'I knew you were going to say that,' sighed Pasanius.
Uriel and Pasanius set off down the tunnel, its course meandering through the mountains for what felt like many kilometres, until they completely lost track of which way they were headed. As the ground underfoot became rockier, the tracks vanished and Uriel knew they were hopelessly lost.
But just as he began to think that they might never again see the surface - not an unappealing prospect in itself - he caught a hint of something on the air. A breath of motion, the faintest gust of a breeze on his skin.
He held up his hand and quieted Pasanius as he opened his mouth to speak.
Just on the threshold of audibility he could hear a soft rumble, like a distant crackle of white noise. Though it took all his concentration, he followed a twisting path through the tunnels, doubling back, stopping and retracing his steps every now and then as he followed the noise.
As it grew louder, his path became surer and within an hour of first hearing the noise, he saw a bright sliver of white sky ahead.
'I never thought I would be grateful to see that sky again,' said Uriel.
'Nor I, but it is better than that accursed darkness.'
Uriel nodded and the two Space Marines emerged from the tunnel, blinking in the perpetual daylight of Medrengard. As they stepped out onto the mountainside, Uriel saw the source of the noise he had been following.
'Guilliman's oath!' swore Pasanius.
Many kilometres ahead over the mountain was a fortification built from dark madness and standing in defiance of all reason. Its steepled towers and mighty bastions wounded the sky, its massive gateway a snarling void. Its walls were darkened, bloodstained stone, veined with unnatural colours that should not exist and which burned themselves upon the retina.
Lightning leapt between its towers and the clanking of great engines and machines echoed like thunder from beyond its walls.
Pillars of smoke and fire leapt from the walls where explosions blossomed against them, hurling great chunks of black stone from the colossal fortress. The distant rumble of artillery crashed and boomed, bright muzzle flares of innumerable great howitzers and siege guns firing upon the fastness from the jagged rocks below.
The primal battle cries of thousands, tens of thousands of warriors - perhaps even more - were carried on the wind from the distant battle, together with the smell of burnt iron and war.
Clouds of ash and smoke from the blazing pyres surrounding the fortress flickered and twitched with the fury of the siege below, and Uriel felt his soul blacken in the face of such savagery.
Nothing could reach that fortress and live.
But that was exactly what they had to do.
PART TWO
BENEATH A BLACK SUN
CHAPTER FIVE
A blast of superheated air whooshed between the stumps of the merlons, hurling Honsou from his feet and vaporising the top half of one of his Iron Warriors. He rolled to one side as the smoking legs collapsed beside him and leapt to his feet, leaning over the ragged remains of the fortress wall and waving his mighty toothed axe.
'Come on, Berossus, you will need to do better than that!' he shouted.
Far below, the metallic coughs of massed artillery fire echoed from the dark mountains, shelling the lower bastions of Khalan-Ghol to oblivion. The screams of dying men drifted up towards him, but Honsou paid them no mind. They were but slaves and those too badly injured for skinning in the flesh camps, and there were plenty more of them to expend.
He wiped dust from his armour as more Iron Warriors marched forward to plug the gap the stray shot had blasted in the upper levels of his fortress. It had been a lucky impact and Honsou felt a thrill of adrenaline course through his body at the near miss. Ever since the siege on Hydra Cordatus, he had craved the fire and thunder of battle once more. The fighting on Perdictor II upon his return to the Eye of Terror had been desultory and unsatisfying, the warriors of the Despoiler proving no match for his advance forces.
But now his ''fellow'' warsmiths were attacking him, and this was sure to be a battle worthy of the name. Once again he was forced to prove his mettle to those who thought him no better than the Imperial dogs they fought the Long War against. The bile rose in his throat at the thought that even though his predecessor had named him warsmith, he was still not considered their equal.
'Lord Berossus is thorough in his attentions,' said Obax Zakayo, his grating, static-laced voice snapping Honsou from his bitter reverie. 'The lower bastions will be nothing but dust and bones soon.'
