The flickering began. Markos could not run straight. Vertigo assailed him. Though his feet drummed against rockcrete, the broken road seemed insubstantial as vapour. Everything he could see had thinned, become a membrane stretched to the last point before tearing.
‘What…’ he gasped. What is happening? he tried to cry, but he had no breath.
Then he was thrown to the ground again. From the south east came the shriek of a new bombardment. Before the city could tear, it began to shake.
Ornastas blocked another blow from Darroban. His muscles retained enough of their old training that he could counter the heretic’s spear jabs with his staff. But Darroban was faster and stronger. He had been in combat for decades longer. He attacked relentlessly, shouting promises of blood to his new god. Ornastas managed a few jabs in the first moments of the duel, ones that Darroban knocked aside with easy contempt.
Adrenaline and zealotry kept Ornastas alive. He blocked another thrust from Darroban that would have pierced his neck. He hadn’t stopped all the blows, and he could feel Darroban taking him down one small wound at a time. His arms and flanks were bleeding. A deep cut on his forehead threatened to blind him as blood dripped down his face. One of his ribs was broken. He was choking on phlegm and dust, and breathing was an agony.
He would not go down. He would not let his service to the Emperor and to Katara end at the hands of this wretch.
Ornastas half staggered back, narrowly avoiding an overhand strike from Darroban. ‘You’re weak,’ he taunted.
Darroban hesitated, surprised and amused. He circled Ornastas, looking for another opening. ‘I’m weak!’ He laughed.
It was hard to talk with the thickness in his throat. Ornastas spat. ‘Weak,’ he repeated. ‘A weak fight. Cutting your foe down a piece at a time. A coward’s strategy.’
He didn’t expect Darroban to react to the taunts. They were too transparent. He used them to gain a few seconds to breathe, that was all. To his surprise, Darroban’s mutilated features contorted in a furious snarl and he threw himself forwards, flailing rapid, wild blows with his spear. Darroban’s rage made him reckless. Ornastas backed up over the uneven rockcrete, countering the strikes. Darroban reared back, left himself open, and Ornastas slammed the shock head of his staff against the heretic’s chest. The jolt only enraged Darroban further. He leaned into the staff and swung his spear sideways.
The blade struck Ornastas in the side of the head. It sliced his face to the bone. The impact was stunning. He stumbled to the right, tripped over a chunk of rockcrete and started to fall forwards, and so saved his life. The movement brought him closer to Darroban as the heretic brought the spear down again. Instead of the blade splitting Ornastas’ skull, the shaft hit his crown, driving him to his knees.
Ornastas hissed, seeing double. He raised his staff to block the next blow.
It did not come.
Darroban howled. He dropped his spear and clutched his head. He weaved away from Ornastas, moving unconsciously towards the drop from the ruined tower. He screamed, clawing at his face. Long strips of muscle came off, caught in his jagged nails. He faced north west, his scream unending, spiralling up and down a scale of madness.
Leaning on his staff, Ornastas made it to his feet. He realised Darroban’s shrieks led a choir. Across the plateau of rubble, the cultists had stopped fighting. They were all screaming, all facing in the same direction. Ornastas followed the line of Darroban’s tormented gaze. He could see nothing past Deicoon’s eruptions. As he stared, though, and the thousands screamed, an intimation of a huge event came to him. He felt it as a trembling of the spirit, as if the sublimely terrible was just beyond the horizon.
The ripples of the great event reached Deicoon. The tremors threw Ornastas off his feet. The burning city shook with mounting violence. The lava fountains surged higher. Ornastas clung to the rubble as it bucked. He stared in awe as the high mountainsides, glowing dimly in the reflected light of the leaping flames, cracked, crumbled and began to slide.
‘The target is the rune,’ Krezoc commanded the battle group. ‘Full bombardment. Fire until nothing is left.’
‘Princeps!’ The voice was Deyers’, shouting in horror.
‘Fire,’ said Krezoc. ‘Fire or lose Katara.’
Bastion of Faith had weathered the shock wave and the killing wind that had followed. Not all the tanks of the regiment had. Some had burned. Others had been upended by a giant’s hand. Deyers had been slow taking shelter, and his skin was charred. The regiment still existed, though, and it was ready to move into the city.
