by Guy Haley
Lucoryphus knew he was going to live forever. He felt it to his core.
So as the ship bounced and screamed through the dried-up valleys of Himalazia, out of sight of the Palace wall guns but on a collision course with them, Lucoryphus stared at his feet. The lengthened toes of the right curled uncomfortably against his boot. He had no heel to speak of on that foot any more. A backwards-facing digit tipped with a claw was growing in its place.
He could no longer deny it. His right foot had become the image of a bird’s talon.
The left foot was not far behind. Their confinement in boots made for human feet was the source of his discomfort. He had wondered if he could find an armourer willing to make him new boots more fitting to his condition, until he wondered again if he was going to need to. A mark had appeared on his right boot recently. An indentation in the ceramite that would not polish out, and no matter how many times he filled and sanded it, grew deeper. The boots were hot with some machine fever, as though they were changing to fit his new form.
He looked around the shaking crew compartment. He was not alone in his change. The Raptors seemed like Night Lords, until one looked closer. The helms of some had been refashioned with a distinctly birdlike aspect. Through personal choice, the armour was diverging already from that of the rest of the Legion, but the alterations that armour hid were telling. When on the ground some of them moved awkwardly, their steps exaggerated into avian hops. Several had strange birdlike twitches and hunched postures, as if the jump packs they wore were folded wings, not jets.
Lucoryphus lived for flight. All of them did. Being a Raptor was becoming more important to him than being a Night Lord.
He looked at his feet again. How would his comrades judge them? He thought how much more useful talons would be to him as a flying being than human feet, how they would allow him to grasp and hold himself fast after a jump.
The engines screamed. The Thunderhawk nosed upwards into a rapid ascent. Suddenly the sky around them was full of the bang of explosions and clatter of shrapnel as the ship came under fire. A heavy lascannon beam cut through the front hatch, skewering three of Lucoryphus’ brethren on a shaft of light, leaving them dangling in their restraints when it snapped off.
Another hit moments later, smashing the left engine. The ship dipped, its wounded jet coughing, and lost height.
The ready lights switched from red to green, bringing a little more illumination to the dingy interior through the smoke rising from the dead. The damaged front ramp flapped open, the extra drag pulling the gunship faster towards destruction. The rear ramp followed with more mechanical discipline. The side doors ratcheted wide. Fire flashed on every side as the Emperor’s slaves tried to bring them down.
Lucoryphus stood first. He drew his weapons as he walked down the aisle to the prow, trying to suppress his growing limp. His armour whined at his awkward movements. Sometimes he thought it would be more comfortable to run on all fours.
‘Brothers!’ he voxed his command. ‘We fly! First to the wall! First to the blood! Ave Dominus Noctem!’
The others were rising as Lucoryphus ignited his jets, ran from the prow and leapt into the maelstrom of fire. Thirty Raptors followed him, bright comets of exhaust joining the flare and flash of war. Its task completed, the gunship rolled in the sky and fell, fatally wounded. Smoke chased it to the ground, where it died in orange flames.
Lucoryphus’ hearts pounded with the thrill of flight. Bloody rain splashed from his war-plate. A billion people were trying to kill him during that glorious fall. The wall rushed at him, a giant’s hand to swat a fly. He fired his jets to slow himself, passing through the failing aegis with a searing crackle of energy that shorted out half his suit’s systems and left the smell of burnt circuitry in his nostrils. The wall grew from a black slab to a layered stack of defences manned by tiny figures in yellow and red. Behind them rose the Palace spires, daunting in their height, and the inconceivably huge whale-ridge of the Eternity Wall space port. The figures saw him, and fired. Smaller humans among the legionaries turned their attention to him. Pintle stubbers streaked tracer fire in his direction. Lasgun beams flickered out their short-lived displays. It seemed he was the one stationary in all that fury, and the bullets, and the wall and the world rushed at him, as if he were the offended party and they attacked without provocation.