Honsou turned to face his lieutenant, a huge, wide-shouldered Iron Warrior with yellow and black chevrons edging the plates of his dented power armour. Hissing pipes wheezed from every joint, leaking stinking black fluids and venting puffs of steam with his every step. Like Honsou, he carried a fearsome war-axe, but he also wielded a crackling energy whip, writhing on the end of a mechanised claw attached to his back.
'If Berossus thinks he is achieving anything by killing such chaff, then he is even stupider than I believed,' sneered Honsou, wiping grey dust from his visor with his glossy black augmetic arm. His former master had gifted the mechanical arm to him after his own had been hewn from his body by the late castellan of Hydra Cordatus. It had once belonged to Kortrish, a mighty champion of ancient days and had been a physical indication of his master's favour.
'What he lacks in imagination, he makes up for with determination,' said Honsou's personal champion, a tall, slender warrior in power armour so dark and non-reflective that he moved like a liquid shadow. His voice was a ghostly monotone, his face a crawling mass of bio-organic circuitry that ran like mercurial fire beneath his dead skin and made his eyes shine with a lifeless, silver sheen.
'Berossus is irrelevant, Onyx. He'll shell the lower bastions to rubble and not be able to move his artillery up. No, it is Toramino that we must keep a careful watch on,' replied Honsou, turning from the battlements as fresh explosions and the roars of charging warriors rippled up from below.
'Agreed,' said Onyx, long bronze talons unsheathing from the grey flesh of his hands. 'Do you wish me to destroy him?'
Honsou had seen some of the most hideous things in this galaxy - having perpetrated a great many of them himself - but even he was unsettled by the malefic presence of Onyx. The Iron Warrior, if he could even still be called such, was a shunned figure, the daemonic presence within him making him outcast even amongst his own warriors. Though his human side still held sway in the symbiotic relationship with the daemon bound to his flesh, its diabolical presence was unmistakable.
'No,' said Honsou. 'Not yet, anyway. I'm going to break these vermin against my walls first. I can defeat Berossus easily enough, but I want Toramino to see this half-breed beat him, to know that the warsmith was right to name me his successor. Then you can kill him.'
'As you wish,' said Onyx, a barely-perceptible haze of power surrounding him.
When the creature had bound itself to Honsou's service, as master of Khalan-Ghol, it had spoken its true name as a sign of its fealty, but its pronunciation had been beyond Honsou, so he had settled for the closest approximation of the part he had been able to understand: Onyx. Honsou had seen, first hand, just how lethal Onyx could be when the warp-spawned part of him rose to the surface and he unleashed the full terror of his inner daemon.
Onyx was his dark shadow, his protector, and he could think of no better a creature to be his champion and bodyguard.
'Berossus is proud though,' said Obax Zakayo, 'and not to be underestimated. He has great strength and many warriors in his grand company.'
'Let them come,' said Honsou.
'They already do,' pointed out Obax Zakayo, gesturing over the edge of the wall.
Honsou followed Obax Zakayo's pointing gauntlet and grinned with feral anticipation.
Tens of thousands of soldiers swarmed across the smoking, cratered hell of the lower bastions, screaming like beasts as they slaughtered the few, mangled survivors of the shelling. Their vic
tims begged for mercy, but their attackers had none to give and the carnage was on a truly grand scale.
Banners with the devotional heraldry of Berossus were raised high and sacred standards that proclaimed the glory of Chaos in its most raw, visceral aspect were planted in the bloody soil. Within minutes, disembowelling racks were set up and the soldiers who were still alive were ritually butchered before the walls to taunt those who watched from above.
'So like Berossus,' scoffed Honsou, shaking his head and watching as another hundred screaming soldiers had their entrails dragged from their bellies and looped around rotating drum mechanisms.
'What?' asked Obax Zakayo.
'He doesn't even have the wit to allow some of his prisoners to live to show his honourable mercy.'
'I fought with Lord Forrix at the side of Lord Berossus before,' said Obax Zakayo wistfully, 'and I know there is no such quality left within him.'
'You know that and I know that, Zakayo, but if Berossus had any sense, he'd try and convince the soldiers of Khalan-Ghol that he does.'
'Why?'
'Because if our soldiers could be made to believe that Berossus would be merciful, the thought of surrender might enter their heads,' answered Onyx. 'But since they now know that only hideous death awaits them should they be taken alive, they will fight all the harder.'
