The Siege of Castellax

by C. L. Werner

  ‘You will die,’ Merihem promised. ‘All flesh will die. In the end there will only be iron!’

  Uzraal threw himself from the cover of a pillar as a stream of fire came rippling towards him. The wraithbone blackened and charred under the blast, emitting an eerie wail of inarticulate agony. The stream of fire shifted, searing along the wall as it chased after the Space Marine.

  ‘Run, rabbit!’ Merihem roared. ‘Cower like all flesh. Hide from true strength. Hide your face from true power!’

  A ball of superheated plasma slammed into Merihem’s arm, burning it clear to the bone. The stream of fire erupting from the flamer was choked off as ruptured hoses sent the same fire spilling across Merihem’s body.

  ‘For a homicidal sociopath,’ Rhodaan spat at the burning monster, ‘you talk too much.’ The demi-organic wings on his back flexed as he marched out into the Daemonculum and watched the Obliterator burn. Before he had taken more than a few steps, he was using Eurydice to leap into the air, hovering above the line of bolt-shells ripping into the floor.

  Wreathed in flame, Merihem came storming across the chamber. The Obliterator had abandoned the flamer, reforming his arm into a combi-bolter. If anything, he presented an even more grisly sight, the pallid flesh of his face burned and charred, bits of steely bone protruding from the cracked skin. One eye had been fused closed beneath a shapeless lump of burned meat. The other glared balefully at the hovering Rhodaan.

  There was no need for words as Merihem raised his weapon and aimed at the captain. Mere words could not have expressed the hate boiling inside the Obliterator’s breast. Mere words could not have voiced the cold defiance of the doomed Raptor.

  As Merihem’s weapon started to spit its rain of death upwards, the Obliterator was struck from the side and dashed to the floor. His techno-organic body shifted as he fell, pivoting so that he might glare at his attacker. All emotion had been burned from the monster’s face, but there was shock shining in the black depths of his eye.

  What had struck the Obliterator down was a creature even bigger and more massive than himself. Steam sizzled from its scaly hide, strange coruscations of light flashed from its pores. Thick ropes of wiry grey hair hung from its limbs, weird runes crawled across its flesh. Great horns stabbed from a narrow forehead like some gruesome crown. A face inhuman and fiendish, pulled into a long muzzle of fangs and tusks, leered with diabolic malignity. For all the horror of the entity’s shape, to the Iron Warriors the most horrible thing of all were the fragments of broken, shattered ceramite clinging to it, scraps of armour that bore the heraldry of their own Legion.

  Struck down by Merihem, dying beneath the wraithbone pillars, Rhodaan could only wonder what obscene promises the daemons had made to Gomorie. That his battle-brother had accepted was all too evident. A quick glance at the pillars showed the withered husks of the daemon-hosts lying limp and abandoned in their chains.

  If the daemons had promised Gomorie the strength to overcome Merihem, then they had exceeded their vow. As the possessed Space Marine loomed over the fallen Obliterator, it brought its talons slashing down, ripping great goblets of molten metal from Merihem’s body, flinging the corruption in every direction. Very quickly, the charred platform was becoming littered with lumps of molten ooze.

  Despite the havoc inflicted upon his body, Merihem did not submit to the daemon’s abuse. With a fierce bellow, the Obliterator surged up from the floor, his chainclaw ripping into the daemon’s steaming flesh. Gobbets of ichor and flesh flew from the churning blades. The Obliterator brought his other arm around, blasting the creature point-blank with a full burst from each barrel.

  The daemon was sent reeling backwards, strewn across the platform. The terrible energies of the daemons alone were ripping apart Gomorie’s body, dissolving it with each breath. A mortal shell could barely contain the energies of a single daemon, even that of a Space Marine was unable to play host for long to the abomination that had poured into Gomorie’s flesh. As the fiendish creature drove through Merihem’s barrage, it seemed to be corroding from within, its substance dripping away with each step.

  Rhodaan didn’t wait to see what the result of this ghoulish contest would be. Tightening his grip on his chainsword, he dived down upon Merihem from behind, adding his velocity to the downward sweep of his blade.

