Warhawk, p.32
Warhawk, page 32
Shiban’s spearhead had been charged with taking Orbital Battery Seven, one of over forty major surface-to-void artillery installations. It was the first of those within range of the Amber incursion point, one the Khagan had desired taken quickly. Control the guns, he had argued, and you could make the Warmaster’s fleet start to fear again. Shiban had asked for the honour of taking it, knowing how fiercely the silos would be defended.
Now he could see the guns themselves. At the very end of a typically vast gallery, enclosed by a roof so high it was entirely lost in accumulated smoke-palls, he could see with his own eyes the first of the giant cannons, each one nearly half a kilometre tall, their immense barrels surrounded by a mini-city of shock absorbers and coolant circuits and ammunition loaders and guidance pistons. They were arranged in long rows, their snouts protruding somewhere high up, piercing layer upon layer of shielding. You felt as if you could almost reach out, now – stretch a hand towards the activation panels and begin to hurl vengeance into the heavens again.
In between him and them, though, was the hateful enemy – advancing through the unnatural mists in numbers, their ranks thick and their support dug in. They did not rush to the charge, but instead soaked up attack after attack. The terrain around them was now their ally – the port’s internal atmosphere was dripping with poisons, its walkways were rotting and treacherous, the walls themselves mumbled with the witch-words of semi-formed yaksha.
The only option left was to press the attack, right down the long gallery, launching wave after wave at them, sustaining the belief that the next one must surely make the breakthrough. Chakaja roared out his weather-magic, blasting apart the thickest concentrations of uncanny presences; Yiman roused his fighters to yet more feats of endurance; the tank commanders dug deep and drove their units hard at apparitions of living nightmares; the squad sergeants, newblood and veteran alike, got up time and again to brave the bursts of phosphex and nerve gas and chem-laced flamers.
Shiban raced ahead of the swiftest of them all, darting around the slamming choreography of impacts, knowing that he had to be seen, to be witnessed, because if he could somehow break the defences here, then those he commanded would keep believing. No fighting he had ever done before had mattered as much as this – not on the bridge of the Swordstorm when the entire Legion’s fate was in the balance, nor against the debauched artisans of Fulgrim’s entourage – because this was no longer for himself, but for those who carried the flame, for those who would lead in the future.
You were the brothers of the Storm, he had told his warriors on the eve of the first assault. When victory is achieved here, they shall call you its lords.
First, though, they had to survive this. Even as Shiban cut his next opponent apart, he heard more cries of agony as his people died. He saw a Plague Marine dragged to the earth by two newbloods, only to rise up again, shake them both off and resume the fight. He saw Orgiz, a wild and beautiful fighter, laid low by the horror of acid-charges, his priceless armour eroded away like moth-eaten fabric. He saw Chakaja crunched off his feet by the malign power of the instantiating daemons, then struggle not to be eaten alive by them as they swarmed over him. He saw a Conqueror battle tank stall on its charge, only to be smashed apart by Death Guard heavy weapons, its crew burned alive inside the raging hull.
‘Khagan!’ Shiban roared, his throat throbbing with the pain of repeated injunctions. ‘For the honour of the Khan!’
And those who still survived answered the call, fighting through the pain, trudging up through the mire and the miasma and the sludge. Their armour was blackened and befouled, their blades blunted and doused, their bolters jammed and their ammo-chambers clattering empty. Yet still they came, heads low and dogged, guided by the memory of what had been, and what could still be. They were unable to turn back now, unable to do anything but advance into that sliding avalanche of hatred and madness, preserving, for a brief moment, what it was to be human, and greater than human.
Shiban caught sight of his next target – a grotesque mass of blistered ceramite with tripartite horns protruding from a scabrous helm – and forced himself up to the attack-sprint. When the monster turned to meet his charge, he saw just how scooped-out by the warp it was. Virtually nothing of the old human occupant could have been left in that mouldering assortment of rotting armour, fogged with crawling insects and glistening with exposed viscera. It was a thing, not a living soul – a vile jest at the expense of the entire species. No spark of mortal fire resided in that tortured psyche still, only emptiness, numbness, surrender to an insane torpor that took away the surface agony even as it chewed through what little remained of the human within.