'To breach a fortress you need to break the men inside, not the walls. And to break a besieging army you must wear its warriors down to the point where they would rather turn their guns upon themselves than take another step forward,' said Honsou. 'We must make every one of Berossus's soldiers feel he is living beneath the muzzle of one of our cannons: that he is nothing more than meat for the guns.'
Obax Zakayo nodded in understanding and said, 'We can do that. My guns will sow the ground before the walls with their shredded flesh and the rocks will flow with waterfalls of their blood.'
'To the warp with that, Zakayo, so long as they die!' snarled Honsou, pleased to see the ember of fear smouldering within Obax Zakayo flare to life once more. 'Or else you will be down there with the scum next time. Ever since you lost those slaves bound for my forges to the damned renegades, your promises have been as worthless as the filth I scrape from my boot.'
'I will not fail you again, my lord,' promised Obax Zakayo.
'No, you won't,' said Honsou. 'Just remember that Forrix is no longer your master, I am, and I know that you are a true protege of his. He may have become so jaded that he tolerated your lack of vision, but do not think for one second that I will.'
Suitably chastened, Obax Zakayo returned his gaze to the slaughter below. 'What will Berossus do now that he has the lower bastions?' he asked.
'He will send the daemon engines,' said Honsou.
As though on cue, the monstrous silhouettes of scores of hulking, spider-legged war engines and clanking dreadnoughts could be seen advancing through the pillars of smoke and blazing wreckage. Berossus's daemonic war engines stalked through the ruined bastions, forcing their way through the fields of corpses, and began clambering across the rocks towards the battered slope of the next level of redoubts.
'Just as you predicted he would,' said Onyx, watching the approach of the daemonic machines.
Honsou nodded, listening as the ululating shrieks of the terrifying war engines echoed towards the next level of defences, hundreds of the clawed and snapping monsters hauling their spiked bulk towards the defenders above them. The next rampart was some five hundred metres above the lower bastions, many levels below where Honsou and his lieutenants watched, but the daemon engines would not take long to reach the defenders. They poured their fire into the climbing machines, but nothing could stop them.
The artillery fire from below resumed with a thunderous crescendo, the first volley exploding against the rock between the defenders and the climbing daemon engines. Boulders the size of tanks tumbled down the sloping rockface, smashing a number of dreadnoughts to flattened hunks of metal as the bombardment continued, the gunners shifting their aim as they found their range.
'Now?' asked Obax Zakayo.
Honsou shook his head. 'No, let the dreadnoughts get closer first.'
Obax Zakayo nodded, watching as the first of the spider-like daemon engines reached the next level, their massive, clawed pincers snatching up soldiers and ripping them apart. They howled as they killed, revelling in the slaughter and hurling the corpses from the battlements.
'Now,' said Honsou.
Obax Zakayo nodded and spoke a single word into his power armour's vox unit.
Honsou watched with relish as the ground of the bastions below shook and trembled as though an earth tremor had struck. Huge, gaping cracks ripped across the bastions, splitting the rock with a hollow boom that rivalled the thunder of the guns. Smoke and flames blasted from the cracks as the ground beneath the entire front half of the bastions sagged and splintered. With a groaning creak, millions of tonnes of rock exploded and detached from the side of Khalan-Gol, sliding ponderously down the face of the mountain.
Thousands of Khalan-Gol's soldiers were carried screaming to their deaths, the avalanche of rubble and debris smashing every one of the daemon engines from the mountainside, crushing them beneath the unstoppable tide of rock. Hundreds were buried beneath the mountain: their shrieking roars billowing from the rubble as their mystical bindings were smashed asunder and the daemons within them were shorn from their iron vessels.
Honsou laughed as he watched the dreadnoughts and the thousands of enemy soldiers below turn to flee the avalanche, knowing that they were already doomed. The tide of rock swept over them all, pouring down the slopes they had fought and bled to capture.
The rumble of grinding rock slowly faded, as did the bellowing roar of the guns, Berossus realising that their fire would be wasted without an escalade.
