by Various
My only concern was Torghun’s slow advance. We surged onwards, punching our way far up the gorge, torching every barricade we came across and slaying freely. I had expected Torghun’s brotherhood to be close behind us. We would have welcomed the cover of their heavy weapons squads.
We began to lose them. They needed to be quicker.
After fighting our way to the first intersection in the twisting ravine system, I withdrew from the combat, letting my warriors take the fight to the enemy.
‘My brother!’ I shouted into the vox, using the channel that Torghun and I had designated for private messages between us. ‘What keeps you? Are you sleeping? We have them on the run!’
I had intended my speech to be light, just as I always spoke when in the midst of battle. Perhaps I might even have laughed a little.
Torghun’s reply startled me.
‘What are you doing?’ he responded. Even over the comm-link, I could hear the anger in his voice. ‘Consolidate your position, captain. You are getting strung out. I will not match this pace. We have not secured our entry points.’
I looked around me. The battle was chaotic and free-flowing, as battles always were. The horde of orks swelled down the ravine floor, huge and sprawling, met by a thin line of White Scars warriors, tearing at them with furious energy. We had already been slowed. We had to break them quickly, to rush at them before they could gain momentum, to hurl them back, again and again.
The task was urgent, and could not wait. The Khagan would be advancing quickly toward the heart of the Grinder. Other brotherhoods would be racing to meet up with him. I dreaded being left behind.
‘We are advancing,’ I said. I reported this as a matter of fact, and no longer smiled as I spoke. ‘We must advance. We are breaking them.’
‘You cannot. Hold your position. Do you hear me? Hold your position.’
The tone of command astonished me. For a moment, I struggled to find the words to respond.
‘We are advancing,’ I repeated.
There was no alternative. He had to understand that.
Torghun didn’t reply. I heard him curse at the other end of the link, and just made out the muffled crack of munitions going off in the background.
Then he terminated the connection.
Jochi, who had been fighting close by, came up to me, looking quizzical.
‘A problem, my khan?’ he asked.
I did not reply immediately. I was troubled. I considered ordering my warriors to pull back, to consolidate our position and wait for the Terrans to reach us. That would have maintained the harmony between us, which I was loath to break.
We were brothers, he and I. The thought of strife between brothers was repellent.
Then I looked out across the ravine, and saw the carnage we were creating. I saw my minghan in the full splendour of their unrivalled ferocity. I saw my warriors fighting as they had been created to fight – with passion, with freedom.
‘There is no problem,’ I said, marching past Jochi and back towards combat. ‘We break them.’
We fought on. As the suns began to sink, we fought. Once the light failed, turning the ravines into pools of oily darkness, we fought. We donned our helms and used our night-vision preysight to hunt them down, always advancing, always rushing them.
They resisted ferociously. Not since Ullanor had I seen them fight a battle like it. They staged rallies, orchestrated ambushes, hurled suicide fighters right into our midst. Every barricade cost us, every gun-pit took lives before we could clear it out. We maintained the punishing pace, never letting them regroup, never letting ourselves slow. Our blood mingled with theirs. The ravines slopped with it, turning the pale dust a deep red.
In the cold hour before dawn when all three suns were still below the horizon, I ordered my brothers to halt at last. We were deep into the Grinder by then, surrounded by jumbled, overhanging terrain of ever deeper gorges and rising shelves of white rock. Curtains of fire streamed at us from all directions. Groups of greenskins had looped round, stealing back through the treacherous country and spilling into territory we had already won. They bellowed at us from the shadows. Cries echoed from the surrounding cliffs, amplifying and distorting. It sounded like the land itself was goading us.
I remembered Torghun’s admonishment. I considered the possibility that he had been right, and that my eagerness to advance had compromised us. His brotherhood was still a long way from our position, making steady but measured progress towards us. I could not shake the suspicion that he was moving deliberately slowly.
‘We will hold here,’ I ordered, conveying the command to Jochi and Batu to relay to the others. ‘At first light, we renew the attack.’
The site I chose was the closest thing in the vicinity to a defensive bastion. A wide plateau of rock rose up from the tumbled, broken landscape, offering a commanding position over the terrain around it. Its sides were sheer on three sides, while the fourth dissolved into a shattered slope of cracked rock and scree. It was not perfect – we were still overlooked by peaks on the far side of the ravine, and there was precious little cover on the plateau itself.
Still, it gave us the chance to stem our growing losses, to bring some shape back into the battle. We fought our way to the plateau, scrambling up plunging rents in the rock, slipping and sliding on the loose stone. Once we had seized it we dug ourselves in along the edges, giving us firing angles into the gorges below. I sent our surviving squadrons of jetbikes after the main static firebases, but did not permit them to go further once they had destroyed their targets.
As I had known they would, the greenskins saw our halt as weakness. They poured toward us, bursting out from hidden caches and up from tunnels we had not properly destroyed. They surged up the steep sides of the plateau, clambering over one another in their eagerness to get at us. They were like an army of ghouls, their skin almost black in the gloom, their eyes burning red.