Then Krezoc issued the order.
Deyers hesitated. He looked back and forth between the Pallidus Mor and the Iron Skulls at work in Therimachus. The Titans blurred together. They were all bent on the annihilation of the final city.
The guns of the Spears were aimed at the Iron Skulls.
Krezoc said to target the rune. To bombard the city itself.
Fire or lose Katara.
The seconds fell away. He could not give the order.
The Pallidus Mor unleashed the totality of its might on Therimachus. Flights of missiles that reduced square miles of hive blocks to dust, las that melted the greatest fortifications, shells that shattered the earth, plasma bursts that vaporised entire divisions – they fell on the wounded city, striking the molten lines of the colossal rune. Deyers stared in horror as the darkness exploded with the light of the murder of hope.
Towers burst to shrapnel or collapsed into seething flame. Chasms ripped open, pulling entire blocks into the abyss. Manufactoria erupted, chaining fireballs and sending floods of ignited promethium roaring through the narrow canyons of the streets. The Iron Skulls turned in fury as the lines of the rune extended, crossed, disintegrated. The pattern being carved into the face of Therimachus was torn apart.
It did not die easily.
The air over the city seemed to tie itself into a knot. Deyers gasped, lightning pain striking him behind the eyes. He saw the reality of the city bend and twist. Then the potential that had been building, that power that had come to the very edge of manifesting as a thing with a name and a will, descended at once into uncontrolled chaos. The materium and the warp collided and warred. The reality of Therimachus turned molten, and the eruption seized the entire city. Therimachus broke up into slabs floating on magma, like ice floes on an ocean in storm. Some were only a few hundred yards long, some were a mile or more.
The magma heaved in waves a hundred feet high. The stone rafts of the city reared up and down, leviathans in agony. Slabs broke apart and disappeared beneath the crimson waves. Two massive rafts hurtled towards collision. The rockcrete prow of one hit the flank of another like a ramming void ship. It rode over the centre of its victim, the underbelly of glowing bedrock scraping the skyline flat. As it passed over, it tilted the other slab onto its side, and then over. The needles of hab blocks and cathedrals pointed to the side and then down. The first slab kept going, pushed by the fury of the waves. Its prow angled higher and higher, and at last it paused, a vertical island a mile high. The impossible moment stretched. Walls collapsed and buildings tumbled over each other, falling like pebbles down the surface of the slab. There were Iron Skulls on the vertical blocks, a Feral and a Ravager, and they dropped, figures that suddenly seemed small, down the face of the slab towards the red ocean. The slab trembled and then it sank, straight down, a plunge into the depthless molten sea.
The earth outside Therimachus trembled, the trauma of the upheaval reaching across the continent. Crevasses split the hills outside the city and raced for the mountain chains. The peaks swayed and broke. The tremors shook the Spears. A Wyvern to Deyers’ left disappeared into a sudden fissure. Medina backed Bastion of Faith away from the widening gap. The tank jerked forwards a dozen yards, and then the ground beneath it disintegrated. The treads spun, seeking a grip on breaking gravel.
Deyers gri
pped the hatch, riding the torment of the earth. The crackling, rumbling thunder of Therimachus swallowed all other sound. He stared at the upheaval, his soul riven like his world.
Somewhere, at a great distance, Platen was shouting to him. But he no longer had any orders to give.
‘What is the condition of Ferrum Salvator?’ Krezoc asked.
Aboard the Nuntius Mortis, Tech-Priest Thassanis said, ‘The primary systems are operational. There remains much to do.’
‘Send it down,’ said Krezoc. She sent Thassanis a datapack with coordinates a short distance from the edge of the magma sea.
Thassanis knew better than to object. Even so, he asked, ‘But who will be its princeps?’ Left unsaid was the enormity of the task facing any soul who hoped to replace Balzhan.
‘No one, unless the Omnissiah wills it,’ Krezoc said. But the shifting equations of the war demanded the unthinkable.
