'It isn't all bad,' Horus said. 'Chondax is barren, suited to your Legion's strengths. You'll enjoy the hunting.'
The Khan nodded readily enough, though, to me, it looked like the gesture of one who knows that the best is being made of a poor situation. 'We are not hungry for glory,' he said. 'Running down Urrlak's dregs needs to be done, and we are equipped to do it. But what then? That is what concerns me.'
Horus clapped his gauntlet on to the Khan's shoulder. Even that simple movement - the faint shift of posture, the upward sweep of his arm - gave away the primarch's warrior-balance. Every gesture was so painfully elegant, so beautifully efficient, so tightly packed with self-assured, superabundant power. They were both creatures of a more exalted plane, shackled only loosely to the stuff of mortal existence.
'Then we should fight together again, you and I,' Horus said. 'It has been too long, and I miss your presence. Things are uncomplicated with you. I wish you would not hide yourself away.'
'I can usually be found, in the end.'
Horus shot him a wry look.
'In the end,' he said. Then his expression became serious. 'The galaxy is changing. There is much I do not understand about it, and much I do not like. Warriors should remain close. I hope that I can call upon you, if the time comes.'
The two primarchs looked one another in the eye. I could imagine them fighting together, and I shuddered a little at the prospect. Such an alliance would make the foundations of the galaxy tremble.
'You know you can, brother,' said the Khan. 'That is always how it has been between us. You call, I answer.'
I could hear the sincerity in his voice; he meant it. I could hear the admiration, too, and the warmth. They were hewn from the same stone.
I held my breath. For whatever reason, I felt that something significant, something irrevocable, had taken place.
You call, I answer.
After that they left the room together, marching in step, locked in conversation. Yesugei went with them.
The chamber fell still. I could hear the ticks of the clock, as loud in my ears as my own heartbeat. For a long time, I couldn't move. My cloying sense of dread faded slowly. When I finally unclenched my fingers from the arm of the chair, I was still trembling. Thoughts and images raced through my mind, jostling in a mad rush of dazzling impressions.
Only slowly did it dawn on me that I had been abandoned in the heart of a Legion battleship with no obvious means of finding my way out. I guessed that my rank would count for little in such a place.
That wasn't the worst of it. I had seen - just briefly - the way in which the Great Crusade was really ordered, and it made my tiny role seem even more insignificant than I had thought. We were nothing to them, those armour-bound gods.
As I reflected on that, the idea of trying to debate war policy with a primarch felt less like vainglory and more like insanity.
Still, I had seen them. I had witnessed what countless career soldiers would have happily died to witness. Despite my failure, that was worth something.
I got up from the chair shakily, steeling myself to go back into the corridor outside. I didn't relish the prospect of meeting those guards again.
As it turned out, I didn't have to. Yesugei returned, slipping silently back through the doors and giving me a conspiratorial smile.
'Well,' he said. 'That was unexpected.'
'It was,' I replied. My voice was still weak.
'Primarch and Warmaster,' said Yesugei. 'You did well.'
I laughed, more for the release of tension than anything else.
'I did?' I said. 'I almost lost consciousness.'
'It happens,' he said. 'How you feel?'
I rolled my eyes.
'I made a fool of myself,' I said. 'This was a waste of time - of your time. I'm sorry.'
Yesugei shrugged. 'Do not apologise,' he said. 'The Khan does nothing wastefully.'
He looked at me carefully.
'We leave for Chondax soon,' he said. "We have orks to hunt. The Khan knows the task ahead. He listened to you. He asked me to tell you, if you wish, you may join us. Our kurultai needs counsellor, one with experience, one not afraid to speak truths we do not wish to hear.'
Yesugei smiled again.
'We know our weakness,' he said. 'All things change. We must change. What do you think?'
For a moment, I could hardly believe it. I thought he might be joking, but I guessed that he didn't joke much.
'Are you going to Chondax?' I asked.
