by Dan Abnett
Armoured belfries disgorging men onto walls. Escalade ladders slamming into parapet lines, or being poled back past the apogee, every figure clinging on and falling as the ladder toppled. Tower guns and wall batteries firing at the lowest declination, barrels glowing with waste-heat, shells jamming in swollen breeches. The drizzling chime of autoloaders emptying hoppers, raining casings in jingling blizzards that fell in metal drifts, and covered parapet steps like spills of mining slag, obscuring all definition of structure.
Lives leaking out. Slow bleeds. Massive and sudden blood losses. Grim mutilations of extraordinary scope that would surprise the most inventive anatomists. Guns too hot to hold or use. Blades broken and still swinging, jagged edges acting surrogate for the lost fine teeth of hallmark weapons. Screams of death, of pain, of hatred, of loss, of hope, of disappointment, of duty. Last breaths expended in long, slow, shuddering exhalations or brief and violent bursts. Final moments spluttering in bubbles of blood between gasped lips, finalwords whispered to no one, final hopes dashed into darkness. Noise too loud to hear, noise that could only be felt, with no meaning in it.
Bloodstained Blood Angels, vanguard of the line, their beauty revealed as it had always truly been: as cruel and merciless horror, their noble legend put aside so they could kill unashamed, the way their genefather had made them to kill. No false myth of noble angels, that guise gone so that they, though unchanged in aspect, had become the truest, oldest meaning of terrible. A coin reversed. A truth that had been obvious all along, but was now unmasked, unslipped. Their true selves, beings of awe, when awe is a weapon of itself.
Bloodied Imperial Fists, backbone of the defence, yellow panoplies so badged and washed with gore they could be mistaken for their Blood Angels brethren, taking not one step backwards, nor one forward, for there was nothing before them but the brink of hell. Shields tattered, lances shattered, swords cracked to jagged stubs clenched in Imperial fists. Fafnir Rann, plate dappled with blood, red spots on yellow, like some illuminator’s garish notion of a heraldic beast, rampant upon a wall of bodies atop a wall of stone, paired axes hacking like pistons into faces, chests and pauldrons, hooking torn visors into the haze on the backswing. Rann’s breaker-shield had been destroyed in the first fury of the assault, and he had cast it aside, unclasping his war-axe’s twin to wield a cleaver in each hand.
Blow answering blow. The hammer of war, a million individual impacts falling so fast they became one noise that shivered and buckled the air. Unbreakable materials breaking. Unstoppable strengths being stopped. A devolution of war: blades when ammunition was spent, empty guns when blades were broken, mailed fists when blade stubs were lost, bare fists when gauntlets were shredded.
And tip from the darkness, the Iron Warriors, the grey-black flood of a dam that had burst in hell, a deluge of siege-breaker armour and liny that would not stop or ebb until the wall and the bastion was washed away and reduced to fused and smoking pegs of rock, and the path to the Sanctum was opened.
Open all the way to the Lion’s Gate, and the Palatine underbelly, and the last, unassaulted wall of Eternity.
It was the morning of the twenty-second of Quintus. In the last three hours, the Bar’s outermost lines had fallen. After a day of long-range shelling, which had wounded even the central bastion, the mass had come, and the outworks and first two circuit walls had been lost, and then the third wall too, in catastrophically quick succession. The traitor tide had rushed in, higher than any forecast, sundering stone, drowning that which had been safe and dose-held. Imperial Fists had died, overwhelmed as they grimly kept their place. Blood Angels had died, overtaken as they rushed to regroup and stem the flow. The hosts of the Army, unbearably mortal, had died in between the two, crushed to paste and bonemeal and blood-ooze by the iron avalanche.
The fourth circuit wall had to be the flood break. The fourth circuit wall, so impossibly quickly, had become the last line that Sanguinius was prepared to draw. ‘No further’. It had not been an order, it had been a law: an Angelic commandment that allowed for no failure.
An hour of inarticulate horror followed that collision of might.
