by Guy Haley
The next room came alive. A labyrinth of screaming faces trapped in mirrors, all pleading to be saved, all in peril, shouting endlessly.
There was perhaps a way through. Once, Angron had possessed a mind sharp enough to best the challenge by intellect alone. Now, he did not need to think. Brute force served him better. His wings were tattered, one eye blinded. Las-burns, rad-burns, cuts and bullet holes covered him. The labyrinth had tested him, but it could never, ever stop him.
Angron heaved in a wheezing breath and spat it out as a blood-curdling roar. He was not done with the maze.
He ignored the faces pleading for mercy. He passed by the slaughter of innocents without care.
‘Blood!’ howled Angron. ‘Blood and skulls!’
The black sword sliced. A mirror burst. The face within screamed. Blood spattered the primarch, followed by a burst of tinkling clockwork. Perturabo had put all his artistry into the creation of the maze. It was lost on Angron.
‘Blood!’ he roared. ‘Skulls!’ Furious at his captivity, he was reduced to a vocabulary of two words. A fist, the skinned knuckles shockingly white against his red skin, caved in another mirror artwork, crushing the weeping mortal trapped inside.
‘Skulls!’ he howled. The black sword fell, umbral flames roaring along the killing edges. It melted as much as cut through the next mirror. Arcane energy fields exploded with a crisp bang. Powdered glass burst everywhere.
Angron was in the thick of slaughter, and there alone could he find a scintilla of peace. As he smashed apart the machines and the beings within, his fury blotted out all thought, removing the troublesome weight of sentience. He did not stop to contemplate whether the people were real, and if so, how they had come to be trapped. He was as unaware as an earthquake, and as destructive. He battered his way through every mirror, silencing the screams, then smashed in the door at the end of the chamber with three blows that dented it and sent it clattering over the floor of the next room.
Flashing lights lit figures juddering into life. Dragging footsteps approached Angron. Bladed fists whirred. Mindless voices moaned. Each one was a Salamander of Vulkan’s Legion, their bodies violated by cruel cybernetics. Insanity blazed from their red Nocturnean eyes. Hints of sentience lurked there. More torments for their father, but Angron did not notice nor would he have cared. He saw skulls and blood for the harvest, and charged without thought.
They cut him. Black blood ran from his wounds and fizzed on the deck as it dissipated, taking his essence back to the warp. Buzz saws and power shears gouged at him. The enslaved Space Marines could harm him. They could kill him. He would not stop fighting until he was hacked apart.
A cut nearly chopped his wing from his back. With his sword gripped in both hands, he spun around in a deadly circle, wrecking every slave-cyborg within reach. Yet still there were more.
They stopped moving. The lights went out, and he didn’t notice, hacking at the Salamanders until most were rent into slivers of metal. He was still battering away at the floor, shouting, ‘Blood! Blood! Blood!’
The last was slashed to bits, its flesh mashed to red pulp and its mechanisms broken.
Angron snuffled in confusion into the dark.
Something had changed. A door opened. He turned. No more tricks or foes. An empty corridor.
His rage ebbed. His mind cleared. He had wandered the maze for hours, fighting and destroying, only to be brought back every time to the central chamber, no matter which route he took.
Far off a klaxon blared, and the maze shook with the movement of heavy machinery. A breeze tugged at Angron’s legs.
‘Freedom,’ he grunted. ‘Blood.’
The breeze grew into a raging torrent of air, sucking at him. Door after door opened, drawing him through inactive rooms outwards, until the air howled, and he came to the end of the labyrinth, and passed out through vast, patched adamantine doors into a cavernous hold.
The maze filled most of the space, the iron mask of Perturabo stamped regularly along the exterior. Angron barely comprehended it, but followed the gale, turned a corner and was presented with the sight of giant loading doors open to the void. He ran to them, and stood upon the lip of the hold, buffeted by the gale. Terra was before him, its tortured atmosphere flashing and roiling, its orbits shoaling with a hundred thousand ships. From them fell drops of fire. Angron’s last remaining shreds of humanity dimly recognised a drop assault of a magnitude that dwarfed any unleashed during the Great Crusade.