He was so intoxicated by his flight that he remembered to fire his own gun only moments before impact. Three rounds he allowed himself. Two went wild. The third blew apart a mortal man in a gaudy uniform whose body flowered with stamen ribs and chest wall petals.
The wall punched up to meet him. Lucoryphus altered his course to slam into an Imperial Fists legionary with force enough to kill. The Emperor’s slave flew back so hard he cracked a chunk from a merlon before pitching over into the fire-dazzled twilight and falling from the wall. Lucoryphus was sent spinning off by the impact, slamming into the rockcrete with his jets still burning. The surface was slick with vitae pouring from the heavens, and for a moment he teetered on the brink of the inner crenellations. The chasm of the canyon road dividing city from defences yawned at him. A burst of jets and a painful push from his twisted feet sent him back onto the parapet, where men ran at him. Staggered, he brought up his inactive chainsword to deflect the desperate bayonet jabs of three Imperial Army soldiers. They fired their guns as they stabbed, scoring his livery. He punched at them clumsily, breaking their skulls with his fists. Time slowed. His head rang. Imperial Fists were running at him, bolters barking. A macro shell hit the wall fifty metres away, sending out a cloud of fire, flailing bodies and a storm of deadly rubble.
Time ran true again. He launched himself up, finger gunning the chainsword trigger. He met the first attacker with a sweep at the torso. The sword’s teeth did not bite, skidding off the ceramite with a spray of sparks, but it threw off the legionary’s aim and his bolt burned past Lucoryphus’ head, wounding his vision with rocket motor flare. The Night Lord was fast, working on instinct, and finished him with a round through the eye slit that obliterated his helmet and painted Lucoryphus with blood.
A second warrior came for him, only to be hit by a howling Raptor whose falling kick was strong enough to shatter ceramite.
Night Lords thumped down around him, guns firing, chain weapons growling. A flurry of violence, a popping chorus of bolt explosions, and there were no more of the Emperor’s slaves there to oppose them.
Lucoryphus was on the walls. After all this time, he was on the Palace walls. Their attack had taken the defenders by surprise. There were no other of the Warmaster’s forces on the battlement; only the blue and red of Night Lords battleplate was visible, both colours close to black in the fire and murk. He looked up at the spires of the Imperial Palace, bathed in light and glorious despite their embattled state.
Lucoryphus’ hearts pounded with the scale of his achievement.
He raised his arms and shouted at the sky. ‘Mino premiesh a minos murantiath!’ he cried in Nostraman, the words as liquid as the rain. ‘We are first on the wall!’
He gathered in his warriors, and ordered them to secure the landing zone.
Skraivok was coming.
Second line
Ordo Reductor
Myzmadra plays her part
Palace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 15th of Quartus
There was only noise.
Guns were firing from both sides in such great numbers their reports had no individual existence, but became a single block of sound as tangible as stone. The racket stole every other sound and made it into part of an unyielding, physical whole. Moving against this force required effort. It permeated the earth. It shook every cell in the human body.
In this realm of war, noise was the king, oppressing every sensation ruthlessly. Occasional louder eruptions would surface from the racket: a jet’s roar, a direct macro cannon hit on the line’s revetment, the warbling shrieks of dying void shields, the explosion of a nearby bomb. They would exceed the vo
lume of the noise, then be swallowed up by the greater whole.
There was no question of Katsuhiro hearing orders. Even touch was blurred out by the noise’s relentless vibrations, and the slaps sergeants gave to attract attention were hardly felt.
Men died to the left and to the right of Katsuhiro, felled by buzzing swarms of shrapnel or shots from the seething mass of the foe coming at them. They fell unnoticed, their screams unheard. He would reach for a fresh power pack, and then see the fellow beside him had been blasted into scraps, or realise that a bunker which moments before had been slaughtering the enemy had become a burning ruin.
