Warhammer - Ultramarines 03 - Dead Sky, Black Sun (McNeill, Graham)

by Graham McNeill

  'Brought big iron man here.' said the Lord of the Unfleshed. 'Take us away too!'

  Uriel shared a look with Pasanius.

  'What do you think?' said Uriel, a ghost of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

  'I think that wherever the thing takes us, it's got to better than here, captain.' said Pasanius, pushing off the rocks and clutching his wounds.

  'I hope you're right.'

  'Well, it's either that or we stay and get flattened by Toramino's artillery.'

  'Good point.' agreed Uriel, turning to the Lord of the Unfleshed. 'Gather the Tribe. We are leaving.'

  The Lord of the Unfleshed nodded, its massive shoulders heaving with the motion. It threw back its head and let out a rising howl.

  Within seconds, the Unfleshed broke off from their grisly feasting and joined their leader. Less than a dozen of them still lived, and Uriel was shocked at how few had survived the mission to Khalan-Ghol. Ardaric Vaanes had been right when he said that most, if not all, of them would die here.

  Uriel nodded. 'All right, let's get the hell out of here.'

  For a moment Honsou thought he was dead. Once he realised he wasn't, he thought he was blind.

  All he could feel was pain and all he could hear were heavy thumps of artillery impacting somewhere above him. He sat up, feeling a stinging in his eyes and reached up to the vacuum seals on his armour's gorget. They were cracked and useless, so he wrenched his helmet off, realising that he wasn't blind after all, but simply had clotted lumps of blood in his eyes.

  Honsou scooped the clumps of sticky matter from his face and spat out a mouthful of dirt.

  He wiped his face again, angry that he still couldn't see out of one eye. As he probed further he realised there a was good reason for this. Part of his head had been pulverised by the impact of the bolt round, and the left side of his face was a burned and bloody ruin, his eye a glutinous, fused mess.

  Dizziness and nausea swamped him, but he put his silver arm out to steady himself, giving a short bark of laughter as he saw that it was smooth and unblemished despite the fury of the battles he had fought since it had been grafted to him.

  'Damn you, Ventris, that's twice you've blinded me with my own blood.'

  Honsou clambered to his knees, trying to piece the last few moments of the battle together. He remembered facing Ventris, and the Ultramarines' desperate charge that had ended in a hail of bolter fire.

  Or, at least, it should have ended that way. The luck of the damned was with them and they had survived long enough to kill a pair of his warriors. As foolishly heroic as their charge had been, it had bought them moments at best.

  But then the monsters had attacked.

  Honsou still felt a shiver of revulsion as he thought back to their unimaginable hideousness. Their corpses were strewn all around him and as he pulled himself free of the rubble that buried his legs and swayed unsteadily to his feet, he was amazed that such incredibly abhorrent creatures could live.

  He had heard of the Unfleshed, but had never dreamed they could have been so fearsome as to almost be his undoing.

  The last thing he remembered was catching a snapshot of Ventris aiming a bolter for his head and twisting to get out of the way. Honsou remembered seeing the muzzle flash, a sensation of bright, burning pain in his face, then... then nothing until this moment.

  'Iron within!' he shouted.

  There was no answer and he knew that all the warriors who had accompanied him to the Halls of the Savage Morticians were dead. He put them from his mind and admiringly surveyed the destruction around him.

  Nothing remained of the chamber, its entire structure laid waste by the daemonic battle and the continuous bombardment from Toramino's grand batteries.

  A flash of movement caught his eye and he picked up his axe before making his way unsteadily towards its source. An Iron Warrior, trapped beneath the half-devoured corpse of another, moaned in pain.

  Honsou lifted the body from the buried Iron Warrior and saw that it was his newest lieutenant, Cadaras Grendel. The armour of the warrior's legs had been torn away and great bites had ripped away a chunk of his quadriceps muscle.

  'Still alive, Cadaras Grendel?' said Honsou.

  'Aye.' replied the warrior. 'I don't die easily. Help me up.'

