by Various
‘Consider it done,’ said Honsou, dropping into the trench. A hundred or more mortals in shredded work wear hacked at the earth, picks battering the bedrock of Calth in a staccato rhythm. Some looked up as he landed among them, but most kept their heads to the earth, terrified that if they looked up and acknowledged the carnage going on around them it might reach out and pluck them from their illusory safety.
‘Dig together!’ shouted Honsou, though he had no idea how many heard him over the constant pummelling of artillery. ‘With me!’
Honsou bent his back and drove his entrenching tool into the earth, the blade biting deep and parting the soil of Calth like the softest flesh. He twisted and tossed the earth backwards without breaking the rhythm of his swing, and even before it landed, his shovel blade was embedded in the earth once again.
‘Together!’ bellowed Honsou, his digging like the regular piston strokes of a battle engine. Dig, lift, twist, thrust. The motion never changed, and Honsou grinned as the memory of his early days in the Legion returned to him. He remembered days spent digging on his belly, pushing approach trenches forward, filling sandbags and gabions with turned earth. Instinctive muscle memory drove his arms, his strength working his body like a perpetual motion machine. There was purity in this work, a singular purpose that allowed for none of the infighting between warbands or any rancour of past betrayals to interfere.
All that mattered was the man and the soil, and the powerful strokes to shift it.
Honsou glanced to his left, and saw the men around him were attempting to mimic his pattern of dig, lift, twist and thrust. They couldn’t match his speed or apparently effortless rhythm, but they were at least working together. The trench was already widened and getting deeper with every passing minute.
He heard a screaming whine, louder than the others that blended together in a banshee’s chorus, and looked up. Through the billowing, dancing clouds of smoke and dust, Honsou saw a bright streamer of a shell’s contrail as it arced over with agonising slowness and aimed its warhead down towards his trench. It should have been moving too fast to see. There should have been little more than a split second’s warning, but Honsou saw the gently spinning shell as though upon a slow-motion pict-capture. Its wide body was tapered at both ends, spinning slowly and painted sky blue. Its tip was gold, which struck him as needlessly ornate for a weapon of war, and he had time to wonder whether it would be better to be killed by a precious metal or a base one.
‘Incoming!’ he shouted, though few would hear his warning or be able to respond to it in time. Honsou threw himself into the forward wall of the trench he had just dug, pressing his body into the earthen rampart and hoping the shell wouldn’t be one of the lucky ones to score a direct hit. He clutched his entrenching tool tight to his chest as the scream of the shell’s terminal approach battered through the endless thunder of impacts and detonations.
Honsou knew artillery sounds, and this was the sound of a shell coming right at him.
He closed his eyes and exhaled as the shell struck.
The high-explosive shell slashed down and struck the centre of the trench, as though a mathematician had plotted its trajectory. Confined by the high walls, the blast roared out along the trench, incinerating those closest to its point of impact, and shredding those beyond in tightly packed storms of tumbling metal. The shockwave blew men out of their overalls, leaving them naked and twisted into grotesque knots of liquefied bone and shattered limbs.
Honsou was plucked from the trench and hurled into the air. Dozens of red icons flashed to life on his visor as the reflecting blast waves pulled his body in a hundred different directions. Seams split, plates cracked and pressurised coils beneath his breastplate ruptured, venting corrosive gases and precious oxygen. He lost all perception of spatial awareness, and only knew which way was down when he slammed into a line of prefabricated, mesh-wrapped blocks of wall being driven forwards by the second wave of diggers.
Gathered up in the tumbling debris before the blocks, Honsou had no control over his movement. His body was still paralysed by the numbing force of the explosion, and he roared in frustration as he was pushed back towards the trench line. Earth and rock gathered around him, pinning his arms in place, but every nerve in his body was still reverberating in the aftermath of the blast, and he couldn’t move.
The yawning black line approached, and Honsou knew there was nothing he could do to prevent his being buried in the trench. A fitting end to his short-lived reign as Warsmith or a bitter irony to be buried in the foundations of a siegework? He kept struggling, though there was nothing he could do to prevent being buried alive. To the last breath he would fight, even as hundreds of tonnes of rubble crushed him to death in the depths of an invaded world.
