Several soldiers at the outer edge where the Ultramarines presence was weakest were dragged screaming into the swarm.
Iulus tightened the cordon further still but his troops were already shoulder-to-shoulder with their backs against the gate of the first wall. He sensed the tide turning, the sheer overwhelming force of the necron constructs tipping the balance. What had started out as an organised defence of hold and repulse was turning into a desperate last stand.
Behind him, there came the churning of gears as the mechanism to the gate was activated. It did not open wide but it was enough to admit a towering war machine into the Courtyard of Xiphos.
‘The walls of Chundrabad shall never fall!’ Agnathio’s multi-melta tore a hot line through the scarabs. Men of the Ark Guard hurried from the Dreadnought’s path as he bullied his way to the front rank. ‘I serve the Chapter eternally!’
Though he moved slowly, his motive servos still spitting oil and steam, when Agnathio reached the necron horde it reeled. So indomitable, so utterly relentless, the venerable warrior’s example was followed by all. Together, they threw the scarabs back.
Agnathio had been joined by the rest of the Immortals and several platoons of Ark Guard who lent their fire to the Imperial barrage.
As if sensing the futility of their attack, the necron machines retreated like ants from a fire and withdrew to their bore holes.
The shooting from the Ark Guard was slow to relent. In the end it took all of the Ultramarines to bring the humans back down again. They had survived a terrifying ordeal and fear did not give up its hold on lasgun triggers easily. When the noise of the barrage died, a wintry silence swept through the Courtyard of Xiphos. Already, the drifts were covering the evidence that a battle even took place. There were only the half-flayed remains of dead Ark Guard, anyway; all of the destroyed necrons had phased out. It made for an eerie scene.
Iulus rested his hand on the still-hot shoulder casing of Agnathio’s multi-melta. ‘We owe you a debt, honoured one.’
Pride was not really amongst a Dreadnought’s limited emotional responses. Agnathio was typically matter-of-fact. ‘I am my Chapter’s servant. I seek only the glory of Ultramar.’
‘Well spoken, brother,’ Iulus murmured, humbled by such stalwart courage and loyalty.
Brother Galvia had been one of the Space Marines from the first wall to come and bolster the beleaguered defenders. ‘Do we return to the second wall and try to regarrison it?’ he asked.
Iulus shook his head. The second wall was all but rubble now, the bore holes had seen to that. It would be indefensible. He turned to Kolpeck who was crouching nearby, breathing hard while some of the men around him were puking out their nerves.
‘Find as many of those seismographic staves as you can,’ said Iulus. ‘Plant them around this cordon, ten metres out.’
‘I could take them as far as the second wall,’ Kolpeck suggested.
‘No. Ten metres, no farther. Do it quickly.’
Kolpeck saluted, gathering up some men he trusted, and went about his orders.
Iulus’s face was grim as he surveyed the ruins in front of them. Aristaeus was by his side and must have seen his expression.
‘Something wrong, brother-sergeant?’
‘That was just a probing attack to test our strength,’ he said. ‘This isn’t over.’
Iulus did not intend his words to be prophetic but as he said them there was a flash of emerald light around the rubble of the second wall. A crack had opened in the air itself. The drifts did not fall there. It was as if something had interrupted the very ebb and flow of nature. The crack widened and became a pool of light that expanded again into roughly the size of a large doorway. Within it, the emerald light rippled as if something very deep down beneath the pool was attempting to surface. Shadows loomed there. Iulus could not be certain but he thought he could make out a long, glowing corridor with the shapes of necrons marching down it, growing more distinct with every step.
Another portal opened up a few metres away. A third followed swiftly after that. Down inside the bore holes a chittering clangour arose as the scarabs returned.
On the battlements, some of the Ark Guard were pointing beyond Kellenport’s walls. Officers were looking through scopes. Iulus could hear the larger guns rotating to fresh trajectories.
Some of the men were muttering amongst themselves. A few in the front ranks who could see the enemy emerging had turned and were trying to reach the gap in the gate, but it had already closed.
