Saturnine

by Dan Abnett

  ‘My lord,’ said Thane. ‘If your prediction was correct, and you must have believed it was to make all this preparedness… If you were right, and Lupercal or some comparable agency strikes here, what then?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sigismund. ‘What then?’

  ‘Five kill teams remain,’ said Dorn. ‘I understand the balance, or I’d have taken all of you. Five kill teams. Five hundred men. Five hundred good men.’

  ‘Good men,’ Sigismund nodded. ‘But good enough?’

  ‘They are armed with surprise, Sigismund,’ said Dorn. ‘If they can’t stop Lupercal with that potent weapon, then you being here is not going to make a difference.’

  Sigismund looked away, swallowed fury creasing his face.

  ‘But you being here would, Praetorian,’ said Thane.

  Dorn sighed. ‘I have a choice, Maximus,’ he said gently. ‘Potential prize or actual. I must respond to real and present threats, not imagined ones. If Lupercal, or whoever, comes here, we will cut our cloth accordingly, and have this conversation again.’

  ‘No doubt very quickly,’ said Sigismund.

  ‘No doubt.’ Dorn looked at them. ‘Get to your stations,’ he said.

  * * *

  Diamantis entered the command post.

  ‘I have operational command in the Praetorian’s absence,’ he said simply. Mistress Elg nodded. Arkhan Land had arrived from his laboratory post just a few minutes earlier.

  ‘You?’ Land asked. ‘What, is everything scrapped then?’

  ‘No,’ said Diamantis. ‘Are your systems ready?’

  ‘People keep asking me that. Of course they are.’

  ‘We need to monitor our readiness,’ said Diamantis. Sindermann could tell how little the Huscarl cared for the magos. He seemed to find him even more aggravating than the interrogator order. ‘You will advise of any sudden technical irregularities?’ Diamantis added.

  Land looked affronted. ‘So long as you advise me of any sudden impending brutal death irregularities,’ he replied. He stared at Elg. ‘Is there really no sign of anything?’ he asked.

  ‘Mistress?’ Diamantis asked.

  ‘Still no target track or sub-surface echo,’ she replied. ‘We maintain systematic tracking as before.’

  ‘Maybe I should tinker with your systems and improve your-‘ Land began.

  ‘Just get to your station and be ready, please,’ said Diamantis. Land glowered at him.

  ‘The waiting,’ Land said, ‘is driving me mad.’

  ‘Be thankful you only have the waiting to do that to you,’ replied

  the Huscarl.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Sindermann, stepping forward, ‘Lyclonus writes that a calm mind is the key to accomplishing-‘

  ‘Stick your books up your arse, history man,’ said Land. He pushed past Sindermann, and strode away down the hall.

  Sindermann glanced at Diamantis.

  ‘I see what you mean,’ he remarked.

  * * *

  The grinding of the Mantolith’s drill head was incessant. Abaddon looked across at Urran Gauk, line captain of the Justaerin.

  ‘Three more minutes,’ he said.

  ‘My lord,’ one of the machine drivers called back. ‘We are close to striking bedrock. We must-‘

  ‘Keep going,’ Abaddon ordered. He looked back at Gauk. ‘Three more minutes,’ he repeated. ‘Prepare.’

  Abaddon, and every man in the rumbling machine, raised the snarling helms of their jet-black Terminator plate and locked them in place.

  * * *

  Loken paced. He spun Rubio’s blade in his hand: two turns forward, one back, snap into grip, then two back and one forward.

  ‘You’ll wear it out,’ said Leod Baldwin, his squad chief. Loken looked at the Imperial Fist.

  ‘Can you practise too much?’ he asked.

  ‘Not as long as you can perform on the day,’ replied Baldwin.

  Loken looked past the waiting rows of his kill team. The deployment hall where Sigismund and his men had been preparing was empty, and had been for ten minutes.

  ‘You think they’ve found better things to do?’ Loken asked.

  ‘What could be better than this?’ Baldwin replied.

  * * *

  Ahriman and seven initiates of the Order of Ruin bowed to one knee in a semicircle as Magnus approached. Rolling mist, pungent with fyceline, drifted up from the ravished plains below Colossi. The fortress gate was a distant, marmoreal ghost.

