‘You did not look hard enough!’ Krezoc snarled at her. ‘You did not look deeply enough!’
The cult had been here all along. There was no way it had spread here since the battle at the Kazani Bridge. It had lain in wait, concealing itself, eating away at Deicoon from below. Eukrolas had seen no signs at the surface and the heights and, in her pride, believed her city to be strong where Creontiades was weak. Instead, Deicoon’s defences were a shell, surrounding putrefaction.
The walls and the guns of the keep meant nothing now. The city could not guard against itself.
Krezoc tapped her vox-bead, trying to reach Venterras. The short-range channels were scrambled too. The same hissing, foul static drilled into her ears until she shut the device off. She could see Gloria Vastator from here. In Eukrolas’ transport, it had taken only a few minutes to reach the keep from the forge. Now the distance seemed vast.
More roads collapsed. From this height, they seemed to be disgorging swarms of insects. Already, flames and smoke were rising from intersections near the keep.
‘We need to reach the Titans,’ Krezoc said to Eukrolas. ‘With or without your help.’
‘You’ll have it,’ Eukrolas said. Her eyes were narrowed in shame, but her voice was determined. If there was any action by which she could make reparations for her mistake, she would take it.
‘Your Chimera is too exposed,’ Krezoc said.
‘I have others.’
‘Good.’ She turned to the princeps and moderati standing behind her. ‘Let’s go.’
They ran from the hall, down the corridor to the grav lifts. Eukrolas’ guards were already there, the lifts summoned and waiting for their governor’s rapid evacuation. ‘The vehicle depot,’ Eukrolas told them.
Less than a minute after Krezoc had lost contact with Syagrius, the grav lift dropped down the height of the keep. For the length of the descent, she was blind to the outside world. The handfuls of seconds it took to reach the depot, one stage below the ground-level entrance to the keep, seemed an eternity. She had just seen the entire war change in the same amount of time. It could change again, and for the worse.
The lift doors opened. Krezoc and her officers followed Eukrolas into the depot. There was a faint haze of smoke in the air, leaking in from the fires outside. Eukrolas led the way to an unmodified Chimera. They embarked while one of the guards fired up the engines.
‘I’ll be with the driver,’ Krezoc told Eukrolas. She needed to see. The governor nodded, and Krezoc pulled open the door from the troop hold. She stood behind the driver’s seat and watched through the armourglass viewing block as the driver pulled out. The Chimera roared past other armoured carriers where more of Eukrolas’ private militia were boarding. The vast, grey space of the hangar rang with the growls of vehicles readying for war.
The Chimera raced down the central space of the depot and up a ramp leading to the streets. A massive plasteel door rose with a harsh grind. It was barely high enough for the Chimera to clear it when the driver tore through the entrance and into the street beyond. He drove straight into flames. The entire block was ablaze. Krezoc could see nothing but fire and collapsing rubble. The heretics had struck with more than numbers. They were armed. She thought of Eukrolas’ pride in the strength of the city. Deicoon had weapons as well as walls. Its manufactoria produced armaments in the millions.
Arsenals had been raided, then. The cancer that was taking the city was virulent, and metastasising with blinding speed.
The Chimera rattled over fallen brickwork and shattered rockcrete as it rushed through a tunnel of flame. Krezoc cursed the blazes. She could see nothing of where they were going, or of what might be ahead. The driver veered sharply to the right as a façade came apart on the left, pouring tonnes of rubble into the street. The Chimera skewed violently, and was still swaying when they reached an intersection.
Krezoc registered the flashes on the right with the corner of her eye. In the fraction of a second between the light and the impact, she had time to process what she saw and know what was going to happen. She did not have time to brace herself. The rockets slammed into the side of the Chimera and against the base of its wheels. The combined force of the explosions lifted it and flipped it onto its side. Krezoc hurtled against the bulkhead. The vehicle slid, trailing fire, for fifty yards before a mound of rubble brought it to a shuddering halt.