‘Hold to your positions!’ Iulus bellowed, revving the teeth of his chainsword. He levelled it at the trio of portals and the shadows coming through them. ‘Death comes for us. It comes clad in metal and with engines instead of organs. We shall hurl it back, back into the abyss. Faith in the Emperor.’
The rallying cry was taken up by his brothers; some of the One Hundred, including Kolpeck, echoed it too.
‘Faith in the Emperor!’
Emboldened, perhaps even shamed by the ragged band of conscripts, the rest of the Ark Guard stopped trying to flee and gave voice.
‘Faith in the Emperor!’
As the shout of defiance echoed to nothing, Kolpeck, alone, could be heard.
‘And in the name of our brother-Angel, Iulus Fennion!’
Iulus wanted to rebuke him, but then the Ark Guard and the conscripts resounded with, ‘Iulus Fennion! Brother-Angel!’
Despite himself, Iulus felt a slight swell of pride. It lasted but a moment as the shadow of the monoliths loomed through the gaps in the wall and the necrons emerged at last.
‘Keep your courage steady,’ he told Kolpeck as gunfire filled the Courtyard of Xiphos.
Letzger sweated like a stuck pig. The gunnery crews had worked well; Hel-handed was ready to unleash her first salvo.
‘Let ’em have it!’ he cried into the vox-horn.
Even with the dampeners and compensators, the recoil from the cannon was immense. It shook its staging platform like the hand of an angry god, while the explosive shell fell like its clenched fist.
A huge cloud of dust and debris rose up from the strike point, obscuring the slow-moving phalanx of monoliths from view. It looked like a direct hit. Certainly, Letzger had made no mistake in his calculations. That heavy a missile payload… Nothing in human creation could survive that.
Some of the gunnery crew were already celebrating. It was as much fear as it was exultation that fed their shouts and angry cheers.
Letzger stayed at the scopes, sweating. He was wearing plugs, but his ears still rang from the report of Hel-handed. She was a noisy bitch, all right, sometimes capricious, but he loved her and he loved what she could do.
Through the scope the smoke and dust was clearing. Ice and snow around the blast site had melted away to steam, adding to the obfuscation.
‘Let me see it,’ he murmured. ‘Let me see your broken carcass.’ He’d never fired on monoliths before; he didn’t know what happened to them when they were destroyed. Perhaps they phased out too; perhaps he was looking for a ghost he’d never see.
The image resolved. Letzger sagged at his post and the men groaned in despair. It was still there. Three of the necron pyramids advanced towards Kellenport. Somehow, impossibly, he had missed. The crater was so large, its effect so awesomely powerful, he didn’t know how. But Hel-handed had been fouled somehow.
Wiping away the perspiration on his forehead and lips, the cigar cinched between them no more than a smouldering nub, Letzger peered through the scopes more intently for an answer. He saw tendrils of darkness, coiling and twisting between the triumvirate of war machines. They appeared in synch, feeding off one another, boosting the terrible shroud that had somehow saved them.
The only mercy was that, for now at least, the monoliths were not firing their weapons. They had phased forces into the vicinity, but otherwise their power matrices were dormant.
For an experienced crew, it took six minutes to load, prime and fire an Ordinatus like the Hel-hande
d. Letzger prided himself that his men were the best. As he bellowed the orders to reload, he knew the old girl would be spitting fury in less than five.
As he watched the monoliths float towards them, in defiance of all natural laws of physics, he clutched the aquila bracelet on his wrist.
‘Come on, sweetheart,’ he said, patting the gun. ‘This time…’
Adanar was running the battlements when the first shot from the Hel-handed rang out. He’d not got far, and even though he knew he was out of position, stopped to watch the magnificent weapon in action. The blast wave, felt even where he was standing on the wall, was invigorating. His heart sank to a cold and pitiless place when he looked through Corporal Humis’s magnoculars and saw the monoliths were untouched. He’d always thought nothing would survive a blow like that.
From the Courtyard of Thor behind him, the uber-mortars and long-nose cannons churned out shells as if on a production line. With their subterfuge revealed, the necrons recommenced their barrage from the Thanatos Hills. As the emerald beams from pylons and gauss siege-cannon started up, Kellenport was under siege once more.
