Such were the circumstances in which I met Justicar Alcuin. It would have been better, I am sure, had our paths crossed in other times. As it was though, the circumstances of our encounter were very far from ideal, taking place on the night that none can forget – only the second time in history that the Outer Walls were breached by the Enemy, an event which would later be called, by its survivors, the Sack of the Lion’s Gate.
I led an attack company drawn from the best of Urbo’s remaining forces. They were becoming hardened to what they saw by then, and were now able to give me useful support when we encountered creatures of the ether. Two hundred of them took off with me from the high landing stages, exiting the wall under the watchful cover of the defence batteries before heading out into the city beyond.
Our target was the manufactorum zone east of the grand processional, within sight of the Lion’s Gate itself. Once a proud thoroughfare three hundred metres wide used to hosting military parades, it had become a haunted semi-ruin, overlooked by eyeless rows of scorched terraces. We launched repeated missions to keep it clear, mostly to provide a route for ground forces retreating to the walls from positions further out. During the nominal daylight hours we drove the corrupted hosts back into the shadows, but as night fell and the flames danced more darkly, they always slunk back.
So here we were again, roaring out into the eternal city, clearing the filth from sight of the walls. It felt like trying to scoop the tide away, handful by handful.
I took a Talion gunship in the lead, and the bulk of Urbo’s soldiers followed in their Valkyries. Once beyond the walls we dropped down low, skirting no more than fifty metres over the deserted transit canyons. Vast hive walls loomed up on either side of us, many still sullenly burning, most as dark as pitch. Billions still dwelled inside those sarcophagi, though I did not like to think on how many still retained their sanity. Ragged banners hung from burned-out windows, all inscribed with signs of ruin. It didn’t matter how many we tore down; within hours, hundreds more would reappear.
‘Target approaches, colonel,’ I voxed, watching the massive gates of an old Munitorum works emerge out of the smoggy haze.
‘Prep for disembark,’ he passed on to his sergeants, and the Valkyries dropped even lower.
Urbo and I had formed something of an effective partnership. Once his awe of me had dissipated a little, I discovered I could rely on him to follow a command. Once he’d witnessed me slaughter in the Emperor’s name, he discovered that I could be a killer after his own heart. It is surprising, I find, what connections can be made in adversity.
The gates to the facility were broken, and on either side of them thick bulwarks soared into the flickering air. The entire place was a labyrinth of smelters, forges and assembly lines, built aeons ago when Terra had presumed to manufacture things for itself, afterwards used to recycle defunct military equipment too high-value to destroy and too low-value to export off-world.
Our transports growled under the low lintel, plunging us into a penumbral world of muffled echoes. I was first out, crunching down onto a wet floor strewn with swarf. The rest of Urbo’s men piled out from hovering Valkyries, then sprinted across the resounding floor of the chamber, their lasgun-mounted lumens flashing in the dark.
The place was like some colossal mausoleum, with a high, empty roof that disappeared into gloom. They had serviced Militarum super-heavies in here, I had been informed, and there were still chain-lifters hanging amid the blown shells of dormant machine-clusters. It stank of sour oil and rotting metal.
I could already hear our enemies. They no longer made any attempt to hide their presence in those places, but conducted their depravities as if they were safely ensconced on some world far from our scrutiny. The fact they dared it at all disgusted me – a blasphemy I could no longer show indulgence to.
So I ran hard, delving deeper into the echoing depths. Empty cage-lifts hung like lanterns in the dark, rusting quietly over abyssal shafts. From ahead I could smell the chemical stench of burning and hear the roar of the crowds. I saw cloaked figures scuttle into the gloom, but ignored them – the real prey was ahead, congregating, organising, making ready to surge out against us. Urbo’s troops kept up as best they could, but they soon fell behind. I pulled ahead, driven by my zeal to end this, running faster and deeper into those stinking foundations.
