by Guy Haley
‘Back away from him!’ Abaddon commanded. ‘Seal the room!’
Atmospheric cyclers ceased turning. Machines bleeped out tones of compliance. Still the Lord of Death marched forwards. Kibre began to cough behind his mask. Aximand took several steps back, his face greening as he fumbled on his helm. Layak dropped to his knees, singing praise in the ear-burning tongue of his worship, but he too struggled to breathe Mortarion’s miasma. Of them all, only Horus, Tormageddon and Abaddon were left unaffected. A stench wreathed the Lord of Death that defied any kind of description. Human senses lacked the capacity to experience it in fullness. So foul, so pungent with rot and sickly life was it, that it triggered Abaddon’s omophagea, and he tasted a bouquet of miseries sublime in their variety. It shocked him to his soul that he could breathe. He looked to the others choking on Mortarion’s foetor, and yet when the primarch approached Abaddon, he inhaled easily, though the stench appalled him.
Mortarion stopped a few feet from his brother’s throne. Pearlescent eyes stared down into brown, both afire with inner power that was not of the material realm. His breathing was laboured, rattling in his lungs so that each exhalation sounded like his last. Puffs of reeking corpse-gas jetted from Mortarion’s mask.
Aximand and Kibre dragged themselves back, behind the throne, crawling as far as they could from the corrupted primarch. Retching grated from Kibre’s voxmitter as he vomited into his helmet. Aximand pulled himself into a corner, managed to roll onto his back, and lay there stupefied.
The Lord of Death slammed the ferrule of Silence upon the floor hard.
‘My Warmaster, I heed your call.’
With those words he knelt. The height his transformation had bestowed meant that he was as tall as the seated Warmaster even when he bowed.
Abaddon suppressed a sneer. Such weakness. The Lord of Death had traded his position as a lord of men to become a slave of the gods.
Angron paced in and out of the field of view of his holo-emitter. Fulgrim giggled. Perturabo glared.
‘My brother, we welcome you,’ said Horus. ‘Rise.’
Bones popped as the Lord of Death stood again. ‘I come to fulfil my promise and lead the assault upon the Palace.’ His voice, once a pure bass, was a hoarse whisper.
‘You are greatly gifted by our patrons,’ Horus said, taking in his brother’s transformation. ‘You will not be able to set foot upon Terra.’
‘I have patience. My sons will go before me to prepare the way. They are ready,’ said Mortarion. ‘We bring new weapons for an old war. My warriors have transcended the limitations of mortality. Nothing can harm them, while I have seven plagues for you to unleash upon Terra. Let the unseen soldiers of bacillus and virus reap the foe, and add their deaths to the total, and when the tally pleases Father Nurgle, then I shall descend to the Palace, and take my vengeance upon the False Emperor.’
‘Do you see?’ said Horus. ‘You all must wait, but not for long.’ He raised his voice to address them all, but stared Angron in the eye. ‘The second phase of the invasion begins tonight. Once the Mechanicum begin the construction of their siege engines, then Mortarion’s Legion shall be given the honour of being first upon Terra.’
‘No!’ shouted Angron. ‘No! It should be me!’
‘It is my will,’ said Horus, ‘that the Death Guard attack first.’
A new pattern
The bombardment continues
Sea of mud
Palace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 1st-13th of Tertius
A new pattern was set. For two weeks after the first landing, the enemy attacks followed the same routine. Swarms of enemy bombers and fighters descended from orbit while the fleet pounded the void shield periphery. Somehow, the exact mechanism was beyond Katsuhiro, the enemy got through, and while the ships in orbit hurled their fury at the ground, the attack craft bombed and strafed everything they could. Every attack saw the aegis lose efficacy, so that each successful raid inflicted more damage. The shields over the Palace proper were inviolable; not so those around the edges. The trench lines took a pounding. Kilometres of works were obliterated, along with the men and women guarding them. The nature of the landscape before the Daylight Wall was transformed. The perfect flatness of planed away mountains was upheaved, and new peaks and declivities carved by orbital attack. Quakes shook the ground as the planetary crust was disturbed.
