He scrambles through brush, reloading his weapon on clips taken from the dead. The blood of others paints his armour, turning him crimson, a colour he has an unexpectedly painful need to wash off. Bolt-rounds snap and whine through the trees. One pulps leaves in a mist of sap. One hits a tree trunk, explodes, and collapses the ancient tree wholesale. One destroys Brother Caladin’s head, and flips his corpse into a ditch.
Ekritus finds a mossy slope, ducks under a root mass, and clambers up. Old stonework, the retaining wall of some earthwork built in the early years, when this was estate land. Smoke bores through the woodland space as if driven by an ocean current. Animals and avians are mobbing out of the devastated environment in teeming plague-year swarms.
Nature in rout. A world turned upside down.
He clambers higher still. He is above the tree line. He can see for many kilometres. He can see the world burning. On the plains beyond the forest expanse, he can see vast hosts assaulting the towns along the river and the port. Waves of men, tens of thousands strong, Army or what until an hour ago passed for Army. Waves of men, of armour, formations of Titan engines, phalanxes of Space Marines, all of them hazed in the dust and smoke of their advance.
The blot of their insult.
The stain of their crime.
Here alone, east of the river, he can see a mobilised force large enough to take a continent. A world, probably. And this, just one muster of the Calth conjunction. He watches as it surges, a fluid mass, sweeping aside everything in its path.
There are so many burning ships and orbitals in the sky, it looks like a hundred sunsets all happening at once. The actual sun, the Veridian system’s pure, blue-white star, is lost behind circumfulgent smoke.
Ekritus wants to kill them all. He wants to face them and kill them, one by one, until there are none left, and the heat of his outrage is finally quelled.
He senses movement. The first of the Word Bearers appears. Behind him, two more, toiling up the earthwork slope. More come behind them. Ekritus stands to meet them.
They do not shoot him.
He hesitates, boltgun in one hand, power sword in the other.
He is red, like them. Except not by choice.
They see his true markings under the sticky sheen of blood only as they draw close. By this time, as they react, he is already killing them.
He shoots the first in the face. There is no time to appreciate the satisfaction of seeing the grilled helm explode, the pieces of bone and hair and brain-matter eject in all directions. The second he hits in the gut. The third in the left shoulder, tipping him backwards down the hill into the men behind him.
The fourth is another headshot.
There is no fifth. No rounds left.
Ekritus goes into them with his sword. He severs a wrist, a thigh, a neck. He impales a body and lifts it, hurling it like a sack down the earthwork rise. It crashes into its kin below. Two-handed, he buries the edge of the blade in the cranium of another helm, splitting it in half.
One has dropped a bolt pistol. He snatches it up out of the bloody moss and fires twice into the chest of the next traitor on him, killing him cold. He kills the next two, then side slashes a man off the bulwark ridge to his left.
But they’re on him. There are too many. Enough to take a world. Enough to bring a Legion to its knees. They hit him. They beat him with gun-butts and sword hilts. They pin him and club him down to his knees, chipping and denting his armour until some of the blue shows through again.
One of them tears off his helm.
‘Bastards! Bastards!’ he yells at them. A fist pulps his face, repeated blows to mash flesh and crush bone. He drools blood and teeth through swollen lips. One eye has gone.
They drag him up. He’s a captain. He’s a trophy.
A figure towers over him. Ekritus, half-blind, realises it’s one of the Titans, advanced to face the earthwork. Its speaker horns boom. The Word Bearers roar an answer and punch the air.
When the Titan resumes its advance, knocking down the old earthwork and trampling the trees, Ekritus is crucified on its torso plates.
[mark: 0.32.31]
Hol Beloth, recently teleported to the surface, commands the advance on the port at Lanshear. Hosts of the Kaul Mandori, the Jeharwanate, and the Ushmetar Kaul sweep before his engine formations. A brigade of the Tzenvar Kaul is encircling the port to the north.
The brotherhoods fight with supreme devotion. Beloth or his immediate officers have selected and anointed many of the zealots personally. They are conduits for the warp-magicks used by the highest ordinals of the XVII to enrapture their warhosts.
