‘Yes, my lord?’ said Aximand.
‘Your attention is elsewhere, I think.’
‘Lupercal, I’m sorry. For a moment there...’
‘What?’
‘I could hear breathing, my lord.’
The Warmaster regarded him with what looked like amusement.
‘We all do it,’ he said.
‘No, I mean... Do you not hear it?’
‘I hear weakness,’ said the Warmaster. ‘Where is this frailty coming from, Aximand? You’re jumpy.’
‘My lord, is there somebody else in your quarters with us?’
‘No. No, there isn’t. I know this for a fact.’
Aximand rose to his feet.
‘Then who is that?’ he asked. ‘Lord, who is that, standing just there, on the other side of the fire?’
‘Oh Little Horus,’ said the Warmaster, ‘you are beginning to speak with the tongue of madness.’
And just as Aximand realised that he was, he woke.
He assembled his squad commanders, and reviewed the tactical data. Aximand was, perhaps, the most scrupulous of all the Sixteenth Legion’s captains. He was not one, like Targost for example, who only ever wanted to know the fundamentals of a target, or was annoyed by extraneous detail. Aximand liked to know everything, every last facet. He studied climate charts. He learned the names and phases of Dwell’s eighteen moons. He studied the intelligencer plans of the Mausolytic Precinct, and had the Fleetmaster’s strategic architects fashion a sensory simulation he could walk through.
He learned the names of his foe. The Tyjunate Compulsories, a high-calibre division of ceremonial city troops whose duty it was, by tradition, to protect the Precinct. The Chainveil, an elite corps named after the ritual screen surrounding the thrones of the Elders of Dwell, who were rumoured to be supplementing the Mausolytic defence.
No confirmation had yet come of Meduson or any of his agents reaching Dwell. If he had beaten the 63rd in the race, it was thought unlikely he would position himself at the Precinct. This role would probably be handed off to one of his trusted warleaders, perhaps Bion Henricos, or to one of the White Scars captains such as Hibou Khan or Kublon Besk.
‘Let us hope for the Fifth,’ said Lev Goshen, Captain of the Twenty Fifth Company, who was to command the second wave behind Aximand. ‘Ill-favoured for static defence, they will make themselves crazy waiting for our overture, stuck in one place.’
‘The Scars should not be underestimated,’ said Grael Noctua, Sergeant of the Warlocked Tactical Squad.
Goshen glanced up from the strategium display, looked at Noctua, and caught Aximand’s eye.
‘He’s got a voice, then,’ he remarked.
There had been some murmuring amongst the upper ranks of the Legion when Noctua’s role as second to Aximand for the Mausolytic assault had been announced.
‘I have been advised I had better use it well, captain,’ said Noctua. There was a reserve to him, a restraint that reminded Aximand of someone. Noctua had that true son face, but the balance of humours was unusual: there was less of the arrogant charismatic and more of the calculated intellectual. Abaddon described Noctua as a blade weapon rather than a firearm.
Goshen grinned.
‘Let’s have your wisdom, Noctua,’ he said.
‘I had the honour to serve alongside a detachment of the Fifth Legion seven years ago during the Tyrade System Compliance. They impressed me with their battlecraft. I was reminded of the Wolves.’
‘The Luna Wolves?’ asked Goshen.
‘The Wolves of Fenris, sir,’ Noctua replied.
‘That’s two enemies you’ve mentioned,’ said Goshen. ‘You understand they are our enemies, don’t you, Noctua?’
‘I understand they are both utterly lethal,’ replied Noctua. ‘Should we not appreciate the qualities of our enemies above all else?’
Goshen hesitated.
‘This terrace here, this parade,’ he said, returning to the chart display. ‘We will need air cover to achieve it.’
The briefing continued. Aximand thought for a moment that someone else had something to say, someone who had come into the room late, to stand at the back of the grouped officers.
But there was nobody there.
‘I hear you’re considering Kibre and Noctua,’ said the Warmaster.
‘You hear everything, as usual,’ Aximand replied.
‘Not Targost, then?’
‘He has other responsibilities,’ said Aximand, ‘and we did not wish to dilute them.’
