Brekash was one of the few warriors in the pack who preferred to stand on his altered foot-claws. He did so now, looking down at his crouching leader.
“You are leading us into folly. Where are the Marines Errant? They do not come to defend these places because these places have no worth.”
Lucoryphus’ helm jerked in a brutal twitch of his neck. Several of the power cables and flexible pipes hanging from the back of his helmet thrashed as the Raptor spasmed, hanging loose like mechanical dreadlocks.
“We’ve seen no Marines Errant because this monastery is the size of a hive city, fool. Scarcely a hundred of them remain on the world. If the Imperial Ones have even had time to react in defence of their fortress, they are defending the lower levels against the Claws.” Lucoryphus punctuated his words with an aggressive growl.
Brekash wouldn’t be cowed. “Each of these we destroy makes no difference. Already, we’ve slain nine machines. Nothing has changed.”
Lucoryphus ordered two of the others to cease toying with the bodies of the dead serfs. “Urith, Krail, destroy the generator.”
The Raptors obeyed, crossing the room in an arcing leap, carried by coughs of jetpack thrust. With nothing even approaching finesse, they laid into the juddering machine with their claws and fists, pounding dents into it and ripping hunks of steel away. Once they’d torn several openings to the generator’s innards, the two Raptors let a handful of grenades clatter into the machine’s core.
“Forty seconds, lord,” Krail hissed.
Lucoryphus nodded, but didn’t leave. He turned back to Brekash. “This fortress is a city, and we stand inside its guts, crawling north and south, up and down, poking at the organs. Think of a Legionary’s heart, brother.” The Raptor held out a claw as if carrying a human heart in his palm. “It is a layered fruit, with chambers and pathways leading inside and out. Cut one connection, and perhaps the body dies, perhaps the body lives. Cut many connections, and there is no doubt at all.”
Lucoryphus inclined his tendrilled helm towards the clanking generator. “This is one of the heart-chambers of Vilamus. We have severed some of its bonds. We will sever more if we must. But the heart will fail, and the body will die.”
Brekash saluted, a clawed fist over his heart. “I obey.”
The Raptor leader’s bleeding lenses refocussed on his brother. “Then we move.”
The Exalted’s swollen black eyes rolled to the occulus once again.
With the lashing return of an overstretched cord, the creature’s senses snapped back into its own mind. Lucoryphus’ perception took several sickening moments to fade—the disgusting feeling of too-human flesh; the repugnant sensation of staring with eyes forged in the material realm, blind to the minutiae of ethereal nuance.
“The Bleeding Eyes are on the edge of success,” the creature growled.
“Orders, my lord?” asked the deck officer.
The daemon leaned forwards in its throne, its armour growling, but not loud enough to mask the horrendous creak and crackle of inhuman sinew.
“Ahead two-thirds.”
“Aye, lord.”
The Exalted watched the occulus closely, before keying in several adjustments to the hololithic system display.
“Come abeam of the first orbital defence platform. Launch Thunderhawks to recover our drop-pods before the Corsairs arrive.”
“As you wish, lord.”
“And ready the warp beacon. Summon Huron’s fleet as soon as our Thunderhawks are on approach to dock.”
XX
THE FALL OF VILAMUS
Cyrion was the last to join them. He pounded into the room, bolter in hand, almost skidding to a halt on the litany-etched stone floor. Footsteps—a great many footsteps—clattered in the corridors some way behind him.
“I got lost,” he admitted.
Xarl and Talos moved with practised fluidity, their movements twinned as they took positions either side of the wide doorway Cyrion had just used as an entrance.
“It sounds as though you brought friends,” the prophet remarked. “How many?”
Cyrion stood with Mercutian, both of them readying bolters. Uzas ignored his brothers, though his helmed head snapped around with a hunting dog’s eagerness when he heard the approaching footsteps.
“Enough,” said Cyrion. “Dozens. But they’re only human. I haven’t seen a single Marine Errant.” The warrior glanced around the chamber for the first time, seeing the immense circular hall cleared of all furniture—everything, every dead body, every pew seat and ornate table, had been dragged to the chamber’s sides, leaving the middle bare. “You’ve been busy,” Cyrion said. The others ignored his comment, which neither annoyed nor surprised him.
