by Guy Haley
'I found myself upon the steps. Where are the gothi?' asked Russ.
'They will not be joining us,' said Bjorn. 'They sleep on the red snow.'
'The manner of their death?'
'Heroic,' said Bjorn simply.
'We will go to them, and see what can be done to honour them in death,' said Russ.
'I cannot,' said Bjorn. 'It is forbidden.'
'Yes you can,' said Russ. 'Just keep your eyes closed.'
Russ led the way back down into the glen. Russ bound Bjorn's eyes over with a strip tom from his own shirt, and the primarch led him by the arm down the steps.
Russ could see Bjorn's assessment was correct as soon as the circle came in sight. The gothi were all dead. The stony ground was tom up as if ploughed, and drenched in blood. Strange weapons were strewn around, though there were no corpses except those of the dead Rune Priests. Some of them were battered beyond recognition, their ritual suits ripped open and flesh stamped into the churned earth. Something towards the end had flash-frozen the corpses.
Kva's body was more intact than most. He lay with his eyes and mouth open, his body encased in a sleeve of melting ice shot through with ribbons of blood. The ice was already beginning to run in the savage summer's heat. Nearby lay Kva's twin guardians Sharing flesh as they had before their birth, they were mashed into a single mass.
The grand menhir was blackened and tilted to one side. Paler stone showed where it had been forced partially from the ground. A crack ran across the middle, close to breaking it in two.
Bjorn sniffed at the air.
'Stinks, doesn't it?' said Russ. 'Magic and desperation. Like Prospero.' He shook his head. 'We use the weapons of the enemy at our peril, but I don't see any other choice.'
'Kva warned you,' said Bjorn, 'and now he is dead.'
'He did. So did Malcador, and Constantin Valdor. They were all right. I have what I need but at such cost…' He stopped himself saying something he would regret. 'This place,' he said suddenly. 'It must be destroyed. It is tainted. Fell things move here. The barrier between warp and world has thinned.'
'You shall burn it?' said Bjorn.
'No, my son,' said Russ. 'That will not be nearly enough. The Krakgard must be remade and the Hel-road through Syrtyr's Door closed. That way will not be safe to use again.' He growled. 'Another task for a later day. We have much to do before.'
Russ touched the ice covering Kva's face. It was slippery with running water.
'Until next winter,' he said.
Fifteen
The Battle Of Trisolian A-4
Broad beams of lightning gunfire cracked the air with sudden, heat-driven displacement, shaking the storage cavern with unnatural thunder. A cohort of thallaxii stalked past guns flashing their coruscating arcs of death. Trisolian A-4's subterranean agrifields could not fall.
If the world died their main food supply would be lost and they would be starved out The fighting began there against groups of Traitor Legion infiltrators seeking to end the campaign before it began.
They had been spotted. Battle commenced. Naturally the magos domina directed the fight from her fortress realm within the Septa station of the Heptaligon. Only her lucky underlings got to experience the thrill of combat.
That is how she had put it to Cawl Had his sense of self-preservation not intervened, he would have begged to differ.
The legionaries opposing them wore blue Night Lords or Alpha Legion, Cawl could not tell through the smoke The signal pulse of their ident beacons was corrupted. Imperial codes had been replaced by the identifiers of the enemy. The smoke shrouded everything further than five metres away. Ruptured oxygen pipes quickened fires enough to make them burn steel. The stink of hot metal was overpowering. Cawl's sensors bleeped out a cacophonous din of alarms that stressed the spaces of his mind. Gas. Fire. Bullets. Explosions. So many ways to die, and the coterie of minor machine-spirits bonded to his mind were only too eager to tell him all about them.
His thallaxii advanced, methodically spraying the hall end with their weapons. Energy discharge of myriad sorts provided a colourful display. Phased plasma bursts and over-charged photons competed to see which could blaze brightest. Las-fire sped in short, straight lines; artificial lightning zigged and zagged.
A hexagonal crate of soil exploded. He saw a legionary go down, the gaping hole in its chest-plate lined with the glow of molten ceramite. Another fell, drilled through in three different places by the indigo beams of a multi-laser. Mass-reactives blew all over the frontal casing of one of the thallaxii. It staggered, sinking lower upon its knees. Gas sprayed from a severed tube. Cawl thought it would fall, but it paused as it rerouted function away from damaged components, then it lumbered on, the slight limp it now suffered hindering it not at all.