The wind died to nothing. Angron stood unharmed in open space.
A little of his mind returned. He saw the white-and-blue ships of his own Legion shoot out their landing craft.
Sol rose around the globe, spreading its wide beam of golden light over Horus’ fleet, and silhouetting the Vengeful Spirit.
‘Horus! Horus!’ he shouted. Against the laws of nature, his voice was heard in the vacuum. ‘Give me my due!’
With that, he spread his wings, and leapt into the void.
Himalazian airspace, 15th of Quartus
Dropping at several hundred kilometres an hour into the most dangerous warzone in history, Lucoryphus of the Night Lords was preoccupied with one thing, and that was that his feet hurt.
He lifted up his right boot for the fifth time and stared at it.
The vox clicked.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Tashain.
Lucoryphus put his foot down.
‘My foot hurts,’ he said.
‘See an Apothecary then,’ Tashain said disdainfully.
He could have added that Lucoryphus shouldn’t need to see one. That his foot shouldn’t hurt. He was a legionary, and beyond the petty aches that plagued unmodified humanity. Lucoryphus could equally have responded that he had already consulted with their company medicae staff, but then he would have to tell Tashain that his foot was not as it should be.
He had been to Estus, because he could trust him. When so many Apothecaries abandoned their role or turned from healing to torture, Estus still did his job properly. Many standards had slipped in the Night Lords, but Estus could still be relied on. In his notes were annotated scans of Lucoryphus’ feet, arrows picking out metatarsals in the process of fusion, the calcaneus atrophying, phalanges lengthening, and smaller bones dissolving altogether.
‘A malfunction of the ossmodula,’ Estus had said, somewhat uncertainly, marking his comments down in a book of meticulous records. ‘There is not much I can do. I am busy with the wounded. I do not have time for your problem.’
He had given Lucoryphus a stabilising compound to add to his suit pharmocopia. It had not helped.
That was weeks ago. Lucoryphus’ foot had changed further since then. He was too canny to go back. The Night Lords were degenerating, but they still had only contempt for mutants.
The Thunderhawk bounced through a storm of turbulence. There was not a still pocket of air in all of Terra’s atmosphere. Crosswinds and pressure changes were violent enough to tear gunships from the sky and dash them on the ground without any help from the loyalist guns. But though the Night Lords had a reputation for cowardice it was undeserved. They were Space Marines; they knew no fear. Lucoryphus didn’t want to die, not one bit, but he did not fear death. The very idea of being afraid was slightly absurd. His disregard for danger was not down to conditioning, or bravery, but because of one simple fact.
Lucoryphus knew he was going to live forever. He felt it to his core.
So as the ship bounced and screamed through the dried-up valleys of Himalazia, out of sight of the Palace wall guns but on a collision course with them, Lucoryphus stared at his feet. The lengthened toes of the right curled uncomfortably against his boot. He had no heel to speak of on that foot any more. A backwards-facing digit tipped with a claw was growing in its place.
He could no longer deny it. His right foot had become the image of a bird’s talon.
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br /> The left foot was not far behind. Their confinement in boots made for human feet was the source of his discomfort. He had wondered if he could find an armourer willing to make him new boots more fitting to his condition, until he wondered again if he was going to need to. A mark had appeared on his right boot recently. An indentation in the ceramite that would not polish out, and no matter how many times he filled and sanded it, grew deeper. The boots were hot with some machine fever, as though they were changing to fit his new form.
He looked around the shaking crew compartment. He was not alone in his change. The Raptors seemed like Night Lords, until one looked closer. The helms of some had been refashioned with a distinctly birdlike aspect. Through personal choice, the armour was diverging already from that of the rest of the Legion, but the alterations that armour hid were telling. When on the ground some of them moved awkwardly, their steps exaggerated into avian hops. Several had strange birdlike twitches and hunched postures, as if the jump packs they wore were folded wings, not jets.