I broke into what had once been an assembly hall. The conveyer belts were still in place, some with the carcasses of battle tanks lurking like monuments. The space was filled now with swaying masses, all clad in the ragged remains of their work-shifts. It was a shrine to corruption, that place – human bodies hung from chains locked into the distant ceiling, twisting amid foetid air, their eyes gouged out and their hands skinless. Huge eight-pointed stars had been graven into the walls with the facility’s own machine tools, then daubed with the residue of slaughter. On top of the smell of engine lubricants I could now detect human aromas – blood, sweat, desperation.
The mob of faces was turned away from me and angled up towards a Mechanicus command pulpit – a hovering mass of intricate metalwork, studded with cables and clattering with extended mechadendrites. That thing had the capacity for perhaps twenty tech-priests, but was now crawling with ten times that number of occupants. They were scratching and clawing at one another, swarming like rats over it, shinning up the cables and clambering towards the summit.
Atop that pulpit was a single priest in ripped Ecclesiarchy robes, though the old sigils of the Ministorum had been excised and replaced by crude octeds. The priest held aloft a still-shivering heart in two blood-slicked hands, offering it up like a benediction. Bodies of Imperial troops from a hundred different regiments lay strewn over the conveyer approaches, all with their chests ripped open and their ribs glistening whitely. Many more, still living, had been corralled into makeshift cages hewn from the rusting hulls of the tanks, ready to be dragged for sacrifice by the hordes who bayed around them.
All pretence at sanity had gone. The thousands of souls who jeered and cried out looked barely human any more. Their skin was white, their eyes ringed with black, their tongues a virulent red. Bleeding tattoos had been carved onto their faces with blunt knives, and metal splinters rammed through skin-folds. They were no longer afraid of me, no longer afraid of anything, their systems force-fed hallucinogens and stimulants by the demagogues who had dragged them into this debauchery.
I did not hesitate. I charged into their midst. I tore through them, slaying rapidly and carving a path towards the pulpit. Behind me I heard the first of Urbo’s troops arrive, and the flash of las-fire soon competed with the leaping brazier-flames to banish the shadows. Gnosis whirled in a reaper-pattern, carving through the diseased flesh. They shrieked and they cursed, throwing themselves towards me. Dozens pressed in, then hundreds, clawing out, their eyes locked wide with demented fury.
Not one of them even touched my armour. I surrounded myself with a hemisphere of tattered flesh, an orbit of thrown blood that spun and splattered. I moved ever faster, my pace barely slowed by the methodical killing. I immersed myself in my combat-state of pure concentration. I didn’t see those wretches as individual targets at all, just one vast, many-headed beast standing between me and my ultimate goal. They died so quickly, depressingly quickly, like dry fuel hurled into the furnace.
Heavy weapons cracked out, telling me that Urbo’s ranged-attack squads were in place. Assault teams headed for the cages, aiming to release as many of their comrades as they could, while the bulk of the regular troops engaged the acolytes.
I was close to the pulpit by then, and could feel the air thicken, just as it had done in the cathedral of the relic. The screams ramped up, the flames leapt higher. The priest sacrificed another struggling victim on his false altar even as I drew into bolter range, oblivious to everything save the rite he was orchestrating. By then I could see just how many had been slain – there were piles of skulls, blood-streaked and fl
esh-pocked, stacked up beyond the pulpit like a conqueror’s hoard.
I hurled Gnosis around in a heavy crossways swipe, clearing space to leap. Even as I did so, the air ahead of me cracked open, shriven by a sudden blast of frost-hard energy, flooring those who still howled and capered, and causing the pulpit itself to rock wildly. Five clear shafts of eye-burning lightning speared down from the void above us, crystallising into the outlines of silver-grey warriors bearing force halberds and crackling warhammers. They slammed into the heart of the enemy, scattering them with the force of their arrival before instantly bursting into choreographed killing movement.
I adapted, assessing how the new arrivals interlocked with my assault, gauging speeds and impacts. Soon we were fighting together, cutting our way higher and hurling the crushed and broken bodies into the conveyers. We closed the gap, vaulting up to the pulpit’s high platform, seizing its crustaceous exhaust vents and hauling ourselves onto it.