Honsou turned from the mass destruction he had unleashed.
Now Berossus would know he had a fight on his hands.
The unchanging sky and static sun made it impossible to discern the passage of time through their surroundings, and the internal chronometer on Uriel's visor had only displayed a constantly fluctuating readout that he eventually disabled. Days must surely have passed, but how many was a mystery. He had heard that time flowed differently in the Eye of Terror, and supposed he should not have been surprised at such affronts to the laws of nature.
'Emperor, I hate this place,' said Pasanius, picking his way over a pile of twisted iron jutting from the rock of the mountain. 'There is not one natural thing here.'
'No,' agreed Uriel, tired and hungry despite his armour's best efforts at filtering and recycling his bodily excretions into drinkable water and nutrient pastes. 'It is a wasteland of death. Nothing could live here.'
'I think something lives out here,' said Pasanius, glancing at the darkened peaks all about them. 'I'm just not sure what or that I even want to find out.'
'What are you talking about?'
'Haven't you felt it? That we're being watched? Followed.'
'No,' said Uriel, ashamed that his instinct for danger appeared to have deserted him. 'Have you seen anything?'
Pasanius shook his head. 'Nothing for sure, no, but I keep thinking I can see, I don't know, something.'
'Something? What kind of something?'
'I'm not sure, it's like a whisper in the corner of my mind's eye, something that vanishes as soon as I try to look at it,' said Pasanius, darkly. 'Something red…'
'It is this place,' said Uriel. 'The lair of the Enemy will attempt to mislead and betray your senses. We must be strong in our faith and resist its evil magicks.'
Pasanius shook his head. 'No, it is something not of the Enemy, but something that lives here. I think it's what killed those people in the cave.'
'Whatever killed and skinned those people was evil and an enemy of all living things. Let them come, whatever they are, they will find only death.'
'Aye,' agreed Pasanius as they climbed onwards. 'Death.'
The b
esieged fortress was lost to sight for now, the path from the tunnels leading them down into the rocky gullies and crevasses of the mountains. The white sky beat down upon them, harsher than the fiercest sun, and Uriel deliberately kept his eyes averted from its flat emptiness. Once, he thought he caught a glimpse of the red things Pasanius claimed were following them, but they defied his every attempt to see them properly. Eventually he gave up, unable to catch sight of them, and concentrated on simply putting one foot in front of the other.
The harsh, metallic shale of the mountainside grated beneath his boots and every now and then they saw grilled vents piercing the rock that disgorged a hot steam that tasted of beaten metal. The vents plunged down into the mountain, the darkness impenetrable, even to a Space Marine's enhanced eyesight.
Uriel saw billowing smoke stacks hundreds of metres above them, thousands of blocky chimneys lining the ridge like great pylons that spewed corrosive fumes into the atmosphere. Yet no matter how much black waste was released into the air, the dead sky was always above them, blank and oppressive.
Over the tops of the mountains before them, Uriel could see what looked like bloated dirigibles, drifting above somewhere ahead in the mountains. Long cables drooped from their bellies, but whether these were simply anchoring them to the ground or acting as some form of barrage balloon, Uriel could not tell. Perhaps they were designed to keep the delirium spectres at bay from some facility as yet unseen?
As their weary trudge through the reeking air of the mountains continued, the two Space Marines passed a shorn quarry of shattered stone, where the side of one of these Cyclopean smoke stacks was exposed. Reddish-brown stains spilled from the joints between the massive, curved blocks making up the stack and a monstrous heat radiated from the stonework in pulsing waves.
'Where do you think it goes?' said Uriel.
'I don't know. Perhaps there is some manufactory below the mountains.'
Uriel nodded, wondering what diabolical production line was at work beneath their very feet. Were men and women dying even now to forge weapons, armour and materiel for the dread legions of Chaos? It galled him that he could do nothing to prevent such abomination, but what choice did they have? The sacred task of the death oath placed upon them by Marneus Cal-gar took precedence over all other concerns. The daemonic womb creatures… these daemonculaba were in the besieged fortress they had seen as they climbed from the darkness of the tunnels beneath the mountains and nothing would stand in Uriel's way of reaching that damned place.
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