Rauth was thrown onto his face, hitting the ground hard. He heard crashes and cracks as others of his contingent were similarly floored. A violent gale screamed across his body, tearing at the extremities of his damaged plate. Huge chunks of broken masonry and cracked metal were flung over the edge of the ruined spire-top, catching fire as they tumbled through the engine-hot atmosphere and disintegrating into rains of flaming dust.
He knew then that Telach had destroyed the rift. In its absence, the winds of Shardenus howled and raced.
Rauth rolled over heavily, powered by his damaged armour, knowing the danger. The portal was gone, but the daemon remained. He looked up – and stared right into its face.
The creature hung low over him. It had been wounded badly by the sudden withdrawal of its ethereal support. Its patchwork face ran with dark blood. Under the skin was a whirl of latticed light, throbbing and pulsing like electrical currents in a cogitator housing. The wind tore at it, lifting up the edges of its broken skin. Its eyes were filmy and its jaw hung slack.
It staggered, almost losing its footing. One of its arms was limp, riddled with bolter wounds and bleeding torrents of virulent blood. Huge chunks of flesh, steaming with heat and plasma, had been gouged from its bloated torso and lay on the ground, slopping in pools of bubbling fluids.
As Rauth lay prone beneath it, the daemon drew its lone claw back, keeping the tips of its blades pointed at the Iron Hand’s torso.
It was coming apart. Soon it would be hurled back from the mortal plane and into temporary oblivion, but it clung on, persisting in the world even as its physical shell collapsed around it.
‘I would have made this world a paradise,’ it said, its voice choked with blood and saliva.
Rauth struggled to move, but the daemon kept him pinned.
‘You have ensured it remains a hell. Perhaps you are proud of that.’
The creature’s face twisted into disgust. It looked repelled, not just by Rauth, but by everything, by the whole edifice of ruin around it, by what the galaxy, what its place within it, had become.
‘We are both sick, son of Ferrus,’ it said, ‘but only I know it.’
Then it plunged its claw down, fast as a bolt-discharge. It ploughed through Rauth’s breastplate, breaking open the ceramite and driving through it. The metal talons travelled straight through Rauth’s chest and out the other side, cutting and tearing as they went.
Rauth’s back arched. The daemon grinned savagely, and twisted the blades.
‘Enjoy this,’ it said. ‘Feel your hearts burst.’
Then Rauth’s own blade shot up, plunging deep into the daemon’s flickering, weeping neck. The power field over the sword detonated in a lashing corona of energy. The daemon screamed, and tried to withdraw.
Rauth wouldn’t let it. He surged to his feet, keeping his sword extended, pushing it deeper into the creature’s unholy flesh. The daemon’s claws broke off as it wrenched away, torn free of the gauntlets and remaining lodged in Rauth’s chest. The Iron Hand fought on regardless, ignoring the metal protruding from his torso and working his own weapon again with heavy, crushing strokes.
The daemon lost its footing, crashing down hard against the serrated plateau. Rauth pursued it mercilessly, hacking at its flailing limbs, carving into the juddering flesh and smashing apart the remnants of its ancient armour.
Finally, he stood over its heaving chest, gazing down at the obscene scrawls on its crushed battle-plate. The daemon-creature looked up at him, surprise and hatred written across its otherworldly face.
Rauth gripped his power sword in two hands, feeling its power thrum along the metal edge.
‘You forget who you’re fighting, son of Fulgrim,’ he said, drawing the weapon high. Despite himself, despite all that had happened, a crooked grin spread across what remained of his face. ‘It’s a long time since I had hearts.’
Then he plunged the blade down, severing the daemon’s head from its neck in a single, terrible blow. Its animating spirit was banished, expiring with a sharp, acrid snap that spun out from where the blow fell. Its grotesque body, hacked and impacted by a thousand blows, slumped into stillness. Blood still ran from the gashes across its frame, bubbling softly as it sank into the charred metal beneath.