My blade was the quickest. I reached the high platform in time to see the priest tear the living heart from a final victim. I cast down the stimm-bulked bodyguards who lumbered to engage me and angled Gnosis to discharge. The human sacrifice was thrown aside, bouncing awkwardly down the slope of skulls.
The priest grinned at me. He held the heart aloft and crushed it between his fingers, dousing his bald head in a lumpy torrent of liquid gore.
‘You see, though, we’ve done enough,’ he told me.
My bolt-shell hit him in the chest, blowing him from the platform. The charge ignited while he was in mid-air, rending him open and sending his severed limbs spinning into the crowds.
The Grey Knights joined me. Their steel-grey armour still sizzled from the extremes of teleportation, and the homer-beacons on their shoulders throbbed with residual power. Four of them bore mighty blades that crackled with neon-blue disruptor charge, while their leader carried a heavy warhammer inscribed with runes of purity.
‘We come too late,’ said their leader.
I turned on him. The hall was now in confusion, the mobs running from Urbo’s advance, throwing themselves into the las-volleys like startled cattle.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. We would kill them all now – by dawn, this place would be purged of its corruption. ‘This is ended here.’
His helm was caked in a dirty brown film of blood, all except the lenses, which glowed with blue fire. I could sense the psychic essence radiating from his core. It was like heat, leaking from his every gesture. He was perhaps a head shorter than I was, a little less heavily built. His armour was scoured raw where mine was ornate, and his movements were a fraction slower, though every part of him was suffused with the arcane potency of the warp.
‘Not yet,’ he said, keeping the shimmering psy-field activated over his great hammerhead. ‘Attend, Custodian – now the storm breaks.’
Even before he had finished speaking, the walls began to shake. The heavy chains swung, first gently, then ever more violently. With a squeal and a whine, the conveyers began to move, their skins drumming. A rumble broke out below us, a grind of earth against earth, almost too low to be heard, but then the reverberations thrummed into our bones.
Urbo’s men kept fighting. The mob kept coming at them. The mortals seemed insensible to this, and yet I could feel it – the build up, the swell and the bulge of something uncurling and extending and thrusting into reality.
This was something cumulative. This was something exponential.
‘You sensed this,’ I said, sounding more accusatory than I had intended.
‘We must leave,’ was all the Grey Knight said.
The walls were cracking. The foundations were shifting. I looked out at the assembly hall, and saw its floor begin to shudder, vibrating like kicked sand.
‘Withdraw,’ I ordered Urbo over the vox. ‘Get out now. Get to your ships.’
His forces instantly complied, disengaging, pulling back the way they had come. I looked up. There were stairs leading up the far wall, hugging the adamantium panels and running sheer to the distant roof. The Grey Knight saw what I proposed, and nodded.
‘That is acceptable,’ he said.
Then we were moving again, leaping from the pulpit and running across a heavy landscape of breaking metal. I felt the decks shatter under my tread. Wherever my boots landed, a red glow was revealed, as if we trod across magma-skin. I could unleash my full power now, and sprinted at full tilt. The Space Marines kept pace, and the six of us swept across the disintegrating hall. As we went, huge chunks of iron fell around us, smashing apart and driving deep into the vaults below. One of the tank husks was struck and tilted straight over into widening chasms beneath.
I reached the stairway and ascended, leaping four steps at a time. We rose swiftly, even as the walls buckled. Blood-red light flooded the chamber now, shafts of it angling from every rent in the toppling edifice around us. I had a vision of the entire structure collapsing as we raced through it, the tonnes and tonnes above us sloughing into a landslip of ruin.
I leapt to one side, my movements governed by intuition, narrowly evading a column that crashed into dust. We ducked and swayed through the disintegrating galleries, showered with clouds of bouncing rubble. The noise became incredible, a roar like the forgotten oceans. I had a final glimpse of the vaults over the assembly chamber – imploding entirely, folding in on the halls below – before we reached the portal to the outside. I raced through it, followed by the others, even as the decking beneath us fell away and plunged into the gathering vortex of collapse.