Hol Beloth is ambitious. He wishes to be more than a commander and more than a conduit. Such status has been promised to him by Erebus and Maloq Kartho and other, unnamed shadows that stand beside them sometimes and mutter in the twilight. He will be invested. He will be greater than even the Gal Vorbak. But he must prove himself, though he has proved himself in war a thousand times before.
This is a new form of war. This is a warfare that has never been unleashed openly before. Beloth must achieve his objectives, and perform his duties well. He must prove that he can command and control men and un-men alike.
He is hungry for power. Erebus and Kor Phaeron were always the greatest adepts, since the earliest days, but now the primarch seems to have exceeded them. His essence is frightening. Lorgar is transcendent. It is not simply the power, it is the fluid subtlety with which he employs it. Just being near Lorgar is a privilege. Being apart from, like here on Calth... it feels like the sun has gone out.
Hol Beloth believes that Erebus and Kor Phaeron are painfully aware of the way they have fallen behind. He believes they watch the primarch and crib from him, borrowing tricks and talents they have learned by observation, and then deploying them with stiff, crude proficiency. They are not adept any more. They are struggling to keep up with Lorgar’s mastery.
It is as though they are borrowing from another place, while Lorgar has become one with that place.
Hol Beloth intends to ascend to a place beside his primarch. He will burn Lanshear for the right to do so.
[mark: 0.45.17]
Numinus City is mortally wounded. Actinic light shivers along the skyline. Criol Fowst knows that the blessed dark masters of the XVII are already loosening the interstices of Calth. They are displacing it; they are rocking it in its clasp like a thief twisting a jewel out of its setting. Hoar frosts keep forming then thawing on the walls and roofs of the city. Fires gutter and die for no reason, and then reignite spontaneously. Twice, Fowst has looked up and seen, through the smoke cover, patterns of stars that do not belong to Calth or the Veridian System; patterns of stars, indeed, that he has never seen before, but which seem so familiar they make him weep for joy.
He rallies his men. The Ushmetar Kaul are dedicated. They have already gutted the Army encampments along the south bend of the river and left them in flames. They have killed thousands. Fowst has inspected the heaped dead. Almost a division of men went into the river in a thrashing attempt to escape, and were cut down by cannon and rifle. Their bodies, those which have not washed away downstream, have formed several new jetties at the water’s edge; slipway ramps of corpses jutting out into the stained current.
Where there is resistance, the Brotherhood does not flinch. They walk into return fire, soaking up the hits. It is a process of gleeful sacrifice that leads to overwhelm. Some of his men are strapped up with explosives, and walk in amongst the masses of the fleeing enemy to find their ascension.
In the ransacked encampments of the Numinus 61st, the Brotherhood has found crates of rifles, las-weapons, new issue Illuminators ready for distribution. The Ushmetar Kaul took them, ditching their old pieces in favour of the powerful new firearms. Fowst has one. It is tough and lightweight, with virtually no kick. It has a folding wire stock that he can clip back out of the way. He has killed six men with it already.
He is an educated man. The irony is not lost on him.
r /> Orders are coming from the Legion. The spaceport must be secured, and then the outlying palaces on the plains.
Fowst wonders about the planet’s southern hemisphere, primarily ocean and more sparsely inhabited. He believes it is about to have more comprehensive fury meted out upon it. Great power, both ritual and actual, has been unsheathed today. But the task at hand will take much more than that.
[mark: 0.58.08]
The Samothrace steers in through the slip gates of the Zetsun Verid Yard. Behind it, Calth’s main shipyard is burning. No one challenges the Samothrace. It’s a vessel of the XIII fleet, running for cover, and besides, the vox is choked and the noosphere is dead.
No one aboard the Zetsun Verid Yard questions the fact that the yard structure has remained untouched either. Too small? Overlooked? Yet it is a vital specialist facility, and yards around it have been targeted and obliterated.
