“The dome is strong, and protected by layers of voids, but against the weapons of a Ramilies-class star fort I fear it will be battered down in moments.”
“Then we are doomed?”
“If destruction is our enemies’ only thought, then we have little hope of surviving a bombardment.”
“Then why do we stand the defences to arms?” asked Nkiru, and Quintus was pleased to note the absence of fear in his Quaestor’s voice.
“Because we are in the presence of the enemy and the Codex Astartes tells us that is what we must do,” said Quintus.
“Of course,” said Nkiru.
“But beyond that,” elaborated Quintus, “the star fort above us is the Indomitable, which was lost with all hands six months ago. Ever since Lord Calgar defeated an infernal lord of the Ruinous Powers it has been hidden within the wilderness space of Ultramar. If it is back, it is certain those who command it seek to humble us beyond simple destruction from orbit.”
“Do you know who commands it?”
“Not for certain,” said Quintus, reaching up to touch the eagle on his breastplate, “but after seeing the corruption of the Indomitable’s character I fear the worst.”
THE PLANET ON the viewscreen was a shimmering orb of pale yellow and soft blue, its outline hazed by the warmth of its temperate climates and near-constant weather systems. It had been simplicity itself to overwhelm the planet’s orbital defences and though the power of the Indomitable was such that its guns could reduce its cities to ashen cinders, Honsou knew a far worse fate awaited its defenders.
He stood in the command chapel of the Basilica Dominastus, the vast citadel rearing from the heart of the star fort that had, until recently, been the command centre for the Ultramarines garrison. Those Ultramarines were now all dead, slain in the siege fought to capture the Indomitable.
In the crew pits below him, the warriors who had followed him from Medrengard eagerly awaited the unleashing of the star fort’s new power. Cadaras Grendel, the horribly scarred killer, clenched and unclenched his fists in anticipation of violence. The Newborn watched with the interest of a student, while Ardaric Vaanes stood apart from his fellow warriors.
Honsou turned from his inner cabal towards the molten alcove behind him where a Techmarine might once have linked with the star fort’s weapon systems and surveyors. Instead of a Techmarine, a monstrous form—part organic, part machine, part warp-matter—held court over the modified slaves and warriors filling the corrupted chapel.
A diabolical hybrid of Dreadnought and warp-spawn, the daemon lord M’kar was a hulking mass of dark iron and fluid flesh that seethed with immaterial energies and aeons-old malice. Its splay-clawed feet burned the deck where it stood, and its hideous bulk rippled with unnatural life where the armoured plates of the Dreadnought’s sarcophagus no longer held sway. Its horned head was bestial and raw, like burned meat left to spoil, and its fangs were cruel and hooked like barbs. Two arms of inconstant form hung from its wide, armoured shoulders. Powerfully muscled with warp-spawned power, dark pistons and chains, they slithered like the limbs of Adept Cycerin. Glossy and black, one arm terminated in an enormous mechanical piston hammer, the other in a rotary cannon of fearsome calibre.
Eyes alive with unholy light regarded the planet on the viewscreen with a hate of such purity that it was almost physical. This creature had trod the worlds of men when the Legions had carved the Imperium from the raw meat of the galaxy, and had spent millennia honing that hatred. It was a creature of ultimate darkness, a chosen avatar of the primal gods of the empyrean.
To Honsou, M’kar represented a weapon to bring about the destruction of all his nemesis cared for. The worlds of Ultramar were dear to Uriel Ventris, the only warrior ever to defy him and live, and that made them targets for Honsou’s rage. He cared little for the Long War, that aeons-long conflict waged by the followers of Horus Lupercal ever since their defeat in a time so long ago that it might as well have never existed.
M’kar, however, still carried that bright torch of hatred for the Ultramarines, and that was all that mattered to Honsou.
He had learned of the daemon lord’s existence from ancient texts he’d salvaged from the ruined fortress of Khalan-Ghol, and had set out to bend the daemon lord to his will.