Talos slapped his crackling sword blade against the stonework to get Uzas’ attention. It left a scorch mark.
“Bolter,” he said.
“What?”
“Use your bolter, brother. We’re taking a defensive position in this chamber. Too many foes to charge.”
Uzas hesitated, perhaps not comprehending. He looked down at the axe and gladius in his hands.
“Use your bolter,” Xarl snapped. “Look at us against this wall, freak. Does it look like we’re charging?”
Uzas sheathed his weapons at last, and unlimbered his bolter. It caught the prophet’s eye with the sting of memory; the same relic Malcharion had commissioned to honour Uzas’ deeds in a brighter, better age.
“Uzas,” he said.
“Hnnh?”
Talos could hear the bootsteps drawing closer, along with the shouted, oath-rich encouragements of the squads’ officers. “Brother, I remember when you were given that weapon. Do you?”
Uzas clutched the bolter tighter. “I… Yes.”
The prophet nodded. “Use it well. Here they come.”
“I hear them,” came a human voice, frail and thin compared to the rumbling growls of the Legionaries’ speech.
Talos nodded to Xarl, and they moved around the corner as one. Bolters crashed in dark hands, shuddering as they spat shells down the corridor. Both warriors were back in cover before the first las-streaks slashed through the doorway in response.
“That one you hit in the face,” Xarl chuckled. “Both bolts. His head turned into red mist. I can hear his men choking on it.”
Talos reloaded, catching the spent magazine and storing it away. “Focus.”
The chains on his armour rattled against the ceramite, though he wasn’t moving. Xarl flicked a glance at his own pauldron, where the chained skulls were knocking together as if in a breeze.
“About time,” Mercutian muttered.
First Claw averted their eyes from the centre of the room as the light first began to manifest. Sourceless wind rushed against their armour, a vortex in reverse, breathing cold air against the implacable ceramite. The faintest touch of ice rime formed on the edges of their armour, while the bloodstained clothing worn by the dead bodies spread around the chamber crumpled and flapped in the building gale.
“Such drama.” Cyrion bared his teeth behind his faceplate.
A sonic boom of violated air shattered several of the overturned tables, blasting their wreckage against the walls.
The light receded, crumbling back into the nothingness from whence it came.
Five figures stood in the chamber’s heart: five figures in desecrated armour, strewn with talismans and engraved with bronze runes. Four of them eclipsed the fifth—their immense Terminator war plate giving guttural snarls as they viewed their surroundings, tusked helms turning this way and that.
The fifth was bareheaded, dwarfed by the others in stature, yet emanating an amused, ugly charisma from the glint in his eyes to the confident smirk.
“You have done well,” grinned Lord Huron of the Red Corsairs.
Variel walked in calm, impassive reflection, heading through countless corridors on his way to the observation deck. It was time to take stock, and drawing close to the time when a decision must be made. To that end, t
he Apothecary made his way to one of the few places he could be assured of some peace. He always felt his thoughts flowed clearest when staring out into the humbling reaches of space.
The first phase was complete, with the Night Lords evidently successful in shutting down one of the secondary power feeds within the walls of Vilamus. Huron had chosen his target well—with that subdistrict’s generatorum offline, the fortress-monastery was vulnerable to an attack far more insidious than the relative barbarism of an orbital strike.
Rather than insist his oath-bound hirelings martyr themselves for his cause, Huron required them to do nothing more than deactivate the outlying shields preventing teleportation, and clear enough space in various chambers for several of his own squads to manifest directly within the fortress. Thus began the second phase, and if Huron’s forces proceeded at the expected pace, they would still encounter insignificant resistance.
It was a plan not entirely without elegance, chosen because little else had any hope of success. Assaulting a fortress-monastery with anything other than esoteric cunning was doomed to failure. The fact this assault was deemed to be so decisive and without risk was, in the Flayer’s mind, nothing short of miraculous. He could almost imagine Imperial archives referencing this defeat for centuries to come, citing the perils of leaving a Chapter’s sanctuary so woefully unprotected.
