The fight is chamber by chamber, companionway by companionway. Daemons lurk in every shadow and around every turn. They spilled into the flagship from loose folds of the warp when the main bridge was compromised, and flow through the vast vessel like a flash flood of ink, of pitch, of liquid tar.
Thiel, Empion and the rest of the ship’s defenders are learning how to daemon-fight under practical conditions. Fire and blades have greater efficacy than projectiles or energy weapons. It seems that the primordial entities suffer greater harm from simple, basic injuries: the primitive qualities of edge, and blunt force, and flame.
Thiel has a theoretical developing, a proposition that suggests a link between damage and ritual function. Fire and cutting or stabbing tools were essential elements of ancient magic-working. It seems more than coincidental that their symbolic provenance should be retained. It is as if the daemons, products of the primeval void before man’s birth, remember the sacred instruments that were used to summon them.
He doubts he will ever have the opportunity to write down or propose this theoretical. He believes that, if he ever should, he would be scorned as a superstitious fool.
Urgency is renewed. Bormarus leads the way. Flies buzz in the clefts of the hall, and gather in frenzies around the bulkhead lights. Mould has formed on ceilings and wall ribs, and slime is dribbling up through deck seams.
Beyond the next blast hatch, a broad prep chamber is littered with dead men. They are almost all flagship crew, most of them ratings, but Thiel spies at least four Ultramarines among the dead. All of the corpses look as though they have been crushed under the treads of a Baneblade convoy. The bodies form a broken, mangled carpet of flesh, bone and armour. The floor of the chamber is slick with blood. Flies buzz.
Thiel can hear dripping.
He looks up. The ceiling is covered, just like the deck. Bodies have been crushed into it, crushed and squashed into the ceiling like papier maché. Small pieces drop or splat down as gravity works its gradual influence.
‘What did this?’ Empion murmurs, marvelling at the sheer ingenuity of the horror.
There is a scraping sound. They turn, and find out the answer to his question.
6
[mark: 9.38.01]
‘Here they come!’ cries Arook Serotid.
The Word Bearers charge out of the fog, their huge red figures dwarfing their cultist troops. They drive the ragged brotherhood warriors ahead of them like packs of dogs into the onslaught of the palace guns. They use the cultists as shields.
‘Meet them! Deny them!’ Ventanus orders. At last, he fires his boltgun. Along the line of the walls and the gate, bolters open up, jagging, jumping and crackling with muzzle-flash. Heavier Legion weapons join in. Autocannons. Lascannons. The precious instruments they reserved for this moment.
The firepower slaps into the enemy charge, properly hurting it, slowing it, breaking it. Thousands of separate explosions and blasts tear men apart or throw them into the air. Tracer-bright streaks of las and plasma stitch across the enemy line. Black-robed humans are mown down. Ventanus smiles under his helm as he sees crimson-armoured figures shudder and fall amongst them.
But there is an inevitable balance. Because it is finally time to utilise the Legion-issue weapons, it is also time to suffer equivalent wrath. The assaulting Word Bearers open fire with bolters and heavy cannons, supplementing the light infantry weapons of the chanting brotherhoods. Mass-reactive shells punch into the walls, scattering large chunks of stone, and rip into the gate. The loyalist forces start taking much heavier casualties.
Loyalist, Ventanus thinks. How bitterly natural was it to arrive at that name?
Crimson shapes, fast as darts, loft out of the fogbank. Assault squads. Shock troops launching on jump packs. They come thundering in like missiles, clearing the broad ditch, plunging down onto the defences. Their attack leap-frogs the main assaulting host. They arrive killing, armed with bolters and chainblades, reaping the Army troops like ripe crops. Angry, whining chainswords rip screaming men apart, making red ribbons of flesh, hurling matted body parts into the air.
‘Drive them off the walls!’ Ventanus yells.
Arook opens fire, spearing one Word Bearers assaulter out of the air with a surgical intercept shot. The Word Bearer veers away on a twisting plume of black smoke.
