The Dragons snarled, cursed, threatened, and fired bolters overhead or into flesh. Most of all, they wielded the monstrousness of their own bodies. They brandished bone-blades and let loose the grotesquerie of their faces. They sacrificed their former sense of identity on the altar of necessity. They spread terror before them, and it tore through the crowd, a wildfire and plague. With it came anguish and fanatical repentance. Every lightning flash was now understood to be the anger of the God-Emperor, and having brought this on themselves, the people had but a single goal: to propitiate their deity. Volos and his brothers were here to show them there was only one route to salvation, and that was through the flesh of the enemy.
The terror and its gospel flashed through the hive faster than the crowd could run, and the population of Aighe Mortis, in hiding or not, guilty or innocent, poured into the streets, screaming their love for the Emperor and their fear of his monsters. The Dragons spread out, each becoming the master of a different quadrant, and they controlled the flow of the crowd. Setheno had caught up to Volos, and as she marched one step behind him, her voice travelled from vox-caster to vox-caster, driving in its message of damnation and bloody penitence.
They herded the crowds west at first, gathering the numbers until they were a colossal army. The terrified outliers were too far away to see the Dragons or hear the canoness, but the message and the horror reached them all the same. The gigantic mass of repentance turned south, then east, and then north, to where the rubble barrier ended and the way was clearest to Concordat Hill. Driven by thunder, wind and raging, armoured beasts, the masses were uncounted insects on a mindless charge. Volos found that he hated them.
Almost as much as he did himself.
The cultists were on their feet again. They were disoriented at first and unsure whether to attack or flee, and the Black Dragons cut swaths of them down, clearing the way for the recovering Guard. Toharan led the assault, his squads unbroken by the fire in the sky, unbowed by the rage of the wind. They took the summit of Concordat Hill. Toharan had the Devastator squads hold the position while his tactical teams moved down the eastern slope, tearing the enemy apart. He was surprised by how quickly the cultists found their footing again. They weren’t organised now, simply attacking as a mob, their mouths open in raging howls whose sound was stolen by the wind. Rather than cowed, they seemed to be energised by the storm, as if it were a reflection of the Chaos in their souls. The delay that the Dragon Claws had bought with the dropped tower had run its course, and though reinforcements weren’t as quick to arrive as they had been before, whether they came in a stream or a flood was academic. They were here, and they were numberless.
But the Concordat was taken, and the Guard consolidated the position. The transports arrived to place a Basilisk gun on the Concordat’s landing pad. Soon, the endless roar of the wind was punctuated by the deep crack-boom of the gun, and the shelling of enemy concentrations had begun. On the ground, Toharan couldn’t see the artillery targets, but from the sound of each shot he could tell that the bombardment was taking in all the points of the compass.
The gun couldn’t defend the hill itself, so the cultists had to be driven back and back, until there was no longer any chance of the Imperial forces losing the heights. The Black Dragons plunged into their ranks like a knife in the belly. Though there were no organised lines to break, and the fighting reminded Toharan of treading water, the Space Marines drew the frothing cultists to them and away from the Mortisian Guard on the summit.
The momentum of both forces reached a standstill once again. The slaughter wreaked by the Adeptus Astartes was enough to hold the cultists at bay. But the heretics had such numbers that, midway down the hill, Toharan’s advance slowed to a stop. Each shot of his bolter blew a head to paste, each sweep of his chainsword cut bodies in half, and every one of his brothers added to the tally of gigantic butchery. Lascannons annihilated dozens of cultists at once, blowing craters of flesh into their packed density. Flamers reduced advancing walls of bodies to ash. But there were always more. There were simply too many of the enemy to kill.
Later, Toharan would wonder what had made him realise a change was coming. Like a slight breeze that foreshadows a storm, a breath against the cheek just before the cloudburst, the premonitory moment came, he would decide, as a nuance in the way the cultists attacked. There was a slight decrease in intensity. When Toharan culled the immediate enemy with his chainsword, the breathing space he created for himself lasted one beat longer. It was as if the heretics were becoming distracted, their minds no longer focussed, to the exclusion of everything else, on killing the Space Marines.
