by Paul Kearney
‘I will do as you suggest.’
‘Where is Magos Fane?’
There was a momentary pause. ‘He is fighting as a loyal servant of the Omnissiah should, with his troops and mine.’
‘You mean to assault the Blood Keep itself, I take it.’
‘I do. I have waited a long time for this day, Chapter Master.’
The vox cut out.
Fifth Company was now sidling leftwards and pulling back at the same time, drawing out the second Chaos army that had issued from the Blood Keep. It was a delicate manoeuvre, but Galenus was conducting it superbly. He had always been a master of squad tactics.
This move stretched out the advancing enemy, and they were coming forward with little thought for their open flank, confident that their fellows were keeping the Mechanicus forces occupied. But in left rear of the renegade Mechanicus line the reserve was building up, maniple by maniple. Calgar noted it with approval. One thing about Mechanicus troops; they could be counted upon to stand and fight, and die where they stood.
Hagnon-Cro was letting his front line bleed so that he could launch a surprise attack with his fast-arriving reserves. It was as well done as Calgar had ever seen, and he made a swift mental reappraisal of the dominus’ tactical abilities. The creature was able, cunning and ruthless. He would prove a worthy foe, if it came down to a last struggle between them.
Calgar looked up and down the thin line of Ultramarines that were fighting in front of him. He felt proud of them, as proud as a father with worthy sons. And he felt also the grief of a father as he watched them fight, and fall.
Even on Cold Steel Ridge, he had not had to struggle against such despair, for he had been fighting on Macragge itself, for the life of his home world. Here, he stood on unholy ground, and in order to cleanse it he would have to order Fifth Company to its destruction.
There would be no triumph in this place, no true victory. His brothers would obey him and fight until they died, one by one, and if they were lucky, then he might be able to make their deaths meaningful. He might be able to make the universe that little bit cleaner. It was the best he could hope for – a meaningful death.
And yet, and yet, as he stood there and watched his battle-brothers mow down the advancing tide of hate and madness, he could not help but respond to their valour, the honour that bound them all. It uplifted him, made him shake off his despair. He remembered something Guilliman had once said, on surveying the aftermath of a bloody battle, back in the blurred mists of time.
It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it.
The Adeptus Mechanicus reserve assault went in, as Calgar had said it should, right into the flank of the advancing second Chaos army. While the Ultramarines chewed them up from the front, fast-striding kastelans and rumbling kataphrons sped ahead of the main Mechanicus forces and hurtled into the arrogantly exposed flank of the enemy formations. The Chaos regiments tried to swing round to meet them, but that only confused their ranks more, and it was a bawling, packed mass that the troops of Hagnon-Cro hurtled into, with no attempt at a firefight, simply a base urge to come to grips with their enemies.
The enemy advance was thrown into utter confusion, and into that confusion, Fifth Company poured a torrent of fire, their line now well beyond the foremost enemy ranks. A terrible slaughter ensued, and the battlefield, which had begun to seem fluid, snarled up once more.
Calgar watched it happen, saw how the Chaos forces were now irretrievably embroiled in a bitter close-quarter fight on both the centre and right of their formations, and gave the order.
‘Fall back.’
Both Chaos armies were now fighting the renegade Mechanicus troops, and his own brothers were free of that murderous embrace, and he meant to keep them free.
‘Drake, I am sending you coordinates now. Meet me there.’
‘Acknowledged.’
‘Captain Galenus, screen the left flank. Keep withdrawing and do not let them come to grips with you at any cost. If you have to detach a squad to hold up the enemy, then do so. It is imperative that you screen my next movement. Understood?’
‘Understood, my lord.’
‘Keep falling back, but do not lose contact with the enemy.’ Then Calgar realised that he was giving too much advice. ‘We go now to try and gut the heart out of this abomination, Inquisitor Drake and I. You must cover us, captain.’
‘Fifth Company will do its duty, my lord.’
‘I know it.’