  Honsou reached down and pulled Cadaras Grendel to his feet. The grim-faced killer retrieved his weapon from the ground and checked its action before saying.' It's over then?'

  Honsou shrugged. 'Maybe. I don't know. It looks like it, though.'

  Cadaras Grendel nodded. 'What about Toramino?'

  'What about him?'

  'I still want to kill him.'

  'Don't we all?' said Honsou, looking through a great rent torn in the side of the mountain. Blue fire still hammered his fortress from the sorcerous towers that surrounded it. Toramino's artillery captains were thorough, thought Honsou, to have broken open a mountain.

  He turned towards a gleaming pile of twitching metal lying beside the entrance to the passageway that had led to the elevator cage. Recognising a discarded set of bronze claws that lay beside the pile, he strode over towards the jumble of metal.

  As he drew closer he saw that it was no simple debris, but the still-living remains of his champion. Onyx lay twitching on the ground, his black armour cracked and shorn from his body, his daemonic flesh ripped from the metal of his skeleton by the monsters.

  The daemonic symbiote's immaterial flesh had housed a scion of the warp and without a body, it had been cast from its shell. All that remained of Honsou's champion was a collection of loosely connected, silvered limbs, brass pistons and a bronze skull with a slowly dulling silver light weeping from the eye-sockets.

  'Are you in there, Onyx?' asked Honsou.

  'For now.' answered Onyx, his voice little more than a rasping whisper.

  'What happened to you?'

  'The monsters...' hissed the creature, only just holding off its dissolution. They unfleshed me, gave the daemon in me nowhere to hide. It fled and left me like this...'

  Cadaras Grendel joined Honsou and said, 'This the daemon thing you wanted me to watch out for?'

  'Aye.' nodded Honsou.

  'Don't look like much now.'

  'No, he doesn't, does he?' said Honsou, turning away and limping towards the centre of the chamber.

  'What you want me to do with it?' shouted Cadaras Grendel after his retreating back.

  'Get rid of it.' said Honsou with a dismissive wave.

  He clambered painfully over the many piles of rabble and bodies that littered the cavern, hearing the hot flash of Cadaras Grendel's melta gun and knowing that Onyx was no more.

  The centre of the cavern looked like the epicentre of some great orbital bombardment, the ground torn up and gouged with the fury of the battle that had taken place. Bodies and wreckage filled the place, so smashed and unrecognisable as to give no clue as to what they had been in life.

  A shorn suit of power armour, gigantic in its proportions, lay at the edge of a deep crater and before it lay the Heart of Blood. The massive daemon's body was a dull, smouldering red, the colour of threatening embers that can leap to life in an instant. Its chest heaved with sated lust and as Honsou watched, the fiery streaks of its veins pulsed with renewed life.

  The axe lying next to the daemon was twice as tall as Honsou and though he knew it was unfeasible, he felt an undeniable urge to try and lift it. His own axe growled in his hand and he knew that it was the daemonic presence within the Heart of Blood's weapon that was calling to him.

  Honsou marched over to the Heart of Blood's recumbent body and delivered a thunderous boot to its horned skull.

  'Come on!' he yelled. 'You are free now, and there are sorcerers to kill! Up!'

  The daemon's lava-hot veins flared and its eyes flickered open, a soulless white fire, like dying suns, burning from its skull. Shaking off the satiety of its victorious engorgement, the Heart of Blood raised itself to its full height, its gargantuan axe and
whip leaping to its great, taloned hands.

  'That's better.' snarled Honsou as the daemon towered above him.

  'Who dares rouse me from my blood-reverie?' bellowed the daemon.

  'I am Honsou. Half-breed. Master of Khalan-Ghol.'

  The colossal daemon loomed over Honsou, but he stood his ground, determined that he would show no fear before this creature.

  'You are touched by the warp.' said the Heart of Blood. 'You have been flesh for one of my kind.'

  Honsou nodded. 'Yes, I was once briefly blessed with the touch of a daemon of Chaos.'

  'I still smell sorcery upon this place.' growled the daemon.

  'You do.' said Honsou. 'My enemies wield powerful magicks against me and seek to destroy my fortress.'