In the pouring rain of blood, the conscripts fired down from the second line rampart. Once more, the lost and the damned of Horus’ grand army surged at them with no care for their own lives. Abhumans and mutants had been replaced by worse abominations. Every squint through Katsuhiro’s iron sights brought a new horror to his attention. Months ago any one of them would have had him gibbering in terror, but now he shot them and moved on to the next target.
The last bastions fired their guns until the barrels glowed hot. They killed and killed, but the enemy would not stop coming, nor would they break and run. Behind the foe the three siege towers rumbled forwards, crushing everything in their path. Smoke obscured them from Katsuhiro, and he saw them only as looming shapes lit up by the aching glow of shield discharge. Another threat ready to destroy him should he survive the horde.
The Palace aegis shook to the drum beat of plasma, las and shell. The shrieks of the voids were the worst of the noises deafening Katsuhiro: otherworldly, moaning howls as each lenticular field collapsed which gave the impression that the shield was a tormented being. Collapses happened with increasing frequency. Each time the voids reignited they came back weaker. Permanent gaps were forced and targeted by the foe, and thereby widened, exposing the wall to the attentions of artillery. Behind the wall the shields held, but over the outworks the aegis flickered with dying light.
Gunfire battered at the Palace walls. Among the outworks the bombardment wreaked havoc, tearing up the ground, breaking the ramparts into islands of resistance amid a sea of hatred. More bombs were getting through. More streams of incinerating plasma slashing into the defenders and boiling them to steam. More las-beams obliterating bunkers and breaking the bastions.
Katsuhiro fired and fired as his comrades were slain. At the beginning of the siege, the conscripts had stood in such numbers they packed the ramparts and tangled their weapons. Now there were too few of them to cover all the defence line. They relied more than ever on the Palace guns and the closer-ranged weaponry of the bastions. They had all become snipers, thought Katsuhiro, which made him think about Doromek. He was certain the veteran had killed Runnecan. Were it not for the million traitors to his front, that might have worried him.
Enfilading fire cut the enemy down some way out from the ramparts, but the dead were so numerous and heaped so high they created cover for those coming behind. Phosphex grenades launched from the tops of the bastions set fires among the slain that reduced them to ash, but the enemy used the black smoke pouring from these ragged pyres to press even further forwards.
Overhead the gunships of the Legiones Astartes roared in to attack the walls. Aircraft duelled around them. Such violence was inflicted on every level of the battlescape, but Katsuhiro was unaware of the larger fight. All he saw were bestial faces twisted in rage, fusillades of las-beams stabbing towards him, and clawed hands reaching impotently from the ground towards the rampart top.
The fumes and poison gases blown away earlier in the day returned. Blood fell in sheets from the racing clouds. Such fury and tumult had the world, Katsuhiro could not hope to survive; but whether he lived another minute or another hundred years, one thing was certain.
The second line was failing.
Siege Camp Penta, 15th of Quartus
Clain Pent watched the battle raging against the wall’s feet. His precious constructs rumbled across the littered plain, each engine fuelled by burning souls and directed by the essences of captive daemons. They were but the first Neverborn on Terra, the machina diabolus. They were protected from the Emperor’s psychic might by their half-material forms. Untold legions of daemons waited beyond the veil, but more blood must flow. Pent’s efforts were key to that.
Pent was nervous. His siege towers were among his finest creations, yet they moved against the greatest fortification in the galaxy.
Around the Pent-Ark, teams of Dark Mechanicum thralls laboured under electro-scourges to load and prime the great cannons. The barrels alone were dozens of metres long, larger than any weapon carried by a Titan, as large as the capital-ship killers mounted on void fortresses. Scores of tracked trucks supported their frames. Platforms along their sides allowed access to unfathomable workings. Grim tech-priests by the hundred oversaw the efforts of their creatures.
Clain Pent’s grotesque body nodded stiffly.
The great guns started to draw power. Giant cables snaked off to trailers behind the cannons, where plasma reactors were lit and coaxed to full power output. Stray arcs of electricity leapt over the surfaces of the weapons. Giant finned energy sinks were filled with coolant in readiness for the cannons’ firing.