The harsh rumble of the digger’s engine changed pitch, changing from the throaty roar of a corpulent dragon to a squealing wail of a denied hedonist. Honsou teetered on the brink of the abyss, a rain of pebbles, soil and permacrete drooling into the trench in front of him. He let out the breath he hadn’t realised he was holding and felt sensation return to his limbs. A hand reached out to him. He grabbed it unquestioningly and hauled himself upright, steadying himself with his entrenching tool.
‘Getting buried in the foundations of a fortress wall is one way to prove you are a true Iron Warrior,’ said Soltarn Vull Bronn. ‘But I wouldn’t recommend it.’
Honsou gasped, his body now his to control again, but his racing senses too stupefied to reply. He nodded his thanks as Bronn pulled him away from the front of the earth-moving machine as its engine revved up again, vomiting a petulant blast of exhaust fumes in his face.
‘Brother Lacuna does not like to be stopped in his tracks,’ explained Bronn, as the machine’s horns emitted a series of angry honks and squirts of binary static.
Honsou saw a hostile pair of cybernetic eyes glaring at him from the thin slit cut into the armour of the operator’s compartment, and moved away from the machine as its tracked wheels spun and bit. Its feed pipes retched as they poured sludgy grey permacrete into the trench. The oozing mixture set almost instantaneously to form a foundation bed for the blocks coming in on the mass-loaders.
‘Won’t happen again,’ promised Honsou. ‘He’s bigger than me.’
‘When has that ever stopped you getting in a fight?’
‘Never,’ grinned Honsou, taking stock of the work around him.
Despite the continuous bombardment, the shape of the fortification was taking shape all along the plateau. The trench line was filled with rubble and rapid-setting permacrete, onto which hundreds of rectangular, mesh-wrapped blocks of debris were being fixed. Already they formed a waist-high wall embedded with iron spikes and the beginnings of gun ports. The artillery duel was still ongoing, with the Ultramarines having the better of the exchange in terms of lives taken.
But this first sortie had never been about taking lives.
Booming reports exploded overhead, and hammering detonations shook the plateau, but kinetic mantlets were now in place, sheltering the slave workers from the worst of the barrage. As the ground level smoke began to thin, Honsou saw the plateau was a cratered no-man’s-land of torn up rock, craters filled with steaming blood and bobbing body parts. A vision of desolation, ruin and death.
‘You have your bridgehead, Warsmith,’ said Bronn proudly.
‘What’s the cost?’
‘Negligible,’ replied Bronn, picking his way over the broken ground to stand in the outline of a gun tower yet to be built. ‘Perhaps two thousand slave workers, but there are plenty more on the surface yet to be brought down.’
‘Machines?’
Here, Bronn looked concerned. ‘At least fifty out of action, and maybe half of those will never raise earthworks again.’
‘Fifty? So many?’
Bronn shrugged. ‘As I told Dassadra, this is not a normal foe we face. These are warriors of Ultramar
. They fight hard, just like us.’
‘You’re wrong,’ said Honsou. ‘They don’t fight like me.’
‘Maybe not, but it’s going to be a hard bloody slog to reach those fortresses, no matter how you fight. That I can promise.’
Honsou unsnapped the ruptured seals at his gorget and pulled off his helmet. Dried blood streaked his face and he felt a fragment of green glass embedded in his cheek. He had long ago become inured to pain and tore it clear without even noticing.
‘The fortresses are unimportant, Bronn,’ said Honsou, marching back through the mass of rumbling machines. Milling warriors and bustling slaves jostled in the smouldering ruins as they dragged more and more blocks forwards to raise the fortifications still higher. Much remained to be done on the wall before it could be called practicable, but the hard work had been done. The foundations had been laid and mortared with blood. All that remained was simply a matter of arithmetic and the cold hard logic of war.
‘Unimportant?’ repeated Bronn. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
Iron Warriors stood tall as Honsou passed, and he knew he had, if not won their unquestioning loyalty, at least earned a measure of temporary respect for his willingness to fight at the lethal edge of battle. The weapons of war may change, knew Honsou, but every war needed a powerful will of bone and muscle and living flesh to win it. No matter how big the guns, or towering the war machines, every siege came down to men putting themselves in harm’s way and breaking open the soil of an enemy world. Since the first wooden palisade walls had been raised on hilltops by savages in a forgotten, lightless age it had ever been thus, and always would be.