The Warmaster nodded. He moved another carved bone counter across the board between them. Of all his sons, Aximand most enjoyed the practice and discipline of strategy games. The anteroom was furnished with many fine sets, most of them gifts from war leaders or brother primarchs. There was regicide, chatranj, caturanga, go, hneftafl, xadrez, mahnkala, zatrikion... It was rare to find a primarch’s homeworld where a skill-honing wargame had not evolved.
‘Ezekyle favoured Targost, didn’t he?’ asked the Warmaster as Aximand studied the field and contemplated his reply.
‘He did, sir.’
‘And when you persuaded him against the choice, did you tell him the real reason, or did you manufacture one that would be more palatable to him?’
Aximand hesitated. He remembered the conversation with Abaddon, wherein he had not chosen to say that Targost, the Captain of the Seventh Company, was not a son, a true son. He was Cthonic stock. Aximand had not chosen to reveal that part of his disinclination.
‘I didn’t–’ Aximand started to say.
‘Tell him?’ asked the primarch.
‘I didn’t... recognise my true motive,’ Aximand replied, with reluctance.
‘Interesting when you see it, though, don’t you think?’ the Warmaster asked, sitting back. ‘You and Ezekyle, Widowmaker and Noctua, all of you... What is it you call it? True sons?’
‘True sons,’ Aximand echoed.
‘So, do you suppose,’ the Warmaster chuckled, ‘it is because you prefer the reassurance of a familiar face? Or is there another face you wish to block out?’
Dry air, cool, a faint hint of salt. The Sea of Enna in the flat rift valley below, like a sheet of glass in a culvert. Along its shore, the teeming city of Tyjun, collected like flotsam, like multicoloured shingle. On the far side of the immense valley, across the back of the sleeping sea, the block line of the opposite valley wall, squared off and velvet black in the dawn light. The sky was violet, shot with stars and occasional moons. To the north, the pre-glow of the rising sun. To the east, the false dawn of the port, on fire since midnight. That was the handiwork of Jerrod and Thirteenth Company.
In the high morning of the Mausolytic plateau, the buildings of the Precinct stood like stone hangars for vast airships. Rectangles, unadorned, they were faced with yellow stone rendered gold by the early light. In places they were linked by soaring colonnades and porticos, gold stone columns the size of ancient redwoods. The pavements were made of etched steel, polished like mirrors. The atmosphere held a dry, static charge, as if great electromagnetic machines operated nearby.
The vaunted Chainveil made no appearance in the direct line at the Precinct. Chainveil soldiers caused a brief delay to Abaddon’s advance into the City of Elders. The First Captain made curt, grudging reports of their determined resistance. Goshen’s advance took a bastion west of the city where the defenders boasted they were Chainveil, but Goshen was sure they were merely regular army claiming to be the elites, so as to seem more intimidating.
He slew them all, anyway.
The Tyjunate Compulsories, resplendent in silver and crimson wargear, formed the main defence. The troopers were armed with long power swords, with energised axes and pikes, with munition-loaders, with sonic tubes, with plasmic-system weapons and las-rifles. Entering combat, they engaged individual, segmente
d force shields, light-absorbing fog that dimmed the glory of their ritual uniforms and made them look as if they’d each been enveloped in a hand-cut piece of storm cloud.
The shields were annoyingly effective, and deflected most gunfire over a certain range. When a Legiones Astartes bolt-round did pierce them, either through a direct hit or by finding the joint between segments, the Compulsory inside detonated, and his explosive demise was contained, pressurised, inside the shield, like a firecracker destroying a piece of soft fruit inside a bottle. The noise of it was dull, muted, like the slap of a muffled bass drum.
It was infuriating. Dug in around the looming structures of the Precinct, the Compulsories were actually retarding a Legiones Astartes assault. They were holding the line against the Sixteenth.
Yet they were men. Just men. Aximand felt a sense of injustice. The force shields, certainly not the best he’d ever seen, but made effective by their individual mounts and portability, were giving the Compulsories enough of an edge to bother the Sons of Horus. It was an aberration brought about by circumstance. Human soldiers, no matter how good they were, did not resist transhuman soldiers. Aximand wanted to crush them, pulverise them for their temerity, to call in an orbital barrage, ranged shelling, or even one of the squadrons of superheavy armour pieces that were basking nearby like vast crocodilian predators in the rising sun, waiting for his word to send them slipping down to the kill.