Lucoryphus lived for flight. All of them did. Being a Raptor was becoming more important to him than being a Night Lord.
He looked at his feet again. How would his comrades judge them? He thought how much more useful talons would be to him as a flying being than human feet, how they would allow him to grasp and hold himself fast after a jump.
The engines screamed. The Thunderhawk nosed upwards into a rapid ascent. Suddenly the sky around them was full of the bang of explosions and clatter of shrapnel as the ship came under fire. A heavy lascannon beam cut through the front hatch, skewering three of Lucoryphus’ brethren on a shaft of light, leaving them dangling in their restraints when it snapped off.
Another hit moments later, smashing the left engine. The ship dipped, its wounded jet coughing, and lost height.
The ready lights switched from red to green, bringing a little more illumination to the dingy interior through the smoke rising from the dead. The damaged front ramp flapped open, the extra drag pulling the gunship faster towards destruction. The rear ramp followed with more mechanical discipline. The side doors ratcheted wide. Fire flashed on every side as the Emperor’s slaves tried to bring them down.
Lucoryphus stood first. He drew his weapons as he walked down the aisle to the prow, trying to suppress his growing limp. His armour whined at his awkward movements. Sometimes he thought it would be more comfortable to run on all fours.
‘Brothers!’ he voxed his command. ‘We fly! First to the wall! First to the blood! Ave Dominus Noctem!’
The others were rising as Lucoryphus ignited his jets, ran from the prow and leapt into the maelstrom of fire. Thirty Raptors followed him, bright comets of exhaust joining the flare and flash of war. Its task completed, the gunship rolled in the sky and fell, fatally wounded. Smoke chased it to the ground, where it died in orange flames.
Lucoryphus’ hearts pounded with the thrill of flight. Bloody rain splashed from his war-plate. A billion people were trying to kill him during that glorious fall. The wall rushed at him, a giant’s hand to swat a fly. He fired his jets to slow himself, passing through the failing aegis with a searing crackle of energy that shorted out half his suit’s systems and left the smell of burnt circuitry in his nostrils. The wall grew from a black slab to a layered stack of defences manned by tiny figures in yellow and red. Behind them rose the Palace spires, daunting in their height, and the inconceivably huge whale-ridge of the Eternity Wall space port. The figures saw him, and fired. Smaller humans among the legionaries turned their attention to him. Pintle stubbers streaked tracer fire in his direction. Lasgun beams flickered out their short-lived displays. It seemed he was the one stationary in all that fury, and the bullets, and the wall and the world rushed at him, as if he were the offended party and they attacked without provocation.
He was so intoxicated by his flight that he remembered to fire his own gun only moments before impact. Three rounds he allowed himself. Two went wild. The third blew apart a mortal man in a gaudy uniform whose body flowered with stamen ribs and chest wall petals.
The wall punched up to meet him. Lucoryphus altered his course to slam into an Imperial Fists legionary with force enough to kill. The Emperor’s slave flew back so hard he cracked a chunk from a merlon before pitching over into the fire-dazzled twilight and falling from the wall. Lucoryphus was sent spinning off by the impact, slamming into the rockcrete with his jets still burning. The surface was slick with vitae pouring from the heavens, and for a moment he teetered on the brink of the inner crenellations. The chasm of the canyon road dividing city from defences yawned at him. A burst of jets and a painful push from his twisted feet sent him back onto the parapet, where men ran at him. Staggered, he brought up his inactive chainsword to deflect the desperate bayonet jabs of three Imperial Army soldiers. They fired their guns as they stabbed, scoring his livery. He punched at them clumsily, breaking their skulls with his fists. Time slowed. His head rang. Imperial Fists were running at him, bolters barking. A macro shell hit the wall fifty metres away, sending out a cloud of fire, flailing bodies and a storm of deadly rubble.