‘It will make sense all in good time, Bronn,’ promised Honsou.
‘Speak plainly,’ demanded Bronn, taking hold of his arm. ‘How can the fortresses be unimportant? How else are we going to get below the surface except by breaking them open?’
‘We aren’t getting below the surface,’ said Honsou. ‘I am.’
‘Have you gone mad?’ stormed Bronn. ‘Ardaric Vaanes was your master of stealth and even he failed to insert himself behind the enemy lines.’
‘I’m not planning on doing it stealthily, it’ll be in plain sight, but they’ll not see me coming,’ said Honsou, shrugging off Bronn’s hand. ‘But this is where I need you to trust me like you have never trusted anyone. Can you do that?’
Bronn stopped to remove his helm, and tucked it under his arm. He looked at Honsou with a resigned expression that spoke of a lifetime of bitter disappointments.
‘I would rather not,’ he said.
‘Honest, at least,’ laughed Honsou.
‘What did you expect? You didn’t get to become Warsmith by being a model of trust and honour.’
‘True,’ admitted Honsou. ‘But I need you to fight in a way you’ve never fought before.’
‘What way is that?’
‘I want you to attack this cavern like you’re looking to win, but fight simply to hold.’
‘What is the point of that? If I attack, it will be to win.’
‘I don’t need that,’ said Honsou.
‘Why? There is no purpose to war if not to crush the enemy.’
‘Listen well, Bronn,’ said Honsou. ‘There is something beneath this world the daemon lord requires me to destroy, and I can’t do that if I have a host of Ultramarines in pursuit. They need to be kept here, pinned in place for as long as I’m gone. I need them to think this is our true purpose in coming here.’
‘Then what is our purpose if not to conquer this world?’
‘Better you don’t know,’ said Honsou. ‘We’re here for one thing, and it’s something I can only do without an army at my back.’
‘You’re leaving the army?’ asked Bronn in disbelief. ‘Who will command? The Grand Company won’t accept Grendel as their leader; the man’s a brute. And that… creature from Medrengard you keep around. It’s an abomination and it insults every son of Perturabo that you allow it to wear our Legion’s colours.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Honsou with the grin of a man who knows the punchline of a joke no-one even knew he was telling. ‘Grendel and the Newborn are coming with me.’
‘So who will command?’
‘You will,’ said Honsou.
It took another fifteen hours for the wall to rise to its prescribed height, twenty metres of hard-packed blocks sheathed in molten metal, strengthened with adamantium reinforcement, and built upon bloody permacrete footings hacked deep into the flesh of Calth. Circular towers with angled abutments, deflector hoardings and numerous loopholes where heavy guns could launch explosive warheads into the valley punctuated its length. Deep artillery pits were dug in the shadow of the banner-topped wall, and into them masked slaves dragged wide-barrelled howitzers on bloody chains. Shaven headed madmen attended these guns, iron-visored priests of the Dark Mechanicus and corrupted calculus-logi with eyes that saw not in hues of mortality, but in angles, trajectories and degrees of deflection.
The Bloodborn army was now ready for battle, thousands of soldiers clad in combat fatigues, gore-smeared armour, fright masks and ragged semblances of uniforms stitched with the daemon lord’s rune. Entire regiments were poised in the shadow of the wall, eager to spill the blood of their enemies. Scattered through the host, impatient squadrons of battle tanks, hulking daemon engines and weaponised servitor-things blared their hatred from saw-toothed augmitters. Ten thousand Bloodborn swords clattered on spiked shields, and a rhythmic chanting of meaningless doggerel filled the air beneath the rumble of gunfire.
While the Bloodborn waited for the order to attack and the Iron Warriors busied themselves with the mortal mechanics of their craft, other beings made their way to the centre of the wall. Clad in flesh-sewn robes, they were an incongruous sight amid such industrial activity and mechanistic surroundings. They moved with the lurching, awkward gait of cripples, broken clockwork automatons or things that were unsuited to using mortal bodies for locomotion.