  ‘The summoned are refreshed from their onslaught,’ Magnus observed, ‘and the spirits of our enemy are worked thin by fear and doubt. Let’s complete this rite of Ruin, oh my fair sons. The Pale Lord chides me, and I will not test his patience. He wishes to advance, and so, in my way, do I.’

  Ahriman rose. ‘Colossi falls,’ he said.

  The others rose too. They turned as one to face the distant bulwarks of the Colossi Gate. Their eyes shone with the pitiless light of white stars.

  Along the broken ridge on either side of them, the sorcerer-warriors of the Thousand Sons stepped up, cloaks and robes blowing out in the rising gale. A winding line of a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, following the contour of the ragged ridgeline, all murmuring the same soft litanies of overthrow.

  The rain began, and turned into stinging sleet. The churned ooze before them became sequinned with pools and puddles, every surface dancing and splashing in the pelt.

  The ooze itself began to stir and lap, as though the mud was alive. Down by the bastion’s wall, the homed and antlered daemons roused from their slumber, and rose to their feet.

  * * *

  Naranbaatar coughed up blood.

  He spat, and wiped his mouth.

  ‘Now they stir,’ he said. ‘Now they come.’

  He had stripped off his helm, so his brother seers could mark his face with stripes of fire-ash and pigments. Flies were settling in the corners of his eyes and mouth.

  ‘Marshal Agathe?’ Raldoron called.

  Her attention was lost. She was staring at the wall of the rooftop chamber. It was beginning to melt. Lime plaster was slipping down like mucus, and the exposed stone beneath was sponging into sludge.

  ‘What is…’ she stammered.

  ‘The sons of Magnus focus their power upon us,’ said Naranbaatar. ‘They channel it through the warp beasts at our gates. Through them, what you think of as reality becomes fluid. It shapes to their will, like wet clay at the hands of a potter.’

  Agathe looked around at the Stormseer.

  ‘What shape do they want us?’ she asked.

  ‘Flat, I imagine,’ he said patiently. ‘Like a slab. Like a grave.’

  ‘Lord Valdor and the Khan await,’ said Raldoron. ‘We must begin.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’ She gathered herself. ‘At once.’

  She led them out of the chamber, trying to ignore the soft, squelching feel of the stone floor underfoot. The flies were even thicker in the access vault to the tower top. They swirled in a black blizzard. She could see maggots boiling from the stone walls and floor of the walk, as though it were rancid flesh. The men posted here were already dead, slumped, slack and cadaverous, strings of writhing larvae dripping from their hanging mouths, their eyes rotting in their skulls.

  Agathe led the party on, resolute, walking ahead of Raldoron and the Stormseers, unchaining the gas shields and blast shutters. She had insisted on being part of this. She could feel her skin crawling, insects beneath her clothes. She could feel bruises blooming on her flesh.

  She opened the last hatch, and took them once again onto the fighting platform at the top of Artemis Tower. This time, Raldoron did not ask her to go back. He understood her intent, and her determination to serve.

  They stepped into swirling bacterial clouds, and a deluge of hail. The entire tower structure was being gnawed away, stone melting like ice, becoming putty, becoming sappy fluid. The bulwarks had already slumped, like soggy paper.
Burr’s head had washed away. They could hear the rising roar of the daemons below.

  Raldoron held her back. The Stormseers advanced. They stood, Naranbaatar foremost, the other two behind him. They raised their staffs towards the thrashing sky. They began to chant, though the hail was too loud for her to hear the words. Where it fell, the hail made dimples in the jellifying stone.

  Agathe knew nothing of magic, or whatever word they cared to call it. She didn’t want to know. Magic was as far from Hatay-Antakya Hive as she ever wanted to travel. Magic was a place she decided she would never go again. But she had, as a career soldier, pledged her service to the Emperor, and to Terra. She had promised to give her life, or her death, as a marshal militant, and the Agathe family did not break their oaths. If this phantasmagoric nightmare had to be part of that service, so be it.

  She knew nothing of magic, but the principles of this rite had been explained to her. Naranbaatar, who seemed remarkably kind and gentle for a Space Marine, a White Scars Space Marine at that, had set it out for her while he waited for his fellow seers to mix the pigments, select the correct charms and burn the proper herbs.