From then on, we were hard-pressed. Hemmed in, we fought like they did – ferociously, artlessly, brutally. They clambered up, we hewed them down. They clawed at us, dragging any warriors who broke formation into their pits of roaring horror. We shot and stabbed at them, sending their flailing bodies cartwheeling away into the darkness. We hurled grenades into their splayed maws, recoiling as their torsos blew open in shreds of flying sinew. They surrounded us, turning the plateau into a lone island of sanity amidst a heaving storm-swell of xenos blood-mania.
I remained at the forefront, where the combat was heaviest, wielding my guan dao two-handed, carving through greenskin flesh as if it were a single, vast, amorphous organism. I felt my hearts pumping hard, my arm muscles searing with pain. Sweat slicked my face under my helm, trickling down the underside of my gorget. They ran at our blades, using their bodies to wear us out, to slow us down, to punch gaps for others to crash through. Their bravery was phenomenal. Their strength was immense. Their commitment was total.
We were surrounded, we were outnumbered. Such a thing was rare for us – we did not let ourselves get pinned down often. Our Legion had never been chosen for missions where objectives had to be held for extended periods, not like the dour Iron Warriors or the pious, golden Imperial Fists. We had always looked down on such garrison work and pitied those who were condemned to it. I could not imagine us ever distinguishing ourselves in warfare of that sort – under siege, fighting with our backs to the wall as the skies burned above us.
For all that, we were Legiones Astartes. We fought with the precision and resolve of our long conditioning. We never yielded. We paid for that bastion on Chondax with our blood, gripping on tight to the handhold, gritting our teeth and digging in deep. When one of us fell, we exacted a toll of vengeance, closing ranks and ratcheting the already staggering violence up a further notch.
I believe we could have held out there indefinitely, letting the greenskin waves crash against us until they were exhausted and we could move on again. As it was, that supposition was not tested. I saw the streaks of missiles s
pin out of the night, slamming into the rear flanks of the enemy and breaking the momentum of their advance. I saw the bloated beams of lascannons snap out in massed volleys, silently reaping their dreadful toll. I heard the low growl of heavy bolters and autocannons, loosed in rolling, dense barrages.
I looked up, out across the seething mass of alien bodies, and saw glints of white and gold moving up the ravine from the south. Gunfire flashed, jetbike thrusters roared into life.
I regarded the development with mixed emotions: relief, certainly, but also annoyance.
Torghun had reached our position at last.
By the time the first shafts of dawn-light filtered down the ravines, the greenskins were dead or fleeing. For the first time, we let the survivors go. We had enough on our hands – equipment to salvage, armour to repair, the wounded to get back into fighting shape. The plateau looked desolate in the growing sun’s light; a hazy landscape of corpses and smouldering jetbike carcasses.
I did not see Torghun for a while, even after his brotherhood had joined us there. I had much to detain me, and I was not eager to speak to him. I busied myself with my own warriors, working hard to get them ready for war again. Despite everything, I was keen to keep advancing. I could see grey columns of smoke rising up ahead of us, and knew that the circle around the orks was closing fast.
I was still looking north, trying to gauge the best route for the advance, when Torghun finally came to me. I turned, sensing his presence before I saw him.
He was wearing his helm, so I could not read his expression. I assumed he was angry – when he spoke, his voice was tight, but resigned.
‘I don’t want to fight with you, Shiban,’ he said, wearily.
‘Nor I with you,’ I said.
‘You should have listened.’
I found the questioning of my tactics a novel experience. Torghun was within his rights to do so, of course, but it wore at my pride as khan, and I could not think of an adequate response.
‘Just tell me this,’ he said. ‘Why does it matter to you so much?’
‘Why does what matter?’ I asked.
‘To reach the Khagan. Why are you determined to do this, putting our formations, our warriors, in jeopardy? We don’t even know he’s on the planet. Tell me. Help me understand.’
His words surprised me. I knew that Torghun was more cautious than I was; that his way of war was different. It had not occurred to me that he did not place importance on fighting alongside the greatest of us.
‘How can you not wish for it?’ I asked.
I actually felt sorry for Torghun then. I assumed that he must have missed something in his ascension, or perhaps forgotten it. He called himself a White Scar; I wondered if the name meant any more to him than his Legion designation. For me, for my brotherhood, it was everything.
I felt I had to try to explain, even if my hopes of making myself clear were not high.
‘War is not a tool, my brother,’ I said. ‘War is life. We have been elevated into it, we have become it. When the galaxy is finally cleansed of danger, our time will have ended. A brief time, a speck of gold on the face of the universe. We must cherish what we have. We must fight in the way we were born to fight, to make art of it, to celebrate the nature given to us.’
I spoke fervently. I believed those things. I still do.
‘I saw him fight, once, from a distance,’ I said. ‘I have never forgotten it. Even from that one glimpse, I saw a possibility of perfection. Each of us has a part of that perfection within us. I long to witness it again, to see it close at hand, to learn from it, to become it.’
Torghun’s blood-stained helm gazed back at me blankly.
‘What else is there for us, brother?’ I asked. ‘We are not building a future for ourselves; we are creating an empire for others. These warlike things, these grand, terrible inspirations, they are all that we have.’
Still, Torghun said nothing.