We emerged onto a high, narrow bridge into the spire levels and kept running. Behind us, the immense Munitorum facility broke open with blazing shafts of red light, thrust out from its slumping profile of darkness. Slowly, agonisingly, like a mountain being consumed from within, the great buttresses folded in on themselves and the towers crumpled. I heard explosions from a long way down, booms of tortured stone giving into tectonic pressures, and plumes of smoke reared high into the sky.
The bridge began to sway, its moorings pulled from their armatures. Ahead of us was another portal set into the face of a rearing hive-spire with a forked crown. We made for that, swerving and ducking even as molten clumps of metal rained down around us. I had a blurred impression of everything – the towers, the domes, the great defence stations – falling apart, as if all creation were splitting into pieces around us. I fixed on the goal – a wide platform of heavy iron and adamantium lodged high up on the westward face of the forked spire – and shut all else out of my mind. As the bridge finally broke free of its fastenings, we threw ourselves into the air, sailing through fire-flecked winds before crunching hard to the solid deck ahead.
Behind us, the bridge twisted away like a headless snake. Its spine broken, it seesawed as gravity sucked it down into the hungry maw of cataclysm. Another towering veil of dust rose up on the far side of the canyon, lit from within by fresh detonations. The overlapping sonic roar became blistering, overwhelming even my aural receptors and making my vision shake.
I stared out west, over to where the processional avenue led towards the Lion’s Gate. As steeled as I was, as conditioned as I was, I could hardly credit the evidence of my senses. For a terrible moment, caught in that seismic upheaval, I lost any sense of location, of secure grounding. The primordial centre had been cut loose.
The Terra I knew was gone. Gouts of hissing flame burst up from the transitways and the deep canyons, licking the sides of the tottering spires. The blazes were impossibly huge, merged conflagrations that thundered into the airless heights. I could just make out the wall on the far side of the heat-shaken night, blurry from the boiling clouds of burning ash. I could see the pinnacles of the basilicas thrusting skywards like ebony spears. The skies themselves had ignited, aching with fell illumination and riven by the bellowing of inhuman voices. I saw dozens of great edifices, all thousands of years old, dissolve into blackened dust, b
roken apart by the rituals enacted at their hearts. An absolute and unearthly psychic hatred, raw and condensed into dreadful purity, flooded across the ancient battlements and towers like the gales of a crashing maelstrom.
The Grey Knights stood beside me, their armour turned deep crimson by the unholy light. Their Justicar looked impassively into the night sky.
‘Shards of Kharneth,’ he intoned, grimly. ‘So they truly dare it.’
We could see across to the old Lion’s Gate void port reaches – huge expanses of rockcrete landing stages and command towers, interwoven with deep chasms where the ship-lifts waited. Even in normal times it was a desolate place, marked for reverence by the Ecclesiarchy and left bare for the winds to scrape against, but now it was a diabolic vision of torment. The great adamantium plates were heaving. Columns of liquid incandescence spat from the ruptures, jetting high into the weeping skies above.
‘The wall,’ I said, preparing to race down from the spire’s flank.
Before I could move, however, an immense boom rang out, striking the spire-faces and shattering their armourglass viewportals. The glittering rain of shards tumbled into cataracts, refracting the crimson aura and splaying it into rivers of rubies.
Out across that immense vista, I saw the columns of flame solidify. Every point of lurid light began to intensify, thousands of them, tens of thousands, until the great plain resembled a starfield of its own, a bloody mirror to the one that cycled above the cloud barrier.
They howled as they were born. I could only watch as they ripped into instantiation, first tens, then hundreds, then more and more until the entire landscape was boiling with daemon embryos. The nightmare infants stretched out, bathed in birth-flames, their bodies extending upwards and outwards, their jaws distended in natal agony, their backs spawning spine-ridged spikes. They opened black-on-black eyes, they lashed with prehensile tongues, they staggered out of flaming cocoons, croaking from vocal cords that were already stiffening and taking up blades that erupted from firming scab-flesh.
Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion Page 19