Rauth looked down at the carcass. He could hear the sounds of his warriors making their way over to his side. He ignored them.
The daemon’s face was shrinking away, dissolving like flesh in acid. The sutures came loose, freeing up flaps of skin and exposing firmer, older flesh beneath. For a moment, before the last of the gaudy, rouged-streaked embellishments fluttered away, something like elegance was revealed – a taut, aristocratic visage, cruel and intelligent.
There were some in the Imperium who might have recognised that face. Some lords of the Ordo Malleus might have identified the features of one who had been First Captain of the III Legion, who had fought alongside gods in the age of wonder when the Imperium was forged, who had strode across the bloodied plains of Laeran, of Isstvan, of Terra, and who, after the ruin of a traitor’s hopes, had been slowly changed by the wearing horror of the Eye. They might have known what hopes had once been placed in him, how admired and feared he had been, and just how far into madness he had fallen at the end.
Rauth knew none of that. He watched his enemy disintegrate, taking neither pleasure nor pity from the spectacle. The creature’s words lingered in his mind, troubling him for some reason that he found hard to pin down.
We are both sick, son of Ferrus, but only I know it.
Then the face was gone, collapsed into blood and muscle as its animating spirit dissipated.
Dozeph Imanol drew alongside him. The sergeant of Clave Prime had taken a massive wound to the head on the charge up through the centre of the spire, shearing his helm casing away and revealing a bloodied skull beneath. On his return to Medusa, no doubt the entire cranium would be replaced by metal.
‘Did you discover its name?’ he asked.
Rauth shook his head.
‘What does it matter?’ he asked.
He limped away from the corpse. As he went, he pulled the creature’s claws from his chest, dislodging a host of flickering, crackling bionic parts as he did so. The loss of them was not entirely trivial – his helm display was blank, and he’d lost filtration through his vox-guard – but he could live without them for the time being. His three mechanical heart-analogues, each one placed in a different location within his armour and protected by multiple layers of adamantium binding, still beat firmly.
He looked around him, waiting for his breathing to return to a more sustainable level. Telach was gone. A lone Codicier had survived but looked to have sustained heavy injuries. Less than thirty warriors of Raukaan had made it to the summit, and all of them had been similarly ravaged by the ascent through the spire. They stood silently, waiting for their next set of orders.
None of them said a word. There were no cries of victory or defiance.
Rauth limped over to the edge of the plateau. Far below him he could see the remnants of Nethata’s tank columns slowly withdrawing across the wasteland, still suffering under fire from the Capitolis walls. Clearly traitor forces still remained within the hive, and the fighting was not yet over. Of the daemons, however, there was no sign.
‘What are your orders, lord?’ asked Imanol, his voice crackling with distortion.
Rauth looked back over to where the rift had been. Its guardians were destroyed. Those mutants that remained would be hunted down, chamber by chamber, before the entire Capitolis was purged with flame.
After that would come the punishment. After that, the populace of Shardenus Prime would be held in judgement for their sins, for allowing malice to root itself amongst them and for failing to resist when the time of testing came. Judgement would come to them; when it did, it would be swift, austere and complete.
‘Shardenus has been saved for the Imperium,’ announced Rauth, looking out beyond the steaming outline of the daemon-corp
se and across the burning wasteland. The Melamar spires to the south smouldered amid the boiling mists of toxic fug. Above them dark clouds raced still, underlit with sporadic bursts of lightning. ‘When our remaining work is done, its loyalty will be unmatched. We will remake it. We will refashion it as an exemplar.’
‘I relish it, lord,’ said Imanol.
Rauth could tell that he did. Imanol had good instincts – a firm grasp of the sacrifices that needed to be made in order to do what was necessary. When the time came, he would make a suitable successor as clan commander.
‘Then we have labour ahead of us,’ said Rauth, turning away from the vista of devastation. ‘Prepare your weapons and follow me down.’
Rauth strode back towards the shaft leading into the spire’s interior, preparing once again for the fighting to come.
