The landscape ripped by, the Dagger rising and falling barely enough to keep it from barking its underside on the rocky ridges hurtling below. Lysander knelt up on the gunner’s seat, leaning into the bulk of the heavy bolter, cycling its action to check the load and playing its sights across the horizon.
Movement glimmered below. A creature ran in long, loping strides, a tail swinging out behind it for balance and a tapering head angled out in front. A rider, one of the cultist scouts, clung on, pressed low against the beast’s back for stability with his rifle slung on his back. The creature was galloping towards a knot of rocky outcrops, a miniature mountain range with passes and valleys running through it, surrounded by tilting slabs of shattered ground.
‘I see it!’ said Kho, speaking over the vox as the howl of the wind and the engines made normal speech inaudible. ‘Rain steel, brother!’
Lysander squeezed the firing stud as he held the sights steady just in front of the beast. The weapon bucked in his grip and he leaned into it harder, keeping it steady as another chain of shots ripped off. The beast was struck in the shoulder, blasting a ragged hole right through it. Its head pitched into the ground and it cartwheeled, throwing its rider spinning out of the saddle to crash broken against the rocks.
The second Land Speeder, the Talon Blade, swept around from the other side of the outcrop, its nose-mounted assault cannon hammering at a trio of scouts scrambling on foot up a rocky slope for the cover of a cave. Chaplain Lycaon was in the Talon’s cockpit alongside Kho’s fellow pilot, Brother Gethor, operating the multi-melta the Talon’s gunner used. While it was better for boring holes through tanks than chasing down fleeing infantry, a multi-melta’s concentrated heat beam was just as effective at ending a pursuit if it hit home. Assault cannon shots blasted one cultist apart, sending a shattered leg spiralling away in a spray of blood, while a beam of superheated particles carved a deep molten furrow across the rock that bisected a second cultist through the mid-torso.
The last cultist dropped to a knee and fired off a shot at the Talon Blade. Perhaps he hit, perhaps he didn’t – it mattered little because the armour of the Land Speeder and the Space Marines crewing it were enough to turn aside the shot, and the cultist was punched through by a half-dozen assault cannon shots an instant later.
‘Brother-Chaplain, do you see any more?’ voxed Lysander.
‘None,’ said Lycaon. ‘Fly a tight sweep, and watch for them doubling back. None can be permitted to reach Shalhadar.’
The two Land Speeders circumnavigated the outcrop. The Talon shot down two more riders as they fled from behind a couple of fallen boulders. Lysander spotted a cultist on foot, and Kho shot him down with the Dagger’s assault cannon before Lysander could bring his heavy bolter to bear.
‘There,’ said Lysander pointing to a ridge a couple of hundred metres west of the outcrop. A cultist rode up over a ridge and disappeared down the reverse slope.
‘We pursue,’ said Kho, and the Dagger arrowed at full speed in the direction of the fugitive.
Lysander held the heavy bolter level as best he could. Below him the assault cannon on the Land Speeder’s nose stitched a spray of gunfire along the ground just behind the rider. Lysander could make out the rider was not just another cultist. Perhaps he was a leader of their kind, going by the headdress he wore with silk pennants rippling in the wind behind him and the large wicker panniers on the beast he rode. Lysander squeezed off a ranging shot of his own and it fell just short.
The rider’s path took him down into the kind of narrow broken valleys the strike force had used to conceal their march. Each time the rider passed through Lysander’s sights he vanished behind the slope of a rise or a finger of shattered rock.
‘The Dagger does not lose her prey,’ said Kho, his voice calm even though he was sending the Land Speeder jinking a few metres above ground level, swinging between outcrops of rock.
Lysander caught a flash of pallid skin and bucking animal between the rocks. Instinct forced his finger down on the firing stud. The heavy bolter kicked and Lysander saw the broken limbs of the riding beast flailing as it flipped over and smacked into a boulder. Bright red spray painted the side of the rock.
‘He’s down,’ voxed Lysander. ‘Bank us around to confirm.’
Dorn’s Dagger swept up and banked, looping around to approach the downed rider from the other direction, slowing as it did so.
