Helsreach

for several days. Little was left, yet neither side was giving ground.

'My princeps…'

No more lectures. I do not care.

'

No more lectures.

I

do not care.'

'My princeps,' Valian repeated, 'new contact. Behind us.'

She spun in the fluid, fish-like and alert.

Stormherald

followed with ponderous slowness, its fortress-legs thudding down onto the ground. The cityscape view through the Titan's eyes panned, showing nothing but devastation.

'The scanner blur is either several walkers together, or a single engine of our size.'

The adept hunched by the auspex console turned to regard the pilot crew with three bionic eyes, each with a lens of dark green glass. A blurt of machine-code disagreed with Lonn's appraisal.

[]

Negative. Thermal signature registers distinct single pulse. [ ]

One enemy engine.

That isn't possible, she thought, but never let it reach her vocalisers. An uneasy tremor was running through the Titan's bones, and she felt it as keenly as she'd once felt the wind on her skin in another lifetime.

'My princeps, we must disengage,' Lonn said, staring out into the burning ironyard. 'We need to rearm and cool the plasma core in standard sustained venting procedure.'

I know that better than you, Lonn.

'

I

know that better than you, Lonn.'

But I am not abandoning a district I have spent four nights fighting to hold.

'

But

I

am not abandoning a district

I

have spent four nights fighting to hold.'

'My princeps, there's precious little left standing to defend,' Lonn pressed. 'I repeat my recommendation to withdraw and rearm.'

No. I am sending

Regal

and

Ivory Fang

north to hunt the inbound enemy engine and confirm with visual scanning.

'

No. I am sending

Regal

and

Ivory Fang

north to hunt the inbound enemy engine and confirm with visual scanning.'

Lonn and Carsomir shared a glance from across the command deck. Both men were restrained in their control thrones, and both men wore the same expression of frustrated doubt.

'My princeps,' Carsomir tried, but he was cut off.

'See? They move.' On the hololithic display screen, the runes denoting the scout Titans

Regal

and

Ivory Fang

broke away from their perimeter-stalking patrol to the west, and strode northward in search of the incoming thermal pulse.

'My princeps, we do not have the ammunition reserves required to inflict destruction-level damage on an enemy engine of comparable size to us.'

'

I

am venting the heart-core's excess fusion matter and flushing the heat exchangers.' Even as she vocalised the orders, she was sending empathic pulses through her links to make it so.

'My princeps, that is not enough.'

'He is right, my princeps,' Carsomir had turned in his throne, and was looking back at her fluid tank now. 'You are too close to

Stormherald's

wrath. Return to us and focus.'

'We are defended by three Reavers and our own scout screen. Be silent.'

'Two Reavers, my princeps.'

Yes. Two. She pulled back from the immersion of rage. Yes… two.

Bound in Blood

was silent and dead, its power core cooling and its princeps voiceless. In her confused thinking, she did not mean to vocalise her next words.

'We have lost seven engines in one week of battle.'

'Yes, my princeps. Prudence would serve us best now. If the auspex is true, we must withdraw.'

She floated in her coffin, hearing the curious humanity in their voices. Such emotion. Such curious intensity, affecting their speech tones. She recognised it as fear, without truly recalling what the sensation felt like.

'We have killed almost twenty of the foe's engines… but

I

concede. Sound the withdrawal as soon as the Warhounds have confirmation.'

* * *

T

he first

I

mperial

engine to bear witness to the

Godbreaker

was

Ivory Fang.

It stalked fast and low on its backwards-jointed legs, the side- to-side pitch of its stomping gait adding a feral, if mechanical, grace to its dawn hunt.

Warhound-class. And it suited the name, lone wolfing its way through the wrecked industrial sector, striding around the shells of tanks destroyed in the week-long straggle for the Rostorik Ironyard. Sometimes, its hooved feet would crunch down on the soft meat of burned bodies and render them into pulped smears along the ground. Dead skitarii, Guardsmen, factorum workers and greenskins littered the district.

Ivory Fang

was commanded most ably by a princeps by name of Haven Havelock. Princeps Havelock dreamed, as did most of his ilk, of one day mastering a great battle-Titan, and perhaps even one of Invigilata's precious few Imperators. His fellow princeps - equals and superiors alike - spoke well of him, and he knew his place in the Legio as a solid, reliable scout-Titan commander was assured, valued, and deserved.

Patience was foremost among his virtues - patience and cunning. That reasoned, meticulous hunting instinct bled through the mind-bond into

Ivory Fang.

Twinned, man and machine were past masters at the kind of deep-urban stalks where Warhound Titans most excelled.

The rough link between Titan commanders maintained throughout the city had suffered just as Imperial vox had suffered, but Havelock was reassured by the fragments of meaning that pulsed through the chaos. If there truly was an enemy scrap-Titan out there, it was nothing the battle group could not