'I do not know,' he said. 'Maybe not yet. Joining us - it will not be easy. We have ways strange to outsiders. Perhaps you would be happier in your Departmento. If so, we understand.'
As Yesugei spoke, I made up my mind.
It was a thrilling feeling, a leap into the unknown, something that was as out of character as my temporary forgetfulness had been earlier. Given the events of the past few hours, it was not hard for me to believe that fate had offered me a chance to make something of myself, to become more than an unnamed cog in an infinite machine. I was near the end of my active service; such a chance would never come again.
'You are right that I do not understand you,' I said. 'I barely know anything about you.'
I tried to keep my voice steady, to sound more certain than I really was. I felt like laughing, half from excitement, half from fear.
'But I can learn,' I added.
VII. SHIBAN
IT TOOK TWO more days before we reached the centre. Torghun and I fought together in that time, blending our different skills. We made an effort not to countermand one another. On occasion, I would be hungry to push on, and he would not protest; on others, I would accede to his desire to secure an area before we left it.
It was not always easy. My warriors did not operate readily with his. We did not mingle much; I met only one of his lieutenants, a dour warrior named Hakeem, and even then barely exchanged two words. For all that, we learned from one another. I came to see that Torghun's way of war had things to recommend it. I hoped that he felt the same way about ours.
By the time we broke into the core of the Grinder we had taken more casualties than we had during years of prior campaigning. My own brotherhood was ravaged, down to barely two-thirds of its original strength. I did not regret that. None of us did. We had always known that the greenskins would fight hard for their final foothold, and those who had died had died like warriors.
If there had been more time, though, I would have mourned Batu, who had always been close to me. I would also have mourned Hasi, who had been a cheerful soul and who would have achieved great things had he survived.
Sangjai retrieved their immortal elements, and so a portion of them was destined to live on in the actions of others. As ever, we preserved their armour and their weapons, and left their mortal bodies to return to the earth and sky of Chondax. Even in the ravines, sheltered from the worst of the wind, we could see them begin to wear away to nothing. I knew that the plateau, the place we had fought so hard for and with so much bloodshed, would now be blasted clean again - bone-white, empty, echoing.
I had seen the monuments raised to the Imperium on Ullanor, and had marvelled at them. They would last for millennia. Nothing like that would remain to mark our presence on Chondax. We were like ghosts there, flitting across the wastes, killing briefly before our presence was scrubbed from existence.
But the combat was real enough. The ruthless, ceaseless, brutal combat - that was real. By the time we reached the core we were weary, driven into fatigue by the unflagging resistance of the orks. My armour was dirty-brown from bloodstains. My breastplate was chipped and dented, my helm scored by blade marks. My muscles, hardened to a life of constant warfare by habit and genetic proving, never lost their dull ache. I had not slept for days.
But when we crested the last rise, coming to a halt along the lip of a long cliff-edge and gazing out into the object of our exertions, our spirits lifted.
We saw the final mountain, the rusting fortress of th
e enemy, and we smiled.
* * *
IT WAS A broad, circular bowl, carved out of the broken landscape like the gigantic scoop of a spoon. We stood on the southern edge of it, looking north into its centre. We could just make out cliffs on the far side, half-lost in dust and distance. The floor of the depression was smooth and empty, a barren expanse of naked rock that gleamed in the light of the suns. The land ran away from us in a shallow curve, sweeping down nearly two hundred metres before levelling out.
In the centre of the bowl stood the citadel - a spike of rock, jagged and cracked by time, hurled upward from the bare stone like a hunting lance piercing a carcass. It rose up over two hundred metres, breaking into a series of slender pinnacles that glistened like splintered bone in the sunlight.
The orks had had a long time to work on it. They had looped walls around it, and towers across it, and twisting stairways slung between the slender rock turrets. The flanks of the citadel bristled with guns, and columns of soot-black smoke belched from its base. Enormous machines growled away within - engines, generators, forges. I guessed that those things had been taken from one of their cavernous space-going hulks, perhaps one that had crashed into the world a long time ago and had been slowly turned into the heart of their last redoubt.