The fourth circuit wall, Gorgon Bar, the twenty-second of Quintus. In other histories of other wars, it would have been a defining moment, a legendary clash. But in this War of Wars, it was just a sortie, a footnote fast forgotten in a catalogue of equal furies.
There was no grace to it, no order, despite the stoic discipline of the Imperial Fists, the drilled resolution of the Iron Warriors, the elegant execution of the Blood Angels. All that dissolved in moments into blind murder. It was the most intense, most concentrated, most disordered battle of the Terran Siege thus far, and would remain so until the ghastly, inchoate slaughter of the final days.
Fisk Halen turned it in the forty-eighth minute of the assault. With Terminator squads at his side, and a deluge of support fire from Aux-ilia units along the bastion ledge, he drove into Katillon guntower and its adjacent wall top, and compressed the southern hem of the enemy influx with such severity that Iron Warriors tumbled from the wall like spilled beads, both down the scarred face they had scaled and off the inner range into the yards below, where Army halberdiers and skitarii hoplites mobbed and butchered any that the fall had not killed.
Sanguinius, Lord of Baal, his golden hair stained red and dripping, saw the break. He could not reach it, locked as he was in cataphract onslaught, but Rann could, and Furio could, and Bel Sepatus of the Keruvim, and those he directed with a voice that pierced the storm. Rann’s tattered wallguard was the first to reach the crux, and they bore into the tide as if they had no other desire than to meet Halen face to face and clasp his hand.
And there it teetered, on the brink of loss and collapse, for seconds as dense and heavy as centuries. Then Sepatus and his Paladins, their tri-faced emblems obscured by gore, joined Rann’s desperate extension, and bolstered it with their Cataphractii might. In the shadow of Katillon guntower, a burning stump of stone into which shells kept smashing, Imperial Fists and Blood Angels pincered and broke the enemy’s back.
The traitor tide snapped. So many bodies, most of them still living, cascaded from the wall where there was no longer any space for them to exist. They became involuntary weapons, their plummeting armoured forms striking those behind and below, taking them with them, disintegrating ladder frames and scaling chutes, tearing down the rising breach-scaffolds and the belfries of the warsmith engineers. Legionaries rained, a black hail of bodies. Rann, his faceplate torn in half, threw three of them personally, grabbing them as they tried to counter and turn, and casting them bodily off the parapet. The rest broke, their formation damaged beyond recovery. Like a sea going out, they rolled backwards in retreat, and the mangled third circuit wall of Gorgon Bar became the Iron Warriors’ new fortification and investment of attack.
Quiet fell, smoke-muffled, somehow more oppressive than the noise that had preceded it. Gorgon Bar, its lines of resistance cut back to one last circuit, was disfigured, weeping smoke, sheeting flames, walls deformed by onslaught pressure, towers bent and gnawed away, as though the entire bastion line had contorted in a rictus of pain and death. A cinder pall, eight kilometres long, hung across the Bar, a smoke ridge visible from the turrets of Marmax, a funeral banner of annihilation barely averted.
* * *
Sanguinius bowed his head. His vision, unbidden, fled from the stilled carnage. It became elsewhere, else-one. It touched an anger still to come.
‘Not now,’ he whispered, but his prescience took no orders, not even from him. It was wilful and disturbing, and came when it chose. For a moment, his mind conjoined with that of one of his brothers, and showed him…
A future. An unbridled wrath. A battle-slaughter that would make the last hour he had endured seem tame. He did not want to look at it. He did not want to see with a traitor’s eyes, feel a lost brother’s infernal torment, taste a killing hatred so intoxicating.
But he wept in pity, for slayers and
slain to come, and could not look away.
The visions had stalked him his whole life, sporadic and infrequent, but they had started to come more often in these last days. He never really spoke of them to others, not out of shame or fear of suspicion, but more because there was never an exactitude to them. It wasn’t a talent, nor could he harness it to make it an art. He had never tried. He didn’t divulge it, because it wasn’t something that could be turned into a reliable tool of prognostication.
It was just a thing that happened to him.
He walked from the broken lip of the wall, too tired to fly, though he knew the sight of him soaring would lift the concussed spirits of the defenders. Too tired, too unsteady: the fleeting vision was already going, but the aftertaste of anger made him tremble, enflaming the autonomic responses kindled by the battle.
