by Dan Abnett
Sullus is rushing the daemon, hacking at it.
Ventanus moves forward. He starts to run.
‘Sullus!’ he yells.
Sullus isn’t listening. He is covered in spatters of ichor, hacking at the thing’s rancid flesh.
The daemon finally seems to notice the cobalt-blue figure chopping at the base of its backbone.
It steps on him.
Then it moves on, oblivious to the mass-reactives streaking into its flesh. Another part of the palace frontage crashes down.
Ventanus reaches Sullus. His body is compressed into the lawn in a steaming, scorched depression that oozes slime. He tries to pull him out. Sullus is alive. His armour has protected him, though there are crush injuries. Bones are broken.
Ventanus hears a crash and a trundling sound. One of the Shadowswords ploughs into the palace grounds. It has come over the bridge, and rammed down the gatehouse to get into the compound. It has brought down the gate the Word Bearers lost hundreds trying to destroy.
The superheavy rumbles across the mangled lawns, knocking down some of Sparzi’s emplacements. It lines up its volcano cannon. Ventanus hears the characteristic sigh-moan of the capacitors charging for a shot.
The blast is savage. A light flash. A searing beam. It hits the daemon in the body. The blindingly bright light seems to dislocate against the daemon’s darkness, obscured. Dark vapour wafts from the creature’s body, but it shows no sign of damage.
It turns on the tank.
Ventanus starts to run again, across the shredded lawn, past the bodies of men killed by the daemon, towards the palace wall. He has a theoretical. It isn’t much, but it’s all he has. The daemon is impervious to harm in its body, but its head might be vulnerable. Brain or skull injuries might slow it down or impair its function. Maybe even drive the damn thing away.
It’s got the Shadowsword. The superheavy tries to recharge its cannon, but that famous slow rate of fire...
The daemon seizes the tank by the front of the hull, buckling the armour skirts and tearing the track guards. It shoves the three-hundred-tonne tank backwards, gouging up the turf like a tablecloth. The tank revs, pluming exhaust, trying to drive against the horned thing, tracks slipping and squirming. Mud sprays. Divots fly. The Shadowsword tries to traverse to aim at the daemon point-blank. The daemon slaps at the massive cannon muzzle, ripping the assembly around like a chin turned by a punch. Ventanus hears internal gearing and rotation drivers shred and blow out. The gun mounting falls slack and loose, lolling on the mighty chassis, weapon flopping sideways.
The daemon bends down, snuffling, and takes a bite out of the hull. Then it shoves the tank again, driving it back through an ornamental bed of fruit trees, and smashes it into the terraced wall.
Ventanus runs up a slope of rubble, leaps, arms wide, and lands on the flat roof of a garden colonnade. He runs along it, leaping over a section brought down by the daemon’s attack, and then jumps again, this time onto the marble parapet of the palace roof itself. He runs along it, drawing level with the daemon, almost above it. It is killing the tank, killing it like a hound killing a rabbit.
Ventanus can see the nape of its neck, wrinkled and pale, almost human. He can see the tufts and wisps of foul black hair roped across it. He can see the back of the skull, where mottled skin hangs slack behind the knotted bur of the preposterous horns.
Ventanus accelerates. He reaches for his sword, but the scabbard is empty.
All he has is Cxir’s ritual knife.
He rips it out, holds it in both hands, blade tip down, and runs off the roof, arms raised above his head.
[mark: 12.42.16]
There’s nowhere to go. Word Bearers stream from the cargo spaces, blitzing the area with gunfire.
Thiel ducks and dodges, bolts slicing past him on silent flame trails.
His kill squad is done. Mission over. The odds are too great.
‘Break!’ he voxes, and fires his void-harness on full burn.
The violent acceleration lifts him in a wide turn, up and curling back, streaking clear of the killing field. Four, maybe five of his squad lift clear with him. Zaridus, the last to come, is shot by down-raking fire, and his slack body spins away into the stars, jerking and zagging as the harness jets cough and misfire.
Shots chase them. Banking, Thiel sees flashes of noiseless light burst against the flagship hull below him and spark off the buttresses and struts.