With the help of Moriana, the damned seer who guided the wars of the Despoiler, Honsou had unlocked the secret of M’kar’s fate. Imperial propaganda told that Marneus Calgar of the Ultramarines had defeated M’kar and torn the daemon limb from limb, thus banishing it back to the warp, but Moriana had told Honsou the truth of that encounter. M’kar had been defeated, this much was true, but it had not been destroyed. Unable to unmake the daemon’s essence, Marneus Calgar had imprisoned it within the Indomitable, a Ramilies-class star fort that roamed the forgotten places within the darkest corners of Ultramar.
The daemon’s power was bound with hateful incantations and sigils, and the more it struggled, the tighter they pulled. And there it had remained for decades until Honsou had set his course upon freeing it. The Iron Warriors and the thousands of soldiers Honsou had rallied to his banner during Huron Blackheart’s Skull Harvest laid siege to the star fort and released the daemon lord from his incarceration.
Now his vengeance upon Uriel Ventris and the Ultramarines was within Honsou’s grasp.
“Tarentus,” hissed M’kar, its voice a hideous mélange of depthless echoes from another world and a grating mechanical growl. “I remember this world as it was when the Imperium was young. Nothing has changed.”
The words were spoken with a disgusted hiss, as though the idea that such places could endure without change was anathema to the daemon lord.
“Do you need the Indomitable to break the dome open first?” asked Honsou.
The daemon lord turned its smouldering eyes upon him, and Honsou felt the full force of its spite, an age of hatred for the scions of Guilliman that had gone unquenched for ten thousand years. The daemon shook its head with a sucking sound of wet meat and the clatter of corroded gears.
“You think such a paltry barrier can withstand my daemon army?”
“I don’t know, can it?”
The daemon laughed, the sound like a consumptive’s death rattle.
“You have a need to flirt with death, Halfbreed,” hissed M’kar, pointing an outstretched talon towards Honsou. “One day you will go too far.”
“So people keep telling me, but here I am.”
“Defy me and I will tear your soul apart,” promised M’kar.
Honsou shook his head and turned away. “No, you won’t. You need me.”
“We shall see,” spat the daemon.
Honsou nodded towards the planet in the viewscreen.
“I’m waiting,” he said. “Let’s see what you can do.”
QUINTUS LISTENED TO the streaming vox updates from Master Unathi with a growing sense of unease. Despite his earlier confident words to Nkiru, there was no indication that any assault was inbound. Darkness had fallen and the night air smelled of turned earth and harvested crops. Blazing arc lights swept the ground before the high walls of Axum and stabbed into the sky to unmask enemy fliers.
Every gun in the city was trained on the sky, and the tension hung on a knife-edge. This level of readiness could not be maintained for long, and Quintus was on the verge of ordering a relaxation of the city’s defensive posture when he tasted something rank on the wind blowing in from the east.
It began as a foulness that reminded him of the blazing fields of dead xeno organisms on Ichar IV when the killing was done. Vast, city-sized pyres of alien corpses were burned to ashes in the aftermath of the fighting, and the stench of charred alien meat was a rank aftertaste that no rebreather could completely dispel.
Quintus tasted something similar, a horrid reek of dead things and corruption; a foulness that was unnatural and unclean. It was the antithesis of all that was good and pure in the world, and Quintus gagged as it swept over the ramparts.
He turned his gaze to the east,
the autosenses of his visor easily penetrating the gloom of the far-off fields. His heart lurched as he saw hectare upon hectare of rotted vegetable matter, hundreds of kilometres square of mulched crop and decayed fields. The entirety of the east was lost, a swelling sea of rotten vegetation and sterilised earth.
An arc light next to Quintus blew out in sprays of fat orange sparks, and he turned his attention back to the city as the dark wind surged like a swirling miasma. He tasted ashes and the sour bile of despair, a bleak hopelessness that swept through him like a virus. Quintus angrily shook himself free of the sensation, gritting his teeth as he focussed on his duty as commander of this world.
Marneus Calgar had handed Quintus the Praefecture Staff, charging him with the defence of Tarentus, and he’d be damned before he failed in that duty to his Chapter Master.
Lights began failing throughout the city and a grotesque buzzing swelled on the edge of hearing, like a static-filled picter with a billion signals shrieking and screaming all at once.