Four of them land on their feet at the head of the bridge, in front of the gate. They hack and shoot their way into the dug-in Army fireteams. The chainblades score through sandbags, through cannon barrels, through shielding, through flesh, through bone. The strangled, oddly modulated shrieks of the Army troopers unable to defend themselves mark the savage progress of the Word Bearers.
Ventanus bounds forward, Greavus at his side. They reach the defensive line under the gate, where the ground flows with a preposterous, spreading quantity of blood. There’s a pulsing pressure to it, a flow driven by the scampering hearts of men who bleed out through unimaginable wounds. Streams spray and gurgle along the gutters of the bridge, gutters designed to handle rainfall. The torrents void into the ditch below like rusty water from iron pipework.
Ventanus reaches one of the Word Bearers while he is busy disarticulating an Army corporal. Ventanus catches the traitor under the chin of the helm with the thrusting wings of the standard. He drives him backwards, and then blasts him in the torso, point blank, with his boltgun. The shot augurs clean through the Word Bearer and his jump pack in a violent belch of flames and sparks.
The Assault Marine falls, but grabs the thrusting standard as he collapses, dragging it out of Ventanus’s grip. Ventanus doesn’t have time to recover it. Still firing with his right hand, he draws his power sword underhand with his left, and then rotates the freed blade in a semi-circle, catching it full grip.
Greavus has engaged the second of the jump infantry warriors, swinging his power fist to meet the Word Bearer’s moaning chainsword. The chainsword is kicking out exhaust fumes of blood and tissue fibre from its fresh kills. The augmented gauntlet, sizzling with force, shatters the grip and blade drivers of the chainsword, seizing its function.
The Traitor Marine discards his broken sword, and fires his bolt pistol. The round explodes against the side of Greavus’s helm, throwing him sideways into the gateway wall. The Marine steps forward to put a second shot into him.
Ventanus’s bolter roars, and the Word Bearer takes one hit in the throat and another in the chest. The twin impacts stagger him backwards, spalling slivers of armour off him in a cloud like ice chips. Blood pours through the ruptures. The Word Bearer sags against the gate wall, bubbles of blood aspirating through his mouthguard. He tries to raise his pistol again.
Ventanus’s clip is spent. He clamps the bolter, bringing the power sword home with both hands. He finishes the wounded, swaying Word Bearer with a brutal scything zigzag slash. The upper part of the cut goes sideways through the faceplate, the lower return through the abdomen, clean to the backbone. Clutching his almost bisected waist, the Word Bearer buckles.
Ventanus turns in time to meet a third. The Assault Marine rushes him. Ventanus notices there are grim figures etched and marked on the Word Bearer’s shoulder guards, and gibberish litanies inscribed down the length of his body plates. It is the heraldry of the insane.
Ventanus blocks the chainsword swing with his blade. More sparks dance. The chainblade, a two-handed monster, chatters as it bites against the energised edge of the power sword. They break. Ventanus parries the next stroke, blocks another, and then runs his blade, tip first, clean through his adversary’s gut. The stab misses the spine, but the end of the blade merges through the plating above the Word Bearer’s left hip.
Ventanus attempts to slide the blade out, but it’s stuck. Nor is his opponent dead. He swings for Ventanus again, and Ventanus is forced to evade as the chainsword mutters towards his face. He has to let go of his sword, and leave it impaling the warrior’s abdomen.
The Word Bearer lunges at him, set on finishing the contest. He’s wielding th
e massive chainsword two-handed, stroking left and right in an attempt to catch the now unarmed Ultramarine. A skitarii warrior leaps to Ventanus’s defence, but the Word Bearer cleaves him in half in a swirling red haze.
Open-handed, Ventanus leaps at him, tackling him bodily to the ground while his chainsword is still tearing through the Mechanicum soldier. Pinning the Word Bearer’s right arm so the brute can’t make a swing across his body, Ventanus punches his confined enemy in the head repeatedly. After three blows, the helmet buckles slightly. A fourth fractures part of the gorget. A fifth crazes a visor lens.
The Word Bearer roars, throwing Ventanus off him. Ventanus allows himself to be knocked clear.
He has regained his grip on the hilt of his power sword.