  'You are the master of this place?'

  'For the moment, yes.' confirmed Honsou.

  'Where are these enemies that stoop to the use of foul sorcery?' demanded the daemon.

  Honsou looked out through the great breach torn in the side of the mountain and pointed to the crackling blue fires beyond.

  'Out there.' he said. The warlord who commands the host that attacks my fortress is a sorcerer and has many magickers attending him.'

  'I will kill him and rend his soul for all eternity!' promised the Heart of Blood, turning and smashing its way through the tear in the mountain of Khalan-Ghol before disappearing from sight.

  Honsou clambered over to the crack torn in the rock and looked out over the smoke-wreathed mountainside, watching with undisguised amusement as the unstoppable daemon smashed into the front line of Toramino's army.

  'Yes.' he laughed. 'You go do that...'

  EPILOGUE

  The sanctuary echoed with the ghosts of the dead, its empty blockhouses and bunkers deserted and abandoned. It had been that way when they had first found the place of course, but now it felt truly empty, as though the warrior band's brief occupancy had been nothing more than its last gasp of purpose.

  Ardaric Vaanes knew they could not stay here now.

  This place was forever tainted in his memory.

  It had been here that Ventris had foisted his lie upon him and his men.

  The lie of honour. The same lie that had seen him cast from his Chapter in the first place. The same lie that had almost seen him dead on this bleak, miserable shithole of a world.

  Honour... What was the use of such a thing when all it got you was death and suffering? Thirty warriors had lived and fought from this place, fighting their enemies and surviving... always surviving.

  Until Ventris came.

  They had not had much of a life here, but it had at least been life.

  'You killed them all, you bastard.' hissed Vaanes, his hatred for the Ultramarines captain burning like a slow fire in his heart as he traced spirals in the dust with his lightning claw.

  Svoljard, tall and wild in his grey Wolf Brothers armour and leffar San, the proud and haughty White Consul, were all that was left of his warrior band, and Ardaric Vaanes knew that they would be lucky to live through the next few days.

  After leaving Ventris and his ragtag band of monsters and misfits, the three of them had made their way through the mountains to the sanctuary, watching the great battles around the fortress from afar.

  The spectacle had been magnificent, and during the incredible attack up the great ramp, Vaanes had unaccountably found himself hoping against hope that Honsou would see off his enemies.

  When the ramp had collapsed and the army of Berossus had been all but destroyed, he had wanted to cheer.

  But as spectacularly destructive as that had been it was as nothing compared to the chaos and slaughter that followed it.

  The streaming pillars of blue fire that had surrounded the fortress for days now hammered it mercilessly, tearing the mountain apart piece by piece. Storms of magickal energy bludgeoned the rock with unimaginable force, smashing impregnable towers and bastions to dust in the blink of an eye. Vaanes had never seen anything like it and though the destruction was awe-inspiring to watch, he felt a flicker of regret that Honsou had not managed to pull off one last trick to defeat Toramino.

  Then the Heart of Blood came, and everything changed.

  It had come from the depths of the mountain like a red whirlwind of death, killing and destroying everything before it in an orgy of destruction that was staggering in its violence. Nothing could stand before this avatar of destruction - not men, not Iron Warriors, not tanks, not even Toramino's daemon engines.

  Everything that came near the colossal daemon died, butchered by its screaming axe or crushed beneath its monstrous bulk. The slaughter had gone on for days, but in the end, Toramino's army had broken before the Blood God's favoured avatar, the shattered remnants quitting the field of batde while they still could and abandoning the smouldering wreck of Khalan-Ghol to the half-breed.

  Honsou was still the master of Khalan-Ghol and though Vaanes had been pleased that the arrogant Toramino had been brought low, he felt an icy shiver of apprehension.

  He knew that the half-breed would surely wreak a terrible vengeance on those who had attacked him. Vaanes knew that that was exactly what he would do and, from what little he knew of Honsou, he suspected that they were not so different in that respect.

  That had been a week ago, and with nothing left to them, he, Svoljard and Jeffar San had remained at the sanctuary as they tried to come to terms with their new circumstances.