Calgar turned aside. He looked at Brother Ohtar and Brother Morent, his honour guards. Each had nearly two centuries of service with the Chapter. There was not much left of their gold ornamentation and they stood in their armour like battered metallic statues, leaning on the hafts of their power axes.
Calgar raised up a bloody fist.
‘Roboute Guilliman once wore this. He took it from a Chaos chieftain, and redeemed it with his faith and his valour. I ask you now to follow me the same way his brothers followed him. Into darkness.’
‘My lord,’ Ohtar said, ‘we would follow you through hell itself.’
Calgar called up Brother Starn.
‘With me. We go now to fulfil our mission. Fifth must fight alone.’
‘Acknowledged, lord,’ Starn said.
Then Calgar led off, moving as fast as the Terminators could manage. Behind him, the cacophony of the battle swelled up into an unholy din, like the roar of an unhinged god.
Seven Ultramarines powered across the desolate expanse of skull-scattered grey and puddled earth, moving swiftly, the Terminators in the party struggling to keep up.
And on their left, a small group of men left their hiding place and started pelting across the steaming plain to join them. Inquisitor Drake and his five surviving retainers.
And less than half a mile behind there rose a third group, a small knot of figures who left their hidden hollow and began following slowly in the wake of the inquisitor, unseen and unremarked. They wore robes that might once have been scarlet, but were now ragged and faded by hard service, and they moved with the singular ease of those whose legs were not made of flesh and blood at all.
Twenty-Two
It was hard to walk away from the fight, as hard a thing as Marneus Calgar had ever known. Drake and his men joined the Ultramarines, and were only just able to keep pace with the giant warriors despite the fact that they were as fit and hardened as human soldiers could be. Were it not for the presence of the lumbering Terminators, they would have been left behind, nonetheless, for Calgar set a pace that had the First Company veterans edging their reactors into the red to match.
They covered a mile in something over five minutes, and paused to take stock, scanning the wide ground behind them.
‘I never suspected Space Marines could be quite so swift,’ Drake said, panting.
Calgar was looking around him, the beak-like Corvus helm turning this way and that.
‘How far?’ he asked Brother Ohtar.
‘Four hundred and sixty yards, my lord.’
‘Inquisitor – we need you to use your psychic skills and look ahead of us.’
There was no gainsaying Marneus Calgar at this moment. The Chapter Master had a tone in his voice that was not far off outright violence. Drake closed his eyes, steadied his breathing, and searched out with the disciplines he had been taught.
Out he reached, as quietly as his hammering heart would let him. His psychic abilities were being thrown off by the sheer level of unadulterated carnage which was in full glorious rage across the Skull Cavern, but he rose over it like a bird soaring, ignoring the lesser troubles, the blood, the mayhem, the lives suffering and ending under him. He had been taught to do this.
He breathed deep, and worked beyond the corrupting rage and despair that infested Fury like a disease.
There was a baleful power in the Blood Keep. He f
elt it as a man feels the sun’s heat on his face. The massive citadel, though by no means deserted, did not teem with the foul squirm of life which was fighting across the battlefield. Most of the enemy forces had indeed been drawn out. But those who were left, who remained silent and unseen within the fortress, were the most formidable of all. They had been kept back, waiting.
Then Drake felt the counter-lunge that rebuffed his psychic enquiry and sent it reeling back across the battlefield, a spike of pain erupting in his skull as it impacted. He had to stop a moment and collect himself, work past the needling agony in his mind. He had seldom touched on such a formidable presence before.
‘The walls are almost unguarded,’ he told Calgar at last. ‘From what I can make out, most of the enemy who remain within them are gathered in a central location, around a single, directing presence, a psyche of immense power.’
‘So much the better,’ Calgar retorted. ‘Guide us, inquisitor. You shall be our compass in this foul place. Direct us to that location.’
They powered onwards, at a more reasonable pace this time. They passed crucified Viridian Consuls in their progress, and Brother Morenich raised his storm bolter to put one of them out of his misery, but Calgar stopped him. ‘Save your ammunition, brother. When we are done, this thing will have been destroyed, and they shall all of them be at peace at last.’