Krezoc ended contact with the Nuntius Mortis and led the impossible charge into Therimachus. She took Gloria Vastator into a landscape possessed by madness. The advance was mad, but necessary. The war was far from finished. When reality lashed out and the city broke, Iron Skulls died. But more still walked the heaving slabs. They were not making for the edge of the city. They were manoeuvring into the beginning of a circular formation. They were trying to regain the reins of the unleashed energy.
Extermination was the only road to victory.
Gloria Vastator stepped across a magmatic strait and onto one of the larger slabs. The Warlord shouldered aside gutted hab blocks. They crumbled to the streets. At the very edge of her awareness, Krezoc registered the presence of panicked crowds. Millions had died in Therimachus, but there were millions more who lived to experience the terror of their city’s final catastrophe. The assault Krezoc led would kill many of them.
The knowledge settled into the back of her mind. It would remain there, buried by the necessity of the battlefield, and if she survived, if there was an aftermath to this conflict, she would deal with it then. She would confront the costs she had exacted from others. But now it was a distraction, as were the fleeing hordes.
Her focus, cold as the void, zeroed on the Traitor Titans in her range.
The Pallidus Mor stormed Therimachus. The maniples attacked together, the reduced demi-legio forming a wedge that sent out a hail of rockets, shells and energy before it. The Ravager at the far end of the slab exploded before it could turn and counter the attack. The other Iron Skulls abandoned their attempt to salvage the ritual and returned fire. Their circle converged. The fist of the Pallidus Mor moved towards the grasping claw of the Iron Skulls.
The semblance of strategy on both sides lasted less than a minute. Massed fire shattered god-machines, and when another Iron Skulls Ravager went nuclear, the slabs broke up into smaller islands. The magma’s convulsions became more and more violent, the unleashed, raging force still unspent. The waves surged higher. More slabs upended and sank. The god-machines walked on surfaces that heaved up and down at ever more violent angles. Formations came apart as lava forced itself up through the plates and split.
The monsters of war fought each other on the back of a dying world.
Markos clung to the tangle of metal wreckage and screamed. The land tilted higher and higher. He looked up and saw the molten waves reaching for him. The immense feet of the Warlord dug the pavement of the avenue, pushing a barrier of rubble before them as the god-machine’s stance slipped. Then the slab fell back. His perspective whirled. The bleeding land slipped out of the sky again.
Markos tried to work his way deeper into the wreckage. He looked around for Sorren. The captain was a few feet away, holding tight to another spur of iron. His mask of determination had fallen away. His face mirrored Markos’ terror.
The other guards were dead, crushed beneath falling buildings. Markos tried to catch sight of the Kataran 66th. He failed. He didn’t know where to look any longer. The ground spun as it rode the waves. There was no north, no south. There was only fire and the coming of the end.
‘What do we do?’ Markos shouted at Sorren. Any answer, any purpose would suffice. Any meaning at all. But not this. Not this death. This was worse than being buried in the vault. ‘What do we do?’ This was beyond defeat, beyond disaster.
Sorren didn’t answer. But his gaze sharpened on Markos, as if suddenly remembering that the governor was still there. Sorren stood up, his movements jerking, unnatural. He pointed.
Markos turned his head. There were only more ruins and flames in the direction Sorren indicated. That darkness would take them away from the god-machines, though. That would have to be enough.
Markos rose, then hunched as the Warlord and two Ravagers exchanged fire. The blasts of crossing las cracked the night with furious day. Monstrous shells struck the Warlord. The Titan withstood the hits, but the force of the explosions transmitted itself to the surface. Cracks chased each other across the floating slab, and it began to split again. The fissures glowed red, then the lava leapt through, jetting from a severed artery. The Warlord walked forwards. Its heavy tread smashed the weakening surface. The fissures behind the Titan widened, and the slab came apart. It split, and split, and split again. Markos tightened his grip on the iron. He was on an islet of rockcrete less than a hundred feet across. It spun on the sea of magma. It rocked violently, tossed by the towering waves. The heat came for him. His skin began to crisp. His vision was a vortex of fire and destruction.
Sorren fell back into the wreckage. A spike pierced his chest. He jerked once, blood spurting from his mouth, and was still.