They are killing us, because they have already lost everything, Shiban realised, leaping into contact, his glaive held tight and the disruptor snarling. So what must we lose, before we can match this? What sacrifice, what pain, must we endure before we can hurt them back?
Devil-boy
The empty road
Little names
She seemed able to endure them all, even in combination.
And she herself was tripartite. Erebus found himself almost laughing when he discovered it. Of course there was more than one of her; of course there were tricks she hadn’t revealed yet. The discovery was startling, but also a little thrilling.
You couldn’t see the effect, at first. The arrival of his companions tended to confuse things. They ripped base matter up as they emerged through it, tearing it apart and mixing it with whatever clots of the warp they had dragged through with them. They made the air ignite, kicked the sand up into burning clouds, shattered the earthenware into flying splinters. They were immense, too – huge creatures of bone and sinew that burst the stone-built lodge apart with every stretch and bellow. They shimmered, they jerked, their outlines initially struggling to solidify, showering the ruins of the woman’s old home with falls of broken stone and rubble. As they unfurled up to their full stature, unroofing the hovel and tearing the awnings away, the naked sky was exposed again, blood-red from the sandstorms.
But she grew with them. She never cowered or tried to get away. She rose up in parallel with those unnatural companions, her body swelling and growing translucent to match their own impermanence. That was when you glimpsed it first– that she had more than one face, and more than a single pair of hands, and different veils of clothing that rippled and flapped in the racing gyre.
The unnatural companions roared right at her, lacing the night air with venomous spittle. The bird-creature was first to strike, lashing out with its snake-headed staff. Then the bull-headed beast launched itself at her, swinging an axe that caught fire as it struck the earth. The serpent slithered around her ankles, swaying upwards to coil itself around her waist, even as the empty-eyed cadaver slopped and staggered its ruinous path towards her. They were steeped in the ether, those creatures – some of the mightiest god-aspects ever to answer his call. Their hides glistened with the afterbirth of the empyrean, their slanted eyes blazed with the specialised hatred-for-life that only they truly possessed. Their fangs snapped shut, their talons flexed open; they weaved in and out of one another’s embrace until they formed a kind of single enclosing organism, a beautiful expression of the Pantheon’s rare unity of purpose.
But she struck back at them. The earth itself rose up around her, the stone breaking off and erupting into shattered columns. The sand flew and blinded, caustic as acid, stripping away flesh as it scoured and burned. The sky cracked with thunder, the packed earth shook, and above it all the red moon shone. The beasts surrounded her, smothering and raking, and she marshalled her craft against them, more than holding her own.
Erebus found himself redundant as that all unfolded, standing back as his creatures went to work, his only function to bring them in, to help them cross the threshold. He gazed up at the contest, held rapt by it, feeling the deep art unleashed, the mastery of powers he had never even dreamed of. The ether dragged hard at him, ripe to haul the whole place into its impossible embrace, only held back by this strange counter-magic, this discipline lodged in a single place, a single time. Was this strange strength of the warp, too? Surely it had to be – its no-place was the source of all potency – but it felt… different, somehow, as if its origins went down into the foundations of the physical world itself, a well that never dried up, one whose black waters fed something truly primordial and rooted and unforgetting. Ah, but the heresy of that! All roads led to the empyrean in the end, whatever comforting stories you might tell yourself otherwise. That was the very first article of the faith, the one from which all the rest sprung, so he had better remember it.