Toharan had time to notice the shift, and a question was just forming in his conscious mind when the tide swept in with enraged shrieks and chanted, hysterical prayers. He looked south, and saw a crowd surging forward through the streets like a torrent churning through a narrow gorge. A few of its members carried firearms, and many of them wore Militia uniforms, though Toharan saw some Guard insignia too. The vast majority of the mob, though, was made up of civilians. They wielded makeshift weapons: short bits of metal for clubs, longer ones for spears. Many were unarmed, and simply had their arms outstretched to grab their foe. They were so frenzied that, at first, Toharan thought they were a massive wave of cultists, coming in on the flank. But then they fell on the heretics. Toharan’s opponents were swept away by the foaming tide of exultant, vengeful, terrified faith. He almost lost his footing in the storm of penitence. Most of the cultists were armed, and they fought back, but the momentum of the surge was inexorable, and the heretics went down beneath a swarm of clawing, grasping hands and beating metal.
Now Toharan could make out, in the cacophony of screams and ravings, the God-Emperor being called on and praised, and begged for forgiveness. He looked to his right again and stared at the savage flow of the faithful until he saw the source of its impetus. Behind the crowd, raging with bone and bolter, came Volos. Toharan saw him gnash his fangs, saw him spear a man with an arm-blade and raise him high. He launched a fountain of blood over the running figures before him, driving them to still greater howling panic, before hurling the corpse through the air. Where it landed, the cries for mercy climbed new heights and the people clawed at those in front of them, urging them to go faster and faster yet, that they might show their devotion by ripping still more heretics to pieces. Setheno was just behind Volos, and as they came closer, nearby vox-casters picked up the canoness’s excoriating liturgy.
Volos drew level with Toharan. He was a colossus risen from the most fevered depths of humanity’s collective unconscious. His black ceramite dripping with gore and flesh, his face contorted into that of a saurian predator, he had become something that Toharan had never wished to contemplate, but now regarded with horrified understanding. He looked at his brother, and saw a daemon. ‘Sergeant,’ he said into the vox-link as Volos passed. The Dragon Claw stopped. The rout he had created ran on without him, the wind and demented lightning carrying on his work. Toharan looked past him at the mob. He saw no trace of reason in its rampage. This was not the redemption he had planned for the rebels. This was not the reasoned return to the light of the Emperor. This was a plunge down into the very pit from which he was trying to pull the Black Dragons. ‘What have you done?’ he whispered.
‘What was necessary.’ Volos spat the word like it was poison.
‘I fear that I am seeing you clearly, brother, for the first time.’
Volos turned his head and looked down at him. His black eyes were as distant as the stars. ‘With respect, brother-captain,’ he said, and the only emotion in his voice was a resigned disgust, ‘I doubt that very much.’
He moved off. Setheno followed. Her exhortations, as calm and closed to entreaty as ever, did not pause, but her helmet turned Toharan’s way. Beneath the helm’s fixed rage, he sensed cold-blooded appraisal. He returned the favour. He had thought her an enemy, and now he was certain. She was, in some way, responsible for this madness. And if he owed
her a debt of thanks for bringing his brother’s true nature to the surface, she was as tainted as he was. He watched them go, herding their monstrous sheep. Decisions that he had imagined would be hard to make were suddenly easy.
Reflective flak armour was no power armour, but it had saved Lettinger’s life. He’d been caught on open ground, just below the top of Concordat Hill, when the first, most punishing blows of the wind had hit, and with them the razoring hail of glass. He had been knocked down with the other humans. When he had been able to look up, he had seen a scoured landscape. The black and brown of Aighe Mortis had changed into a flashing, roiling hell where the only things that stood were the black silhouettes of the rotting hive towers and the relentless shapes of the Black Dragons. From his prone perspective, abased in spite of himself, the Space Marines were more like gods than ever. They were monuments that moved, but would not be moved. His own status as a mere human was driven home yet again.
