The warsmith gloried in the song of war, but he and his warriors were far from mindless berserkers and their foe far from defenceless weaklings. The Iron Warriors wielded their bloodlust as a coldly precise weapon, focusing it, rendering it down to an incandescent core. The warriors of other Legions had long ago surrendered all self-control, the bloody World Eaters being the most infamous, but the warsmith would never allow his warriors to do so. Others of his Legion had answered the call of the Blood God, burning brightly, yet all too briefly as they drowned entire worlds in blood. Ferrous Ironclaw had vowed to wage the Long War, and would never surrender himself to such short-lived and shortsighted victories.
As the carnage ground on and the weaker of the bastion’s defenders were ruthlessly culled, the stronger, more experienced of their number mustered near the city’s centre to mount what must surely be their final stand. Whoever was in command of the defenders, the warsmith was forced to give him due credit, for after the initial slaughter the defenders mounted a series of well-coordinated counter-attacks. Venting their pent-up bloodlust in their typically cold fashion, the Iron Warriors were by necessity forced to spread out through the shattered, burning city and so became prone to envelopment by any sufficiently organised foe.
The warsmith had anticipated this, of course, and ensured that each of his sub-commands was formed into a smaller version of the overall force, well able to defend itself against a range of enemies. Individual squads were accompanied by Dreadnoughts, Obliterators, Predator tanks or, where they could be controlled, the fearsome daemon-engines. These small, concentrated, all-arms groupings were able to take on many times their own number, and to deal with any type of enemy that dared oppose them.
Soon, a score of bitter, close-quarter battles were raging amongst the ruins, each every bit as bloody as the slaughter beyond the breach. These confrontations came down to combat blades and knives, grenades and pistols. Where before the penal legionnaires had come on in a frenzied horde, now the defenders were drilled Imperial Guardsmen, determined to repel the brutal besiegers or to fall defending the bastion. They knew the city well, and used sewers and service conduits to move about unseen and to launch a series of coordinated ambushes.
By the time the warsmith and his retinue were closing on the central citadel, his force was separated into a dozen sub-commands. None had avoided casualties, and none had expected to. One of Ironclaw’s own Chosen, a veteran of the Siege of Terra, had been slain when an enemy gunship had strafed the street the retinue was crossing. It was not the gunship’s fire that had struck the warrior down, however, but a cruel twist of fortune – or perhaps the fickle judgement of the Ruinous Powers, punishment for some unknown failing. The warrior had unleashed a fearsome torrent from his autocannon as he turned in the centre of the street he was crossing. The gunship’s cockpit had disintegrated in a hail of micro detonations, and bereft of control the vessel had upended, veered about and come smashing to the ground. That veteran of the Long War had been struck down and consumed by the explosion, his Terminator armour, a suit as old as he, unable to protect him from the impact and resulting explosion. In what amounted to a powerful portent, the warrior’s armour had survived almost unscarred, while the body within had been burned to ash.
As the warsmith finally laid eyes upon the citadel, reports of the night’s battles came flooding in. Over a dozen Iron Warriors were unaccounted for, while one of the Dreadnoughts had been lost when an air defence battery had been turned upon it. Two more Defilers had been struck down, each overeager and incautious as the lust for battle overcame the daemon-things within them.
For the defenders, however, the butcher’s bill was many times higher, and the battle was not even concluded. Indeed, the siege of the Bastion Primus was yet to enter its final, climactic phase.
The warsmith had no way of calculating the precise casualties his force had inflicted, and no real desire to do so. All that mattered was that the raw stuff of reality was even now being twisted and stretched out of all recognition by the pressure of the warp as it crowded inwards. Were the slaughter to continue to engulf the entire planet of Bellum Colonia, were the Iron Warriors to slay and brutalise its entire population, then perhaps the thin skein that separated reality from the Sea of Souls might be breached, like the walls of this very bastion. Then, the denizens of the warp would come swarming through, and in all likelihood a full-scale daemonic incursion would ensue. Bellum Colonia would become a daemon world, a half-light realm ruled over by the immortal servants of the Ruinous Powers.