The legionaries fell back like ghosts. The thallaxii plodded on, weapons swinging on their gimbals as they tracked, locked onto and assessed everything that might pose a threat.
A moment's relative quiet fell. Alarms wailed all over the facility. Decompression winds surged violently and died as breaches in the agri-caverns were made and bulkheads sealed against them. Cawl risked poking his head around the fallen utility column he cowered behind. He gripped his volkite serpenta so tightly his fingers ached. He had not fired a single shot.
An oxygen pipe overhead roared like a flamethrower. Cawl risked accessing the infosphere to hunt out its command protocols and shut it off. He found it. Like an extinguished candle the pipe went out. The wall opposite was blackened for metres around. At least now he felt he had done something useful.
The thallaxii paused ten metres away. Cawl had a minor pict view in his third eye run a text screed eavesdrop on their conversation. Their communications were terse, to the point and exclusively concerned with killing.
Their next course of action agreed, they advanced again. Cawl swallowed. He was assigned as support to them. He would have to follow. He did not want to. He was unaccustomed to the armour he wore. The weight of the servo-harness mounted on his back was supported by suspensors, but the mass upset his gait, and he was forced to move oddly, ridiculously, to keep up with the shock troops.
Chiming more insistent than his threat indicators announced an incoming communication. Hester Aspertia Sigma-Sigma's mirrored visage imposed itself over his field of vision.
'Cawl,' she said. 'Nothing like battle, is there?' She was gloating. No doubt she could read his discomfort through her battle omnispex. He was subordinate to her, and no one that served Sigma-Sigma was beyond her oversight. He imagined his craven heartbeat racing across her own displays, and he attempted to quell his fear.
'The enemy have fallen back,' he said.
'The Ordo Reductor Taghma serving here is a fine one,' she said. 'But the war goes ill elsewhere. The Heptaligon stands, but the extraction station at Trisolian A-3 has already fallen. The enemy will be sending reinforcements from there.'
'What should I do?' he said.
'Attend to the fallen. Fight,' she said. 'I have much to deal with.' Her face vanished from his third eye.
The squeal of treads on metal grabbed his attention. Smoke curled around a fast-moving tank festooned with weaponry.
'Legionary Sicaran Destroyer tank, sector two!' Cawl vox blurted. He ducked as it opened fire.
The thallaxii were incapable of fear, and therefore evidenced a more heroic reaction than Cawl, They immediately returned fire Unlike the legionaries' battleplate, the tank's hide was proof against their weaponry. Earthing sparks fizzed from its hull. Plasma carved molten slashes into its glacis, but it accelerated towards the cyborgs, spewing laser beams.
A thallax at the far end of the line spouted magnesium-white fire from its blank faceplate. It fell to its knees and clanged to the floor face down, its organics reduced to greasy smoke. A second lost an arm to a las-beam. The limb spun through the air, and clattered off the wall behind where Cawl hid. He cringed at the noise.
'Armoured assault, sector two!' he shouted. He sent out a
data burst and activated his locator beacon at full strength, not caring who might lock on to it.
The thallaxii parted to allow the tank through. It caught one a glancing blow on the leg as it passed, knocking the cyborg down. Stabbing fires flickered into the tank's weaker rear armour. It locked its tracks, skidding to a halt right by Cawl's hiding place. It bore the dark blue heraldry of the Night Lords, and was covered in chains dangling bones and bloody scraps that had recently adorned living bodies. The tracks spun in opposite directions, pivoting the tank on the spot to face the dwindling number of cyborg troops.
Cawl hunkered down, praying to the Omnissiah that he would not be detected. He came close to giving away his position with a joyous emission of data when a short, pointed message wrote itself across his internal displays.
A red marker blinked into being on his cartograph. Reinforcements moved slowly towards a companionway gallery overlooking the cavern. Chanting the doleful, single digit of death, 'Zero, zero, zero, zero,' a coven of myrmidon destructors moved in to attack.