However, any of those actions would also raze the Precinct. The Compulsories were protected by the very buildings they were defending. Aximand had latitude, but he sincerely intended to prove he didn’t need it.
Less than twenty minutes from drop landing, the assault on the Mausolytic Precinct had grown bitter and choked. The Sons of Horus and their Army auxiliaries had lost momentum, their offensive stalled, all their advantages cancelled out by the clear-sighted deployment of professional soldiers exploiting their combat assets.
Yade Durso, second captain of Aximand’s company, cursed all the spirits of vengeance and destiny over the vox-link, but Aximand knew Durso was actually cursing him. Xachary Scipion of Metallun Reaver reported his assumption of squad command. His sergeant, old Gaspir Yunkwist, was dead. There was heat in Scipion’s voice. He was calling for an Apothecary. Zeb Zenonius of Bale Tactical reported two fallen.
Somewhere, someone was breathing.
Taking hits, driven into cover, Aximand looked up at the sky above the plateau. It was still flooded with the blue ink of night, but the pale margins were increasing. He could see four of Dwell’s moons in the sky, one large, the other three not much larger than stars. Because of their relative positions, they were each in a different phase: full, gibbous, half, new.
The sight of it let his anger breathe out for a second. It was, what? A sign? A portent?
His vox tapped. Visor display identified the link as Grael Noctua.
‘Forget bolters,’ said Noctua. ‘Blades.’
‘Indeed?’ Aximand replied.
‘Get in close, and the fools do not stand a chance,’ Noctua replied.
Aximand smiled.
‘Blades! he yelled. He locked his bolter to his hip, and unsheathed his sword. Double-edged, power-active, Cthonic bluesteel, etched along the fuller. He’d called it Mourn-it-all. His combat shield was already on his left arm.
He didn’t wait to see his order observed. He powered out of cover, lasbolts clipping his shield face and dinking his leg plates. Two big, bounding strides put him on the colonnade, moving fast, head down, blade up. He saw the first of the Compulsories up ahead, fogged in their shields, dug in around the massive pillars, firing at him. He could see their faces, pale and astonished.
Transhuman dread. Aximand had heard iterators talk of the condition. He’d heard descriptions of it from regular Army officers too. The sight of an Adeptus Astartes was one thing: taller and broader than a man could ever be, armoured like a demigod. The singularity of purpose was self-evident. An Adeptus Astartes was designed to fight and kill anything that didn’t annihilate it first. If you saw an Adeptus Astartes, you knew you were in trouble. The appearance alone cowed you with fear.
But to see one move. Apparently that was the real thing. Nothing human-shaped should be so fast, so lithe, so powerful, especially not anything in excess of two metres tall and carrying more armour than four normal men could lift. The sight of an Adeptus Astartes was one thing, but the moving fact of one was quite another. The psychologists called it transhuman dread. It froze a man, stuck him to the ground, caused his mind to lock up, made him lose control of bladder and bowel. Something huge and warlike gave pause: something huge and warlike and moving with the speed of a striking snake, that was when you knew that gods moved amongst men, and that there existed a scale of strength and speed beyond anything mortal, and that you were about to die and, if you were really lucking, there might be just enough time to piss yourself first.
Aximand saw that dumbfounded look on the faces of the Dwellers he was about to gut and section. He heard the men of Fifth Company following behind him. He felt the joy of being Horus’s son.
Noctua was right. They had been wasting time and effort with guns and bolters. The shields were good enough to make the percentages of a firefight poor. The shields were good enough to stop blades too. Bayonets, that was. Pole arms. A sabre. Maybe even a powered blade.
But not, not for a moment, a powered blade driven by transhuman arm.
The shields shattered. They cracked and broke with the sounds of smashing glass. Sharp chips of shield segment flew into the air for a microsecond after each blow before evaporating, the shield first, and then the body inside: the energy shell, then the meat. Blood exploded from the yawning wounds under pressure, jetting into the morning air, hosing Aximand and the great columns of the colonnade with arterial spray. Each sword stroke made an explosion of viscera, a puff of red in the air as if a bag of blood had been detonated and its contents particulated.