‘I pray, my lord, I have the chance to visit justice on those who did this.’
‘I promise you will, brother.’
Calgar was laconic, self-contained, continually monitoring the way ahead and then stopping to glance back at the battle they had left behind. His face could not be read in the stark helm, but his fingers clenched, and the energy fields surrounding the Gauntlets of Ultramar crackled and spat as though feeding off the Chapter Master’s anger.
They splashed through the shallow, sucking expanse of the moat, the water rising no higher than the Adeptus Astartes’ knees – though it was over Drake’s thighs. Even through his sealed armour, the touch of the stuff felt unclean.
He felt the sweat trickling down his nose inside his helm and longed to wipe it away.
‘There it is, bearing two eighty, two hundred yards.’
The walls of the Blood Keep towered over them, running with slime and moisture. They were an eclectic mix of stone, steel and ferrocrete, all festooned with green moss which seemed to writhe in unsettling patterns, giving the battlements a singular crawling aspect. Drake thought he saw bloodshot eyes there, embedded in the very walls, and pink-grey tendrils uncurled to grasp feebly at the humid air. More rose up under his feet, and he crushed them beneath his boots as he splashed along in the wake of Marneus Calgar.
He heard his own men curse and pray alternately, sobbing for breath. When Kastiro stumbled, the foul tentacles sought to latch onto him, entangling his hands, his weapon. It was one of the Terminators, Brother Antonus, who physically picked up Drake’s struggling retainer and ripped him free of the earth’s foul clutch.
‘You go down here, you’re liable to stay down,’ the veteran said. ‘Keep up.’
Kastiro gasped his thanks, and on they jogged, until they were right before the wall itself, and the unmanned gate that nestled within it. Behind them, the battle raged on as though it had forgotten them.
Close to, the postern did not seem small at all; it was perhaps twenty-five feet high and half as broad, welded steel reinforced with bands of adamantium, all caked with filth and fecund growth like running sores. Runes were graven across it, and the eight-pointed star of Chaos, as well as the antler-like rune of Khorne.
Calgar stood there, and they stood behind him as though waiting for some sign.
Drake reached out to his fellow psyker, Brother Ulfius, and found a howling cacophony out on the plain beyond – and in the midst of it the Ultramarines Librarian was encased within a psychic shield, lashing out periodically in vicious explosions of power that burned up whole squads of the enemy and blasted others into blank drooling oblivion.
Fifth Company was still withdrawing, but the enemy were gaining the measure of the Mechanicus forces, and were now sending fresh formations out on both flanks. The fighting was reaching a desperate crescendo.
But no doubt Calgar knew that. The Chapter Master looked the gate before him up and down, and then without warning he charged forward and slammed his fists into it with two vast hollow booms. The entire structure quivered, and they were all deluged in falling muck and fragments of broken masonry that tumbled from above.
The Gauntlets of Ultramar shook and shimmered as Calgar slammed them again and again into the gate, lightning bolting out of them in a corona of flaring discharges. The disruptor fields that encased them made the metal of the gate melt and run, molten rivulets pouring bright and steaming down to the ground, the structure groaning and shrieking in a howl of overstressed alloys and rending steel.
And Drake saw now the true depths of the rage that burned in Marneus Calgar. He might direct his brothers on the battlefield with cold, unsparing efficiency, but here, in the momentous crushing blows he struck the gate, was the Lord of Macragge’s genuine, unfettered fury. The massive gauntlets he wore struck again and again at the tall gateway, until it buckled under the blows, and then he grasped great chunks of the door and ripped them clean away, like a man setting his fingers to gouge a bank of soft clay. Within a few minutes, the gate lay in sundered, steaming ruins, the hot metal spitting and creaking as it cooled in broken pieces on the wet ground.
‘Now, let us go,’ Calgar said, and his voice was low and calm, but something in it set the hairs rising on the back of Drake’s neck. He had never before sensed such pent-up violence in another being that purported to be human. Even the First Company veterans seemed subdued by it.
