He closed his eyes for a moment.
Blessed Emperor… he began, before trailing off.
He could no longer remember the words.
He opened his eyes again, took a spore-filled breath, and pushed his head through the gap.
Immediately, he knew where he was. From his know-ledge of the spire’s schematics, he recognised the shape of the governor’s audience chamber, right at the top of the administrative palace. There was no mistaking the room laid out before him – it must have been over a hundred metres in diameter and perhaps twice as high, and nothing else in the upper spires was remotely as big.
He had emerged high up one of the inner walls. Below him, he could make out a glittering carpet of slime strewn across what had once been marble flagstones. It looked like incarnadine vomit.
The remaining walls of the chamber soared up far above him, terminating in a sheer pointed arch. Chandeliers hung on iron chains from the ceiling, each one emblazoned with crystals and burning with lilac fire.
The chamber was octagonal. Five of the walls, including the one Valien had emerged from, had been constructed from dark stone, fluted and ornamented in the Imperial Gothic style. Most of that decoration was now covered in a thick layer of translucent ooze which glistened warmly in the light from the chandeliers and dribbled obscenely over the faces of sculpted angels.
The remaining three walls were made of armourglas and formed part of the outer skin of the spire. The huge windows looked south, out across the wasteland between the hives. Though his view was clouded by the filth in the air, Valien could just make out the hunched outlines of the Melamar and Axis hives on the southern horizon.
It was an odd thing to see. He’d been active in Melamar Primus only days previously, creeping through the corridors and goading its inhabitants into action. Back then, he’d been in confident control of all his considerable faculties; now, he was only a finger’s width from expiring.
His gaze dropped back into the chamber itself. Before Shardenus’s ruling classes had turned to corruption, Valien imagined that the space would have been austere and elegant. The workmanship of the panes was impressive. The statuary, what remained of it, was imposing. It would have been a fine location to receive ambassadors, Imperial officials, trade delegations.
Now the place had been turned into a carnival of grotesquerie. Facets of the glass swam with filmy matter. Mouths opened and closed obscenely between the flexing stonework. Dripping protuberances snaked out from pools of bubbling froth, lashing back and forth as if searching for prey. Twisting lines of burning incense rose up from the floor, each one a different colour – purple, crimson, cobalt, cadmium. Coloured smoke merged and melded, turning the air of the chamber into a vaguely blood-coloured murk.
The chamber was full. A chorus of murmuring emanated from its occupants, thousands of them, all arranged around a tall throne in the centre of the marble floor. As far as Valien could make out, they were all naked, all bare-headed, all covered in tattoos and splattered purple sigils. They swayed in unison, rippling in time with an ever-present heartbeat that ran through the bones of the structure around him.
Valien didn’t look at them for long. Their murmuring made him feel nauseous, and he had to grip the edges of the orifice to keep himself in place.
He knew where he’d have to look next. He’d been putting it off, forcing his gaze to skirt around it, trying to avoid the inevitable. As surely as if it possessed gravity of its own, however, the throne demanded his attention. With his heart still hammering, Valien let his eyes rise until he was looking at it.
The very act was painful. No figure sat in the throne. The seat was made of obsidian. It was strangely angled. Light reflected from it in unpredictable ways, making it look at once bone-dry and blood-wet. Incense-heavy air shimmered above the empty seat, trembling with every beat of the immense heart. The effect was like heat-haze, or hallucination, or dreaming.
Valien squinted, trying to make some sense of it. He couldn’t latch on to anything. Every time he tried to focus, the image would slip away. Trying to fix on to the shimmer over the throne was like trying to control ball bearings on a metal sheet.
He clenched his fists and hunkered down, peering through the narrow gap and pushing his head out further. His eyes narrowed. He switched off his augmetic implants, resorting to his natural sight alone.
The distortion over the throne clarified a little. Even attempting to look at it made his head throb. Tears started in his eyes.
He saw something, just for a moment. It was just an impression – a fleeting after-image of a ghost presence, like a hololith spinning into being or a retina-burn after an explosion.
It was man-shaped, but far bigger even than a Space Marine. Valien saw tatters of dried flesh waving as enormous arms thrashed out. He saw the glint of armour rimmed with bronze, and harlequin patches of intense colour on ancient ceramite. He saw long, curved claws made of metal, and clusters of jewels hanging from clanking iron chains. He saw the remnants of a face, a once beautiful face, now a rag-tag collection of stitched sinew and gristle held together by steel clips and nutrient tubes. He saw two eyes, burning through the curtains of incense like plasma bolts.
He felt his grip slipping, and one hand dropped from the edge of the orifice. A gasp of pure horror burst out of his lungs, overriding all his psycho-conditioning and neural training. The world shifted around him, shaking and blurring. He could feel himself losing his precarious footing.
He pulled his eyes away – it was difficult – and tried to right himself. Waves of sickness washed over him, dragging at his frail, fractured consciousness.
He reached down to his chest again, searching out the indentations below his heart, beginning to make preparations.
As he did so, the daemons came. He didn’t see where they came from – they seemed to swim up out of the air itself. They screamed at him, hurtling towards the orifice like loosed bullets homing in on a target.