‘Leave no mutant alive,’ he ordered, activating the disruptor on his force-blade. ‘Preserve any mortal loyalists still living – we still have need of them.’
As he neared the edge of the steep way down, a dark expression kindled on his helm-guarded features.
‘Except for Nethata,’ he growled, starting the long climb down into darkness. ‘Should you find him, bring him to me.’
Nethata adjusted his his chem-suit a final time before climbing out of the Leman Russ. He clambered down the ladder from the open hatchway, feeling the toxin-laced air pull at him.
He walked out across the ash, his boots crunching through the thin layers of drifting embers. Behind him, a kilometre to the north, the Capitolis burned. Huge explosions continued to surge through the enormous superstructure, making the earth beneath him tremble.
Ahead of him stood the two Warlord Titans. They had come to a full stop, and towered over everything within fire-range. Seeing them up close was awe-inspiring – he had to crick his neck just to make out anything above their massive knee-joints. Their cockpit lights glowed dimly amid the shrouds of ash, and their gigantic weapon-arms hung, de-powered, from their mighty shoulder housings.
Between the Warlords stood a tracked vehicle – a steep-sided armoured crawler with the emblem of the Mechanicus emblazoned on its flanks. Columns of dirty smoke poured from vents along its sides, making the dark metal even darker.
As Nethata approached it, a ramp lowered slowly from the crawler’s blunt forequarters, touching heavily onto the earth with a low hiss of pistons releasing.
Nethata halted, waiting for Ys to emerge. He knew it had to be her, even though he’d had no confirmation of her arrival. Though unexpected, the development gave him hope – Lopi must have been in touch with her. The princeps, seeing the way things were going, must have passed on the reports of the Warhounds’ destruction, triggering her descent from orbit.
As Nethata waited, he marvelled at the twists of fate. He knew Rauth was furious with him, and that the fury of the Iron Hands was only ever satisfied by a single result. The Mechanicus, though, was a different matter. Nethata was fully aware of the links between them, and the knowledge Ys had of Rauth’s protocols and machine workings. If anyone could stand against Rauth, if anyone could hope to act as a bulwark against the Iron Hands, then it was her.
A squad of skitarii lumbered down the ramp, spilling out into the wasteland with their bizarre array of inbuilt weapon systems and external bionics. Behind them came Ys, striding out with human-like fluidity. Her cowl had been pushed back to reveal the strangely organic curves of her metal face.
‘Magos,’ said Nethata, bowing. ‘I am glad to see you again.’
Ys stood before him. Her expression, as always, was impossible to read.
‘I don’t know why that should be so, Lord General,’ she said, and her voice was cold.
It was then that Nethata knew that he’d miscalculated.
‘Has Princeps Lopi not informed you?’ he asked. ‘We had an agreement – an arrangement. He promised me that–’
‘Princeps Lopi has been relieved of his command,’ said Ys.
As she spoke, a team of skitarii dragged a body down the ramp and hurled it onto the ground. The flesh on it was milk-pale and covered in metal-rimmed input nodes. As it hit the ground, its head fell back.
Nethata recognised Lopi’s face despite what had been done to it.
‘He acted outside the boundaries of his jurisdiction,’ said Ys. ‘The penalty for that is the same for us as it is for you.’
Nethata looked up at her severe face, and knew then that it was over. The Warlords stood impassively above him, gazing northwards with their vast machine eyes. They looked like vengeful giants. For a few moments, Nethata had dared to believe he could use them to shield himself; that the Mechanicus would honour its compact.
‘I do not understand,’ said Nethata, knowing that protestation was useless but finding himself unable to avoid the attempt. ‘He told me that Rauth had betrayed him, that if we stood together then we could force him to come to terms. You yourself, you told me that. You told me that they only respect strength.’
Ys’s expression didn’t change. There was no sympathy there, no compassion, nothing but a steady, machine-cold glare.