  The chainsword crunched down into Merihem’s charred skull, burying itself in his neck. Rhodaan left the churning blade embedded in the Obliterator and pressed the muzzle of his plasma pistol against the wound. Grimly, he pulled the trigger and sent a blast scorching through Merihem’s head, incinerating the abomination’s brain.

  The withering fire from the Obliterator’s guns fell silent. The hulking mass of metal and meat staggered forwards a few paces, Rhodaan’s sword buried in the wreck of his head. Then, with a great crash, the monster fell, slamming through the charred bloodwood panels and hurtling into a sub-cellar far beneath the Daemonculum.

  ‘Rot in agony,’ Rhodaan spat at the fallen beast. He thumbed a grenade from his belt and tossed it into the cellar. With something like an Obliterator, there was no such thing as being too careful.

  Turning away from the pit, Rhodaan braced himself to confront the daemon. There was no knowing what the creature would do now that their common enemy was vanquished. There was no knowing if it would feel a sense of kinship simply because Gomorie had been an Iron Warrior.

  His caution was unnecessary. Before Rhodaan’s eyes, the battered, broken body of the daemon began to collapse. Perhaps, with their promise fulfilled, the daemons were withdrawing back to the warp. Certainly after all the centuries bound to the Daemonculum, it was understandable that the entities might have experienced enough of mortal reality for a long time.

  In the space of only a few heartbeats, the daemon was nothing more than a pool of greasy putrescence from which the odd bit of ceramite plate protruded. It was a miserable legacy for a battle-brother who had died so well. The daemon’s dissolution hadn’t even left anything to bury.

  Uzraal marched across the chamber and joined Rhodaan beside the greasy morass. He stared down at the muck, then looked up at his captain.

  ‘What is your command, Grim Lord?’ Uzraal asked.

  Rhodaan stared at the other Raptor, wondering if the fight had driven him mad. Only the Warsmith was addressed that way. As he stared at Uzraal, however, understanding came to Rhodaan. If Oriax’s plot had worked, then Andraaz was dead. There was no question that Morax was dead. So were Gamgin and Nostraz. Algol was missing and far too unbalanced to lead anyone. That made Rhodaan the last of the Third Grand Company’s captains. As Over-Captain, Vallax was outside the line of succession, expected to function as the Warsmith’s second-in-command, not his heir. Even if he survived, Vallax couldn’t become Warsmith.

  Uzraal was right, Rhodaan realised. Except for the orks, he was now Lord of Castellax, commander of the Third Grand Company. Or whatever was left of it.

  ‘Fall back to the hangar,’ Rhodaan ordered. ‘We will rendezvous with the other survivors at the Oubliette.’

  Rhodaan cast a last, contemptuous look at the shattered ruin of the Daemonculum. They had suffered much because of this fiendish creation and its crazed master, but the Third Grand Company would endure. They would rise from the ashes stronger than before. Under his leadership, they would recover and return to fight the Long War.

  Turning from the Daemonculum, Rhodaan marched towards the inner recesses of the sanctum, Uzraal close behind him. ‘We’ll use the maintenance tunnels to make our way back to the upper levels. I want to be away from here before the entire Bastion is crawling with orks.’

  It was some hours before Kaptain Grimruk and his kommandos made their way into the wreckage of Oriax’s sanctum. The lone Iron Warrior in the receiving bay had put up an impressive fight, impressive enough that Grimruk had taken the dead Space Marine’s head as a present for Warlord Biglug.

  The orks began to fan out through the sanctum, ripping down anything that looked portable,
smashing anything that looked like it wasn’t. Grimruk paid them scant attention, prowling among the wreckage, kicking over the disabled husks of servitors and flesh-drones. It was only when the kaptain drew near the Daemonculum itself that he became more attentive.

  There was a strange energy, a sense of power and danger emanating from the chamber. Grimruk removed the peaked cap from his head and scratched his leathery brow. Privy to Biglug’s inner councils, Grimruk knew that the warlord was searching for something on Castellax, some weapon that would make Waaagh! Biglug mightier than Waaagh! Kogtoof. The problem was, none of the orks knew exactly what it was they were looking for. They’d captured immense stores of weapons and ammunition, even put some of the captured humans to work making more. The fleet had been expanded with captured ships. Despite the millions of ork dead, Waaagh! Biglug was already more powerful than before the attack on Castellax.