He lands, hoping he has decent cover. He has to reload. He tries to calculate the enemy spread and assess the angles they will be coming from. He shouts marshalling orders to his surviving squad members.
The Word Bearers are on him anyway. Two come over the top of a thermal vent, another two around the side of the plating buffer. He gets off two shots. Something wings him in the shoulder.
No, it’s a hand. A hand dragging him backwards.
Guilliman pushes Thiel aside and propels himself towards the Word Bearers. His armoured feet bite into the hullskin as he gains traction. He seems vast, like a titan. Not an engine of Mars. A titan of myth.
His head is bare. Impossible. His flesh is bleached with cold. His mouth opens in a silent scream as he smashes into them.
He kills one. He crushes the legionary’s head into his chest with the base of his fist. Globules of blood squirt sideways, jiggling and jostling. The body topples back in slow motion.
Guilliman turns, finds another, punches his giant fist through the legionary’s torso, and pulls it out, ripping out his backbone. A third comes, eager for the glory of killing a primarch. Thiel guns him apart with his reloaded boltgun, two-handed brace, feet anchored.
The fourth storms in.
Guilliman twists and punches his head off. Clean off. Head and helm as one, tumbling away like a ball, trailing beads of blood.
Cover fire comes across. Another kill squad finally reaches the hull section. A fierce, silent bolter battle licks back and forth across a heat exchanger canyon. Struck bodies, leaking fluid shapes, rotate away into the freezing darkness.
Thiel triangulates his position. He signals to the bridge to open the Port 88 airgate.
He looks at Guilliman. He gestures to the airgate.
The primarch wants to fight. Thiel knows that look. That need. Guilliman wants to keep fighting. There’s blood around him like red petals, and he wants to add to it.
It’s time to stop this fight, however, and fight the one that matters.
2
[mark: 12.53.09]
Erebus stands, surrounded by daemonkind.
He is still high in the north, on the now-accursed Satric Plateau. The sky is blood red, the colour of his Legion’s armour. The horizon is a ring of fire. The earth is a cinderheap. The black stones marking out the ritual circle, the stones taken from the graveworld of Isstvan V, throb with an incandescent power. A wind howls. In its plangent notes, like voices chanting, is the truth. The Primordial Truth.
The truth of Lorgar.
The truth of the words they bear.
The surviving Tzenvar Kaul have long since retreated to a safe distance some fifteen kilometres away down the valley. Only the Gal Vorbak warriors remain, led by Zote, their obdurate forms proof against the lethal wind and the unnatural fire.
Erebus is tired, but he is also elated. It is almost time for the second sunrise. The second, greater Ushkul Thu.
He signals to Essember Zote.
Around Erebus, on the charred slopes and blackened rocks, the daemons slither and chatter, disturbed by his movement. They are basking in the luciferous glow, glistening, glinting, chirring; some sluggish, others eager to be loosed.
He calms them with soft words. Their forms stretch out around him as far as he can see, like a colony of pinnipeds basking on a blasted shore. They loop around one another, bodies entwined, embraced, conjoined. They writhe and whine, yelp and murmur, raising their heads to utter their unworldly cries into the dying sky. Fat blowflies buzz, blackening the filthy air. Horns and crests sway in ghastl
y rhythm. Batwings spread and flutter. Segmented legs stir and rattle.
Erebus sings to them. He knows their names. Algolath. Surgotha. Etelelid. Mubonicus. Baalkarah. Uunn. Jarabael. Faedrobael. N’kari. Epidemius. Seth Ash, who aspects change. Ormanus. Tarik reborn, he-who-is-now-Tormaggedon. Laceratus. Protael. Gowlgoth. Azmodeh. A hundred thousand more.
Samus has just returned, dipping into the circle to clothe himself in new flesh. There is still some fight left in the enemy then, for the likes of Samus to be turned back.
It will not be enough. It will not overcome what is descending.
Reality is caving in. Erebus can hear it creaking and ripping as it buckles. Calth can only stand so much stress.
Then ruin will break, like a storm.
Zote carries over the warp-flask.
Erebus tunes it to link with Zetsun Verid Yard, with Kor Phaeron.