He wrenches it out of the Word Bearer. Sideways.
Greavus, his head streaming gore, isn’t finished. He has risen again, throwing aside his ruptured, ruined helm. He has recovered a bolt pistol and is firing it past Ventanus. The fourth of the assaulters is cleaving his way through Army regulars and skitarii.
Arook and the largest of the heavyweight skitarii have retrenched. They open up with their plasma inbuilds, and slice the traitor apart. Ventanus hears Greavus yelling tactical commands to rally the head of the bridge and drive back the storm force. They’re holding, but the line’s going to break. Hundreds of cultists and Word Bearers are on the bridge, and some are actually swarming up the slopes of the ditch. The defenders on the walls can’t get an angle of fire steep enough.
Selaton arrives with several more of the Ultramarines contingent. He moves in to support Greavus at the bridge. Ventanus reloads his boltgun, and takes a place in the line.
The force of fire now being directed at the palace gate and frontage is immense. Men are being felled by the hail. They are even being hit and killed by the stone shrapnel kicked up by shots striking the wall.
‘I have a signal!’ Arook yells to Ventanus over the din. ‘A new signal.’
‘Relay it!’
‘Inbound force of XIII Legion requesting position specifics.’
‘Challenge them,’ Ventanus orders. ‘Ask them the number of the painted eldar!’
Arook sends the message.
‘Reply,’ he says. ‘The number is twelve. Message continues, “As anyone will tell you”.’
He looks at Ventanus. Droplets of blood from dozens of bodies bead his golden armour. His defective red eye ebbs and flares.
‘Captain?’ he asks. ‘Response?’
‘The correct answer is thirteen,’ says Ventanus. He takes a deep breath. ‘Supply them with the coordinates and tell them that time is not on our side.’
[mark: 9.44.12]
The daemon has a beak. It has a beak and feathers, and hundreds of vestigial limbs that end in hooves. But its body, all thirty tonnes of it, is that of a serpent, a fat, bloated constrictor. A Space Marine could stand with his arms outstretched and not match the diameter of its scaled girth.
It emerges from the vault shadows to the side of the prep chamber, spooling its vast, swaying bulk up through a massive deck hatch that leads into a magazine store. Thiel realises how the crushed carpet of victims was manufactured.
The vast beak clacks. Thiel sees that secondary snake bodies, dozens of them, form a beard, a frill under the chin of the beak. They writhe like tentacles, like pseudopods. The daemon is a hundred giant snakes fused into one titanic abomination, sharing one beaked head.
Bormarus rakes with his heavy bolter, and Zabo spears scalding flame. The daemon-snake rears back, and then lashes out with its frilled head. The beak catches one of the squad, a battle-brother called Domnis, and shears him in a line from the groin to the left shoulder.
Empion wades in, unflinching, circling his thunder hammer to gather momentum. The daemon-snake strikes at him, and he meets the strike, turning its beak aside with a staggering blow. The impact shakes the chamber and causes a pop of overpressure.
The beak is cracked. Ichor trickles out. Thiel strides in to support the Chapter Master, and when the daemon-snake strikes again it is greeted by the hammer and the electromagnetic longsword.
The hammer connects above the bridge of the massive beak, and deconstructs a brittle, avian eye-socket. Simultaneously, Thiel runs his longsword’s razor edge up the rising belly and throat under the beard of secondary tails. The sword parts white scaled flesh, and opens bright pink meat and transparent bone. Internal pink sacs, swirled with white fat, burst and an alimentary canal ruptures.
The daemon-snake rears, its beak wide. Its secondary snake bodies and vestigial hooves thrash and spasm furiously. Partially digested, dismembered parts of human beings and Space Marines spatter out of the deep, gutting wound Thiel has delivered. The body parts spew wide in an outrush of gastric fluid.
The Ultramarines can all hear a colossal booming noise. It is the daemon’s immense tail end, still coiled in the magazine below, thrashing in pained frenzy against the metal walls of the compartment.
The daemon slides back through the hatch to escape its tormentors.
