lupercal?’

‘May he burn forever.’

Aximand laughed.

‘But your master is a coward and a traitor,’ murmured Henricos, ‘and all he sends is you.’

‘It would appear I’m quite enough,’ replied Aximand. ‘What did you hope to do?’

Henricos gurgled.

‘I said, what kind of trap is one flesh-spare warrior?’

Henricos did not reply. All the life had drained out of him.

Aximand rose, and kicked the corpse.

Geraddon had got back up.

‘What was he saying?’ he asked.

‘Nonsense,’ Aximand replied. ‘Simply nonsense. He was desperate.’

‘It was supposed to be a trap,’ said Geraddon, ‘so why was he alone?’

The sound of breathing had come back. Aximand turned slowly and realised that it was simply the background noise of the Mausolytic Hall, the slow, throbbing murmur of the cybernation system. It was the pulse of the sleeping dead.

He felt like a fool. When the operation was over, he would meditate. He would clean his mind of the fears and dreams that had accumulated. He would purify his thoughts and expel his weaknesses. To serve the Warmaster, he needed to be an even-tempered weapon.

He had let himself slacken. It was time he recommitted his mind and made himself truer to the image of Lupercal.

Aximand opened the vox, and took stock. Large portions of the Precinct were in Sixteenth Legion hands. Grael Noctua reported the West Hall and the approaches secure. Aximand ordered squads forward into the East Hall, to his position. He ordered all access ways closed.

He looked at the cybernation array around them. A little damage had been done, but not too much. The facility was essentially intact, and a little pressure applied to Dweller technadepts would soon have repairs completed.

The huge white statues of shrouded demi-gods, bright as snow, that had been kneeling in obeisance around the central great bio-stasis generator stack were gone.

‘Wait–’ Aximand began.

The White Scars killteam rushed them. The five killers of the Fifth Legion had thrown off the white cloaks they had used for concealment. They had used chalk dust or some funereal powder to mask the crimson edges of their armour. Their helms were crowskull, the Corvus pattern. It seemed Lev Goshen had been badly mistaken. The White Scars didhave the patience to wait. What on the open field was fast hit and run became, in city fighting, stealth and swift ambush.

Grael Noctua’s warning had been shrewd.

The first one was on him. It was Hibou Khan. Aximand identified him from his rank and company pins. This was the practice of burkutchi, to ‘cut the head’. The term came from the Chogorisian art of hunting with eagles, the great akwilluh, using the birds to draw out and isolate the bull leader of a herd. Once the bull was dead, the herd was broken.

It had been their intention to decapitate the Sixteenth. Thwarted, they were going to make do with other prey: other bulls, junior bulls, company captains.

Aximand smashed Hibou away, and broke the White Scar’s blade on Mourn-it-all’sedge. Another Scar lunged in. Aximand parried and heard Geraddon cry out as two blades punched through him. Aximand drove his sword down through the cap of the next snow-white crowskull helm that came at him. Suddenly, not all the red decorating the White Scar wargear was scarlet lacquer. He reached for his bolter.