The ship docks between the two fast escorts sheltering in the yard space.
‘How long?’ Kor Phaeron asks the senior magos of his shadow techpriests.
‘Three hours, provided we are not interrupted, majir,’ the priest replies.
‘They will not be interrupted,’ says Sorot Tchure.
Kor Phaeron is breathing hard. He seems desiccated and frail inside his armour, as though he is drawing off great quantities of his own vitality. Space has worn thin around him.
Calth is his operation, far more than it is Lorgar’s. Kor Phaeron has planned this for his primarch meticulously, and executed it with the aid of Erebus. The punishment and annihilation of the XIII is its principal aim; the humiliation and execution of the wretched Roboute Guilliman. But it is also an advancement, another step on the spiral path of the Great Ritual. It will allow their beloved primarch to progress.
Sorot Tchure is aware of his commander’s burden. There is no room for failure. There is a priceless and vital military objective to be won, but even that pales into nothing beside the greater intent.
He will support his commander every step of the way. It has been Sorot Tchure’s privilege to be one of Kor Phaeron’s senior assault leaders for several years. The novelty of their Legion’s transmutation has simply deepened his commitment to their cause. They were always driven by faith in a higher power. Now they are inspired by proof of that power. It has invested them all. It has answered them. It has blessed them. It has revealed to them the truths that underpin all mysteries of creation.
And the greatest truths are these: the Emperor of Terra is no god, as they once believed. He is a small and pitiful spark in the blackness of the cosmos, and in no way deserving of their devotion. He rebuked the Word Bearers for their faith, and he was right to do so: he was probably afraid of what the real gods would do when they saw him being worshipped.
The faith of the Word Bearers was misplaced. It was mis-assigned. They were looking for a god, and they found merely a false idol, hungry for adoration.
Now they have found a power in the heavens worthy of their faith.
The docking clamps seal the airgate hatches open. As he did during the first act of the ritual, Sorot Tchure leads the way through.
3
[mark: 01.16.32]
In a star formation, led by the barge Destiny’s Hand, seventeen ships of the XVII fleet enter low orbit and prosecute the southern hemisphere.
As they descend, the ships snipe and barrage at the local orbitals, destroying two yards outright and crippling a third. Attempts to block their advance are met with dogged fury. The frigate Janiverse is killed by multiple main lance blasts as it attempts to disrupt the planetary assault formation. The carriers Steinhart and Courage of Konor are driven back, and then crippled in a direct confrontation. The Steinhart suffers a critical power failure, loses all vital support mechanisms, and slides into a ragged, thousand-year death orbit of the sun with its crew ice-locked at their posts. The Courage of Konor, void-holed twice by broadsides and struggling to pull clear of the advancing formation, is caught a third time by cannonfire. Hull plates fail. The keel fractures. A meson beam ruptures the carrier’s exposed reactor core, and it immolates, dropping away into the atmosphere.
It becomes, therefore, the second capital-class ship to hit Calth.
Its plunge is not stately and slow like the dying fall of the grand cruiser Antrodamicus. The Courage of Konor is a plenilunar ball of white fire, consumed by fluorescent radiation from bow to stern. It falls like a meteor, turning and spinning. It strikes the cold, open ocean near the planet’s southern pole.
The impact is akin to an extinction event meteor strike. The atmosphere buckles for five hundred kilometres in all directions as the released heat and light squirt outwards in a distorted, epipolic flash. Trillions of tonnes of ocean water are vaporised instantly, and trillions more are upflung in an ejection cone. Tectonic damage occurs. The consequential tidal wave, a rolling wall of black water, hits the continental coast six minutes later and wipes out the littoral to a distance of four kilometres inland.
It is merely a prelude, collateral damage that forms a savage precursor to the assault proper.
The assault formation descends to the lowest possible operational altitude, their sizzling void shields squeaking and howling against the thin upper atmosphere. Ventral lance batteries and bombardment cannon begin to fire.
The systematic destruction begins.