Whatever edge the Tyjunate Compulsories had owned, they lost it the moment the most advanced warriors in the Imperium remembered they were adaptable enough to fight the old-fashioned way: blade and trade, strength of arm, sword-school close combat.
The Fifth made the entrance to the Precinct less than five minutes after Aximand’s inspiring charge.
Aximand went into the thick of it with three sons at his side: Zenonius of Bale, Ger Geraddon, and Mir Amindaza, both of Tithonus Assault. They went in at the end of the grand colonnade, under a gateway called the Arch of Answers. Dweller Compulsories were packed in beneath the shadow of the vast archway, ready to defend the sunward entrances of the East Mausolytic Hall.
The air was full of shots, like neon rain, horizontal. Energy bolts and tracer rounds shone especially brightly in the shade of the vast archway. The Sons struck the line with their heads down and their shields up, sucking up the lancing gunfire, barrelling Compulsories over in a crush, like a surging mass of rioters. Dwellers fell, their shields still lit, rolling and bouncing inside the hard-light shells. There was a crush, a sense of crowd momentum, of thousands of bodies rippling as one mass. There were bodies underfoot. Hands clawed. Weapons fired point blank.
The Sons bit deeper. Their shields were ploughs and rams. Their swords were scythes and pikes. Compulsories dropped, spilling from their shredding, fizzling shields in tattered states, blood sobbing and squirting out of the compromised fields. Blades hooked other men, hurled them into the air, their bodies spinning, tumbling, flailing overhead, above the crowd, crashing back down on the necks and shoulders of their kin. Some men were dead, upright, their bodies kept from falling by the press of the mass. The mirrored pavements were running with blood. The huge pool, draining out from under the fighting mass, spread its racing edges out across the etched steel, wider, broader, crimson in the sunlight, scarlet in the shadows, flooding around the bases of the columns, making islands out of plinths and pillars.
The scr
eaming voices of the Compulsories were either muffled by their cocooning shields or rendered tinny and raw by the vox-intercept feeding into the comm systems of the Legiones Astartes. Most of the sounds Aximand registered were the concussive impacts as he chopped and barged and hacked. Mourn-it-all was running red on its hilt and grip, blood-smoke cooking off the powered blade. Blood had painted Aximand’s sword arm to the elbow and was dripping off the edges of his vambrace. His shield boss was bruised, and splattered with gore and brain matter.
Behind everything, he could hear breathing.
Zenonius moved past him, shield up, ripping through waists and hips and ribcages with broad, horizontal slashes, bisecting bodies, rupturing shields. It was a devastating, mechanical action, almost agricultural rather than martial. He was reaping his way through the enemy to reach the Mausolytic Halls. Like a worker in a field of crops, he was cutting his row, back and forth, swinging his long blade from the shoulders.
To Aximand’s left, Amindaza was treating it more as sport. His blade was shorter, and he toyed with the Compulsories he was rushing, as if trying to engage them in combat and test their skill. He looked for blades to lock with, to deflect. No one met his challenge. They were too busy trying to fall back out of the path of his butcher assault. Amindaza favoured hacking downstrokes, deep, crushing blows coming from over the shoulder that demolished his foes and smashed them onto the ground at his feet. Aximand could hear him calling out his enemies, daring them to fight him. He railed contempt at their attempts to retreat. He killed men whether they were facing him or not.
For his part, Aximand, like Geraddon, preferred a more textbook mass assault form: shield at eye level, used as ram; sword tip-forward at chest level, punching and stabbing like a piston from under the shield rim. It was relentless. It was like rolling a heavy piece of fruit into rows of toy soldiers and watching them knocked down and scattered.
The assault was so fierce that a brown smoke of aerosolised blood was fuming off the fighting line into the sunlight.
Zenonius reached the East Hall entrance, and slaughtered a dozen Compulsories around the ornamental fountain and pool in the deep, sunlit antehall. Larger cohorts of Aximand’s company were on their heels on the colonnade. The lake of blood was so deep and swollen, there was some pressure in it as it grew and spread. Bodies on the smooth, polished floor rotated in its current, end to end, like sticks of driftwood caught by an overspilling river.
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