This time, however, the mechanoids were aiming for the walls.
A chunk of crenellation spumed into the air, trailing dust, grit and snow. Men went with it, broken and half-flayed.
Adanar ducked, grabbing Humis’s jacket before he fell off the battlement like several others. The screams of the falling men didn’t last long as they cracked against the ice-hardened flagstones of the square below.
‘I’ve lost one aide today,’ he said through gritted teeth, dragging the corporal bodily against part of the wall that was still intact. ‘I don’t intend on losing another.’
Humis was a little shell-shocked but otherwise grateful. He gestured to the blast-scarred section of wall. It gaped like an old wound, still festering. ‘We are dead men out here on the wall.’
Adanar nodded. ‘Agreed. All except the heavy cannon and gunnery nests are to drop below the wall to the lower level. The emplacements are dug in harder, that should give them some protection. For the rest: heads down and hunker down,’ he added, as Humis got on the vox and started relaying orders to the officers spread throughout the defences.
The corporal put his hand over the receiver cup, though he scarcely needed to – the combined barrage from both sides was deafening. ‘What about the troops in the Courtyard of Xiphos? They’ll lose the support fire from the platoons.’
Adanar thought for a second. He ducked again, as did Humis, when another explosion rocked the wall. More screaming followed.
‘Tell Sergeant Fennion he’s losing his support and offer to open up the gates. He’s a warrior-knight, so I doubt he’ll retreat easily, but at least the Ark Guard can get behind shelter if the Ultramarines want a glorious death.’
Adanar could tell by Humis’s expression that he’d shocked the corporal. ‘I’m sorry, Humis. It’s hard to see any hope amongst all this death.’ Subconsciously, he rubbed at the locket-charm strung around his wrist. ‘It’s been too long since I’ve seen anything else.’ Another blast shook Adanar from his reverie. ‘Give the order. The Angels are not immortal, they’ll either fall back or they’ll die like heroes.’
Chapter Eighteen
It felt strange to be above the ground. So long he had dwelled in darkness, his thoughts lost in a timeless miasma without meaning. The long sleep had gnawed at the Undying. Even his name, his true name, was denied to him. He was only the Undying now, an immortal king upon a decayed throne. Eternity was not the paradise he had hoped for. With every waking moment, as his lucidity returned to him, it became a terror instead.
How can I exist for all the long aeons of the galaxy? Will I not atrophy? Will my mind not erode to oblivion?
As a member of one of the necrontyr’s royal houses, he enjoyed certain privileges. No servitude as an automaton for him. Though the Undying had lost part of his identity, he knew that much. Plebeians and nobles were separated by a gulf. Since the necrons had embraced metal over flesh, that divide had increased exponentially. Not only was freedom denied to the lower classes, so too now was true sentience.
Though tarnished and tattered, the Undying’s vestments looked regal enough. As he’d left the tomb, eager to dispense death and annihilation, his lych-like guardians had found him.
Like their lord, they carried long war-scythes in silvered fists. As they bowed, he saw the flare of recognition in their eyes and knew these were no ordinary slaves.
‘Retinue,’ he had proclaimed. ‘Summon my phalanx to war.’
Immortals had filed from the bowels of the tomb, rank upon rank recently armed and revivified. They were the Undying’s honour guard. In the lowest levels, the very catacombs, the reviled spilled forth. Held aloft on humming repulsor platforms, the destroyers were a blend of necron and something else. Nihilism burned coldly in the depths of their eye sockets. Fused with gauss technologies, boasting cannons not limbs, they were amongst the tomb’s deadliest servants.
The Undying felt an instant kinship with them, despite the fact that the house shunned such creatures. Their curse, the slow descent into madness and destructive desire, was a fate shared by all. The destroyers’ presence was merely a reminder of that.
Lesser creatures joined the hovering gun platforms in legion, raider constructs and the flickering shadows of tomb wraiths. The latter were an obvious bribe. The Architect was trying to make certain of his position and influence.