  What were they to do? Where should they go?

  Find some way to leave Medrengard and ply their trade as mercenaries once more?

  Perhaps, but Vaanes had lost his taste for desperate causes and did not relish the thought of wandering the galaxy and fighting for petty tyrants once more.

  He was shaken from his bitter reverie by the sound of footfalls behind him. He scuffed out the spiral he had been tracing in the dust and turned, seeing Svol-jard at the door, a grim look of inevitability etched on his lupine features.

  'What is it?' asked Vaanes.

  'Trouble.' said the Wolf Brother.

  Jeffar San stood at the entrance to the blockhouse, his bolter carried loosely over his shoulder and his long, dirty blond hair pulled in a tight scalp-lock. The white of his armour was all but obscured by the dirt and filth of their adventure into Khalan-Ghol, but he still carried himself with an arrogant air of faded grandeur.

  'What's going on?' snapped Vaanes as he and Svoljard emerged into the bright, perpetual daylight.

  'Over there.' said Jeffar San, pointing to where a single vehicle sat at the end of the shadowed valley. Vaanes recognised it as a monstrously powerful Land Raider battle tank, its hard, iron sides chevroned with yellow and black stripes and its upper armour plates fringed with spikes. A disembowelled body was bound, spread-eagled, upon the tank's upper glacis, its limbs bloody and loops of its entrails wound around the tank's spikes.

  Massive guns housed in armoured sponsons were aimed at the blockhouse. The power of those weapons was enormous, knew Vaanes, easily capable of demolishing the blockhouse with one shot.

  So why didn't they fire? Honsou - for no other would seek them out in this place - would have no reason to come here other than to kill them.

  'Why doesn't it shoot?' hissed Svoljard, thinking the same thing.

  'I think we're about to find out.' said Vaanes, nodding towards the massive tank as its frontal assault ramp lowered with a great clang on the rocks.

  Three warriors emerged, all liveried in the armour of the Iron Warriors and carrying their weapons before them.

  'What the hell?' said Vaanes as the Iron Warriors marched from the security and strength of their vehicle and came towards them, crossing the ruined trenches and skirting the jagged remains of tank traps.

  As the Iron Warriors neared, Vaanes whispered, 'Be ready to fight when I give the word.'

  The other two nodded, but he could see that they had no taste for this last stand.

  The lead warrior removed his helmet and Vaanes was not surprised to
see the battered features of the half-breed. One side of his face was a ruined mess, a knot of augmetics covering half his skull and a glowing blue gem replacing his missing eye. The second warrior had the face of a killer, his eyes hard and cold, with a jagged mohawk running over the centre of his skull. Vaanes couldn't see the third figure: his powerfully armoured form was obscured by Honsou's body.

  'You've come a long way to just to kill us, Honsou.' said Vaanes.

  The half-breed laughed. 'If I'd come here to kill you, you'd already be dead.'

  'Then why are you here?'

  'I'll get to that soon enough.' promised Honsou. 'You fought alongside Ventris, yes?'

  'Aye.' spat Vaanes. 'For all the good it did me.'

  'That's what I thought.'

  'What are you talking about?'

  'You carry great bitterness within you, warrior, but you are a fighter, a survivor.'

  'And?'

  'And I need men like you now. Most of my own grand company are dead, and those of Berossus's that swore loyalty to me are few in number. I offered Ventris the chance to join me, but he spat it back at me. I now offer you the same chance, but I do not think you will do the same.'

  'You want us to fight for you?'

  'Yes.' said Honsou.

  'For what purpose?'

  'For conquest, for war and blood. And to take revenge on our enemies.'

  'Ventris...' hissed Ardaric Vaanes.

  'Aye.' nodded Honsou, waving forward the Iron Warrior who had been standing behind him, and who now reached up to release the clamps holding his helmet in place.

  'My champion is dead.' said Honsou, 'and I need someone like you to train his newborn replacement in the art of death.'

  The warrior removed his helmet and Vaanes gasped in shock as he saw the face that was revealed.