All the while, the enemy landed more of his troops. They came down as regular as the tides, rising up across the twisted landscape to break against the fortifications in spumes of blood. Though it was cold at such an altitude, the stink of spoiling flesh infiltrated everything.
The sun was gone, hidden by clouds of ash black as the sackcloth of myth. Winds laden with corpse dust blew from far-off cities. When the visibility was good enough, they saw the funeral pyres of distant hives.
Spring approached. The energy poured upon Terra caused a rapid warming, and snow turned to rain, even at the top of the world. Freezing mud clogged everything. Watered now by blood, the ground reeked horribly. The recruits fought in the clothes they had been drafted in. Nobody had anything to change into, nor was there water to wash. They became a dirty tribe, skulking behind their broken ramparts in the shadows of the Imperium’s greatest fortress. Whatever their original skin colour they were remade in a single shade, caked in grey dust, red raw eyes startling in their filthy faces. Dust coated the whole world. Their clothes took on the hue of the ground, the fortifications, the downed ships. Everything was the same colour, everything smelled the same, living and dead.
A lucky few were given coats to stave off the cold. Katsuhiro was not among them. To begin with he cut a hole in the middle of his blanket and wore it over his head as a poncho. He was never warm, even when the dead provided him with a padded jacket and trousers more suited to the climate. All were bloodied, and covered in excrement and rotting flesh. He had ceased to care. The cold was a worse killer than the guns. Battle was an infrequent peril. The cold was persistent.
Sometimes, it rained a toxic slime of pollutants from the burning cities. When it stopped, it left behind a metallic stink. Those who dared to drink the rain perished. Some tried for lack of water – thirst and hunger tormented them all – but after a time, some drank the water purposefully in order to escape. The rain brought other dangers. When tech-adepts and their robotic guardians paced the outworks on their inscrutable tasks, rad clickers rattled loud as hysterical ravens.
‘We’re all dead,’ Katsuhiro said, to no one in particular, one night when they tried to snatch some rest. His teeth wobbled in his gums. His hair was falling out. ‘The question is when.’
‘That’s the question asked the moment you were born, boy,’ said Runnecan. He was one of the few Katsuhiro knew. He never learned many of the others’ names. The conscripts hadn’t made much of an effort to get to know one another. Death took most before familiarity could set in.
Sleep was only ever taken in snatches. Watches were four hours long. The enemy could come at any time, and did. Katsuhiro’s time was filled with terrifying battles repulsing hordes of raving traitors, sheltering from the bombs, or engaged in backbreaking manual labour repairing the fortifications. Their efforts were overseen by tech magi, not the VII Legion as the conscripts hoped. At least sometimes the Martians lent their servitors or constructs to the task, though machines and cyborgs were just as likely to stand aloof while sentient men worked themselves to death.
Daily, trench networks spidered out from nexuses like Bastion 16, bridging shattered sections of the original rampart system, or breaking up the kill-zone between the lines into defensible boxes. Sometimes they looped out into the plains to create deeper zones of defence for the bastions, or incorporate lumps of wreckage into the plan. Remarkably quickly, Lord Dorn’s original circles of defence were remade, but as soon as they were done, the enemy did his work again. Trench lines were smoothed away, along with the lives of those within, and the digging started anew. Constant attacks broke up the stone of t
he geoformed plain, but although this eased the cutting of trenches, it churned flesh into the mix, making the work abominable. The walls of the networks were mortared by the remains of the dead.
Such things Katsuhiro saw in those two weeks. A lifetime’s supply of fear and awe packed into a terrible winter. There were rains of debris that created an optimist’s wealth of shooting stars; each wish Katsuhiro made was not to die. Sometimes, huge elements of sundered craft made it down from the heavens, or entire vessels cut burning wakes overhead. Once, a capital ship, its back broken, fell on the Palace. It appeared suddenly through the ash cloud, its burning lighting up the land. It plummeted towards the Palace centre, disappearing from view behind the monumental walls moments before impact. They expected the worst. Men stood from their defences pointing. A voice called.
‘The Emperor has fallen!’