He rose as soon as he could, and mere human though he was, he was still up and taking the hill before any of the Guard. But once more, he was behind the Space Marine advance, and as he crossed the summit to the eastern slope, now with the Devastators at his back, his hunting was not what it had been earlier. Some cultists did get past Toharan’s teams, but they were easily contained by the Devastators’ heavy bolter fusillades. His own kills, it seemed to him, had a pathetic ‘me too’ quality, and until he worked his way a bit further down the hill, his martial skills were most heavily called on in avoiding the indignity of being cut down by friendly fire.
He killed what he could, and he was only a dozen metres away from Toharan when the surge happened. He watched the shrieking horde overwhelm the cultists, and saw very little to distinguish the behaviour of the heretic and the faithful. Then he saw Volos and Setheno. The Dragon Claw’s tainted nature was now visible to all, and Lettinger felt some small satisfaction in being vindicated. But the power Volos wielded was disturbing. And the presence of Setheno made it clear to Lettinger how mistaken he had been to seek her as an ally. She was at least as corrupt as the Space Marine.
They passed, and Toharan stood still for a moment. Then, perhaps sensing Lettinger’s gaze, he turned around. Lettinger nodded to him. The monsters of Chaos who had just passed below him were dangerous. But so was he, and so was his ally. They would not make the mistake of underestimating the threat before them. They would not turn from the measures that would have to be taken.
CHAPTER 19
THE SANCTUARY HORN
For the third time in quick succession, the Black Dragons tasted ash instead of victory. They had retreated from Antagonis, lost their captain on Flebis, and now the word spread of daemonic corruption. The dawning triumph on Aighe Mortis was a false one. It was being won through the archenemy’s means, and so his military defeat became his spiritual victory. That was the word. That was the story. The damage, though, was not caused as much by what the story told, as by how it was told, and by who told it. Toharan spoke to the Disciples of Purity on a dedicated vox-channel he had set up. They, in turn, passed on the tale of Volos’s taint to their squads. The whisper was a virus, and it travelled the landed contingent of Second Company with the speed and virulence of an epidemic. It was as if the Black Dragons had created their own strain of doubtworm and infected themselves. Some succumbed, others fought off the illness, but all were injured. The body of the company took sick.
There were those, like Toharan, who believed in the truth of the tale. These were the most fervent of the Disciples, those whose desire for purity of body, of dogma, and of Codex compliance had become the master drive of their identity. There were those whose resentments and ambitions made them want to believe, and choose to do so. There were those who looked to what they knew of the sergeant of the Dragon Claws, and considered the source of the tale, and felt their anger grow in the face of the lie. And so, even as the Dragons fought shoulder-to-shoulder, brothers together, to purge the heretics and consolidate the gains of Concordat Hill, the schism grew. Within minutes, alliances had been formed. They weren’t spoken of, and in many cases their members did not know they had joined one side or the other. But they had, and oaths had been taken as surely as if they had been witnessed by the God-Emperor himself.
Nessun returned to his body and left the Hall of Exaltation. After extended sessions of travelling the immaterium with his mind, his body felt like a suit of clothes cut a few sizes too big. His limbs were awkward, and didn’t want to do as they were bid. His movements lacked grace. Sensation was too distant, seeming to come at one remove. He used the minutes it took him to travel from the Hall to the Revealed Truth’s strategium to master the physical. By the time he walked onto the bridge, he was serenity in motion once more.
Raphyle was awaiting his pleasure. ‘What is your will, Father?’ the Sword asked.