Markos was alone. Abandoned, he screamed at the universe. Around him, all form of meaning hurled itself into the flames. His life and death were nothing, just another splinter in the galaxy’s endless howl of pain.
His fragment of the city rose towards the crest of a magma wave. The climb was too steep. The slab tilted past the vertical. Markos caught one last, upended sight of the god-machines wreaking destruction on each other and the world. Then the slab fell on the wave, delivering him to the darkness and the agony.
‘Banelord to the right,’ Vansaak said. ‘Crossing over.’
‘Apocalypse salvo,’ Krezoc voxed Konterus. ‘Hold it off.’ She gave only a fraction of her attention to the missiles. She left the attack to the moderati minoris. The priority was Gloria Vastator’s struggle with a second Banelord directly ahead. The battle had reduced the size of the slab by half. Krezoc divided the Warlord’s fire between the Iron Skull and the ground at its feet. Volcano las-beams slashed into the traitor’s shields at the level of its head. Quake shells shook the earth. The Banelord fought back in kind. The rockcrete raft cracked. It rocked high and low. Gloria Vastator’s internal gyros tilted to the extreme. Krezoc felt a machinic form of vertigo as the Warlord turned top-heavy and came close to toppling, first forwards, then back.
The Banelord’s tail cannon launched a shell that struck at the same moment an initial blast from the new arrival overloaded the void shields. The blast rocked the length of the torso. The controls became even more sluggish. The change was instantaneous. Krezoc grimaced in pain. Gloria Vastator’s motor functions were being severed.
To the right, the night flashed with fury.
‘We’re down!’ Drahn voxed. ‘Right leg severed by two slabs. Took two of the bastards first.’
Krezoc walked the Warlord to the right, shifting with a new tilt of the island. ‘Can you retreat?’ she asked Drahn. The commander asking the question was detached, barely linked to the warrior fighting to kill two opponents.
Drahn’s laughter was sardonic. ‘Drag ourselves to firm ground? Perhaps.’
‘Do it.’
‘My weapons systems are operational. We can provide support.’
Belicosa and Mori, simultaneous shots at the right foot of the Banelord, in the wake of a steady mega-bolter stream to strain the Iron Skull’s shields. �
�Save Fatum Messor,’ Krezoc ordered. She was running the cold arithmetic again, comparing the remnants of both forces. Drahn’s position was isolated. Her salvoes would be of limited use. Better to preserve something. Fatum Messor was not far from the edge of the city.
Gloria Vastator had gone much further in, and the slab was drifting further and further still.
The las and shells hit. The beam melted halfway through the leg where it joined the foot. The leg buckled and the ground gave way. The Banelord sank on one side into lava. The impact of its torso smashed the weakening surface. Fissures multiplied, and the forward third of the slab broke into pieces. The Banelord fell backwards into the waves.
Krezoc turned Gloria Vastator on its waist axis the moment she saw the disintegration of the slab, turning the Vulcan onto the other Banelord, unleashing another Apocalypse flight while the Belicosa recharged and another shell was loaded into the Mori’s chamber. The Warlord’s void shields blazed under the traitor’s energy assault. Crimson, warp-tainted plasma burned through the defences and melted the front armour.
The primary weapons readied. Her will gave the order to fire again. In the same moment, she registered a flood of vox-bursts and auspex reports. The shape of the battle changed second to second, and the equations reduced to a single solution.
The war had turned into a chaos of skirmishes and duels, determined by the chance of the city’s immolation. Slabs broke up, capsized and sank. The names of princeps and god-machines disappeared from the feed to the manifold. Enemy signals vanished too. Krezoc’s situational awareness stripped the confusion of the battlefield to the essential vectors. The Banelord before her, and one other, engaged by Crudelis Mortem. That fight was to the west, about the same distance from the shore of the magma ocean.
Krezoc aimed the volcano las and quake shells low again. But the ground held, and so did the Banelord’s defences. It closed in, firing again. A smaller slab ground against Gloria Vastator’s, and two Ravagers marched off it, joining the battle.
Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine Page 25