Blood poured into Krezoc’s eyes from a wound in her head. The driver was unconscious. She climbed over the sideways doorway into the troop compartment. One of the Imperial Hunters’ moderati had a broken arm, and Rheliax looked badly concussed, barely able to focus his eyes. The others seemed to be battered but were moving well enough. Drahn met Krezoc’s gaze as she helped Rheliax to his feet. Krezoc nodded, pressing her lips together in a grim line. They both knew what was coming. They would fight it anyway. They drew their sidearms.
There was pounding against the sides of the Chimera. The rear entrance began to glow in the centre. Someone was cutting through it with a plasma torch. On Krezoc’s right, the turret hatch began to turn.
Krezoc raised her plasma pistol. She aimed it at the hatch. She shouted the war-cry of the Pallidus Mor. ‘We are the pride of Death!’
‘The pride of Death!’ her officers echoed.
‘For the Emperor!’ Krezoc roared and fired the pistol as the hatch opened.
She killed many cultists, denying them access to the hold, before the rear entrance was cut open. Then she, the princeps, the moderati, the governor and the guards hit their attackers with a wide stream of las, plasma and bolt shells. They fought hard. They fought for as long as they could.
They were overwhelmed in less than a minute.
Are you ready?
Hallard Eukrolas tried to be. He tried to be ready to die. Could anyone truly be prepared for that moment? He did not think so. Not really. But he braced himself, and he murmured a prayer to the God-Emperor, and he forced himself not to think about the pain that would come with burning alive.
‘I am prepared,’ he managed to croak out. ‘Do your worst.’ His crouching position was already agonising. In another few minutes he would be blind with pain. Death would be a release.
But the heretic leader did not leave the platform at the centre of the structure. Around the dais, flames gouted from clusters of gas pipes, but they shot into the air and were not aimed at the prisoners. Not yet.
The heretic turned his lipless smile Hallard’s way again. He swept his arm towards the square and the avenues beyond. Hallard followed his gestures, and understood. The heretic had not asked Hallard if he was ready to die. He had asked if he was ready to see.
The spectacle he had been called on to witness began.
Hallard was not ready.
Yet he could not look away, and he could not shut his eyes. Down the wide boulevards, to the limits of his sight, the slaughter began. The cultists turned on their prisoners and butchered them. The howls of terror and fruitless pleas for mercy were a deafening chorus of the damned. Blood filled the streets. It streamed into the square and lapped against the edge of the sacrifice engine. Wherever Hallard turned his head, he saw the same atrocities replicated, and in the end, he understood that it was all a single act, a single monstrosity perpetrated across the city, and though he was forced to witness it, the immense sacrifice was not for his benefit. It was for other eyes. Perhaps it was for the scaled, horned god-machine that presided over the square. Its eyes could see much farther than his. It would see much more of the slaughter. Its head turned back and forth, and it seemed to be surveying the bloodshed, ensuring the sacrifice unfolded as it should.
Then a change came upon the streets of the city, and Hallard understood that even the Titan was not the true object of veneration. It too was a mere witness, a participant in the ritual. The ocean of blood was for still other eyes. And those eyes must have seen, for the cultists were answered. E
nergy crackled along the streets. It arced across the square and jumped from pole to pole of the iron-and-brass construct. Hallard screamed as the bars of his cage grew hot. He tried to recoil, but there was no room to move, and the floor of the cage was heating up too.
The energy discharges built. Lightning of red and blue and green shot up and down the lines of the immense rune of blood the heretics had created. The air thrummed, and then it screamed. The sky roiled, low clouds of magmatic crimson rushing down as if to feed on the rivers of gore. The earth began to shake, harder and harder. The energy became a blinding, shimmering wall. Hallard could see nothing except the infernal lightning. His cage burned through his clothes. His skin crisped and smoked. And though the agony consumed him and his lungs began to smoulder, his screams were for his soul, and in fear of the wonder that was coming.