‘The hatch! Close the hatch!’ Zabo yells. He has a locked string of ten frag grenades in his hand. As Empion punches the hatch control, Zabo arms one and lobs the whole string into the deck hatch.
The hatch is almost shut when the grenades go off. The blast jams the hatch a few centimetres from full closure, and the narrow slit focuses the contained blast pressure into a tight, extreme geyser of flame and debris that jets up and burns out across the chamber ceiling.
The booming stops.
Empion glances at Thiel.
‘Every door, a new horror,’ he says.
‘And every moment a moment lost,’ Thiel replies.
It is not the last time they will echo this call and return.
It is not the last compartment of the flagship they will have to clear a path through.
7
[mark: 10.00.01]
The Word Bearers launch a third wave of Assault Marines at the palace.
Ventanus, Selaton and Greavus have held the defence force together, and kept the gate and the bridge, though the bridge is chewed down to shreds of its former majesty. The second wave almost pushed them out of the gate into the inner yard, but for serious counter-fire from Arook’s skitarii.
The third wave, Ventanus knows, will be the critical phase. He sees it coming: one formation of jump troops swooping for the bitterly contested gate, another veering south to hit the wall further around the perimeter. Their intention will be to break in on Sparzi’s artillery positions.
Remus Ventanus is resolved to endure whatever he must endure, but he knows that resistance must crumble eventually. It is a calculable inevitability. It is a matter of numbers. It is a solid practical.
He clings to one hope. He clings to the whispered, relayed message from his home company. Let it not be a lie or a trick, he thinks. I’ve had enough of tricks this day. If it isn’t a lie, let them be fast enough. Let them be fleet of foot and tread. Let them get here while being here still matters.
He knows the wave is coming. There are precursor signs. The brotherhood cultists swarm yet again at the gate and ditch. The chanting becomes so loud that Ventanus imagines the pulse of it, the massed breath of it, will blow away the fetid smog. The enemy strikes at the walls with more rockets, with mortars, and with medium artillery. Shells punch holes in the old walls, or drop long into the gardens and compounds, scattering gun-crews and reserve positions. Selaton reports hearing tracks clattering in the fog, suggesting that the shelling is coming from enemy tanks or self-propelled guns. Ventanus doesn’t hear anything: his hearing is dulled by the sheer pitch of the intense combat in which he has been locked.
The Assault Marines shriek down. Their jump packs generate rasping, heat-shimmered forks of blue flame. The brotherhood charges crush the bridge barricades. Part of the top arch of the gate explodes and collapses in a slip of dust and loose stones. The defenders brace.
Greavus curses, blood matting his alread
y red hair.
A Baneblade, a crimson behemoth, looms out of the fog on the far side of the earthwork and lines up on the gate and west wall. Brotherhood warriors swarm around the bulk of the massive tank.
The super-heavy tank takes aim with its primary siege weapon. The Demolisher cannon clanks into alignment. Its skirts and side-plating are painted with eight-pointed star designs and what appears to be considerable quantities of scrawled handwriting.
A Baneblade.
Ventanus knows the balance has finally and firmly tipped in favour of the Word Bearers.
The close combat has already begun. There’s no time to think about the tank.
He is too busy fighting off a pair of Assault Marines. One has wounded him in the side. The other is laying in with a power axe. The confines of the gate cramp the full measure of the axe-wielder’s swing, but the Word Bearer has already killed two Army troopers and a skitarii.
Selaton covers his captain’s back, turning aside the power axe with a battered combat shield whose surface decoration has been obliterated into a billion raw metals, nicks and scratches. Ventanus and Selaton fight back-to-back. Ventanus clashes his power sword with his opponent’s kinetic mace. Selaton drives a chainsword across the guard of the axe-wielder.
All the while, Ventanus has half an eye on the tank.
Selaton takes a hit. The power axe gets past his combat shield and hacks into his shoulder guard. It doesn’t bite through to the flesh underneath, but the damage is deep, and it jams the articulation of his arm.
Selaton tries to compensate, but his balance is twisted. He stumbles sideways, lurched by the momentum of the axe wrenching out.