  Still, Biglug insisted there was something special, something secret hidden somewhere on the planet. As his body recoiled from the Daemonculum’s emanations, Grimruk wondered if this was the weapon the warlord was looking for. He would have the mekboyz come down here to have a look at it.

  Grimruk glanced across the sanctum, watching the kommandos pulling the place apart. He looked again at the Daemonculum, feeling the evil of the thing oozing across his leathery skin. The ork growled angrily. He didn’t like this sensation that the device stirred in his mind, this feeling of fear. What Grimruk didn’t like, he destroyed. Biglug would get over his disappointment.

  Howling orders, firing his weapon into the machinery to set the kommandos an example, Grimruk began the demolition of Oriax’s Daemonculum.

  Epilogue

  I-Day Plus Three Hundred and Fifty-Seven

  Warsmith Rhodaan studied the holographic display being projected above the obsidian table. Several of the Iron Warriors’ deep-space observation satellites had escaped the orks, being too small to attract their attention when they still had entire ships to chase around the system. Most of Admiral Nostraz’s fleet had been captured by the xenos, rearmed and repaired in the Iron Warriors’ own shipyards. It was a final indignity for the lords of Castellax to endure, but Rhodaan was determined that others would soon share his pain.

  A large part of the ork fleet was already gone, though he suspected the aliens hadn’t planned it that way. A few months after the fall of Vorago, the orks had hastily assembled their fleet midway between Castellax and its sun. It was a typically orkish manoeuvre – impulsive and utterly lacking in preparation. The most junior naval captain would have cringed at the wild, haphazard action and at the dozens of collisions resulting from it.

  The vanguard of the ork fleet, however, was too impatient to wait on those ships too slow or too damaged to join them. Under the impatient urging of Biglug himself, no doubt, the ork ships had pushed ahead with their strange operation.

  What happened next would have astonished anyone who had not seen the Daemonculum in operation. One instant the ork fleet was there, the next a hundred of their biggest ships were gone, as though they had simply winked out of existence. Sensors detected warp energies, but without the telltale signature of a warp gate, allowing that one could have been opened so deep within a planetary system. Moreover, there were a few dozen wrecks floating about that hadn’t quite made the transition with Biglug’s ships. From the satellite representations, the wrecks looked strangely twisted and mangled, as though caught in a tug-of-war between Titans.

  Biglug was gone. For several weeks, the remaining orks fought amongst themselves as they tried to find a new leader. Rhodaan never did learn the name of the new warlord, but it showed an unusual streak of humour for a xenos, calling its warhost the ‘Rustbustas’. Rhodaan would have liked to feed the creature its own organs for that joke.

  Instead, Rhodaan decided to feed the orks something else. Scavenging resources wherever they could find them, the surviving Iron Warriors of Castellax began assembling vox-transmitters all across the planet, staffing them with whatever Flesh they could find. The slaves were charged with transmitting distress signals, not to Medrengard, but to Obestrus, the nearest inhabited world controlled by the Imperium. There was no chance that the low-powered signals would actually reach Obestrus, but that wasn’t important. What was important was for the orks to discover the direction those signals were being sent.

  It didn’t take long. The orks were growing bored since the fighting on Castellax had ended. With the vox-signals promising another world nearby to sack, the aliens threw themselves into a frenzy of activity. Ships were repaired, stores transported off the planet, ork warriors loaded onto transports and ferried up to the waiting fleet. Before they were done, every ork on Castellax would be up there, ready and eager to take the fight to Obestrus.

  Through the orks, the weapons of the Iron Warriors would strike the Imperium. They would decimate their armies, cripple their fleets and devastate their worlds. It was revenge by proxy. And while the Imperium sent its resources to deal with the orks, they would leave other sectors exposed and vulnerable.

  The Iron Warriors would find those weak points. The Iron Warriors always found an enemy’s weak point. Maybe it wouldn’t be the Third Grand Company, but the Iron Warriors would be there to prosecute the Long War and remind petty humanity that the sins of their past were still with them.