  ‘Seers of the Storm are exactly that,’ he had said. ‘Our working is strong, stronger than most, but only under the wide sky. We call upon the elemental anima to aid us. But there is no wide sky here, no sky like the one we were born under, no open space that is our preference to make battle upon.

  ‘So we are few. Just three of us here, at this hour. Weak, then. And the sons of Magnus Single-eye are strong and many. Their workings are fierce, and they draw upon the dark anima. They drink straight from the Neversea, so their power is not constrained or limited. They are boundless, because they have accepted power that we would never touch.’

  ‘So how,’ Agathe had asked, ‘how in the name of hell can you do anything? You said you had a plan, an initiative. I took you to the tower top so you could assess whatever it is you assess for-‘

  Naranbaatar had raised his hand to quiet her. Ungloved, it was covered in threaded tattoos. She had been able to see them under the crawling skin of blowflies.

  ‘High up is good,’ he had said. ‘We needed to smell the air.’

  Agathe had stared at him through the smudged lenses of her gas hood.

  ‘Are you shitting me, lord? Smell the air?’

  And he had laughed.

  ‘Yes, Aldana Agathe. The air. Listen, there is no wide sky here. The great sky that once overarched these mountains is gone, as gone as the mountains are gone. What sky there is, is small, and it is closed. The void shields. The aegis of the Palace. Everything is locked in and napped, and this has been so for months.

  ‘There is still weather though,’ he had said. ‘Artificial weather systems. What is the word?’

  ‘Microclimates,’ she had replied.

  Naranbaatar had nodded. ‘Microclimates. Weather systems building and breeding under the shields, fed by smoke and dust, and blood vapour, and piss-rain, and air, breathed a billion times over, fed and stirred by impact winds and blast concussion. Toxic weather, poisoned weather, spoiled weather. Small weather.

  ‘But weather, even so,’ he had added. Trapped so tightly, it is concentrated, compressed, furious with power it cannot release. It is not the elemental anima we are accustomed to, but it has an anima. You took us high up so that we could smell the air, and know it, and learn its name and its pain. And now we do. And now the sons of Magnus Single-eye are breaking down the shields that trap it.’

  ‘To get at us.’

  ‘To get at us, they are setting the small weather free.’

  Agathe huddled close to Raldoron, hail blitzing off them both. Nothing seemed to be happening. They had been ridiculous to expect anything to halt the-

  A tiny spark blinked away from the tip of Naranbaatar’s raised staff. It was small, but so sudden it made her jump. The spark, no bigger than a firefly, darted into the hail and the cataclysmic sky.

  The hail stopped, abruptly.

  The lightning began.

  Dazzling pillars of blue-white light, too fierce to see, shafted straight down from the clouds. Four, five, six, there and gone again; then another, two more. Each one made a noise like the sky tearing. Each one hit the ground in front of the Colossi Gate with such force, the world shook.

  The crack and boom of each discharge was like the concussion of a howitzer. The shock staggered them back. Raldoron steadied her.

  She pushed forward. She wanted to see. Raldoron stopped her short of the platform edge, before she stepped too far and the liquescent edges of the roof gave out under her.

  The lightning did not let up. Shaft after shaft ripped down, each one as thick as a bastion pier. The strikes were so bright they hurt her eyes, despite the lenses of her hood. Some flashed, there and gone. Others lingered, contorting and crackling, for long seconds before fading into after-image phantoms.

  The seers were using the aegis. The White Scars Stormseers were using the broken envelope of the voids as a lid to focus and pressurise their power, and unleash the rage of what Naranbaatar had called ‘small weather’.

  They were amplifying their elemental gifts to match the overwhelmingly more potent talents of the Thousand Sons.

  Below Colossi, in the blast zone, the Neverborn were writhing. Some had fallen, spasming, suffused with electrical discharge. Others were being pinned to the mud by coruscating spears of lightning. Others were howling and stumbling back towards the enemy lines, their flesh and antlers burning with corposant.

  Their will was broken. They were freshly birthed into the realspace of Terra, with all its thrilling new textures and flavours, but it had stung them. They were recoiling from the unexpected pain.

  For now.