The citadel had many gates, each with heavy lintels of rust-crusted iron. Thousands of greenskins milled about on the ramparts above, bellowing their challenges into the clear air. Many thousands more, I guessed, sheltered further within, waiting for the attack they knew was coming.
Near the top of the haphazard pile of interlocking structures, lodged among a cluster of lopsided walls and precarious weapons platforms, was a mass of bolted metal sheets in the rough image of a giant greenskin head. I saw ten-metre long tusks and flaming eye sockets, each the size of a man. Slaps of red and yellow paint had been thrown across its angular skull. Slivers of lime-green light danced across the surface, indicating the presence of rudimentary shielding.
The structure might have been some quasi-religious artefact, or perhaps a den for the shaman-caste, or an elaborate garrison for their elite warriors. Perhaps their leader resided in there, squatting like a bloated insect in the dark while its minions died around it.
That level of artifice surprised me. We had never seen orks build such structures, even during the slaughter of Ullanor.
As I gazed at it, I guessed the truth. The greenskins learned fast. We had always known that about them. If they were not utterly exterminated by the forces ranged against them, they would eventually turn any weapon back against its bearer. Even here, hammered into submission and bereft of hope, they were still working on new tools of destruction.
They had seen what weapons we had used to lay them low, and the inspiration had lodged deep in their brutish minds. Somehow, driven by some astonishing capacity for replication, they were still labouring.
They were building a Titan.
I noted the routes up to that grotesque head - the tottering gantries, the rough-cut stairs, the clattering elevator-shafts. I memorised them quickly, knowing that once we were inside the citadel I would have no time to orientate myself.
By then I could hear distance-echoed reports of gunfire from the far side of the wide depression. My helm-display showed the signals of other brotherhoods closing from the north, east and west. Already some squads had broken out of cover and were streaking down the long slopes of the bowl toward the citadel. The guns on the walls opened up, hurling their shells in long arcs at the incoming jetbike squadrons.
I turned to Torghun, who, as ever, stood at my side.
'Ready, brother?' I asked.
'Ready, brother,' he said.
I held my gauntlet up, open-handed, in the Chogorian way. He clasped it. If we had been warriors of the Altak, we would have cut our palms, allowing the blood to mingle.
'The Emperor be with you, Shiban Khan,' he said.
'And with you, Torghun Khan,' I replied.
Then we activated our blades, gunned our engines, and broke into the charge.
AS KHAN, I could have taken one of my brotherhood's remaining bikes from its owner, but chose not to. I saw no reason to deprive any of my warriors of their mount just because I had lost mine.
So I ran, just like the others around me whose jetbikes had been downed. We surged down the slope, crying out and letting our blade-edges hiss with energy. Over a hundred of us sprinted alongside one another, whooping and roaring, swinging our glaives and tulwars around our heads. The remaining jetbikes thundered overhead, laying down a crashing layer of heavy bolter fire and screaming ahead to the walls.
I watched them soar with envy and with joy. I saw the superb control of their riders, the way they banked and thrust in the sparkling sunlight. They were so natural, so effortlessly deadly. I wished to be among them.
Deprived of that raw power, I ran hard, using my own native speed and my armour's peerless machine-boost. I felt my muscles work, shot-through with hyper-adrenaline and combat-stimms. My brothers charged with me, kicking up dust from their pumping limbs.
At the edge of vision I could see other warriors spill into the depression. Dozens crested the rise, then hundreds. Entire brotherhoods broke from cover, streaking into the open. I did not wait to count, but before I reached the walls there must have been thousands of us in the attack. I had not seen such White Scars numbers since making planetfall. We were together again, reunited in the splendour of our full, dreadful potential. The noise of it - the voxed battle-cries, the massed drum of boot-falls, the percussive clamour of the jetbikes - it thrilled me to my core.