The tremors began at the same time that a foul light rose from the direction of Creontiades. Deyers had to lean against the side of Bastion of Faith to keep his feet. A hundred yards from the front line of the Kataran 66th, the cliff edge cracked and tumbled into the sea. Across the Kazani Strait, light the colour of flaming blood shot upwards from the distant skyline. The sky twisted, spun, became a vortex and came down to meet the light. Blood in the air, blood in the light, blood in the clouds; all boiling, seething and ravenous.
The tremors grew stronger. Cracks spread outwards from the cliff edge. Deyers climbed onto Bastion of Faith. He sat in the turret hatch and voxed the regiment. ‘Pull back,’ he ordered. ‘A hundred yards for now, but be ready to go further.’ He muttered a prayer. Ornastas and his company had already departed in two Tauroxes, and Deyers wished the confessor were still here. Deyers needed his strength of faith.
‘This isn’t an earthquake, is it?’ Platen called.
‘No. It’s something worse.’
It was a thing he had no name for. There were no words, only ancient fears, for the furious, crimson light in Creontiades. It was not of the world, but it was hungry for it, and it was wounding it. The shaking became so violent it almost hurled Deyers from his perch. He held tight to the edges of the hatch and stared across the strait. The clouds were gathering, deepening, turning the day into a bloody night. It seemed as though a titanic maw was about to open in the firmament, one that would come down and devour the world.
Then the world broke. Deyers felt it – a change in the nature of the tremors. There was a snap, and a giving way. Deyers had once broken three ribs in combat. They had fractured at both ends and he had been aware of an awful floating in his body, of objects that had acquired a freedom of motion they should never have had. He felt that same sensation again, only it came from far below. It was the bones of Katara that had broken, were parting, were being reshaped.
A second glow appeared. It came from the depths of the strait. The waves were driven to new heights of frenzy. The glow brightened as the thing came closer to the surface. The water began to boil. Steam rose in vast, writhing curtains. The other side of the strait disappeared. All Deyers could see was the glow in the east and the glow in the water.
Brighter, closer, hotter, whatever was coming was immense. The hideous light stretched across the entire length of the strait, and it was wider than the ruined bridge. It carried those ruins to the surface with it. For several seconds, it seemed the bridge was resurrecting itself. Smashed superstructure and tumbled supports rose above the waves, then fell away, crumbling and melting, from the surface of the monstrosity below. It came into sight now, climbing higher and higher. It was a causeway of bronze, heated to incandescence in the act of its creation, its glow beginning to cool now but still so bright it hurt Deyers’ eyes. At regular intervals and on both sides of its length were towering, twisted pillars, topped with huge skulls. The vacant eyes of the skulls stared westwards, eager for the prey on the mainland.
The causeway climbed until it was level with the clifftops. Where the bridge had been, there was now an even greater expanse of bronze. The waves of the strait, divided from each other, slammed in impotent anger against the metal walls.
The curtains of steam faded. The bronze still glowed. It illuminated the far side of the strait. It reflected off the giant forms in motion. In despair, readying for a battle he knew he could not win, Deyers watched the Titans of the Iron Skulls march in triumph towards the causeway.
Chapter 7
The Run
Why didn’t they kill us? Krezoc wondered. Though she and her comrades took down many cultists, the heretics fired to disable, except when aiming at the governor and her guard. Eukrolas was slain fighting, as she would have wanted, and Krezoc hoped that salvaged some of her pride in the end, despite the futility of the struggle and the humiliation of the overthrow. When the cultists swarmed into the Chimera, they came to capture the Pallidus Mor, not to kill. Why? Krezoc thought as they disarmed her and dragged her from the vehicle. Why? she thought as they marched her and the others through the burning streets of Deicoon.
Violence had taken the city, but the battle was not done. Militia and reserve units of the Kataran Spears fought on. The cultists had the greater numbers and the weaponry to make those numbers count against the loyalist forces and the unarmed populace of the city. Krezoc could see how the struggle was going. Deicoon would fall.
But she was not dead. They want us for something more. It took her longer than it should have to realise what the enemy wanted from her. Perhaps because the goal was so completely beyond her conception of the possible. It was madness within madness.