The rider had sprawled onto the ground, and was crawling back towards the broken remains of his beast. Lysander opened fire and caught the rider in the shoulder, blowing an arm clean off.
The rider reached the beast. With his remaining arm he unfastened a clasp on the side of a pannier and pulled the lid open.
A cloud of dozens of tiny bright shapes fluttered upwards, billowing towards the sky.
Birds, trailing bright plumage as they flew.
‘Shoot them down!’ voxed Lysander. ‘All of them!’
He fired his heavy bolter into the flock. The assault cannon did the same. Tiny bodies burst into nothing. But there was so many of them and they flew off in every direction, too small and numerous to pick out with the Land Speeder’s weapons.
The Talon Blade reached them a moment later, but the single beam of the multi-melta was even less use. Fully half the flock dispersed into the air, beyond the strike force’s reach.
The two Land Speeders rejoined the rest of the strike force, dropping back down near ground level to reduce their profile. Lysander vaulted out of the gunner’s seat, hands still tingling from the heavy bolter’s recoil. Chaplain Lycaon dismounted the Talon Blade, his gauntlets scorched by the heat coming off the multi-melta. ‘What did they release?’ he asked Lysander.
‘Messenger birds,’ replied Lysander. ‘It is how Shalhadar’s forces communicate over a distance. He will have news of our arrival before the sun goes down.’
Lysander walked up the slope and looked west towards the horizon. The strange sun that had lit the hour was setting and its harsh light glittered against the distant hills. Among them it picked out tall slender towers and minarets, high walls cutting through foothills and mountains, thousands of banners fluttering. ‘There,’ he said. ‘The city. It dominates this land along with Kulgarde. It has an army hundreds of thousands strong, so it was said. Cultists and daemons, all answering to the city’s master.’
‘Can they overtake us?’ asked Lycaon.
‘We are on foot over broken ground, and swift though a Space Marine can march he cannot outpace the outriders that will be sent to hunt us down. Yes, Chaplain, they can overtake us, and the daemon prince is jealous of this land. I imagine they will send out their cavalry to force us to stop and face them, and then seek to crush us with their main force following up behind.’
‘Sound strategy when you outpace the foe,’ said Lycaon. ‘I read nothing in the Codex Astartes demanding that we give the enemy such courtesy as to fall in line with his plans. First Sergeant Kaderic!’
Kaderic hurried to Lycaon’s side. ‘Chaplain?’
‘A small, swift force pursues us from the city you see on the horizon. They wish to force us to give battle to a larger force marching in its wake. How does a Space Marine fight?’
Kaderic smiled. The question might have been sprung on a novice in the training halls of the Phalanx, an elementary puzzle which every recruit would be expected to answer swiftly. ‘He turns around and marches on the city,’ he said. ‘We will punch through the enemy’s vanguard and fall upon him when he is not ready. And Emperor willing, we will walk into his city when his army is elsewhere and impale his head on the battlements. Such Dorn would say.’
‘Such he would!’ agreed Lycaon. ‘If the ruler of the city is the one whose destruction we seek. Lysander? Would it be straying too far from our mission’s path to bring the Emperor’s wrath to this Shalhadar?’
Lysander looked towards the city again, and in the failing light gold glittered among its spires. ‘He will hound us until we are dead or gone,’ he said. ‘
Now he knows we are here, Prince Shalhadar will be our enemy until the end. He must die.’
‘Then he will die,’ said Lycaon. He switched to the strike force’s vox-channel. ‘Brothers! The forces of the city of Shalhadar do not take to intruders such as ourselves, who have so rudely intruded on their lands, so we shall introduce ourselves like gentlemen! A friendly bullet will be our calling card! A kindness of chainblades will see they remember the Imperial Fists!’
A low ripple of voices ran across the strike force, murmurings of good battle finally approaching, for the Imperial Fists had been too long on this world without a fight.
‘Techmarine Kho, scout the way,’ voxed Lycaon. ‘There are damned souls between us and our objective. We will go through them like a spear to the gut. Lead on!’