With its initial defences rendered worthless, Vilamus now stood on the edge of true invasion.
Huron would drag his Terminators down to the surface through the arcane complexities of teleportation, manifesting at the preset coordinates cleared by the Eighth Legion infiltrators. From there, each squad would seek to link up on the march to the primary power relay station deeper within the monastery’s core. A Terminator advance, while ponderous, would break everything before it. With fifty of his chosen elite in the priceless suits of war plate, reinforced by eight Claws from the Covenant, Variel doubted Huron would have anything to worry about.
The destruction of this inner sanctum would supposedly herald the endgame. For now, even with its orbital platforms blinded and powerless, and even with its protective shields dead, Vilamus remained an unapproachable bastion, capable of annihilating any ground forces that dared lay siege at its staggering walls. Any attempt to make a landing would be met with withering fire from the legion of turrets and missile silos lining the battlements.
Variel reached the observation deck, striding to one of the glass walls and gazing down at the barren rock of a world. From orbit, it seemed almost a stalemate. The raider fleet approaching the world couldn’t drop warriors in support. Gunships and drop-pods remained clutched in loading bays, filled with eager warriors unable to see battle.
Vilamus was visible to the naked eye even from this altitude, but it failed to inspire anything but contempt in the Flayer’s thoughts. A vast spire of uninspiring red stone, soon to be cleansed of anything even remotely valuable.
The Tyrant’s Terminator elite were at work down there, cutting their way to the primary energy relay sector, ready to starve Vilamus’ last defences of the power they craved in order to fire.
Variel stared at the world in silence, severing himself from the vox-channels to avoid the pre-battle tedium of his brothers swearing oaths to powers they barely understood. He needed time to think, despite doing little else these last weeks.
At the cusp of the second phase’s completion, Variel would need to act, one way or the other. With his best estimate, that gave him less than an hour to make a choice.
The creature glared at Talos as it clutched the Tyrant’s shoulder guard. He was tempted to swat the ugly little thing with the flat of his blade, and wipe its alien stare clean off its beady-eyed face. Spindly, cursed in appearance with an excess of protruding bones at its ribs and ungainly joints, the xenos-wretch rode on the warlord’s armour, occasionally twisting its features into a grimace.
Huron’s focus was elsewhere. After greeting the warriors of the Eighth Legion, he’d immediately set to advancing through the hallways, every tread crushing marble and onyx floor tiling beneath his boots, and testing the abused vox network in a bid to link up with his other squads. The Terminators flanked their lord, forming a ceramite shell as they marched, filling the breadth of even the widest corridors.
Behind them, First Claw walked in relative quiet, weapons lowered, each member’s thoughts sealed within his own helm.
The few squads of uniformed Chapter serfs that didn’t immediately flee died to the chattering crash of Terminator storm bolters. Several times, the horde stalked over ground thickly pasted with organic mush from shell-burst bodies. The Corsairs appeared no different, but First Claw was stained red to their shins.
Talos recognised the smell thickening the air, knowing the same spicy, sulphur-copper reek of ruptured human meat from every battlefield he could remember. Yet, most recently, it had been richest on the corrupted decks of Hell’s Iris. The scent saturated even the metal hull of Huron’s outpost, doubtless seeping in from the Maelstrom’s poisoned winds. No wonder mutation ran rife.
“What is that thing?” Xarl voxed. In close proximity, communications worked, though in a scratchingly weak half-hearted way.
“I asked Variel once.” Talos couldn’t stop staring at the little beast-thing. “Huron calls it a hamadrya, apparently. It’s a psychic creature, mind-bonded to the Tyrant.”
Xarl curled his lip. “I want to slap it off his back and stamp on its leering face.”
“You and I both, brother.”
Huron brought the procession to a halt with a raised hand. “Hold.” The Corsair’s eyes, already bloodshot and narrowed by the pain of simply existing in his reconstructed state, twitched as he concentrated. The creature on his back drooled a viscous, silvery slime from its chittering maw. It bleached the paint from Huron’s armour where it dripped.