The cultists brought the prisoners to the Cathedral of Saint Chirosius. It was on the other side of the ruined street from the Viokania forge yards where the Titans stood, omnipotent giants inert and vulnerable to the vermin that scurried at their feet. Guns prodding her back, her hands tied behind her with brass wire, Krezoc was forced to climb the stone spiral steps of the cathedral’s southern tower. It took almost an hour to reach the top. There, a line of crude frameworks, also of brass, had been constructed. Krezoc turned her face from their jagged shapes. They formed the angular, runic skull she had seen emblazoned on the armour of the Iron Skulls god-machines. The cultists cut the bonds on her hands, then fastened her to one of the frameworks, arms spread wide. She was facing Gloria Vastator. It was really not that far away. Her spirit tried to fly from the roof of the tower, across the fissured street and into the skull of the Warlord. The machine-spirit was calling to her, distressed that she did not answer. She and the Titan were trapped in their incomplete states. She strained against her bonds. She willed them to snap. Her will felt strong enough to give her true wings. She would give anything to fuse once more with the Warlord. She would…
She stopped, the burning hate replaced by cold fury. She began to understand what the heretics were trying to achieve.
She looked north, to her right. There were more of the runic frameworks on the peak of the other spire, a hundred feet away. There were still more assembled underneath the huge bells, visible through the tower’s gothic windows. They held the secutarii of the Pallidus Mor. There were generators of some kind too, running some kind of disabling current, she guessed, holding the warriors immobilised.
Beside her, Drahn had noticed the secutarii too. ‘Why have they been captured too? Why haven’t we been killed?’ she asked.
Krezoc cast her eyes over the city, at the rising smoke and glint of fires. She thought of the patterns in the streets, and of the true enemy that was directing the actions of the heretics. ‘Because,’ she said to Drahn, ‘the Iron Skulls have unfinished work they wish to complete.’
Carrinas, the princeps of the Imperial Hunter Reaver Nobilis Arma, spoke up. ‘If they complete it, we have you to thank.’
Drahn snorted. ‘I admire your resilience,’ she snapped.
‘Enough,’ Krezoc said. ‘Do not help the traitors in their goal.’
Drahn frowned for a moment, then shook her head in disbelief. ‘They seek to corrupt us
?’
‘I believe so.’
‘They’re going to be very disappointed.’
‘Yes,’ said Krezoc. But the victory was hollow. She took no comfort in the prospect of an honourable death.
A figure moved to stand between Krezoc and her view of Gloria Vastator. The cultist was a tall man. His posture was rigid in spite of the wounds he had inflicted on himself. The left of his body was flayed. Articulated brass plates covered the musculature. His clothes, though torn and debased with bloody runes, had once been those of an officer of the Kataran 66th.
‘I am Darroban,’ he said. ‘I was a colonel. You do not know me?’
Krezoc shook her head.
Darroban shrugged. ‘There are some who would remember the name. Perhaps I will see them yet.’ His mutilated mouth parted in an angry sneer. ‘I have lessons to teach them.’
‘I doubt that very much,’ Krezoc said.
‘Do you? You’re wrong. They will look on the weapons we stole so easily from them, and the weapons given to us by the Iron Skulls, and yes, there will be lessons there. I think you will learn things today, too. The same things I learned long ago. When you descend from this tower, you will be sworn to Khorne. You will march to harvest his skulls. You will bring blood for the Blood God.’
Krezoc spat. ‘I am not a weak puppet. Now go. I’m sure your masters require you elsewhere, serf.’
Darroban’s eyes widened in rage. He took a step forwards, his hand going to the blade at his side. With a visible effort, he stopped himself before he drew.
‘That’s what I thought,’ Krezoc said. ‘You aren’t even allowed to answer insults.’
‘Perhaps not,’ Darroban said. He moved back, as if taking himself out of the range of temptation. ‘Or perhaps I do not want to deprive myself of the sight of your suffering. Your conversion won’t be easy. It won’t be stopped, either.’
Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine Page 12