  For in all the galaxy, nothing endures like hate.

  About The Author

  C. L. Werner’s Black Library credits include Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang, the Brunner the Bounty Hunter trilogy and the Thanquol and Boneripper series. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. He claims that he was a diseased servant of the Horned Rat long before his first story was ever published.

  An extract from The Death of Antagonis by David Annandale

  On sale February 2013

  The Dragon Claws slammed into the ground with the force of judgement, punching craters in the enemy army. They came in at staggered distances, with Volos closest to the caravan. The goal: blast away the dead and form a chain along which the caravan could move once more. A jump pack assault normally called for close combat weaponry, but for this deployment Volos had ordered a maximum ammo load and flamers for all. He straightened from his landing, unshouldered the flamer and let spray in a single movement. His back to the mountainside, he played the fire out over 180 degrees, incinerating the dead and pushing their masses back.

  The leading Hellhound started up. Its cannon was silent, the promethium tank long since depleted. Volos stepped forward, the flamer on full, and the dead retreated still further. The Hellhound drew level with him. Volos glanced up and saw Colonel Kervold salute his thanks. Volos gave a slight nod and returned his attention to the enemy. The Hellhound passed at his back, between Volos and the cliff wall. Toharan’s voice crackled over the vox-link. ‘We’re advancing. Fine work.’

  ‘So is yours.’ He tried to picture the journey his fellow sergeant had made. It was song-worthy.

  The Hellhound stopped. Its engine stalled out. Not letting up with the flamer, Volos turned his head. Kervold was looking down inside the vehicle, his expression a jagged mix of fury and puzzlement. He opened his mouth.

  The order never came. His eyes widened. Volos saw something new wash over the colonel’s face, emotions that should have been foreign to that scarred stone. The first was fear. The second was doubt, and somehow, this seemed more intense and terrible than the fear. Kervold convulsed with spine-snapping force, his body shaken by the fist that was seizing his soul. His eyes glazed as his face twisted into the shape of blank fury. He thrashed himself free of the hatch and turned with a snarl towards the refugees who were just now passing the Hellhound.

  His right hand holding down the flamer’s trigger, Volos pulled out his bolter with his left and shot Kervold, turning his skull into mist. As he acted, he processed what he had seen. The contagion had struck from the inside
of the Hellhound, where no injury had been sustained. The implications staggered him, but they would receive his attention later. The consequences demanded a response now.

  The plague spread through what remained of the Mortisians with the speed of a shock wave. The last of the Imperial forces succumbed in seconds. The disease leaped from man to man without needing injury or even contact. It was as if the fall of the colonel signalled the death of the companies’ collective spirit. Commissar and conscript alike frothed and lunged for the civilians.

  Volos’s flamer ran dry. The enemy surged with renewed strength and reinforcements. Clawing for their prey, the dead slammed in a wave against Volos, knocking the bolter from his grasp, lifting him off the ground and throwing his weight against the Hellhound. Volos slid off the vehicle’s hull. The flood tried to crush him. ‘Toharan!’ he voxed. ‘The Guard is lost! Grab anyone and go!’ Buffeted by the infinite enemy, he vowed to the Emperor that he would give his life in the service of any victory that might yet be claimed from this day. Then he crossed his arms against his chest and flexed his wrists, fists down.

  There was a familiar moment of agony so pure it bordered on ecstasy, and his bone-blades shot out from his wrists, passing over his knuckles. They were a metre long and sheathed in adamantium. He swung his arms down and out. Limbs and heads went flying. Arterial fountains burst around him, drenching his armour, covering his visor. He ducked his head and lunged forward, a maddened bull. His helmet had a large slit near the top, and from it protruded his forehead’s bony growth. He had sanded it into the shape of a crescent horn, the tips and edge as lethal as the blades that grew from his arms, and here too he had added the extra kill strength of adamantium. The dead fell before his charge. His vision became a specialised tunnel vision as the euphoria of war descended on him. He saw nothing that wasn’t the next thing he was about to butcher. His fangs extended, hungry for the mangled flesh and blood whose sight and smell had become the sum total of his world. He was the destroyer, and however numerous his foes, they were pitiable in their fragility.