He saw the first of them just before the end, just before it came to take him.
It was beautiful – so, so beautiful.
He tried to reach down again, to do the thing he had travelled so far to do, but it snatched him away too quickly.
He felt its talons lance through his shoulders, punching through the flesh under the bone and hooking him out. Musk, maddening and potent, clogged his nostrils, accentuating his sudden, shocking agony. He felt himself lift, borne aloft by a violent kick and carried far out into the open. Dimly, as in a dream, he heard mortal worshippers bellow their rage at him.
The daemon’s claws ripped through him, tearing up his already tortured flesh and flaying layers of armour like falling leaves. Then, its work done, it dropped him.
With his last flickers of awareness, Valien saw where he was headed. The empty throne rushed up to greet him, replete with the fractured, semi-manifest horror that it cradled between its arms.
Before he hit it, he only had time to do two things. The first of those was to scream.
Rauth felt anger course throughout his veins, as rich and virulent as he had ever felt it. His armies were assembled again, ready to storm the gates, and his residual capacity for fury had been rekindled. It was not a good time to hear bad news.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked, keeping control of his voice with difficulty. ‘What do you mean, he wants to discuss terms?’
‘He has ordered his forces to remain where they are,’ said Khatir. ‘He says he will not commit them until certain conditions have been met.’
They stood at the base of the enormous gates to the Capitolis spire. Only Telach and Dozeph Imanol were with them; the rest of the claves stood in their assault formations across the huge expanse of the gates’ antechamber. Ranks of mortal soldiers stood behind them, thinned out since the last muster but still presenting a formidable force of arms.
Khatir was as angry as Rauth. Imanol,
the Veteran Sergeant of Clave Prime, said nothing. He lurked silently on the fringes of the discussion, his Terminator plate crusted with blood and the residue of the daemonic. Telach too was silent. His exhaustion was palpable.
‘I will flay him,’ said Rauth, balling his immense fists.
‘He can be compelled,’ growled Khatir. ‘Give me leave to go.’
Rauth’s instincts were the same. He had a brief, satisfying mental image of tearing through Nethata’s scant defences and seizing control of the precious armour under the mortal’s control. It could be done.
He turned to Telach, suppressing a burning desire for revenge.
‘What of the Capitolis?’ he asked.
‘Still nothing, lord,’ said Telach. ‘It is closed to me.’
‘You said the presence was growing,’ said Rauth. ‘How much time do we have?’
‘Hours,’ he said. ‘Maybe less. Thousands of souls have been fed to it; the veil between the worlds is weak now.’
Rauth took a deep, long breath. The wounds he had sustained were raw still, but their pain was welcome.
‘We need Nethata’s armour,’ insisted Khatir. ‘We need those tanks.’
Imanol nodded slowly.
‘You are right,’ he said. ‘The enemy is numerous; we will not kill them quickly enough.’
Rauth felt fresh frustration boiling within him. The entire campaign had been arranged around the union of forces – the numerous mortals to soak up the bulk of the enemy’s rage, freeing the Iron Hands to strike out at the real danger, the spirits of the arch-enemy that no unmodified human could take on.
‘What does he think, that we made our choices for no reason?’ Rauth thundered, struggling with the urge to lash out and crunch his gauntlets into the fabric of the doors. ‘Does he think we do not suffer? Does he think that we do not absorb our share of pain?’
‘He is weak,’ said Khatir. ‘Let me destroy him – I can deliver you the armour we need.’
‘We do not have time,’ said Telach. ‘He is out on the wasteland, and we are down here – we must assault the spire.’
‘We cannot succeed without them,’ said Imanol.
For a moment, Rauth felt paralysed, hung between two equally unacceptable options. Part of him burned to crack open the gates that very moment, to tear into the spire and burn his way up to the summit, damning the consequences of failure. Another part burned to take vengeance for Nethata’s treachery, to drag the mortals to heel and compel them to do their duty.
For a veteran Iron Hand, raised on a world of cold and shadow and gifted the terrible gene-legacy of his austere primarch, that, in the end, was all there was: wrath and duty. If any other human state had once held sway in his psyche, it was now long forgotten – the slow burn of transformation had done its work, and the last of the weaknesses of the past had gone.
The rest is strength.
‘We will withdraw,’ announced Rauth, and the words were bitter on his synthetic tongue. Once the decision had been made, he felt the first stirrings of full combat readiness pricking across his enhanced nervous system. ‘We will move quickly, back out into the wastes, and take the armour by force. Then we will assault, our numbers restored, and break the spires. We can do it, if we leave now. No hesitation, no restraint.’
Rauth turned his helm towards Telach, and the ceramite curves glinted in the dark.
‘And for the traitor Nethata,’ he said, ‘no mercy. No mercy for any of them. Everything about this world is weak and perverse – when our task is accomplished here, I will scour it. A thousand years, hence the fate of Shardenus will echo throughout the Imperium. Men will look to our actions here and know the price of weakness. This shall be the example. This shall be the demonstration.’
