There had been enough petty death. The gods wanted a spectacle.
“You there!” yelled Colonel Dal’Tharken at the closest officer, as he stormed out of the command bunker. “Get some men into that firepoint! And get the engineers up on the battle cannon. The damn things jam every three rounds.” Guardsmen were scrambling to their posts, including the tanks iced in at the ends of the line. The Hathrans were an armoured regiment but the fuel had frozen in the engines of their Leman Russ battle tanks and those that still worked were dug into the ice to be used as fixed gun points.
“Colonel,” said Alaric as he pushed his way through the soldiers now thronging up onto the battlements. “Where do you need us?”
“Hold the right,” said the colonel. In truth he had no right to give orders to the Grey Knights, attached as they were to the Inquisition, but protocol was less important here than the battle plan. “If they get explosives between the medical bunker and the valley wall they can blast a breach. That’s what you have to stop.” The colonel’s features softened for a second. The man underneath the soldier showed through for a moment. “Good luck, Justicar,” he said. Colonel Dal’Tharken, alone among the Hathrans, had some understanding of what the Grey Knights really were and why they had been sent to Sarthis Majoris.
“The Emperor is with us,” replied Alaric, and turned to join his men.
The Grey Knights were already in position. The medical bunker on the extreme right of the line was crowned with battlements like the jawbone of a stone-toothed dragon, but it was still the line’s weak point. The enemy would pool here, forced wide by the crossfires of Hathran guns, and sooner or later a cultist would throw a demo charge or a bundle of grenades into just the right place to shatter the ice and blast a gap wide enough for men to pour through. Then the line would be surrounded and everyone defending it would die.
Except, the Grey Knights were there. As far as the Hathrans were concerned, nothing could destroy them as long as there were Space Marines still alive to fight.
“It’s not another sacrifice,” said Brother Visical. “They’re holding back.”
“Not for long,” said Alaric. “The enemy isn’t that patient. They’ll hit us here and now.”
“Justicar,” said Thane, “it’s the Blood God, isn’t it?”
Alaric glanced around at the youngest Grey Knight. Thane was right. The symbols, the chanting, the crazed desperation to die, the blood: the Blood God’s hand was on Sarthis Majoris. However, enough Grey Knights had died in battle through thinking that they understood the enemy, and Alaric was not going to be one of them. “Chaos has infinite faces,” said Alaric. “We won’t know which one it has here until we look it in the eye.”
“Armour,” said Haulvarn, pointing into the darkness at the southern end of the valley. The ice-cold sunlight was picking out ridges of snow and rock amid the shadows, and as Alaric followed Haulvarn’s gaze, he could see vehicle hulls, corroded and barnacled like ancient creatures from the sea bed, lumbering through the seething darkness.
“Then this is it,” said Alaric. “Thane?”
“I am the Hammer,” began Brother Thane, because in Alaric’s squad, the newest recruit led the others in their prayers. “I am the point of His spear, I am the gauntlet about His fist…”
The drone of prayer joined the faint hiss of the wind along the Imperial lines. The Hathrans were praying too, old war songs from their home world of endless plains and violet skies.
In reply, the sky overhead turned purple, then black, and then red. Clouds heavy with blood rolled across, and the valley was bathed in deep rust-red, the colour of dried blood. The ridges of the mountains were picked out in scarlet. A sudden flash of red lightning burst overhead and, for a split second, Alaric took in the scene revealed at the southern end of the valley: tangles of limbs, heaving masses of robed bodies, lumbering contraptions like ancient metal spiders, and a tower carved from frozen blood with an armoured figure leaning from the battlements. Even that briefest glimpse somehow conveyed an infinity of arrogance and evil.
Even the wind changed. It was drumming against the battlements in a terrible rhythm, carrying with it voices speaking a language that burned the ear.
“They’re praying,” said Haulvarn.
“It’s not a prayer,” replied Dvorn bleakly. “They’re begging. They want their god to be watching when they die.”
The Hathran prayers rose in competition with the heretic drone. Thane’s voice rose as the wind battered more blasphemies against the Imperial lines. The wind was hot now, stinking of old blood and sweat, and slowly the darkness was creeping forwards.