But that would not be, for Ferrous Ironclaw had no interest in the world of Bellum Colonia. He cared only for its central strongpoint, the lynchpin in its defences. The Bastion Primus.
The citadel at the heart of the bastion soared overhead, its bulk black and glinting with the flickering reflections of the fires that consumed the city all about. The sky behind was lightening with a grey false dawn, and the warsmith vowed there and then that not a single defender would see the true dawn rise. He vowed that the citadel would be cast down, one block at a time if necessary, each torn asunder by his taloned hands. The Caliphar, wounded unto death and bleeding into his silken sheets, would soon be slain, and there was nothing that the pitiful forces of Terra could do to save him…
With a snarl, the warsmith stalked before the rearing citadel, barely noticing the wall he ploughed straight through, nor the shower of debris scattered in his wake. His Chosen at his back, he walked into the open, his baleful glare fixed on the citadel’s armoured portal.
‘Ghar nhag,’ the warsmith spoke a word of binding into his vox. A sound as of a furnace opening wide to vent its infernal heat sounded from nearby. ‘Lor!’
A ruin to the warsmith’s left exploded in dust and scattered rubble as a mechanical form powered forwards on mighty-pistoned forearms, followed a moment later by three more. Though smaller than the spider-form Defilers, these particular daemon-engines were far more suited to what Ironclaw had in mind for the citadel. The lead engine was a mass of pistons and flailing mechanical tentacles, its central mass a heavily armoured shell. Its forelegs were far larger than those at its rear, lending it a vaguely simian gait, its glowering head low between its massively armoured shoulders. Those following behind were of a similar type, though no two were armed identically. It was clear that here was the work of the most blasphemously skilled of daemon-engineers.
Imagining the Caliphar that doomed city stark with terror upon his deathbed, Ferrous Ironclaw gestured towards the citadel with a taloned hand.
The daemon-engines surged forwards to obey.
The first powered across the open space before the citadel, the tower’s weapons batteries opening up, hundreds of rounds churning up the ground and ricocheting from its armoured bulk in a hail of dirty sparks. Ten metres from the base of the tower the mechanical nightmare bent almost double, its piston-driven limbs tense and coiled, before propelling itself with unimaginable force at the wall.
The impact was staggering, the daemon-engine’s foreclaws digging into the citadel’s armoured hide to lend it purchase. The creature hauled itself up the wall, its animalistic head sweeping back and forth as if hunting some unseen prey. The head shot suddenly about, its glowing eyes narrowing as it caught some trace of its prey. It withdrew an arm, stretched it back and pistoned it hard into the wall; the entire structure trembling under the force. It seemed to listen, as if deciphering the seismic echo or sniffing out the souls of stunned defenders.
Then a searing fire guttered to life as clusters of melta-weapons mounted on its limbs unleashed the power of a sun. The roar of the weapons’ concentrated fire searing through the citadel’s outer armour was nigh deafening to those on the outside; it must have rendered those within entirely senseless.
But before the daemon-engine on the wall could complete its task, the warsmith gestured a second time, and another engine ploughed forwards. Clearly akin to the first, this one had a trio of wi
de-mouthed cannons mounted to its fore where the other sported forearms and head. It put the warsmith in mind of the ancient legends of the Grekans, where three-headed hell-dogs had guarded the gates to the underworld. But this infernal engine would not be guarding anything. Rather, it would do the opposite.
As one, all three of the engine’s weapons projected a blast of concentrated warp-stuff directly at the citadel’s armoured portal. The fusillade was accompanied by an atonal roar that could only be the wailing of the damned as they writhed in eternal torment in the deepest, darkest reaches of the warp. Ironclaw’s ears rang with the glorious outburst, while any mortal who had not dedicated his soul to the Ruinous Powers must surely have been driven utterly insane by the merest hint of that infernal cacophony.