He hoped that Calgar could retain his iron control, and keep the boiling rage in check for when it was needed.
Beyond the ruined gate was a broad avenue, running at a slight incline, up to a series of immense red towers which formed the heart of the Blood Keep. Under their feet, the ground was no longer wet earth, but slick, shining metal, set in plates like the pebbles of a riverbed, and running with foul effluent in which fragments of body tissue floated. It was hotter. Drake consulted his helm readings and registered a temperature jump of some fifteen degrees, and the radioactivity that flooded all the vast Skull Chamber was steepening also. Were an unprotected man to walk in this place, he would be dead in a few days, and as it was, Drake’s own suit systems were all at their limits trying to compensate.
The roadways within the Blood Keep were all but deserted, but there were dark shapes scurrying about, and as they continued onwards they twice ran into slithering beasts which Calgar’s honour guards chopped into pieces, the Axes of Ultramar slicing them to shreds and steaming unharmed in the acid that sprang forth from their carcasses. The two tall Ultramarines had once been glittering figures of blue and gold, but now they had been seared and burned and battered until their armour was the colour of dull, blackened iron. Yet their fighting prowess was undimmed, and they strode along swiftly behind their Chapter Master showing no sign of weariness.
‘Where to, inquisitor?’ Calgar barked, pausing to look around. Their entrance had been marked now, and in the distance bodies of the enemy were forming up. A shining volley of lasgun fire zipped through the party, and one bolt fizzed off Calgar’s ornate shoulder-plate, leaving a smoking dot of black carbon behind.
Drake pointed. ‘The towers – there is a tall, sharp one in the midst, very like the prow of a voidship. It is in there, my lord.’
‘We shall have to find a way in. Onwards, brothers. While we dawdle here, Fifth Company fights for its life.’ He powered off again, towards the cruel angular tower which loomed ahead, fully a thousand feet high, dull red, venting steam from a hundred orifices, and foul with foetid, luminous growth, like garlanded intestines wrapped steaming around a jagged megalith.
There was real fighting then, as warbands of Chaos troops began to converge on the interlopers. The Ultramarines stood back to back and loosed blazing, superbly placed volleys of storm-bolter fire, and bursts of promethium for the charging rabble who got too close. The roadways and streets of the Blood Keep, so empty a few minutes before, were filling rapidly.
Scores, hundreds of the enemy were streaming out of the shadows, and not only cultists, but tall Champions of the Broken also. Some of these screamed challenges that were barely rational speech at all, their power armour decorated with Khorne’s rune as well as their own defiled badges, and they came running at Calgar and his entourage like things demented.
They were brought down by well-aimed shots, sent to their knees. Even shattered by gunfire, they kept trying to crawl into contact with the Ultramarines. One of them had his helm blown off to reveal the pale, noble features of a Space Marine, hardly different from his foes; but he snarled like a rabid beast, and his eyes were full of darkness, nothing human left in them at all. Brother Morent decapitated him with a sweep of his axe, and booted his body aside.
They came to the base of the tall blade-shaped tower, and there they found huge double-hatchways yawning open, and beyond, a wide staircase going up into darkness, fashioned out of immense blocks of unmortared stone.
‘These were blast doors,’ Drake shouted on the vox, trying to make his voice carry over the shrieks of the gathering enemy. ‘This whole structure was a ship hull at one time.’ He peered up and down. ‘It looks like the prow of a strike cruiser, half buried here.’
‘My lord, the enemy is closing in. If you must go up, then my brothers and I should stay here and hold the doors,’ Brother Starn said. ‘Otherwise they will rush us from the rear.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Calgar said. ‘But Starn, be ready for my word. I will call on you, before the end.’
‘We shall not fail you,’ Starn said grimly, and he blasted back a howling knot of the enemy with a billow of bright, crackling promethium, setting a dozen of them alight as they closed in on him, and striding forward to kick the burning, shrieking wretches out of his field of fire.