The horde was hundreds of thousands strong. Deformed and insane, robed or stripped naked even of their skins, some carried guns or knives, while others wielded the bloodstained bones of their fingers as sharp as blades. Alaric saw a war machine anchoring the horde. Its pitted hull was held up by four mechanical legs, and it waddled through the melting snow like a fat metal spider. Banners held over the horde bore symbols of stylised skulls and parchments of flayed skin carved with bloody prayers. Mutants twice the height of a man were whipped ahead of the horde. Their torsos were pierced by iron spikes on which were mounted the heads and hands of fallen Hathran soldiers, and these walking trophy racks lowed like cattle as the cultists drove them forward.
The blood from thousands of self-inflicted cuts stained the snow and the valley sides before them. It was as if the valley was a bleeding wound, the Chaos army a welling up of gore rising to drown the Hathrans in its madness. The sun of Sarthis Majoris struggled to shine down through the gathering clouds, fighting its own battle in a sky dirtied by the sight of flapping creatures circling overhead.
“Let us be His shield as He is our armour,” Thane continued. “Let us speak His word as He fuels the fire of our devotion. Let us fight His battles, as He fights the battle at the end of time, and let us join Him there, for duty ends not in death.”
All along the line, the Hathrans were taking up their firing positions. The battle cannon swivelled to point at the centre of the horde, icicles scattering from its massive barrel as it moved.
“Flares up!” yelled an officer, and several bright flares were fired to land on the snow between the line and the advancing army. Thick plumes of green and red smoke curled up. They marked the furthest accurate range of a lasgun, the line beyond which an enemy could not be permitted to advance without having to wade through las-fire as thick as rain.
The battle cannon fired, rocking back in its mounting above the line. The battlements shook. Shards of ice fell from the mountainsides. Even after weeks on the line, Hathran soldiers flinched at the appalling sound. A grey tongue of snow and pulverised rock lashed up in front of the horde, carrying body parts with it, sending out a Shockwave through packed bodies as cultists were thrown to the ground by the impact. Yet the horde advanced all the faster, the front ranks breaking into a run.
Alaric took his position behind the battlements. Brother Haulvarn was beside him. If Alaric fell, Haulvarn who would take command of the squad, and Alaric could think of no one he would rather have next to him in a fight.
“They’ll get in close,” said Alaric. “They won’t run. We’ll have to take them on face to face. Visical, that means plenty of fire.”
“It would be an honour,” said Visical. The pilot flame of his incinerator flickered, ready to ignite the blessed promethium in the weapon’s tanks. The fuel had been prayed over that very night, and the Emperor implored to manifest His will through the holy flame. Fire burned the enemy’s flesh, but faith burned its soul, and faith was the weapon of choice for a Grey Knight.
The horde reached closer. The stench of it was choking. The tower of frozen blood was visible to all, and it was warping, its front folding down like an opening jaw to form a flight of steps. A man in black armour, lacquered in red, descended from the battlements to the ground. He carried a two-handed sword with a blade as long as he was tall. He was noble and arrogant, his face so pale a
nd angularly handsome that it looked like it had been cut from the ice. The warrior was as tall as a Space Marine and carried with him an air of such cruelty and authority that it took a conscious effort not to kneel before him. The horde parted as he descended, hulking warriors in rust-red plate armour gathering in a cordon around him. The tower was still well beyond lasgun range, but the lord of the Chaos host was obvious, like a beacon in the horde.
“See him?” asked Haulvarn.
“Yes,” said Alaric.
“The Guard can’t take him,” said Brother Dvorn. “It’s up to us.”
“For now, Dvorn, we help to hold the line.”
The horde reached the first of the marker flares. At this range Alaric could see their faces, buried under scars or masks of blood, or just so twisted with hatred that there was nothing human left.
“Open fire!” yelled the colonel, and the air in front of the fortifications was streaked with las-fire. The front ranks of cultists were riddled, fat crescents of laser lashing off arms and slicing bodies open.