The entire bowl filled with the whoosh and crack of incoming fire. Primitive flak-bursts studded the air, downing several bikes even before they had come within bolter-range of the walls. Artillery crashed out at us, ploughing up the wind-worn rock and scattering whole squads of charging warriors. Massive, snub-barrelled guns opened up, lobbing shells into our path and ripping up the terrain.
I felt my secondary heart kick in, and relished the blood pumping through my veins. My long hair whipped in the racing wind. My guan dao trembled from its death-hungry disruptor field, eager to bite into flesh again.
I leapt over smoking craters and swerved round heaps of blazing wreckage, building up speed with every stride. We were like a bursting tide of ivory, spilling into the depression from all directions and racing toward the flaming pinnacle at its centre. Everything moved, everything hurtled, everything streaked and blazed in a smear of white, gold and blood-red. Shadows of jet- bikes raced across us as they wheeled into their searing attack runs. The walls ahead were already burning, cracked open and leaking acrid columns of smoke.
We gained one of the many gates, freshly devastated by volleys of heavy bolter strikes and missile-fire. Orks rushed out to meet us, slavering with rage. They were bigger than any I had seen on Chondax, almost as big as some of the monsters we'd seen on Ullanor. They lumbered right at us, stumbling over their own clawed feet just to get into blade-range. We crunched back into them, bursting through what remained of the gates, spinning, hacking, blasting, punching, gouging. Two hordes - one blinding white, one sickly green - crashed together in a morass of blades, bullets and flailing limbs.
I surged up a tangled slope of rubble, my glaive flying around me. Orks lurched down, shoving aside debris and kicking up dust. I thundered into them, dragging my guan dao in whirling arcs. Its edge sliced clean through iron plate, skin and bone, flinging scraps around it as it flickered back and forth. I cut them down before they knew I was even within range. Every stroke whistled cleanly, delivering crushing levels of force before springing away again and moving on to the next target. Throughout it all, my brothers' gunfire roared away, blasting exposed armour-pieces into shrapnel and shredding flesh into chunks of bloody meat.
In those moments, tearing into battle under the incandescent light of three suns, we had become the storm. We were irresistible: too savage, too skilled, too swift.
I tore on upward,
fighting past the ruined gates and into the tottering maze of the ramshackle citadel beyond, flanked by Jochi and others of my minghan-keshig. More orks threw themselves at us, swinging down from corrugated roofs and burning webs of scaffolding. I punched one full in the face with my ceramite gauntlet, splintering its skull into bloody shards, before spinning away to crunch my boot into the stomach of another. My glaive threw gore around in swathes, streaking my armour and spraying my helm lenses.
'Onward!' I roared, pumped with aggression and energy. 'Onward!'
My brothers swept along with me, racing up ladders to reach greenskins on platforms and charging up stairwells to purge them from the ramparts. When one of us was thrown down, another took his place. We gave them no room to breathe, to think, to react. We used our speed and our power in turn, swivelling away from danger only to surge back in with our power-weapons spitting. The citadel became clogged with bodies - thousands of them - all locked in close combat amidst the burning towers, slaying and being slain in great, bloody droves. The deafening noise of it, amplified and distorted in the claustrophobic narrows, made the towers tremble and shake down sheets of dust.
As I fought my way up, I lost sight of Torghun. Only my own brothers, those whom I had led across the Crusade for a hundred years of warfare, kept up with me. We raced together, blasting aside all who came before us, shouting and laughing for the sheer exuberance of it. My armour clanged from repeated solid-round impacts, but I never slowed. The blades of the enemy came at me in clumsy swipes, but I thrust them aside and slew their owners. I heard the screams and bellows of greenskins ringing in my ears, and it only fuelled my drive to kill. I inhaled the stench of ork bodies and ork filth and ork blood, a hot musk of alien excreta. Everywhere, every stinking corner of that shoddy place, rang with the clash of weaponry; every rusty facet flashed with the reflected burn of gunfire.
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