The lords of the Ordo Reductor held their machines, waiting for the command to come down from the fleet. In the eight siege camps, Sota-Nul’s disciples, reliant on the ordo’s protection for their infernal devices, watched impatiently.
The order came. Horus Lupercal himself issued the command, a single, rasping sentence broadcast to each of the cyborg siege masters.
‘Unleash your weapons,’ the Warmaster said.
The guns spoke.
Palace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 15th of Quartus
Something imperceptible changed the moment before the cannons fired, causing Katsuhiro to cease shooting, and look to the wall to the south of the Helios Gate.
Out over the wastes before the wall, there was movement. From the siege camp came first a flash, and then a spear of black light that crawled across Katsuhiro’s vision. It was energy of some sort, but it moved with a malevolent slowness a man’s eyes could track.
A shock wave preceded it. Although the beam itself did not touch the ground, a line of force surrounding it ripped a furrow through debris, the defence lines, the defenders and the attacking armies. Like an attacking serpent, it slithered quicker, then struck, planting itself against the shields, which wavered and sang with tortured harmonics.
Upon contact with the void barrier, the beam thickened, its strange energies dammed by the aegis. A living tar spread over the voids, some arcane reaction making the lenses of the Dark Age energy field constantly visible on normal wavelengths. Like an overlapping wall of shields, the lenses stood against the strike, but as Katsuhiro watched, their vitality was bled away. Where the play of black energy caressed them, the lenses dimmed from healthy blues and greens to angry reds, then through lower frequencies to sulphurous, glowering oranges.
A horrible, discordant squealing came from the contact point, building in volume and intensity, until it overcame the thundering guns completely. The detonation was immense, sending warriors on both sides reeling from their fight in pain. Something gave in Katsuhiro’s right ear. Hot wetness trickled down the angle of his jaw. His left ear screamed with discordancy.
The shields bled light.
He fell to his knees, jaw clenched tight enough to break his teeth. The pain went beyond any suffering he had so far endured. His eyes shook, blurring his vision. He wished then to die, but could not stop watching.
Like dying embers, the lenses under fire burned out, and their failing set up a chain reaction in the cellular construction of the aegis. With painful flares and whooping screams, a great swathe of the landward shield collapsed, robbing fifty kilo
metres either side of the Helios Gate of shelter, opening the way for the Warmaster’s forces to assail the walls directly. Uncountable thousands of land-based artillery pieces hammered the great walls, or shot over the defences to target the giant buildings they guarded.
The moment had come. Huge chimneys on the motive units of the siege towers belched green smoke. Wheels ten times the height of men churned up the ground, and the massive constructions lurched forwards, their fronts alive with shield flare as Dorn’s defences tried to bring them down.
Dauntlessly, the Death Guard’s towers made all haste for the breach in the aegis and the walls behind.
The ruination of worlds poured down upon the outworks. Quake cannons ripped up the ground. Macro shells gouged craters from the stone. Plasma reduced rockcrete to boiling geysers of atoms. Weapons exotic and mundane hammered into the second and first lines. Now completely unprotected by the shields, they were ripped apart. The bombardment was intense and indiscriminate. Hundreds of thousands of Horus’ followers were obliterated to kill a few thousand defenders. The ground bucked and heaved, swallowing the living and the dead. Bastions up and down the line were smashed like skulls under hammers.
The defenders broke and ran. The veterans who had watched over them fled as readily as the depleted regiments of conscripts. There was no other choice.
Katsuhiro ran when the others did, abandoning his post in a state of detachment. Weeks of horror had numbed his soul. The deafness in his left ear isolated him a little from the battle’s fury. Tiredness cocooned him. He felt as if he floated over himself. The pathways of his body raged with adrenaline that muzzled his consciousness and pushed him only to survive, so that numinous piece of Katsuhiro which existed apart from the slosh of blood and muscle watched disinterested from on high.