Those last few words came out like an animal growl. He began to move, to stride back down the tunnel towards Nethata’s position. His fury was unabated, and he knew it would burn on throughout the fighting to come. Khatir and Imanol both approved – they understood.
Only Telach remained silent.
‘Wait,’ the Librarian said, holding up a hand.
Rauth almost didn’t listen, but something in the tone of Telach’s voice gave him pause.
‘Listen,’ said Telach.
Rauth stopped, and listened.
Above, far above, something enormous had detonated. Rauth’s enhanced hearing picked up the muffled crashes of gigantic explosions from the far side of the gates. His helm’s auditory filters worked quickly, bringing him detailed information on the location, size and magnitude of the blast.
Auspex data started to flood into his tactical systems – target runes, comm-signal ranges, psychic concentration nodes, power build-ups. The explosions kept on going. They were getting bigger.
He turned to Telach, his fury forgotten for a moment.
‘What is that?’ he asked.
Nethata walked along the ridge towards the first of his armoured columns. His entourage followed closely, holding their lasguns ready and going watchfully. The men had been taken from the remnants of the Ferik’s First Company and were as good as any of the troops still under his direct command. They were seasoned by several campaigns and gifted with the best equipment he could find, but still they went nervously, as if expecting attack at any time.
Nethata didn’t share their trepidation. Five hundred metres away, the huge outline of the Warlord Meritus Castigatio loomed up through the ash, monumental and imposing. Even when stationary and mostly powered down, it was a fearsome prospect. Lopi’s other war engine, the Terribilis Vindicta, stood immobile at the other extreme of his army’s long formation of mechanised units, watching over them protectively.
It was hard to imagine anything taking on such a concentrated collection of firepower. Space Marines were impressive, to be sure, but they weren’t invincible, and Nethata knew that if Rauth had any sense he’d use the opportunity presented by such defiance to behave with a little more respect.
Nethata looked away from the Titan and out over the wasteland. The landscape around him was a picture of devastation. Old, rusting industrial compounds mouldered in the corrosive air, gently worn away by the acids at their base and the toxins in the air. A vast expanse of low-level buildings stretched away north, wreathed in a faint smog of ash and dust, only broken by the immense bulk of the Capitolis spires on the northern horizon.
Nethata knew that he was safer in the sealed confines of Malevolentia. Even with his elaborate environment suit working at full capacity, the poisonous air of Shardenus made its presence felt; without such protection he’d have long since been dead. He liked to inspect his formations in person, though. He’d always done so in the past when he could. A hololith tactical could only tell you so much – you learned more by looking into the eyes of your company commanders, seeing whether they were prepared, assessing their stomach for the coming fight.
For the most part, he’d been reassured by what he’d seen on his impromptu inspection. The Ferik and Galamoth regiments had taken losses in the fighting across the wastelands, but they also knew what had happened to the Harakoni on the walls, and to those units taken by Rauth into the Melamar hives and the tunnels. They knew which commanders were likely to get them killed quickest, and which ones were likely to give them a semblance of proper support.
Nethata reached his destination – a small, semi-derelict control tower overlooking the heart of his carefully arranged army. He kicked the door open and ascended the stairs quickly, eager to get the overview he wanted before returning to Malevolentia for final preparations. It would probably be his one chance to see the entirety of his forces laid out before him.
He reached the top level quickly – an abandoned comms room with broken plexiglass in the panes and a bank of smashed cogitators along one wall – and leaned out over the cracked sill to get his overview.
His tanks were arranged in their
battle groups in a long, broken line along the ridge ahead of him. They stretched out in either direction running east-west, their engines idling and sending a film of fresh smog into the already thick air. It was a significant force – over two hundred Leman Russ main battle tanks in varying configurations, backed up with Basilisk artillery pieces and Chimera troop carriers. Sentinel walkers prowled around the fringes, looking fragile under the enormous shadow of the two Warlords. To the south lay the burning Axis hives; to the north was the gigantic Capitolis spire. Everything in between swam with a green-tinged toxic soup, washing over the abandoned buildings like an inland sea.
Nethata let his gaze run down the length of the army, looking out for units out of sequence. For a while, he saw nothing untoward. He was about to go back down the stairs when he saw the first of them start to move.
A squadron of Leman Russ battle tanks powered up their engines and lurched forwards, all twelve of them, grinding over a straggling barbed-wire thicket before setting off down the long, broken highway ahead and out into the swirling chemical mist.
Nethata watched them go, momentarily dumbstruck. He hadn’t given an order to advance. He hadn’t given an order to do anything.
‘Heriat,’ he voxed over the comm. ‘Do you know anything about–’
Before he’d finished the question, another unit set off. Then another. Before long, whole sections of the defensive line had broken into movement. Nethata felt a chill run through him. He turned and ran down the stairway, back to where his entourage was waiting for him.
His comm-channel began to fill up with queries. Group commanders of stationary units sent urgent requests for clarification. Group commanders of moving units kept their channels offline. Nethata wasn’t interested in any of them; there was only one man who he wanted to speak to.
‘Commissar-General Slavo Heriat,’ he voxed again. ‘Respond immediately. We have multiple unauthorised movements. Respond immediately.’
Wrath of Iron Page 27