It was at that point that he saw her many selves emerge, cycling rapidly like overlaid frames of a confused vid-animation. He saw a woman taking on the daemons, her dark skin as hard as the staff she twisted around her in her impressive anger, majestic at the apex of a long life. He saw a youth, vital as starlight, fast as the racing waters, slender limbs wielding a sickle that flashed under the blood moon. And he saw a crone, withered black like an olive, hard as twisted tree roots, freezing everything she clutched with long knuckled fingers. All of them were deadly, and all of them were her, switching rapidly from image to image, never settling, as if an eternity of evolution had been jumbled up and replayed over and over, provoked into being by this violation of the desert sanctuary, the place where past and present and future merged into a kind of arid timelessness.
Erebus had thought she was wearing a dress – a cotton-spun thob – but now saw that it was a single piece of twine, wound and wound about her but coming apart to form a cocoon of protection. It was impossibly long, going on and on as if forever, like the names the Custodians inscribed on the inside of their armour; but whereas those names marked the end of many lives, this was the signifier of a single life, ancient and interwoven with everything of importance that had ever happened here.
He tried to intervene, to wade into that great clash of god-aspects, but the sandstorm pushed him back, burning his flesh with its howling pressure. The entire crater seemed to be coming apart around them all, its concentric rings cracking and tumbling, with the detritus caught up in the maelstrom and sent sailing around the epicentre. He was losing his footing, slipping down into a whirlpool of hissing grains.
She cried aloud, and Erebus heard three voices overlaid, all of them enraged and in pain. The beasts were shrieking in their turn, wounded to their hate-hot cores by the power she unloaded at them. He saw the cadaver staggering, its loose flesh ripped from exposed bone. He saw the serpent crushed under a disdainful heel, and the bull-creature sent reeling from the staff’s tip. The vile bird, with translucent plumage in every hue of an outlandish spectrum, jabbed in close, only to have its feathers plucked from its hide and its eyes put out with a deft flick of the sickle.
Blood started to enter the vortex of whirling matter, gobbets of it, some truly human, some just a cheap copy. Erebus caught glimpses of real pain amid the fury – a wince from the woman, a gasp from the crone. The twine was unravelling, severed in many places now. The quicksand sucked at them all, bubbling under their bloodied feet.
She could have been magnificent, Erebus thought to himself. She could have been the queen of the warp. He smiled ruefully, capable of pride even as the world around him shook itself into oblivion. But I have stamped on another scorpion, and now the desert is almost free of its sting. Praise be to me.
She killed them all, in the end. Or, since they were not truly of that plane, she banished them. She undid their ties to the world of the senses, unpicking them like a seamstress at a torn cowl. They yammered and they squealed, but she was remorseless, countering their outlandishness with a kind of infinite maternal patience. Watching it all, Erebus realised then how she must have done it. The Great Deed. And a kind of awe took hold of him, for he understood at that moment that she had been nothing other than truthful with him – she had hoped the whole thing would just end there, with the Scheme of the Anathema perpetually unfinished. And now, in her own home, he had demonstrated to her just how wrong she had been about that, how foolish, and what her intervention had actually achieved.
That was the stiletto he needed to finish her.
‘Fury,’ he said, at last making some progress through the tempest. ‘Obsession. Despair. Power. These were the things He set Himself up against. These are the things I brought with me. You see it now, do you? You see what He saw, all those centuries ago?’
She was crying out by then, from the agony of her wounds, or maybe even from the knowledge he had given her. If she could have done, she might have called out to her old conspirator, the one with whom she had both created and destroyed, the one she had both loved and hated. But He was far away now, fully occupied with troubles of His own. She was fighting still, defiant to the end, but her soul’s storm was faltering.
‘I can admire that,’ Erebus said. ‘He made a choice. The wrong one, but a choice all the same. You, though. You.’ He chuckled, pulling a knapped blade from his belt. ‘You wanted it all ways. Meddle here, meddle there, and then return to the desert with your statues.’
His boot crushed the figurine she had showed him, and he barely noticed. The last of the unnatural companions was sent screaming back into the hole in reality, tumbling back down the vortex they had brought with them. Erda fell to her knees, bruised and lacerated, her shifting visage now settled back to how she had been when he’d arrived. Her dress hung in tattered loops around her, the threads prised apart.