Soldiers dropped to their knees as the sourceless sound blared. No decibel meter would have registered more than background noise, for it resonated in the mind, the sound of madness and pain combined. Soldiers fired their rifles at unseen enemies, their shots stabbing wildly into the darkness. Cries of fear turned to terror and pain as screaming defence auxilia fighters turned their swords and pistols on each other, fighting as though confronted by their worst nightmares made real.
The dark wind blew ever stronger and the air beneath the dome seethed with light as storms of unnatural colours blew to life with unnatural swiftness. Shapes moved in the clouds, like sharks through a billowing cloud of blood in the ocean. Quintus felt a host of hungry eyes looking down upon his city, mountainous creatures with bodies so vast they could not exist in this world, slavering beasts of hideous appetite and aeons-old lust for the souls of mankind. Unearthly laughter drifted on the wind and the clouds gathered together in one giant thunderhead.
An arcing bolt of lightning lanced from the clouds, flashing into existence with impossible brightness. It slammed down in the centre of the city but instead of a fleeting blaze of light, the lightning remained in place. Like a frozen pict image, the lightning bolt connected the sky and the earth in a looping, twisting tracery of energy.
Quintus felt the air grow thin, as though reality had become membranous and a multitude of hitherto unseen worlds pressed in from all around. He stared at the impossible lightning bolt, watching in horror as it seemed to unfold like a tear ripped in the curtain of night.
He opened his mouth to shout a warning, but it was already too late.
The tear opened wider and an unstoppable army of nightmares poured from the lightning.
“THIS,” SAID CADARAS Grendel, “is impressive.”
Honsou had to agree with his lieutenant, watching the scenes of carnage unfolding on the planet below. Flayed beasts with obsidian horns and claws ripped flesh from the bones of the city’s defenders, while formless things of jelly-like ooze with teeth devoured the corpses of the fallen. Winged bat-creatures of utter darkness capered in the air, filling the city with their apocalyptic shrieking.
A violent tide of warp-spawned abominations filled the city, killing and destroying without mercy. Towering juggernauts of brazen flesh demolished entire buildings with their bulk, while howling pack hunters with raw meat skin dragged weeping victims from their hiding places. A riot of horrific forms rampaged below, and there was nothing the defenders could do to stop it.
“That must be their leader,” said Honsou, pointing to the image of a warrior in blue armour fighting against the hordes with an energy-sheathed sword. “One of Calgar’s lackeys.”
“A veteran,” said Ardaric Vaanes, the renegade Raven Guard warrior Honsou had recruited prior to leaving Medrengard. “And a broken one at that.”
Honsou looked closer, now seeing the ivory trims on the warrior’s armour and the dull gleam of bionics beneath the swarming monsters that beset him. The veteran’s sword plunged into the body of a wiry daemon with skin the colour of an infected wound. Black ichor sprayed, but before the warrior could withdraw his blade, a scaled minotaur creature with russet skin and crackling horns gored him and hurled his body from the walls.
Honsou lost sight of the veteran as his body broke on the ground and the pack predators fell upon him with claw and fang.
“Is this how we are going to conquer Ultramar?” asked the Newborn, its dead skin bathed in the reflected light of the city’s death. “It doesn’t seem very… honourable.”
“Honourable?” hissed Grendel with a bark of bitter amusement. “What the hell’s honour got to do with anything?”
“And who said anything about conquest?” said Honsou.
“So what are we doing here?” asked Vaanes.
“We’re here to destroy,” said Grendel with relish, the scars around his mouth and eyes weeping infected fluid. Vaanes grimaced in disgust, and not without reason.
Grendel’s face was a horrific mask of poorly-healed scars, his Astartes ability to survive mortal wounds tested to its limit by the damage done to him in the closing moments of the battle to take the Indomitable. An Imperial agent had shot Grendel with an archaic melta pistol and though his armour and sheer venom saved his life, his face was horribly burned. To see him with the Newborn was like seeing two twins standing together, for its face was as dreadfully malformed as Grendel’s.
A patchwork mélange of stolen skin sewn together from the corpses of Medrengard, the Newborn’s face was a hideous fleshmask through which its all too familiar stormcloud grey eyes stared with pain-filled innocence. Honsou almost laughed at the thought, knowing of the slaughters and murder it had done in his name. Crafted by daemonic womb-mothers, torn into existence by the Savage Morticians and clad in the armour of the Iron Warriors, there was nothing innocent about the Newborn.