The city did not have a name. It was the City of Shalhadar, or simply the City. Some referred to it as Shalhadar, the city and its ruler becoming one. Most had no need to name it anything because the majority of its inhabitants were born there and died there, and never left.
It was surrounded by walls that served not just to protect it from invaders, but to remind its population how blessed they were to live inside. The walls were of enormous blue and rose marble blocks, inlaid with whorls of gold. The skins of past exiles hung as banners, covered in obscene tattoos of entwined limbs and tormented bodies. Below the walls were the exile grounds where those banished from the city clawed at the base of the walls and wept that they would never again look on the face of Shalhadar. A few of them were kneeling there now below the wall, pale and shaven-headed, wearing the torn and stained silks of the city’s castes. Whatever their crime, there was only one punishment – to be cast out of the city of pleasures and condemned to starve, incapable of surviving without the city around them.
The Imperial Fists strike force had passed an army from the city on their way towards the marble walls. Several thousand cultists, armed with flintlocks and clubs with obsidian blades, wrapped in silks around gilded armour. The riding beasts carried outriders at the army’s flanks, and up close Lysander could see the beasts’ flickering tongues and asymmetrical black orb eyes, daemon-bred and warped by the influence of Malodrax.
Lycaon had brought the strike force swiftly to the shadow of the city, evading Shalhadar’s troops on the way. At Lycaon’s command the strike force broke out of the cover of the low hills around the walls, across the open ground towards the nearest gates.
The exiles looked around from their weeping-places at the wall to see thirty Space Marines rushing towards the gates. Some whimpered at the sight, some did nothing. One stood and took a couple of faltering steps towards Lysander as he ran alongside Squad Kaderic.
‘You,’ said the exile, a man whose face was streaked with grime and tears, and bearing the marks of a recent beating on his pale skin. ‘You will end it. I knew it would be you…’
The deep lowing of alarm horns sounded up on the walls as Lycaon brought the Imperial Fists within a pistol shot of the gate. The gate itself was almost the height of the wall, purplish wood banded with iron – sturdy enough, but not designed by a fortress-builder like Dorn.
‘Gorvetz!’ ordered Lycaon. ‘Bring them down!’
The Devastator squad halted and braced their weapons, aiming up at the great hinges holding the enormous doors. Techmarine Kho’s twin Land Speeders thundered overhead, nose cannons spraying the top of the wall where defenders were gathering to fire down at the attackers.
The art of the siege was beloved of Rogal Dorn. He had written volumes on the subject that still guided the Imperial way of war to that day. But Dorn knew that there was one way for the endless armies of the Imperial Guard to take a city, and another way for the Space Marines. The Imperial Guard would spend months moving men and machines into position, setting artillery positions to bombard the target city and gradually forging closer to the walls in trenchworks and tunnels until demolition squads could rush forth and bring the walls down, or until artillery could be brought close enough to shell the city within at will. It was a bloody and drawn-out business, where the will to stay the fight was of greater importance than skill or experience.
What the Imperial Guard did with big guns and endless manpower, the Space Marines did with shock and with speed. In the kind of battle for which he had been created, each Space Marine was worth an army. Once through the breach he could visit the kind of violence on an enemy-held city that a whole regiment of Imperial Guard might wreak. First he had to get in, and to do that he used all the speed and ruthlessness the Emperor’s own teachings and the blood of his primarch had given him.
Squad Gorvetz’s plasma cannon and heavy bolters blasted chunks out of the doors, blowing the fittings free that held them to the marble pillars on either side. One door sagged in, the final hinge giving way under its weight, and it crashed to the ground with a sound like a peal of thunder. Choking masses of rubble dust flared up where it fell.
‘Onwards!’ ordered Lycaon, before the echoes had died. The Imperial Fists followed their Chaplain through the gate, ignoring the pattering of fire from the few defenders who had reached the walls in time to see the gate fall.
It was a terrible familiarity that Lysander felt as the dust around him cleared and he emerged into the grand road that led from the breached gate. There was gold and silver everywhere, plating the slabs beneath his feet, swirling up the walls of the pleasure domes and temples lining the road. Fat emeralds and rubies studded the marble walls.