He knew what it was. At least, he had always believed he knew. They had always said he was like his father, more like his father than any other. He shared the numinous qualities of his genesire. He was no high psyker, no magician, no warlock of the warp, but the vestige was there, an inherited trait like eye colour or handedness. It was his talent, or perhaps a slow curse. From time to time, the future would glance his way, and he would lock eyes with it briefly. Since the start of the siege, since the grim vision he had seen during the turmoil of the Ruinstorm, in fact, Sanguinius’ escalating visions had become very particular, very specific. Each vision showed him the future through the eyes of one of his brothers.
The specific intimacy his visions brought to him chilled him. He would glimpse something the way one of his brothers was going to see it: a prescience linked to kinship, to blood.
And there was blood at Gorgon Bar. Too much of it. It pooled on the parapet walks and anointed the broken crenellations. Blood of the Legiones Astartes gene-line, which traced its direct heredity through him and his brothers to the Father of All. Perhaps that, Sanguinius thought, was the raw truth of it. Perhaps that explained why his unwelcome visions had come more often since the start of the siege. The blood of his familial line, spilled in unprecedented quantities, in such a small space on one world, the birth-world no less, spilled in such concentration as to be an offering, a sacrificial libation that enflamed and amplified his latent gift. The shamans of old had spilled blood to coax secrets from the future. They had sacrificed their own kind.
‘My lord?’
Bel Sepatus approached, with Khoradal Furio and Emhon Lux. There was blood on them too, coating their angelic plate. The currency of future exchange. Sanguinius’ visions were fading, mere aftershocks, but this blood seemed to stir them again. In quick succession, Sanguinius blinked away flash-visions: an elemental end-storm beheld by Jaghatai’s eyes, cyclonic force dumping rain and unimaginable lightning on the earth; a tower or wall collapsing, witnessed by Rogal, carrying him with it; a great chart of the Imperial Palace, laid out with its edges weighed down by bolter shells.
That last, the clearest, the longest-lasting, was a glimpse through Perturabo’s gaze. Sanguinius felt the unpleasant prickle of sharing that place, of inhabiting the Lord of Iron’s best-protected fortress, a recondite bastion of the mind where none wanted to be, not even, so it seemed, Perturabo himself.
It made sense that this should be the vision that lingered. It was the blood of Perturabo’s family branch that dripped from the warriors who faced him.
‘My lord?’ Bel Sepatus said again.
‘Secure the Bar,’ Sanguinius said. They hesitated, expecting more. He noticed their faces, their quizzical beauty. His words had been feeble. It was hard to summon words up past the pulses of sight. Shell cases on a chan…
He remembered himself, and reached out, clasping the side of Sepatus’ head.
‘You did me great service, Bel,’ he said. ‘A feat of arms. No one lacked. Not our crimson host, nor our brothers of the Seventh.’
‘What troubles you, lord?’ asked Khoradal. Sanguinius realised he had stumbled on the word ‘brothers’.
‘I fear, Khoradal,’ he said, ‘that before this is over, too many will witness the true terror of us.’
A half-lie, but sufficient. Khoradal Furio nodded.
Shell cases on a chart. A hand moves one…
‘Secure the Bar,’ Sanguinius said. ‘Engineers, sappers, the magi of the Forge. Fourth circuit is our line now. We hold what we have.’
‘There may not be time enough for full securement,’ said Emhon Lux. They will come again-‘
‘They will.’
‘Too soon for-‘
Shell cases. Moved across the chart to the spot marked Gorgon Bar. This is the future.
‘We have until tomorrow,’ said Sanguinius.
‘Surely they will seek to-‘
‘They will not come again until tomorrow,’ said Sanguinius.
‘You say that as if you know,’ said Sepatus.
‘Then treat it as if 1 do, Bel,’ said Sanguinius. ‘They have wounded us sorely, broken us hard, but we have shattered their momentum. They are in recoil. They are stunned. They did not close the action. We have until tomorrow. We have time for modest securement at least.’