Alone of Honsou’s followers, Ardaric Vaanes had come through their many conflicts without disfigurement, save the ritual cuts on his angular cheeks and a trio of scars above his left eye where long service studs had been removed. The plates of his battle armour were black, its shoulder guards without any heraldic devices. Scouring winds on the planet where Honsou had consulted Moriana had stripped his armour bare, and Vaanes had chosen not to renew them.
“Is that right, Honsou?” demanded Vaanes. “Are we just here to serve your vengeance?”
“What if we are?”
Vaanes shrugged, as though the matter were of no real import. “I need to know what I’m fighting for. It’s been a long time since I’ve known.”
“You fight because that’s what he damn well tells you to do,” spat Grendel. “That’s a good enough reason to kill Imperials, isn’t it?”
“Good enough for you, Grendel,” snapped Vaanes.
Honsou let them spar, knowing that a little dissent in his underlings was never a bad thing. Fight amongst themselves and they couldn’t unite to unseat him. The Newborn watched impassively, its loyalty to Honsou won through months of indoctrination and psycho-conditioning. Even the latest bouts of seizures, lunatic ravings and visions of a life unlived hadn’t dented that devotion.
“We’re here to kill Uriel Ventris and hurt him where it matters most,” said Honsou.
“No,” said a voice from above, as a shadow fell upon them, its touch icy and unclean.
Honsou turned his head and saw the dread form of M’kar standing over them, its armoured skin alive with traceries of warp energy. Traces of the Dreadnought it had possessed were still visible beneath its undulant warp-flesh, and Honsou saw the burned remnants of the Ultramarines inverted omega symbol at its shoulder.
“Your vengeance means nothing, Halfbreed,” hissed the daemon. “The heart of Guilliman’s empire must burn. The Eternal Powers require it. All else is irrelevant.”
The daemon turned away, its every step like the hammer of a coffin nail.
Honsou bit back a venomous comment, feeling his warriors’ eyes upon him.
br /> “What next?” said Grendel.
“Let the monster have its moment and destroy this world’s cities,” said Honsou, nodding towards the viewscreen. “This planet means nothing to us, it’s just the lighting of the fuse.”
“And then?” asked Vaanes.
“Then we wait for the Ultramarines to react,” said Honsou.
“They’ll come here in force,” promised Vaanes.
Honsou grinned. “That’s what I’m counting on.”
TWO
IT'S MORNING, BUT it’s still dark and he can’t stifle a yawn as it surfaces with the inevitability of a buried secret. He steps onto the high ramparts of the Scelus Progenium, and the cold hits his thin body like a blow. He lets out a soft gasp and follows Commissar Coehoorn onto the ice-slick ramparts, keeping his eyes glued to the frozen stones to avoid slipping. Coehoorn had flogged the last boy who’d slipped and allowed the scholam’s flag to touch the ground. His breath mists as Coehoorn walks towards the heavy blast door of Ursakar’s Tower, and he trots after him with careful steps.
Junior cadets aren’t permitted to wear winter coats yet, and his body is shivering uncontrollably. His fingers grip the flagpole tightly and he clamps his jaw together to stop his teeth chattering. The senior cadets manning the walk are bundled in fur-lined greatcoats, stamping around the ramparts with lasrifles slung at their backs and gloved hands tucked in their pockets. No sooner has Commissar Coehoorn appeared than those hands are withdrawn from pockets and the rifles are returned to the shoulder arms position.
Stars twinkle in the pre-dawn sky, and he recalls how unusual it is to see lights above that aren’t orbital defences or starships in low orbit. He likes looking at the stars, but life at Scelus Progenium leaves little room for stargazing. Little room for anything fun for that matter.
It’s only been a week and he hates it already. Cadet Miklo has established his dominance of the new class with a vicious display of strength, and the swelling above his right eye is still tender to the touch. He wishes his mother had never sent him here. He wishes his father hadn’t been killed in the wars raging around Fortress Cadia, thus dooming him to this frozen hellhole. His mother claims it will make a man of him, but he curses the ill-luck that has seen the premature end of his youth. Only twelve Terran standard and his life as a child is over, or so the commissar instructors are fond of telling them every day.