The detonation that followed could only confirm their fears. A brief sun rose in the west over the Palace, vaporising the Warmaster’s falling ordnance and half blinding the conscripts with its brilliance. For a second a searing false day bled all colour away, then winked out, leaving after-images in the eyes of its witnesses, and the rumble of thermic shock rolling over Himalazia’s distant peaks.
‘The Emperor!’ someone whispered.
Further down the line people were weeping.
Yet the Palace guns fired on, punching glowing holes through the pall of ash smothering the sky, and the Warmaster’s fleet returned the same, while the aegis danced with purple, pink and blue arcs of discharge as it had for days and days.
‘The Emperor lives, so do you. The shields took it!’ shouted one of Jainan’s veteran bullies. He moved down the line, shoving people back to the wall. ‘No danger! All mass and energy gone into the warp. That’s the aegis’ job or we’d all be dead a thousand times already. Back to your stations. The war’s not over yet.’
Indeed it was not.
Sometimes, hours passed with no attempt made on sector 16. Its bastion heart fired ceaselessly, one small part of the Palace’s endless array of weaponry. Three macro cannons with limited traversal studded its outwards-facing walls. The rearmost portion was free of guns, to prevent their use against the fortifications should it fall to the enemy. Between these iron-collared behemoths, the slimmer barrels of lascannons protruded, and neat stacks of heavy bolters in vertical series. The top was crowned with anti-aircraft weaponry, whose quad cannons, each as big as super-heavy tank barrels, banged endlessly away. Their distinctive chattering became the background to Katsuhiro’s life, so constant and unvarying that he only really became aware of them when they stopped firing briefly to cool.
Behind Bastion 16 were Bastions 15 and 14, offset from the outermost tower to provide the greatest amount of cover. Bastion 14 made the transition from active defence to blackened stump sometime around the end of Secundus, taking a direct hit from orbit that sent its magazines up in a pyrotechnic display. Bastion 15 went soon after.
Katsuhiro lost track of the date. It seemed to him that time flowed differently on the line. Life became a series of horrifying incidents interspersed by periods of exhausted terror. If he had been familiar with the old Catheric myths, Katsuhiro would have thought himself in hell.
Despite all the privations and loss of liberty the rebellion had incurred on Terra, and the sorrow and the death of hope for man’s future, the war had been far away. Now he was living it.
Thus was the pattern of the siege set, until, inevitably, it changed.
Blood and skulls
Father’s wrath
Five of Eight
The Conqueror, Terran near orbit, 14th of Tertius
The Conqueror shook to the steady beat of its guns. Since arrival in orbit over the Throneworld, they had not ceased. Overseers worked their gunnery crews to death. Weapons fired to the point of failure. Reports that the magazines were running empty went unheeded.
The Legion did not care. The World Eaters could not hear the booming of cannons. They did not feel the decks vibrate. Their skulls sang with the sawing song of the Butcher’s Nails, and that obliterated all other sensation.
At being denied the spear point, Angron had lost all vestiges of restraint. The Legion agreed with him.
Violence had been endemic on the Conqueror for years now. The thralls knew to keep themselves apart and seal themselves away where they could, lessening the effects of the great massacres that had come after the Thramas Crusade. With little to spend their rage on, fights broke out between rival squads of legionaries, staining decks that were already black with mortal vitae with transhuman blood. Those particularly afflicted were brought under control only with much bloodshed, which provoked more. Others made for the embarkation decks and the lesser hangars, eager to be off the ship in defiance of their orders to remain aboard.
Angron could not be restrained again as he had been before Ullanor. He strode his vessel as a pillar of living rage. The deck plates shook to his tread. The air trembled to his words. Where he went, lives ended, but when he learned his sons attempted to depart the Conqueror, his rage could finally no longer be contained, and his rampage cut a bloody swathe through his Legion.
‘None shall depart!’ he roared. ‘I go first! None shall take skulls on the Throneworld’s soil before I!’
Khârn ran in his genefather’s footsteps. Where the daemon primarch trod, the metal smoked. Heat as much as anger radiated from Angron. Mortals ran from him. Those that did not fell convulsing, bleeding from their eyes, or else attacked one another in awful outbursts of violence.