‘It is time for the harvest,’ Nessun said. The explosion of the In Excelsis had not had the effect planetside he had been counting on. Someone had read his move and countered it by using the devastation in precisely the fashion he had intended for his own forces. The tide of the war had turned, and the loss of Aighe Mortis was inevitable. He gave a mental shrug. Control of the planet itself was unimportant. Whether the world was his or not, he would be leaving soon, but would return to teach a new lesson, one that would make everything that had come before seem but the shallowest of prologues. He had seen, through eyes that belonged to him more and more with every beat of thwarted desire, the Black Dragons carve out another material victory. He had also seen them make, from the array of dooms that great Tzeentch had offered them, their final choice. On balance, he thought it a good one. The aesthetics of it pleased him. But for now it was time to complete the immediate task on Aighe Mortis, so that he might head off to meet his greater glory. ‘Order the Foretold Pilgrimage to the surface,’ he said.
‘What about the Immolation Maw?’
‘Does it still live?’
‘As far as our remaining augurs in planetary orbit can tell. It hasn’t moved since the explosion, but it is still intact.’
Nessun hesitated. The chance was there to swoop in personally on the crippled Space Marine cruiser and finish it off. The temptation was delicious, and he allowed himself a few seconds to indulge in it and savour its taste. Then he dismissed it. The mission was at too critical a stage to allow any risk. The Maw might be dead, and it must certainly be hurt, but it might still be capable of striking back. He could not permit harm to come to the Revealed Truth. Not now, when it was about to make the most important journey of its millennia of service to the gospel of Chaos. ‘Avoid it,’ he said. ‘Take up position over the horizon from the Maw. Send the Pilgrimage in now. Sound the horns.’
The Swords of Epiphany squadron left its concealment behind the sun and closed on Aighe Mortis. As the endgame moves began, Nessun felt there was one indulgence he could allow. ‘The warriors of the Metastasis performed their duties on Aighe Mortis well,’ he told Raphyle. ‘They have earned a reward. Tell Captain Meliphael that the Immolation Maw is his.’
The heavy raider split off from the rest of the squadron, hunting for its wounded prey.
Volos retracted his blades and lowered his bolter. He didn’t need to act the monster any longer. The penitent mob had its own momentum. It was gathering recruits far beyond the reach of his epicentre. It was a question now of directing the force of the mob, of sending its fury down the channels that would have the greatest strategic benefit. All that was required was for a Dragon Claw to make an appearance at the head of the kilometres-long rush and gesture. The flood would follow that path with renewed, shrieking fervour. The work, the necessary work, was accomplished.
He brooded over the look Toharan had given him. Their bonds were broken beyond salvage. He knew that now. There had been nothing but horror and disgust in Toharan’s gaze. How should he have responded? he wondered. Should he have defended himself? Should he have explained that he had only killed men he knew to be traitors? And of this, Volos was
sure. For all the raging and fury he had unleashed on the Mortisians, he had never been out of control. He had picked his targets with care. They had all been renegade militiamen or disaffected Guardsmen. They had all been part of the celebration at the foot of the rubble. They were traitors and heretics, even if they did not think so themselves, and by their actions had proven Setheno correct. There was only one verdict possible. So he had killed them, but no others. Anyone whose guilt he was not certain of, anyone who might simply be a civilian caught up in the religious frenzy he had created, he had not touched.
He could have said these things to Toharan. He hadn’t. He doubted Toharan would believe him. He doubted, for that matter, that Toharan could afford to believe anything he said. But the deeper truth was that he had no desire to defend himself. He loathed what he had had to do. And though he had not hurt any innocent citizens directly, he knew their blood coated his hands. The forced march had taken many victims, some trampled, some beaten to death by their neighbours for imagined heresies, others ground into the muck in the attacks on the cultists. Volos was a realist. He knew that war and its unalterable demands made no allowance for the innocent. He had taken part in actions before that had had massive civilian costs. But this time, his role had not been one of direct action. He had not been fighting the enemy with the brutal honesty of bolter and blade. He had become the monster many feared him to be. Perhaps Toharan was right to look at him as he did.
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