All three nodded.
‘Get to your work,’ Sanguinius said. ‘Convey my instruction. And commend me to Fafnir and worthy Captain Halen.’
‘Where will you be?’ asked Sepatus.
Sanguinius was already walking away.
He needed to clear his mind. The visions were not just more frequent, they were closer. No longer fragments from months or years to come, they were glimpses that were mere days away, hours, minutes.
How long, he wondered, before they simply became glimpses of the now?
During the Ruinstorm, Sanguinius had seen a vision of his own death, at the hands of Horus. That was a future he intended to deny, but how many others could he prevent coming true? He needed to see them clearly, understand them so he could stop them from happening.
The flashes were fading, the chart and the shell cases dissolving. A sense of Perturabo’s iron will lingered. What strength he possessed!
What control! Willpower ground to a sharp edge, a mind that had emerged from the shadow of some black sun, no longer an organ of the flesh but a cold and aimed weapon.
From his vantage – it was impossible to tell where, for the vision had been very close in focus – but from his vantage, Perturabo had been directing his warsmiths closely. As the outworks and ring circuit of Gorgon Bar had fallen, and fast victory had become a fair promise, the Lord of Iron’s heart rate had barely lifted. He had not succumbed to hope. He had maintained his cool, logistical oversight. And when Fisk Halen, and bold Fafnir, and the valiant Bel, had turned the tide on that instant, Perturabo had not despaired. Sanguinius felt that clearly. Perturabo had not despaired or exploded in thwarted rage. He had taken it in his stride, immediately adjusting, amending, preparing for the counter. That was his brilliance: the calculus of siege, the dogged, relentless warfare of attrition; allowing no highs, no lows, just constant, grinding pursuit of the goal. Today was no dismal loss for him. It was just a step, a small component of a grander mechanism.
That’s why Perturabo, Lord of Iron, so alarmed Sanguinius, perhaps more than any other of his turned brothers. His relentless prosecution. In a siege… in this, the siege… It made him the most dangerous of all. Sanguinius felt he would rather face the Lupercal, close, hand to hand, than Perturabo at a distance. When the time came, facing Horus, in whatever situation, would be a monumental deed: to face down that once-beloved brother, first in majesty, and thwart him, him who they had all always thought un-thwartable.
To contradict and overturn the vision of his own doom.
But Perturabo…
The visions were all but gone, just flash-echoes. As he crossed to the main bastion, moving further from the spilled blood with each step, they receded. Perturabo was why Sanguinius was glad to have Rogal stand at his side. In this manner of warfare, only Rogal, dear Rogal, stood any
chance of matching the Lord of Iron like-for-like.
Is that how it must play out? Rogal games Perturabo into check and mate, so that the task of fronting Horus falls to me? Perhaps it must. Like for like. If any must face the Lupercal with even a modest hope of prevailing, then it must likely be me, even though I have been shown that I must fail.
He stopped, two-thirds of the way across the bridge that joined the fourth circuit with the bastion proper. He looked up at the punctured towers above, draped in smoke. That other flash, of Rogal falling with a tower. How far off was that? How literal a vision? The glimpse of Jaghatai, lit by lightning, had been shockingly real, a moment of crystal definition. But the sight-blink of Rogal, like so many other visions he had suffered in his life, had been more abstract, as though symbolic, metaphoric – like the styled meaning of tarot cards turned up. Death, but not literal death. A man hanging, but not literally hanged. A tower struck, but not literal lightning.
Sanguinius dearly wanted counsel. If his visions had any real value, if they were anything more than a curious quirk of inheritance, he wanted to know. To understand. If he could learn to use them, even belatedly, now was the time. He wanted to confide in his father, or if his father was occupied, as his father so often was, then the Sigillite it least. The old man knew of numinous things too, and surely he had the advantage of familial detachment. Malcador could help him.
But Sanguinius knew he didn’t have the luxury of leaving the line. Gorgon Bar was his place, and had to be held. It had to be, and tomorrow was too close, and it would not stand without him. Yet if they were to lose Rogal…