The armoured portal, a five-metre-tall gateway designed to withstand massed melta-cannon fire, turned to seething liquid metal under the relentless, otherworldly blast. Spurred on by the spectacle, the other daemon-engines joined the assault, throwing themselves at the walls as had the first or unleashing their own abominable weapons.
No man-made structure could hope to stand against such concentrated wrath.
The defenders’ fire died off as those within were shaken and stunned by the terrible attack. Ironclaw could taste their terror, nigh see it coiling upwards as the warp closed ever tighter inwards. Truly, the eyes of unknowable beings were being turned upon the bastion this day, just as the warsmith had hoped.
‘Kharak!’ Ironclaw bellowed another word of command, even his augmented voice barely carrying over the relentless clamour of the daemon-engines’ assault. The Forgefiend concentrating upon breaching the armoured portal resisted the order for a few seconds, before silencing its weapon with undisguised reluctance. Ironclaw bared his metallic teeth at the daemon-engine and it backed off a step or two, cowed by the being bound as its master.
‘Muster the warriors,’ the warsmith ordered the nearest of his Chosen. ‘The end draws near.’
As the Chosen relayed his master’s order to gather the grand company before the bastion, Ferrous Ironclaw crossed the open space before the portal, the defenders’ gunfire now silenced.
The portal writhed with unknowable energies, and waves of baleful power radiated from its surface. Looking upon it, Ironclaw saw the twisted faces of the damned rise and sink amongst the energies, and he gloried in the sheer blasphemy of the spectacle.
The roar of an engine and the grinding of huge tracks caused the warsmith to turn in time to see one of his grand company’s Land Raiders smash through an already ruined structure before coming to a halt and lowering its forward assault ramp. As the warriors transported within dismounted, more armoured vehicles closed in on the gathering, and soon scores of ironclad Traitor Marines mustered to begin the final assault.
So effective had the primarch’s virus-bombing of Tallarn been that his own warriors had been forced to wage war from the confines of their armoured machines for long weeks, only able to dismount for limited periods lest even their Legiones Astartes bodies be overwhelmed by the contagion still ravaging the planet. The defenders of Tallarn had been unable to fight outside of their own armoured vehicles at all. Now, they cringed within their shelters or beneath the last of their domed cities, their ruler wounded unto death and the primarch himself preparing their final doom.
‘Warriors of Iron!’ Ferrous Ironclaw addressed his grand company, a hundred and more grim-faced helms fixed expressionlessly upon him. ‘The gods themselves watch our deeds this day, and our foe cowers upon his deathbed. This place is ours, and so too shall be our enemy’s head before the day is out!’
A chorus of war-cries swept the ranks, but the warsmith held up one talon for silence.
‘But our work here is not yet done,’ said Ironclaw as the warriors fell silent. ‘Only when our real foe deigns to enter the fray shall we truly prove ourselves worthy, in the name of the primarch.’
A bitter tension descended upon the warriors of the grand company, for each and every one of the warsmith’s followers knew well the foe he spoke of. The thought of that most hated of enemies served only to fuel the already raging fires of war within each, their eagerness to face him once more a palpable thing.
Turning his back on his warriors, the warsmith faced the armoured portal, its surface still writhing with warp-spawned energies. The Caliphar of Tallarn cringed within; he was certain of it. The primarch would be pleased to receive the head of that foe, and in delivering it, Ironclaw knew that the Iron Warriors’ true enemy must surely come.
Firing his lightning claws and girding himself to the charge, the warsmith bellowed the war cry of his Legion as his warriors followed in his wake.
‘Iron within!’ he cried, his serrated claws scything through the armoured portal and sending gobbets of liquefied matter arcing in all directions.
‘Iron without!’ the warsmith’s warriors replied as the grand company plunged headlong into the tunnels of the citadel.
The slaughter that ensued made the fall of the city appear no more than an appetiser at a feast of godless carnage.