Erebus realises he is bleeding from the mouth. He wipes the blood away.
‘Begin,’ he says.
[mark: 12.59.45]
Sorot Tchure watches Kor Phaeron’s face as he receives the message from the surface. There is glee. The time is at hand.
The bulk coordinates are already set. At a simple nod from Kor Phaeron, Tchure instructs the magi at their control consoles. The entire planetary weapons grid is retrained on a single new target.
Kor Phaeron’s eagerness is evident. He has played with the grid, annihilating battleships, orbitals and moons, but quickly wearied of the sport. A pure purpose awaits.
The Word Bearers affect a communion with the stars. The suns of the heavens hold deep meaning for them. The strata of their Legion’s organisation are named after solar symbols. Through superhuman effort, Erebus and Kor Phaeron have transformed the entire planet of Calth into a solar temple, an altar on which to make their final tribute.
Erebus has worn the skin of reality thin, and opened the membrane enclosing the Immaterium. The altar is anointed.
Kor Phaeron steps forward and places his left hand upon the master control.
He presses it.
The weapons grid begins to fire. Concentrated and coherent energy. Shoals of missiles. Destructive beams. Warheads of antimatter sheathed in heavy metals. The rays and beams will take almost eight minutes to reach their target. The hard projectiles will take considerably longer. But they will all hit in turn, and continue to strike again and again and again as the merciless bombardment continues.
The target is the blue-white star of the Veridian system.
Kor Phaeron begins to murder the sun.
[mark: 13.10.05]
‘We feared you had perished,’ says Marius Gage.
Guilliman has just walked onto the auxiliary bridge of the Macragge’s Honour with his battered kill squad escort.
‘What does not kill me,’ replies Guilliman, ‘is not trying hard enough.’
He makes them smile. He’s good at that. But they can all read the change in him. He was never a man you could warm to. He was too hard, too driven, too austere. Now he is wounded. Wounded like an animal might be wounded. Wounded in a way that makes that animal dangerous.
‘Voided without a helm,’ Guilliman says. ‘Primarch biology helped, but the atmospheric envelope was my true saviour.’
‘What...’ Gage begins.
‘What was that thing?’ Guilliman finishes. Everyone is staring, everyone listening.
‘Should this be a conversation we finish in private?’ asks Gage.
Guilliman shakes his head.
‘As I understand it from Thiel,’ he says, gesturing to the sergeant at his side, ‘you have all spent hours fighting your way through this ship against other fiends like it. It has cost you. I can see it has cost you, Marius.’
Gage is suddenly painfully aware of his truncated arm.
‘I can’t see any point in hiding the truth from anybody here,’ says Guilliman. ‘You have all served Ultramar today with more than duty might have reason to expect. And the day is not done. It seems unlikely that we will win anything, or even survive, but I would dearly like to wound our treacherous foe before we die.’
The primarch looks around the room. His armour is sheened and sticky with filth. His face is dirty, and there is blood in his hair.
‘Let us share what we know, and build some strategy. I welcome theoreticals from anybody at this stage. Anything will be considered.’
He walks over to the strategium.
‘We can use the word daemon, I think. A warp entity manifested and destroyed the bridge. You have fought others. Daemon is as good a word as any. It was Lorgar, or at least...’
He pauses, and looks back at them.
‘I don’t know where Lorgar is. I don’t know if my brother was ever in this system in the flesh, but it was his voice and his presence that visited me, and it was him that transformed. It was no trick. Lorgar and his Legion have consorted with the powers of the warp. They have forged an unholy covenant. It has twisted them. It has started a war.’
Guilliman sighs.
‘I don’t know how to fight them. I know how to fight most things. I can even work out how to fight warriors of the Legiones Astartes, though the notion seems heretical. Like Thiel here, I can think the unthinkable, and make theoreticals out of the blasphemous. But daemons? It seems to me, with the Council of Nikaea, that we voluntarily rid ourselves of the one weapon we might have had against the warp. We could dearly use the Librarius now.’
His warriors nod in silent agreement.
‘We should petition for their reinstatement,’ he adds, ‘if we ever get the chance. We cannot do it now. There is no time, no means. But if any of us survive this, know that the edict must be overturned.’