‘Yes, I told you that, Lord General,’ she said. ‘I told you that to warn you, and you should have heeded it. The strength of the Iron Hands is far beyond your strength; you could never have stood against them, and you were foolish to attempt it. Lopi was also a fool, and he has paid the price. The Warlords will walk on the Capitolis, and I will aid Commander Rauth in his cleansing of it. Perhaps, in that small way, we will recover a portion of honour. For you, for Lopi, there is nothing.’
Nethata watched the magos’s lips move, and it felt like watching his own death sentence being read out. The ceaseless wind blew ash across her cloak, dragging on the fine fabric and staining it black.
‘Then you are here to kill me,’ he said. He wondered briefly whether he could reach his bolt pistol in time, and quickly discarded the notion.
Ys shook her head. The gesture was so impeccable, so graceful.
‘I have taken care of my own,’ she said, gathering up her robes and preparing to return to the crawler. ‘Your fate is not in my hands.’
Then she turned, and walked back to the ramp. Nethata watched her skitarii follow her. When they were inside, the crawler was resealed and began its steady movement again.
Nethata watched it go. Then he watched the Warlords grind into movement. He watched them stride out north, stalking across the shattered terrain with their massive, earth-crushing treads.
Then he was alone again, save for the lone Leman Russ tank he’d withdrawn from the front line. As he pondered what kind of protection that offered him, he almost laughed.
He looked north, following the route of the Titans towards the Capitolis spires. The whole structure raged with flame and smoke. Clouds raced across the distant summit, swirling and breaking open. Lightning still flickered down the smouldering flanks, though it had lost the lilac hue it had had before.
Something had changed. The spire still loomed up massively, a monument of decaying grandeur riddled with blast-gouges and semi-ruined gothic ornamentation, but it no longer carried the spectre of abject horror that it had done. A pall of fear had lifted from it, replaced by the grimy tang of spilled promethium, molten metal and soot.
Nethata knew then that Rauth had been right. Something had been waiting for them in the Capitolis. The Iron Hands had been prepared to sacrifice everything they had to destroy it, and they had succeeded. They had been prepared to make the calculations he hadn’t.
He felt sick.
‘Lord?’
The tank commander’s querulous voice was another irritation. Even at the end, even with the ruin of all his hopes, still the reminders of his failure intruded.
‘What is it?’ he replied absently, staring up at the Capitolis.
‘What are your orders? Where are we going?’
Nethata didn’t reply immediately. He afforded himself the luxury of thinking back over his lifetime’s many glorious conquests.
Jeriul XI, the Refaloa Stars, the Adjmena agri-belt. None of those would now be remembered – scholiasts would painstakingly amend the records, substituting the names of more suitable commanders. The only world left next to his name would be this one: Shardenus.
He wondered how long it would take Rauth to find him. Despite everything, the thought of dying at the hands of the clan commander rankled.
Nethata began to unhook the catches at his neck, unfastening the seals that kept him isolated from the lethal air of the wasteland. He felt the links unclip with tiny snaps.
There was still one thing he could do; one aspect of his fate that remained within his hands.
‘We are going nowhere, commander,’ he said absently, disconnecting his rebreather and wondering how long it would take him to die.
Chapter Twenty-Three
How long, Khadi wondered, did it take to punish a world?
Perhaps they would only stop when every last mortal life was extinguished. Perhaps that had always been their goal. For a long time Khadi had thought that was what they were planning. In the weeks after her escape, as she’d made her way back to Melamar Secundus and headed down into the hidden catacombs in search of safety, it had seemed that they would stop at nothing less than that.
After leaving Marivo in the tunnels, she’d gone as quickly as she could through the ruined chambers of the war-torn hive. It hadn’t been easy, even during the chaos of the residual fighting and resupplying. Troops had been moving up to the front all the time, though none of them looked to have enough spirit to report a deserter.
She hadn’t been alone, either. The terrible carnage in the tunnels had broken the spirit of many others, and some of them had formed into ramshackle bands as they’d slunk back into the shadows and slipped down hidden tunnels.
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