Ferrous Ironclaw’s twin hearts pounded deep within his Terminator-armoured chest as he stepped through the wrecked hatch and into the chamber at the heart of the Caliphar’s palace. The warsmith was covered head to foot in the blood of his foes; for the last hour he and his warriors had fought the defenders hand-to-hand, face-to-face. Though none of the Caliphar’s elite palace guard were the equal of a Traitor Marine, they had fought with all the ferocity and zeal they were famed for, and to a man had died well, if messily.
Debris crunching under his tread, the warsmith entered the Caliphar’s inner sanctum and glanced balefully around. It was a large chamber, the walls hung with flickering pict-slates and looped with guttering cabling. The lumens had failed, the power now intermittent thanks to the devastation the Iron Warriors had wrought upon the infrastructure of the Crescent City. The only light illuminating the inner sanctum was the flickering of the screens, which every now and then locked on to a feed of the burning city before being consumed by churning static once more.
A sharp detonation sent a shower of sparks arcing across the chamber, snapping the warsmith’s attention to the clustered command terminals at its heart. His blood-flecked lips splitting in a feral leer, his metallic teeth glinting in the bright static of the nearby pict-slates, he stepped forwards, his gaze now locked upon the figure at the heart of the chamber.
‘Traitor…’ the man slumped across the master command lectern spat through lacerated lips.
The warsmith’s vision swam as he regarded his foe, his grey military uniform soaked in his own blood and caked with dust. Was this the Calipher...?
‘You’ll pay,’ the man coughed, the last of strength clearly ebbing away. ‘Truly is it said that the wages of sin are–’
‘Spare me your decrepit sermon,’ said the warsmith, coming to stand before the broken figure. ‘I come for your head.’
‘Then take it, abomination!’ the dying man spat, a trickle of blood running down his chin.
Ferrous felt the bow-wave of onrushing fate even as death loomed through the warp, a thousand potential events converging into a cold, bitter singularity. He moved to the left as fast as his hulking Terminator armour would allow, just as a shadow emerged from the darkness at his back.
‘Kill it!’ the Caliphar shrieked as loud as his ruined lungs could manage. ‘Kill the traitor before he dooms us all!’
The Caliphar’s champion was little more than a blur, his genhanced body a scything whirlwind of death.
With a thought, Ironclaw’s serrated lightning blades spat into actinic life and he lashed out, one claw cleaving the air where the cyber-dervish had whirled but a fraction of a second before.
The champion dived back into the shadows before reappearing an instant later somewhere to the right, a pair of matched power scimitars scything out of the darkness in
a vicious attempt to cleave the warsmith’s head from his shoulders. Ironclaw snapped his head about sharply, yet still the tip of one blade parted the skin across his left cheek, the wound so clean and precise he barely felt it.
‘I swore to my primarch I would present him with the head of the Caliphar of the Crescent City,’ the warsmith bellowed as the whirling figure dashed to one side, nothing of it but shadow and steel visible. ‘And that I shall do!’
Now the warsmith plunged headlong into that storm of blades. It was clearly the last thing the Caliphar’s champion had expected him to do, and the rhythm of the enemy’s swordplay changed drastically. One moment it was poised and deadly, the next desperate and clumsy. Sparks flew as the scimitars cut into the warsmith’s armour, great tears rent in its fabric. Even as the eyes of the Ruinous Powers turned fully upon him, the pressure of the warp so great it threatened to crush reality to a pulp, the warsmith drew back his lightning claws and brought them together in a titanic sweep.
Where the two sets of fist-mounted, serrated blades converged, the body of the champion was cut into a dozen and more chunks of meat.
Silence fell upon the ruined chamber as the unrecognisable human ruin collapsed at the warsmith’s feet.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he heard the Caliphar whisper behind him, and he turned, flexing his lightning claws as he prepared to decapitate his enemy and deliver his head to the primarch. ‘None of this matters…’
The warsmith stepped before the command lectern as the Caliphar raised his head with what must surely be the last of his strength.
‘You think yourself the victor in this war,’ the Caliphar said, his voice now barely audible. ‘You’ve lost…’
Treacheries of the Space Marines Page 16