They were massive things, belligerent grotesques humming with power, fanatic technicae who had given their bodies entirely over to augmentation. The thallaxii they came to support had the uniformity of manufactorum produced units, and appeared inhuman. Not so the myrmidons.
The myrmidons were architects of their own enhancement, and so they were blessed with the potency the Machine-God provides to he who works his own will upon his own form. Little more of flesh remained to them than it did to the thallaxii, but they appeared more human for their ugliness. On one a polished skull, most likely the warrior's original, jutted out on a steel cable neck from beneath hunched shoulders. His arms bore matched plasma cannons. Eyes of red glass swept the battlefield with the thin lines of ranging lasers. From the front of another dangled a pair of flesh-and-blood arms, incongruously wired into a metal breastplate. All of them wore robes, though they did not need them. They were the priests of the Machine-God as destroyer, horrific and potent with the Motive Force in reward for their devotion.
Their stride was as measured, slowed to a reverential pace by the burden of their inbuilt reactors and enormous weapons. Their heads swayed with their ponderous motion. The Sicaran noticed them, and its turret rotated to bring its twin weapons to bear.
Double pulses of lascannon fire tore up towards the companionway, catching it from beneath. Gobbets of metal sprayed upwards. One of the myrmidons was caught full in the chest, rocked back by the explosive reaction of cohesive light contacting matter.
The others repaid the favour.
Cawl's ears vibrated painfully to the building thrum of a conversion beamer powering to fire. A cumbersome, complex weapon to operate, in the hands of the myrmidon lord who bore it, it reached its full, deadly potential. Only one such as he had the internal space to mount dampers required to stabilise the weapon correctly, the cranial implants to calculate the precise focal point for the beam reaction, the internal reactor to feed its massive hunger for power. Light gathered in the weapon's exhaust vents.
'Omnissiah exultant!' the myrmidon blared through multiple vox-emitters. A blinding shaft of energy burst from the weapon's blunt end, and slammed into the Sicaran's turret. This did not cause the damage.
At a conversion beamer's focal point, matter underwent an instantaneous conversion to energy. It was this that ripped away the turret with the force of a minor fusion reactor going critical.
The detonation was deafening. Cawl managed to pull himself back behind his cover just in time to avoid being blinded by the accompanying after-flash and immolated by the fire of freed atoms.
Pressure ripped at his robes. The explosion's electromagnetic pulse sent his implants haywire. For a moment, he lay stunned, machine senses offline, human senses numbed.
He pulled himself up with the help of his servo-arms.
The Sicaran was a blackened husk. The top half had been completely obliterated. The bottom half was cupped like a palm holding a guttering fire.
'So perish all who turn the gifts of the Machine-God against the Omnissiah,' intoned the myrmidon.
Cawl glanced up at them. He ran down the corridor, pleasantly surprised at the extra strength his power armour gave him. But he was too slow to catch his charges. The legionaries had been sheltering at a junction. The flash and rattle of weapons receded down the corridor to the left, leading to one of the vast cavern-fields. The cyborgs' in sight was immune to the overload that had floored Cawl, and they had already moved on. He looked around helplessly. Dead Night Lords and Word Bearers were scattered about the decking. Their colours were different to one another, but the grisly nature of the trophies they wore made them brothers of a sort, and set them apart from legionaries as Cawl knew them.
There was something else there, a ragged corpse in black with the stature of a standard human.
Sensing something amiss, Cawl approached it gingerly, priming his serpenta. He pointed the weapon at the figure, though he had no reason to believe it alive.
The figure had been felled by an access panel whose workings he seemed to have been in the process of subverting with a portable cogitation unit. He was face down, hidden by his robes, one pale hand stretched out to the side of him.
Cawl's Mechanicum power armour allowed him to roll the augmented figure over with his foot.
The corpse was a tech-adept. The augmetics told Cawl that But his robes were black, a colour no forge world wore, and the sacred symbology of the Cult Mechanicus was perverted. Around the machina opus stitched over his heart were eight arrows, like those of a compass rose, and the skull contained within the cogs wore a daemonic grimace.