  ‘Once the shields are gone,’ said Raldoron, ‘this is not a trick the seers will be able to duplicate. So let us make the most of it.’

  Agathe nodded. She keyed her vox.

  ‘Open the sortie gates,’ she said. ‘Unleash.’

  * * *

  The sally ports and iris shutters of Colossi bastion opened. Bright missiles raced out, some passing the gates before they were fully wide. The missiles were gold and red blurs.

  They accelerated.

  It was Constantin Valdor’s turn to ride out. He led the pursuit prosecution. His voidbike flared ahead of the rushing Legio Custodes Kataphraktoi of Agamatus Squadron. Gyrfalcon jetbikes screamed as they chased his vehicle, hounds baying at the heels of the hunt master.The Khan could not sit by watching at such a moment. He led his own riders out in a murderous wave behind Valdor’s formation.

  Valdor and his Custodians killed from the saddle, running down the limping, fleeing Neverborn, swinging their guardian spears, one-handed, to hack them through the legs and back as they passed. Hamstrings sliced, spines snapped. Agathe’s observation had been correct: the Custodians, more than any other warriors, possessed some numinous quality that could render true harm to the Neverborn.

  Valdor gripped his spear tight, jaw set, racing into the kills. He braced his mind. The Emperor had gifted him with one of the most potent weapons in the arsenals of the Palace, but the spear carried a price. Each blow he struck with it taught him something of the things he killed. Each spear thrust brought knowledge that increased his understanding of the Primordial Annihilator. The golden spear made him a better warrior, but its precious lessons were hard to bear, even for him.

  Now he learned from raw Neverborn.

  He steeled himself, and struck anyway.

  Daemons fell, hobbled, screaming, sprawling and clawing in the mud. Gilded riders banked, turned, and came again, raining execution strikes with spear blades, thrusting with lances, or raking fallen bodies with their lastrum cannons. Some Custodians dismounted, and strode pitilessly towards their crippled prey. They hefted their gleaming spears with both hands, raised them above their heads, and brought them down.

  The Neverborn could not die, but their new flesh-forms had been
traumatised by the Stormseers’ battle-magic. The Custodians’ blows, impelled by the will of the Emperor, which blessed them and flowed through their limbs, cut daemon-flesh apart, and broke giant bones. Black blood splashed up, like welled oil. The Neverborn shrieked and shrivelled as the meat forms they had dressed in to visit the mortal plane failed them, and were destroyed.

  Closing in behind Valdor’s squadrons, the Khan slowed his voidbike. He stared at the surgical slaughter as he coasted past. There was something surreal, something inhuman about the scene: gleaming jetbikes, masterpieces of artifice, hovering on idle as their riders – noble giants of wrought gold, majestic in aspect – stood upon the smouldering field and calmly, with flat effect, thrashed blows down on the pathetic, mangled carcasses of giant beasts, shredding, chopping and dismembering them into smaller and smaller parts, long past the instant of their deaths. Beautiful, gleaming gods mechanically butchered their helpless foe, reducing them to scraps in clinical acts of unconditional degradation as apocalyptic lightning split the sky above them.

  It was complete, ft was macabre. It was victory, but it didn’t look like the one Jaghatai had wished for. It was unsettlingly obdurate and detached, an almost ritual deed of obliteration that seemed unworthy of the demigod Custodians, as though they were indifferently rendering meat for some sacrificial tribute.

  But it was victory. That was the word that mattered. The Khan turned in his saddle, raised his dao, and flicked the blade in a gesture of command.

  Jaghatai Khan and his riders swept past Valdor’s extermination, and gunned for the ridge, accelerating, their weapons thundering as they came into range.

  The winding line of the Thousand Sons vanished into the air as they drew near, leaving nothing but fumes of acrid mist that spiralled and whirled in the wakes of the White Scars bikes.

  * * *

  ‘A strange turn,’ murmured Ahriman, slowing his breath to normal.

  He rose to his feet. ‘Colossi holds.’

  Magnus made no reply.

  ‘The Pale King will be displeased,’ Ahriman said.

  ‘Damn him and his damned soul,’ Magnus whispered. ‘He must learn the patience of Perturabo, regroup his cowering Legion, and make new plans. The siege is ours to win. Time stands with us, and we will outlast Colossi.’