That might have amused the Undying once but now, as he gazed out upon the frozen city of the humans, he only craved to vanquish. There was one out in the wastes who had defied him. He had led an attack and slain lords of his royal court. As the killing urge boiled up within him, the Undying vowed he would humble this worm. An arc of emerald fire raced up the war-scythe’s blade in empathy of its master’s rage, as he willed his forces onwards in the snow and ice.
They marched, their royarch at the forefront, and together their footfalls shook the earth. There were no war cries, no banners held aloft, none of the pomp and ceremony of other armies. The necrons were silent and implacable, their advance unstoppable. Nothing except total annihilation would do. And even then, the Undying’s lust for carnage would not be sated.
‘Let it all burn,’ he growled, and in the balefires of his eyes it did.
Ankh surveyed the cold black metal of the necron artillery approvingly.
Rows of pylons, once held in stasis and now dredged from the very earth, stood alongside static gauss siege-cannons. The latter were long, multi-barrelled monstrosities. Their flanks were wrought from the living metal of the necrontyr and pulsed fluidly in the half-light. The former were sickle-shaped turrets that spat death from their gauss-annihilators. A wash of emerald light bathed the ordnance with every discharge of their power. Lances of energy scored the sky, cutting into it with harsh green jags of light. Where the pylons fed continuous beams into the heavens, the siege-cannons throbbed with the drumming staccato of their salvos.
The earth trembled. Far into the distance, the human city was slowly rendered to dust.
Ankh joined another of his noble brethren, who was watching the barrage from the same icy ridge but with prideful eyes.
‘Impressive,’ the cryptek conceded.
Tahek, the Voidbringer as he demanded to be known, turned on the other necron lord like a jackal scenting prey. ‘It is irresistible, world-slaying,’ he snarled.
Black vapours surrounded the Voidbringer, the reason for his name. They roamed and twisted about his metal form, seething through the gaps in his ribcage, spilling over his skeletal fingers and out of the sockets of his aeons-dead eyes.
This was the Night Shroud, a piece of ancient necron technology that had existed since before the long sleep. Not only did it swathe the Voidbringer, it encircled his dominion too. Like some unnatural fog it rolled over the ground and between the artillery emplacements, foiling the efforts of the humans to target them with any certainty. It was not foolproof, some of the we
apons had been destroyed in the ordnance exchange, but the Voidbringer’s technology kept the damage to a minimum.
Effective as protection, it was when deployed as a weapon of terror that the Night Shroud truly excelled. During the taking of the Thanatos Refinery, Voidbringer had sent the darkness snaking through corridors, seeping into anterooms, infiltrating the hearts and minds of the crude human soldiery. Mortal fears amused him greatly. So primal, so instinctive, the horrors of the dark would ever plague the souls of the fleshed.
Tahek Voidbringer was powerful, Ankh knew this and it was the reason for his visit. He also knew of the Undying’s malady. Despite his status, the long sleep had not been kind to him. Tahek was aware of that too and had set his ambitions to becoming royarch.
‘The Night Shroud proved extremely useful,’ said Ankh, showing his appreciation with a slight bow. ‘The humans are trapped inside their stone cage.’
‘Did you doubt it?’ Voidbringer snapped. A crackle of energy was fed down the haft of his staff but dissipated quickly.
Ankh went on, unperturbed. ‘Your shadows blinded them to the machine host until it was too late. Their outer defences are in ruins, their forces driven back.’
‘Yeeesss.’ A fire burned in Voidbringer’s eyes. It was as if he had discovered something in the cryptek’s penitent demeanour. ‘I know why you are here, Ankh.’
‘To return your gracious favour, my lord.’ Ankh bowed lower.
‘My lord? Yes, that’s right. I am of noble heritage and you…’ Voidbringer’s tone expressed his disdain. ‘You are little better than a plebeian with certain… gifts.’
‘I live to serve the necrontyr,’ answered Ankh, carefully politic. Away from the tomb he was vulnerable. Although very unlikely, Tahek could decide to destroy him here and he’d be able to do little to stop him.
‘You will serve me,’ Voidbringer asserted. ‘The Destroyer curse has him, does it not?’
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