‘Khârn, I have reports of a demi-company attempting to breach hangar nineteen, not far from your position.’
‘Hnnnh,’ Khârn swallowed bloody spittle. ‘We are nearly there, Lotara,’ he said. ‘Angron knows.’ Speaking with the shipmistress calmed his fury a little, but not much. He struggled to concentrate.
’That is not good.’
‘I… I… hnnnh, I would agree,’ Khârn finally managed.
‘You will not land before me!’ Angron roared, and sprinted ahead. ‘I will be first!’
‘I must go.’ Khârn swore, and ran after him. Angron pulled ahead easily. His sword was ready and trailing black vapours.
Khârn caught up as the primarch was slaughtering his way through a hundred World Eaters. The fools had been throwing themselves against the hangar doors, despite all of them being sealed at Khârn’s order. The heavy portals were scarred with melta burns. The disobedient company had made little headway before their father arrived to punish their presumption.
Angron’s lessons came at the edge of his sword, and all were fatal.
‘You dare? You dare!’ Angron roared. He cut one of his sons in half from helm to crotch. The sword wailed as it swung, blood boiling from its edges. Always huge, Angron had grown to immense stature since his change, dwarfing his sons. He caught one up in his left hand, his fingers easily grasping the Space Marine’s chest, and slammed him repeatedly into a wall. Armoured fingers prised at Angron’s grip, but nothing the World Eater did could free him.
‘I will be first upon Terra!’ roared Angron. ‘You are not worthy! It is my honour! Khorne demands it! The Blood God decrees it! You shall burn in lakes of fire for your temerity!’
Several hacked at the primarch’s limbs. The blows his brass armour did not turn aside sunk only a little way into his daemonic flesh. Sprays of scalding ichor hissed over the primarch’s assailants, blinding those without helmets. His skin rippled around the wounds, closing them quickly. Angron ignored those who attacked him, and continued to pound the warrior in his fist against the wall.
‘Traitor!’ roared Angron. ‘Usurper!’
The ceramite cracked, followed by the warrior’s ribs. Blood gushed from rupturing flesh. The primarch cast his dead son aside, and turned his blade upon the others.
Angron would not rest until everyone in the corridor was dead. Khârn tried to think of how to calm his primarch, to bring his rage to manageable levels, but the answer eluded h
im. His own reason was drowning in a tide of blood. The Butcher’s Nails pounded into his skull. The smell of spilt vitae excited his senses. He swallowed a mouthful of saliva, suddenly conscious of a flood of it streaming down his chin. Before he lost himself entirely, he reopened communications with Lotara.
‘Seal decks eighty-four through ninety, portside of the spinal way. Every entrance.’ He could barely speak. His vision swam. He wanted to fight. He needed to kill. With heroic effort he growled out his orders. ‘Order this deck cleared. Dispatch suppression teams to all other hangars, ship-wide. Lock them all down. Prime remote weapons to kill on sight. No one leaves this ship. Angron will slaughter us all if anyone tries. Seal all portals on this deck except forwards gate nine. Open all doors leading to the lower decks beyond. If Angron wants to keep fighting, he can do it among the thralls.’
‘Confirmed. No one runs from the Conqueror,’ Lotara said. ‘What about you? Khârn?’
Khârn could no longer hear. Words belonging to something else forced themselves out of his mouth.
‘Blood for the Blood God!’ he roared, and joined battle at his father’s side.
Ark Mechanicum Pent-Ark, Terran near orbit, 14th of Tertius
Clain Pent’s Ark Mechanicum took its first orbital breach with good graces. Spherical and of a mass similar to a large asteroid, it was not designed for such a landing, but it was not the first void-ship to break Terra’s atmospheric envelope during the siege, and it would not be the last.
Pent’s lair was situated right at the centre of the vessel, in an armoured sub-sphere that could be ejected in the event of the ark’s destruction. It was a ship within a ship, equipped with its own void shields, drives and external weapons systems. Throughout the descent, Pent’s metaphorical hand hovered over the activation codes in the ship’s infosphere.