“We are close now. And several of our kin-squads draw near. Come, brothers. The prize is almost ours, then this siege can truly begin.”
“Wait,” Uzas said. “I hear something.”
To say they arrived in orderly formation would be to do them an injustice, for the warriors’ cohesion far exceeded anything seen in the Blood Reaver’s attack force. In pristine ceramite of blue and white, matching the halved heraldries of ancient Terran knights, a single squad of warriors threw themselves into cover at the far end of the corridor. Their movements were utterly economical, ruthless in their soldierly precision, taking positions in total silence but for the growl of armour and the crack of bolter stocks against shoulder guards as each of them took aim.
Their leader was unhelmed, his stern features moulded into a mask of absolute resolve. Even over the distance, Talos knew that look, and could recall when he’d worn it himself. The defiance in the warrior’s gaze made the prophet’s skin crawl. Here was a man that believed in his cause. He felt no doubt, no hesitation, no temptation to wrack his mind in the futile second-guessing of sworn duty. His life was unclouded by broken oaths, and the legacy of mistrust and confusion that drifted in the wake of every betrayal.
Talos saw all of this in the time it took the warrior to raise his chainsword—a single second spent recognising the eyes of one who lived his life according to Talos’ own long-abandoned convictions.
He heard Mercutian say, in rare Nostraman gutter-tongue, “Oh, shit.”
The prophet and his brothers moved in a unity of their own, despite no signal passing between any of them. Clutching weapons tightly to their chests, First Claw stepped into the hulking shadows of the Terminators.
“Kill them,” Huron sneered, already advancing in a halting, hitching stride. His Terminators followed, leaning forwards into onerous runs, keeping pace and enclosing their lord, shielding him with their armoured bodies. Their tread was enough to send an arrhythmic pulse through the ground.
Ahead of them, the brother-sergeant chopped the air with his howling chainblade, and the Marines Errant filled the corridor with a demolishing hail of bolter shells.
D
etonating shells burst against the layered ceramite, shrapnel clattering against the walls in gritty hail. Even protected as they were in their armour, the Corsairs growled and cursed.
First Claw kept themselves in the Terminators’ wake, shadowing their steps, letting the Corsair elite wade through the enemy fire. Xarl’s snigger came over the vox, and Talos felt himself grinning.
“You’re doing fine, brothers,” Cyrion mocked the Corsairs over the squad’s secure vox-channel. The gore-scent was buried now, hidden beneath the chemical tang of bolter discharge and the powdery reek of fyceline dust.
“Fight,” one of the Terminators growled in a grey-voiced drone of vox. “Fight, you spineless Nostraman bastards.” First Claw didn’t answer, though their helms gave subtle clicks, betraying the laughter they shared in private. As the Corsair warrior reloaded his storm bolter, a shell cracked against his helm, shattering both tusks and earning a pained grunt.
The sound of so many bolts striking home was a rainstorm on a roof of corrugated iron. Over the din, Talos heard the Marines Errant sergeant give that ancient cry, “For the Emperor!”
Ah, the whispery tendrils of nostalgia. The prophet smiled again, even as the warrior in front of him buckled and crashed to his knees, finally felled by massed bolter fire. Talos moved in the same moment, slipping into another Terminator’s shadow, sharing the living, cursing cover with Mercutian.
“Charge!” Huron screamed the order in two voices, when the vocaliser built into his throat took over from his damaged vocal chords. His warriors powered forwards, lowering their bolters and hefting energised mauls.
“We should take these fools everywhere,” Cyrion suggested.
“Blood…” Uzas whispered over the vox. “Blood for the Blood God.”
Xarl blind-fired around the bulk of the Terminator he was using as a shield. Talos and Mercutian joined in, and the prophet risked a glance around his reluctant protector’s shoulder guard. He saw the Marines Errant falling back in supreme order, abandoning their dead, still pouring out half a squad’s worth of fire.
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