Erebus knelt down beside her, hauling her exhausted head up so she had to look at him.
‘Devil-boy, you called me?’ he hissed viciously, remembering every slight that had ever been aimed at him. ‘Maybe so. Maybe that’s what I’ve always been. But you see what I can do now, what I can summon when the need arises. So maybe being a devil-boy isn’t so very shabby.’
He pressed the edge of the athame against her blood-blotched neck, making the skin stretch.
‘But I, unlike Him, have no pretensions against the divine,’ he whispered softly. ‘I would have raised you up as a monarch, had you grasped the chance. Even now, I feel the unfamiliar tug of mercy on my hearts. So, on the acceptance of the one condition that He has always resisted, I still propose to let you live.’
Her dark eyes flickered up to meet his. Despite everything, she wanted to hear it.
‘Worship me,’ he told her, smiling softly.
The fire in her eyes went out. Her limbs went slack.
This was the moment he lived for. The instant of total defeat. He watched her swallow, trying to find the words with which to accept his terms, to articulate lips that were caked with her own blood.
She drew in a painful breath, and spat across his helm. Then she smiled crookedly.
‘I said no to Him,’ she rasped. ‘And He might even have been worth it.’
Erebus looked down at her, too inured to serial rejection to be overly surprised. His fingers tightened on the knife-hilt.
‘As you wish,’ he said. ‘Gods, though, what a waste.’
Sigismund saw Khârn come for him out of the fog bank.
The World Eater made no attempt to disguise his attack run. Neither did those who came with him. More than a hundred warriors of Angron’s Legion, with the sounds of many more coming up behind them. They were raving now, with the last slivers of a rational consciousness stripped from them. They howled as they ran, more like beasts than men. For a moment, seeing that, you could imagine you had been suddenly transported to some wild world of eternal savagery, not the ancestral home of the species itself.
The warriors under Sigismund’s command were already outnumbered. He had been preparing to fall back again, once the Sons of Horus had been sufficiently blooded. That was the only thing his primarch had commanded him to do – to make them cry out from pain. In truth, it was all he was ever going to be able to do, for he could see clearly enough that the war was already lost. This was an act of defiance, nothing more. He might slow them a little, but his objective was, and had always been, merely to do damage.
He could scarcely remember a time when that hadn’t been at least partly true. For seven years, they had fought the steady defeat, standing up against the heretics more out of a desire to punish them than out of a true conviction that the thing could be won. He had resisted that in his conscious mind. He had always pressed for more, prompted most strongly by those who had believed in him, like Keeler.
No longer. Vengeance was the whole sum of the universe, now. Vengeance was the entire truth. Vengeance was all that remained, the final performance of duty, not done for some external motive, but for its own sake.
He wouldn’t stop going at them. Not now. Not ever.
‘We engage,’ he voxed to Rann, who was deep in his own combat with a Sons of Horus warrior.
No answer came. Rann was clearly too busy to reply, neck-deep in his own world of fighting, but the message would have got home to those that needed the command. All those who still fought alongside him, those who he had dragged out of their slack despair and hurled straight into the open jaws of the enemy, would have to hold firm for a little longer. Thousands of them would die for this indulgence, but that mattered not. He had made them sanctified. He was the maker of martyrs.
Sigismund pushed the corpse of his last sacrificial victim away. The lifeless body hit the viaduct’s deck hard before toppling off into oblivion. Freed up, the sword shivered keenly in his hands. Its spirit was aroused, its chorus of slaughter whipped up by the fire-torn winds around him. It knew an enemy worthy of its status when it saw one.
At Sigismund’s back was the terminus tower – a monstrous pile of plasteel and ouslite, parapets crowned with a destroyed cat’s cradle of comms equipment. On either side of him was a plunge into a smoke-filled abyss. Ahead of him stretched the old elevated transitway, the blast-rails at its sides ripped clean off, the deck littered with mortar-punched holes. The World Eaters rampaged along it, leaping across the voids, howling and screaming in a rolling scrum of frenzy.