He pauses, thoughtful.
‘It is almost as though,’ he muses, ‘someone knew. Nikaea disarmed us. It is as though our enemy knew what was coming, and orchestrated events so that we would voluntarily cast aside our only practical weapon the moment before it was needed.’
There is a murmur of quiet dismay.
‘We are all being used,’ Guilliman says, lifting his eyes and looking at Gage. ‘All of us. Even Lorgar. When he tried to kill me, to rip me into space, I could feel the pain in him. I have never been close to him, but there is a fraternal link. I could feel his horror. His agony at the way fate had twisted on us all.’
‘He said Horus–’ Gage begins.
‘I know what he said,’ replies Guilliman.
‘He said others were already dead. At Isstvan,’ Gage presses. ‘Manus. Vulkan. Corax.’
‘If that is true,’ says Empion, ‘it is a tragedy beyond belief.’
‘Three sons. Three primarchs, the loss is appalling,’ agrees Guilliman. ‘Four, if you count Lorgar. Five, if what he says of Horus is true. And others, he said, had turned...’
Guilliman takes a deep breath.
‘Corax and Vulkan I will mourn dearly. Manus I will miss most of all.’
Gage knows what his primarch means. In all tactical simulations, Guilliman shows particular favour for certain of his brothers. He refers to them as the dauntless few, the ones he can most truly depend upon to do what they were made to do. Dorn and his Legion are one. Ill-tempered, argumentative Russ is another. Sanguinius is a third. Guilliman admires the Khan greatly, but the White Scars are neither predictable nor trustworthy. Ferrus Manus and the Iron Hands were always the fourth of the dauntless few. With any one of those key four – Dorn, Russ, Manus or Sanguinius – Guilliman always claimed he could win any war. Outright. Against any foe. Even in extremis, the Ultramarines could compact with any one of those four allies and take down any foe. It was primary theoretical. In any doomsday scenario that faced the Imperium, Guilliman could play it out to a practical win provided he could rely on one of those four. And of them, Manus was the key. Implacable. Unshakeable. If he was at your side, he would never break.
Now, it seems, he is gone. Gone. Dead. Brother. Friend. Warrior. Leader. Ultramar’s most stalwart ally.
Guilliman breaks the
bleak silence.
‘Show me tactical. The nearspace combat. Someone said there was a vox from the surface finally?’
‘From Leptius Numinus, lord,’ says the Master of Vox.
‘Who was it?’
‘Captain Ventanus,’ says Gage. ‘We had a good signal for a while, and were getting a vital datafeed, but the vox cut off suddenly about an hour ago. A violent interrupt.’
‘I don’t need to ask if you’re trying to re-establish the link?’ says Guilliman.
‘You do not, lord,’ replies the Master of Vox.
Guilliman turns to Empion.
‘Assemble all the strengths we have aboard this ship. Kill squads. Every heavy weapon we can find. Forget Chapter and company lines, just divide and group the men we have into viable fighting parties. Have the squad leaders mark their helms in red.’
‘Red, sir?’ asks Empion.
‘We do not have reliable vox, Klord, so I want firm and simple visual cues for the chain of command.’
Guilliman looks across at Thiel.
‘Besides,’ he says, ‘I think after Thiel’s efforts today, it’s high time that stopped being a mark of censure.’
‘Yes, sir,’ says Empion.
‘My lord!’ Shipmaster Hommed calls out.
‘What is it?’
‘The weapons grid, my lord. It’s firing.’
‘At whom?’
‘At... the sun.’
3
[mark: 13.30.31]
Thunder rolls through the glowering skies above the shattered palace of Leptius Numinus. It starts to rain torrentially. The weather patterns of the abused planet are convulsing again.
Ventanus stands for a moment and lets the streaming rain wash the foul black ichor off his armour. He feels the water hitting his face. He opens his eyes and watches Sparzi’s flamer squads burning the slime, the blubbery black flesh and the noxious inky entrails the daemon left behind when it exploded. The flame jets sizzle and hiss ferociously in the rain.
He walks up to what’s left of the palace atrium. Selaton is waiting for him.