An unnaturally tall being in a fuliginous robe of crimson led them, skeletally thin and hunched over as though made from twisted wire. Its hood flapped loose, as though draped over the long skull of a crocodylus. Wheezing breath escaped from beneath the hood, cold as the grave and just as lifeless.
Bronn and Teth Dassadra watched the approaching warlocks from the centre of the wall with more than a measure of distaste.
‘It offends the rites of advance that we use such unnatural means to fight the enemy,’ said Dassadra. His hand rested on the butt of his boltgun, as though he was considering turning it upon the witches.
Bronn shrugged. ‘We are at war, and we use what weapons are made available to us.’ But he too was irked at the appearance of these lurching, wiry figures. Though they were ready to storm the valley, Honsou had postponed the attack until these daemonic sorcerers had done their work.
‘What can warpcraft do that our guns cannot achieve?’ pressed Dassadra.
‘Wait and find out.’
‘Where did they even come from? They weren’t on any of the ships that came to Calth.’
‘You know that for sure, do you?’ said Bronn, growing tired of Dassadra’s constant harping. ‘You searched every scrap of darkness aboard our warships and know they were not among us?’
‘I didn’t see them when we took Ultimus Prime,’ said Dassadra more warily. ‘Where were they when we had to fight through an army of skitarii and battle-servitors?’
‘Perhaps you should ask M’kar himself,’ said Bronn. ‘I’m sure the daemon lord would welcome your questions.’
Dassadra fell silent at the mention of M’kar’s name, and watched as the figures formed a circle, into which was led a group of slaves who walked with the sluggish, dragging footsteps of sleepwalkers. Their flesh was excoriated and raw, cut with symbols that meant nothing to Bronn, but which he presumed were of significance to the warlocks. The s
laves dropped to their knees, idiot grins plastered across their willing faces as they bared their necks.
The leader of the skin-robed witches stepped into the circle of sacrifices and a long blade of a finger unfurled from his ragged sleeve. Part organic, part sharpened wire, it flicked out like a scorpion’s stinger, and a throat was opened with a whip-crack of metal on flesh.
‘M’kar tothyar magas tarani uthar!’ screamed the warlock as blood squirted from the slave’s ruined artery. Before the first drop hit the ground, the pack of thrall-warlocks fell upon the slaves in a jagged, jerky frenzy of stabbing blades and shrieking wire-claws.
Like a shoal of ripper fish, they tore the slaves to gory tatters, letting their blood fill them like water pumped into empty bladders. The bodies of the warlocks, once so skeletal and thin, now swelled with black life as they gorged themselves on the slaves’ life force. They howled with perverse satisfaction, but their joy was short-lived as the master of the sorcerers supped greedily from their newfound well of power.
The blood was drawn from them like dark mist, pulled towards the master of the warlocks like spiralling ribbons of oil in an ocean maelstrom. His hunched form gradually straightened until he stood taller than a Dreadnought, his once frail-looking frame now made monstrous. He raised his curling arms to the cavern’s roof and loosed a piercing scream that split the air like the sonic boom of a Hell Talon.
The beat of a thousand Bloodborn drums echoed from the cavern walls in answer as roiling thunderheads formed just below the rocky ceiling. Bronn had quickly adjusted to the changeable weather patterns of the cave, but this was something else entirely.
Arcing bolts of lightning leapt from cloud to cloud, gathering strength and frequency with every passing second. The temperature in the cave dropped sharply, and a cold wind blew from the mouth of the tunnel that led back to the surface.
‘Blood of Iron,’ cursed Dassadra. ‘Lightning? With this much metal? They’ll kill us all!’
Bronn said nothing, knowing that this was no ordinary lightning to be drawn to iron as metal is drawn to a magnet. This was warp lightning, brought into being and directed by the towering figure at the heart of the sorcerers. A booming peal of thunder eclipsed the maddened drumming, and a sheet of dazzling lightning blazed from the clouds. The atmosphere in the cavern twisted as though some fundamental aspect of it had changed, and blinding traceries spat from the unnatural clouds. Black rain fell in torrents, turning much of the cavern floor to quagmire and slicking the armour of the Iron Warriors with an oily, rainbow sheen.