‘The future will be otherwise,’ I said. ‘For now, though, for us, there is only war. We must live it.’
Torghun shook his head in disbelief. ‘I see they breed poets on Chogoris as well as warriors,’ he said.
I could not tell whether he was mocking me.
‘We do not distinguish between them,’ I said.
‘Another strange habit,’ he said.
Then he reached up and unfastened the seals on his helm. I heard the locks hiss as they were undone. He twisted the helm off and mag-locked it to his armour.
Once we were looking with our own eyes it was easier to understand one another. I do not think my words had done much to convince him.
‘I do not fight in the way you do, Shiban,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I do not even fight for the same things that you do. But we are both of the Fifth Legion. We must look for common ground.’
Torghun looked up, past me and into the north.
That was where he was. That was where he was fighting.
‘We must be at the forefront of the assault, even now,’ Torghun said. ‘How soon can your brothers be made ready?’
‘They already are,’ I said.
‘Then we travel together,’ said Torghun, his expression sombre. ‘In unison, but I will not slow you.’
In the morning light, lit only by one sun, his skin looked darker than before, almost like one of us. He had conceded a lot already. I could appreciate that.
‘We will find him, brother,’ he said. ‘If he is there to be found, then we will find him.’
V. Targutai Yesugei
To flee onto the Altak, that had been a bad decision. Had I stayed in the mountains, I might have had some chance of evading my pursuers. Out on the plains, it was impossible.
I sometimes reflect on why I made the choice that I did. I was a child, of course, but I was not a stupid one – I would have known that the wooded valleys gave me a better chance to escape from the Khitan, even if the prospect still remained slim.
Perhaps I was fated to make the choice I did. I dislike the idea of fate, though. I dislike the idea that the things we do are ordained for us by higher powers; that our actions are like shadow-plays performed for their amusement. Most of all, I dislike the idea that the future is set, running away from us in clear lines that we are compelled to follow, with only the illusion of a sovereign will to comfort us on the journey.
Nothing I have learned since my ascension has convinced me that I am wrong to think those things. I have learned of the deep metaphysics of the universe, and the long, tired games of the immortals, but I retain faith in our ability to choose.
We are the authors of our actions. When the test comes, we can go in either direction: we can triumph, or we can fail, and the universe cares not which.
I do not think it was fate that carried me out of the Ulaav and into the empty spaces of the Altak. I think I made a poor decision, born from fear.
I do not blame myself for that. All of us, even the mightiest, even the most exalted, may make such mistakes.
For a while, I was faster. The Khitan in the mountains were armoured and wore curved steel plates over leather jerkins. I could hear the clatter of their jointed arm-guards even as I sprinted, and knew that they would tire quicker than I would.
I headed south, running hard out of the shadow of the highlands and down across the open plains. The earth was firm and dry beneath my feet. The wind was dawn-fresh, cold and spare.
Ahead of me was nothing. The Altak undulated gently, like an ocean of green, but there were no deep valleys for me to hide away in. A man or beast could be spied for kilometres on the plains. That was my hope – that I would see the Great Khan’s entourage from a distance and be able to get to it in time.
I felt my breathing grow ragged and my feet, bound in soft leather, ache. I had not eaten since the day before, though for some reason that didn’t affect my stamina. I remembered my vision of the four figures and the drink they had given me, and wondered how close to reality that vision had been. I could still taste something at the back o
f my throat – a bitterness, like spoiled milk.
For all their armour-encumbered clumsiness, I worried that I could not pull away from the pursuing Khitan. The noises of their footfalls, their heavy breathing, their clinking weapons, all of it followed me out across the plains. I turned my head as I ran, expecting to see them close behind me.
They were not. I had far outpaced them, and they laboured in my wake, running on foot like I did. My hearing seemed to be sharper, as did my eyesight. As I watched twelve of them come after me, puffing and swearing, I felt that I could see right into them. I saw the flame of their souls burning within their chests.
That startled me. My perception had been changed. Everything – the world around me, my pursuers – was more vivid than it had been.
I found that terrifying, even more so than the prospect of being killed. New sensations boiled within me, bubbling up under my skin and making my cheeks flush and my palms hot.
I felt powerful, but also powerless. I knew enough of the ways of the seers to know that whatever had been birthed in me on the mountain needed tutoring.
I turned away from the Khitan, and ran harder. The physical exertion helped a little. I felt the grass flatten under my feet, and the curses of the soldiers recede as they lost ground.
I scoured the horizon ahead, desperate for some sign of the Khan. I cursed his evasiveness then.
I saw nothing – just sky and earth and haze between them.
I knew that the foot soldiers would not be the only ones. No one travelled far on the Altak without steeds, and the lands of the Khitan were far away.
Once the soldiers realised that I would outpace them, they began to blow split-bone horns. The sound of their warnings rang out across the open spaces, travelling far on the gusting wind. Then they fell back, panting, content to let me race away from them and knowing I would not get far.
I kept going. I felt like I could run forever. My light kaftan, which had failed to keep me warm in the high places, let my legs stride out. As the sun rose higher into the sky, my muscles warmed up properly. I could feel the heat on my clean, brown limbs, and it spurred me on further.