Cawl looked more closely. There were strange malformations in the adept's flesh that augmentation could not explain. His jaw line was fringed with bony excrescence that had grown over some of the metal of his implanted voxmitter. Upon his head. Upon his head… Something moved upon his head, wet and sinuous.
Gripped with foreboding, Cawl leaned in to see what nestled between the cabling across the adept's scalp.
As Cawl bent down, the adept's eyes snapped open. They were like no eyes Cawl had ever seen. Vertical slit pupils split irises striated with purple and gold.
Instinctively, Cawl fired his volkite into the man's face. Metal and flesh vanished beneath the torrent of energy, exploding into steam. He shut off his gun when the body ignited. Dying augmetics sent the headless man's limbs into a maniac dance.
Entranced, horrified, Cawl watched the corrupt adept burn.
He had killed his first man. Suddenly, the weapon felt more natural in his hand.
Cawl remained staring at the corpse for some time, until the plaintive psalm of a distress cant intruded itself onto his consciousness. The fallen myrmidon was still alive. He had work to do.
He went back up the corridor to the myrmidon's aid. His companions had brought him down from the companionway. When Cawl appeared, their mechadendrites and other subsidiary limbs laid the injured cyborg down and they stepped back.
Cawl knelt to attend the injured man, if man he could claim to be. He set about his work eagerly. He was well versed in the secrets of mechanics and biologies, and healed the warrior's wounds efficiently.
Soon he was immersed in the hallowed mysteries of nerve shunts and biologic emulator organ repair. When he was done, the myrmidons departed with a meaningful nod, and chittered binaric speed prayers. More thanks pulsed from their augmented minds into his, along with a token of gratitude, a promise of future help.
The myrmidons were holy avatars of the Machine-God's wrath. Cawl had earned their respect. The moment should have been precious, but Cawl could not put the dead adept's disfigurements from his mind.
Sixteen
A Calculated Betrayal
Battle continued in Trisolian A-4's cavern farms for the remainder of the day. Cawl went where he was needed, using his arts to mend the fallen, until fate found him within one of the giant agrifields.
> Lines of blue-green foliage marched away to vanishing point under yellow lumens suspended from cold, weeping rock. Long troughs of hydroponic liquid fed bare roots. He supposed it must normally be a quiet place. No more.
Half the cavern was ablaze. The troughs had been broken somewhere down the line, and a lake of thin yellow water had filled the perfectly flat space. Missile fire and the roar of bolters boomed, amplified by the stone. Agri-machines, oblivious to the chaos, raced towards the damaged troughs to repair, only to be shot down.
Between the rows of food plants, thallaxii marched, their line staggered to increase the spread of their gunfire. Energy weapons made musical sounds with their discharge. Legionary weapons fired back, smashing the cyborgs from their feet. Undaunted, the survivors pressed on. The traitors had set up a wide front in the field. Rather than destroying the crops and moving on, they seemed to be attempting to take the facility. That made them vulnerable.
Cawl's own fear had diminished now. Taking a life had made him careless of his own, and he walked in a half-crouch behind a thallax trooper, using its heavily armoured war body to shield his far more delicate own.
The rapid, doomy rattle of a heavy bolter sounded not far ahead. Speeding shells scythed down the plants. Cawl ducked behind the thallax, but it shook and stopped suddenly. Bio-suspension fluids gushed from holes in its front and fire licked from around its joints. Enraged by the death of the machine, Cawl leaned out around its corpse and snapped off a shot from his volkite. Dark, armoured shapes were advancing through the smoke, weapons thumping. The thallax took another hit. Cawl took a breath, and leaned out again, yelling in exultation as he punched one of the armoured giants from its feet with a precise shot through the helmet.
But they were not firing back. It had become silent. Dangerously silent.
He looked to the side. The thallax had frozen. Red lumens blinked on the back of the casings of them all. Suddenly, they put up their weapons, and went into a stance of attention, before shutting down. All the Mechanicum troops were inactive. Tech thralls froze. Skitarii spasmed as they fought with orders imposed from outside. Only the adepts and others with independent will remained active, and they looked about in bewilderment. Those that continued to fight were shot down. Weapons clacked onto the floor as the rest took stock of their situation, and surrendered.