Down the thoroughfare roared the daemon host of Shalhadar, the prince’s handmaidens and viziers, the courtiers who danced around him eternally. They were things of the warp just as much as the Grey Hungers or the Red Widow, but where those were horrific, Shalhadar’s host had an appalling beauty. They were humanoid in shape, but elongated and sharp-featured, as if the shape of a human being had been stretched and tapered by a sculptor on a futile quest to make it perfect.
They wore the features of male and female, jumbled together on the same daemon as if to further divorce them from a sane concept of beauty. Their torsos were snakelike and muscular, their eyes enlarged black pools, skulls elongated to accentuate their swept features. They wore silks and harnesses of black leather, claws of glinting amethyst chitin, black talons for toes, vestigial wings, tentacles in place of hands, ridges of waving fleshy protuberances along the spine or breastbone, smiling mouths inscribed into their flesh, purple tattoos or raised pinkish scars – each was different, each the work of a mad artist’s lifetime.
Shalhadar’s court had its dancers, musicians, scribes and advisors. All of them were there, sent from Shalhadar’s palace to intercept the intruders who defiled his city. They might have been gifted by the warp to beautify the court, but they were still predators, still killers filled with the warp’s own malice.
One, clad in a spectacular construction of silks that flowed behind it like the fronds of a sea creature, threw its head back and screeched. The others took up the cry. Claws snapped. Tongues lashed, long and spiny. Lysander’s battlefield instincts told him the Imperial Fists faced more than a hundred daemons. His oaths as a Space Marine told him the galaxy would soon be a hundred daemons less.
Lysander drew his chainblade. The Fist of Dorn, his power hammer, was in Kulgarde somewhere in the hands of Kraegon Thul. He would rather have the hammer in his hand now, but a chainblade was the weapon he had trained with and he put faith in what he knew it could do.
‘The enemy shows his face!’ cried out Chaplain Lycaon. ‘And he but begs us to cut off his head!’
The Imperial Fists charged as one. The daemons rushed to meet them. Lysander ran alongside the brothers of Squad Kaderic. Brother Halaestus was beside him, firing his bolter from the hip with one hand as he drew his combat blade with the other. Halaestus’s eyes were blank, as if he were focusing on something far away. Lysander barely had time to register the look on his face before the first of the daemons was within a lunge of his chainblade.
Lysander waited a split seco
nd more. His target was sprinting right at him on legs with knees bending the wrong way. It had a claw for one hand and a jewelled dagger in the other, its gilded blade sheened with greenish venom. Its face was a horror, noseless and with a round lamprey-like mouth. Its ugliness was only enhanced by the pink and purple silks wrapped around it, too thin to hide the slithering knots of its muscles and the pallid expanse of its skin.
A thrust with the chainblade would have impaled the daemon through the gut but left Lysander open to a dagger in the back of the neck, and perhaps the point would find a seal or gap in his power armour and hit home. As the battle around him seemed to slow down, Lysander’s mind automatically accessed the years of battle-lore a Space Marine learned from the moment he was chosen to join the Adeptus Astartes.
Lysander let the daemon come within the arc of a chainblade’s swing. He swept the blade in front of him, squeezing on the activation stud to send the chainteeth churning. The daemon was caught in the midriff, skin and bone chewed up by the blade.
Lysander ducked to one side and caught the dagger on his shoulder guard. It rang off harmlessly. He brought his free hand up to block the claw snapping down at his head, and for a moment was face to face with the daemon.
This thing of the warp, the abomination, had about it a grace that Lysander could not deny. A man could go mad to look at it, captivated by the movements of its sinuous body, obsessed and desiring. It was in this way that such a daemon corrupted and destroyed. Perhaps lesser minds, already broken down by the galaxy’s cruelty, had fallen to it. Not a Space Marine.
Lysander clamped his hand around the back of the daemon’s head, where its skull erupted into a crown of fleshy feelers, and rammed it face-first onto the paving slabs of the road. He drew back his chainblade and stabbed it down through the back of the daemon’s neck. The chainteeth ground through spine and sinew, and the daemon’s head came free in a spray of blue fire.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 286