Time ran true again. He launched himself up, finger gunning the chainsword trigger. He met the first attacker with a sweep at the torso. The sword’s teeth did not bite, skidding off the ceramite with a spray of sparks, but it threw off the legionary’s aim and his bolt burned past Lucoryphus’ head, wounding his vision with rocket motor flare. The Night Lord was fast, working on instinct, and finished him with a round through the eye slit that obliterated his helmet and painted Lucoryphus with blood.
A second warrior came for him, only to be hit by a howling Raptor whose falling kick was strong enough to shatter ceramite.
Night Lords thumped down around him, guns firing, chain weapons growling. A flurry of violence, a popping chorus of bolt explosions, and there were no more of the Emperor’s slaves there to oppose them.
Lucoryphus was on the walls. After all this time, he was on the Palace walls. Their attack had taken the defenders by surprise. There were no other of the Warmaster’s forces on the battlement; only the blue and red of Night Lords battleplate was visible, both colours close to black in the fire and murk. He looked up at the spires of the Imperial Palace, bathed in light and glorious despite their embattled state.
Lucoryphus’ hearts pounded with the scale of his achievement.
He raised his arms and shouted at the sky. ‘Mino premiesh a minos murantiath!’ he cried in Nostraman, the words as liquid as the rain. ‘We are first on the wall!’
He gathered in his warriors, and ordered them to secure the landing zone.
Skraivok was coming.
Second line
Ordo Reductor
Myzmadra plays her part
Palace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 15th of Quartus
There was only noise.
Guns were firing from both sides in such great numbers their reports had no individual existence, but became a single block of sound as tangible as stone. The racket stole every other sound and made it into part of an unyielding, physical whole. Moving against this force required effort. It permeated the earth. It shook every cell in the human body.
In this realm of war, noise was the king, oppressing every sensation ruthlessly. Occasional louder eruptions would surface from the racket: a jet’s roar, a direct macro cannon hit on the line’s revetment, the warbling shrieks of dying void shields, the explosion of a nearby bomb. They would exceed the volume of the noise, then be swallowed up by the greater whole.
There was no question of Katsuhiro hearing orders. Even touch was blurred out by the noise’s relentless vibrations, and the slaps sergeants gave to attract attention were hardly felt.
Men died to the left and to the right of Katsuhiro, felled by buzzing swarms of shrapnel or shots from the seething mass of the foe coming at them. They fell unnoticed, their screams unheard. He would reach for a fresh power pac
k, and then see the fellow beside him had been blasted into scraps, or realise that a bunker which moments before had been slaughtering the enemy had become a burning ruin.
In the pouring rain of blood, the conscripts fired down from the second line rampart. Once more, the lost and the damned of Horus’ grand army surged at them with no care for their own lives. Abhumans and mutants had been replaced by worse abominations. Every squint through Katsuhiro’s iron sights brought a new horror to his attention. Months ago any one of them would have had him gibbering in terror, but now he shot them and moved on to the next target.
The last bastions fired their guns until the barrels glowed hot. They killed and killed, but the enemy would not stop coming, nor would they break and run. Behind the foe the three siege towers rumbled forwards, crushing everything in their path. Smoke obscured them from Katsuhiro, and he saw them only as looming shapes lit up by the aching glow of shield discharge. Another threat ready to destroy him should he survive the horde.
The Palace aegis shook to the drum beat of plasma, las and shell. The shrieks of the voids were the worst of the noises deafening Katsuhiro: otherworldly, moaning howls as each lenticular field collapsed which gave the impression that the shield was a tormented being. Collapses happened with increasing frequency. Each time the voids reignited they came back weaker. Permanent gaps were forced and targeted by the foe, and thereby widened, exposing the wall to the attentions of artillery. Behind the wall the shields held, but over the outworks the aegis flickered with dying light.
Gunfire battered at the Palace walls. Among the outworks the bombardment wreaked havoc, tearing up the ground, breaking the ramparts into islands of resistance amid a sea of hatred. More bombs were getting through. More streams of incinerating plasma slashing into the defenders and boiling them to steam. More las-beams obliterating bunkers and breaking the bastions.