There is no finesse involved. The northern hemisphere is dense with strategic targets and population centres that need to be targeted and secured. The northern hemisphere is also where most of the XVII ground forces could be landed prior to the hostilities without raising questions.
The southern hemisphere can, largely, be decimated.
The Hand’s formation does just that. Magma bombs blitz the bleak antipodean continents, scouring them with hellish firestorms. Lance fire turns seawater into steam, and rips oceans from their beds. Meson convertors and ion beamers dislocate the ancient tectonic patterns, buckle the crust, and send seismic spasms through the mantle. Smoke, ash and ejected matter stain the atmosphere. Steam clouds the polar latitudes.
Forests burn. Jungles scorch. Rivers vanish. Glaciers melt. Mountains collapse. Marshlands desiccate. Deserts fuse into glass.
Millions die in the scattered southern cities.
[mark: 01.37.26]
Guilliman watches.
His stylus has snapped in his hand. He calls for another. The console in front of him is piled with notes and sketched plans.
The magi of the Mechanicum, those who were not crippled or killed or driven insane by the first outrage, have begun to reboot the flagship’s crippled systems. Limited vox has been restored. Guilliman has motive power, shields and weapons.
But even the mighty Macragge’s Honour cannot take on the XVII fleet alone. The Ultramar fleet elements are scattered. There is no way to coordinate them.
There is no way to coordinate them fast enough to counter and check the planetary assault.
Calth is burning. Calth, jewel of Veridia, one of the great worlds of the Five Hundred, is violated, perhaps beyond any hope of recovery.
Guilliman turns his back. He cannot watch.
‘Is it still on repeat?’ he asks.
‘My lord?’ Gage responds.
‘My declaration? My message to my brother?’
‘Yes, my lord,’ says Marius Gage. ‘It is on constant repeat via what little comms capability we have.’
The primarch nods.
‘Should I… cancel it?’ the First Master asks.
Guilliman doesn’t reply. Aides have delivered more data to his bridge position. Lacking cogitator function and active grids, he has had scribes and rubricators stationed on all observation decks, recording data by hand on slate and paper. Runners bring all documents to him every four minutes. The heap of information is growing.
The primarch has noticed something. He has noticed some detail amongst all the others. He scoops it up. Other papers and info-tiles slither to the deck, disturbed.
?
??What is it?’ asks Gage.
[mark: 01.40.41]
The world is trembling. On the far side of the globe, the planetary bombardment is under way, scourging the other hemisphere. The trauma, transmitted as a subterranean micro-shock and an atmospheric flicker of overpressure, can be felt even here.
Here. Numinus starport. Enormous sections of its sprawl are still on fire. The drumming of heavy artillery is coming from the city. Formations of attack craft rush overhead every few minutes, roaring bright coals of afterburner heat. Smoke has blackened the sky, apart from the bright pinpricks of debris burning up, of ship-fire up in space, of dying orbital yards combusting.
There’s dust everywhere. It’s fine, yellowish, a by-product of ash and the up-cast of surface impacts. It films the air and coats upper surfaces. The micro-shocks are making it trickle and sift in places. It seeps through vents. It dribbles down gutters. It wafts like smoke where the breeze stirs it.
It sticks to blood.
It has adhered to the blood-soaked skin and armour of the fallen. It has clotted the pools of blood like sawdust. It covers dead faces like powder, so the corpses look painted and preserved, formally prepared by mortuary assistants.
Vil Teth, gene-named leader of a Kaul Mandori strike team, advances along one of the transit causeways, las-rifle trained. His brown leather boots scuff up the yellow dust. Eight men of his immediate brotherhood squad follow him, with another twelve holding back with the heavy support, an armoured speeder with an autocannon mount. Zorator, their watcher, is somewhere nearby.
The zone has to be cleared. The commanders have ordered this. By midnight, the entire port must be sectioned and secure. There are survivors hiding everywhere. Teth is cautious because he knows that some of these so called ‘survivors’ are XIII Legion warriors, gone to ground. His men are not equipped for that kind of opposition, no matter how broken or cornered it might be.