Billows of steam rose up where the snow and ice were vaporised. The sound was immense, like reality itself ripping under the fury. The battle cannon fired again, but its roar was almost lost among the gunfire, the explosion of smoke and gore just a punctuation mark amid the slaughter.
Alaric took aim and fired. The Grey Knights around him did the same. A Space Marine’s aim was excellent, and he picked out the individual shapes of heads and torsos among the confusion, and spat explosive bolts into them. Where the bolts detonated, puffs of blood and bone showered. Alaric fired in bursts, picking out a cultist and blasting him apart. The Grey Knights chewed a hole into the end of the Chaos line like a bloody bite mark, and within moments cultists were clambering over the ruined bodies of their dead.
However, the front ranks were just weak-willed fodder for the guns. The true power of the army followed them, ensuring the Hathrans used up ammunition and time killing the scum herded into the firing line.
The tide drew closer. The rhythm became frantic, trigger fingers spasming as the Hathrans sprayed rapid fire into the mass of men swarming towards them. A war machine rose through the fire, its guns opening up even as las-fire rained off it in showers of sparks.
“Visical! They’re in range!” shouted Alaric, relying on the squad’s vox-link to carry his voice over the din.
Brother Visical leaned between the battlements, his incinerator aimed down the steep slope of the fortifications.
The horde swarmed faster, chewed up and riddled with las-burns and bolter fire, but still numbering countless thousands. Their hands and feet were bloody from tearing on the ice. Pale, frost-bitten limbs reached from tattered red robes as they scrabbled to get a purchase on the fortification wall. The skinless ones leapt over the cultists in front, agile as insects.
Alaric looked into the eyes of one of them. They were rolled back and blank. There was nothing human left there.
All along the Imperial line, with a million voices raised in a scream, the Blood God’s army hit the wall.
CHAPTER THREE
“For the Emperor!” yelled young Brother Thane as he sliced a screaming robed killer in two with his halberd. The cultist’s twin blades clattered to the rockcrete of the fortification as Thane kicked out and knocked another from the parapet. Autogun fire spanged off the Grey Knight’s armour as he swept the battlement clear, the arc of his halberd blade taking off a hand, and then a head.
Another blast of sacred flame washed the battlements clear. A once-human shape, now hunchbacked and many-armed, reared up and screamed, cloaked in flame. It collapsed, skin and muscles boiling away.
“The dead,” said Brother Haulvarn, “they’re climbing their dead.”
Haulvarn was right, The Grey Knights’ guns and Visical’s incinerator had killed so many, so quickly, that cultists were piled up at the bottom of the wall, high enough for the killers behind them to clamber up. They were on the wall now, fighting each other to die by the Grey Knights’ hands.
Along the walls, huge mutants had clambered up onto the battlements and were fighting with the Hathrans. Alaric saw one Guardsman thrown from the wall by a deformed giant, and another having his brains dashed out by a foul creature with weeping skin and giant crab claws. A mutant fell from the wall, chest flaming from las-fire, and crashed the cultists below him. The battle cannon fired again, almost point-blank, throwing Hathrans from their feet, and showering them with earth and body parts, but it was not enough. Cultists were making it onto the walls to lay into the Hathrans with guns and blades.
Haulvarn’s halberd took the arm off a feral warrior with woad painted skin, before he ducked back below the battlements to shelter from the fire of the closest war machine.
“Too many?” he asked.
“Too many,” agreed Alaric.
“Then it’s ours to win.”
Alaric looked around at his oldest comrade. “The line cannot hold, not against this. Be ready to take command.”
“Why?”
“Because I might not come back.”
“Justicar, your brothers need—”
“My brothers need what the Emperor needs. They need victory. Standing back and letting the enemy kill us will not win us that victory. It is up to us, which means it is up to me. That is a justicar’s responsibility. Can I count on you?”
“Of course, Justicar, always.”
“Then we need to get to the centre of the walls. Open up a path for me through this rabble.”
Haulvarn paused, just for half a second. He stood to his full superhuman height, holding his halberd up so the squad could see. “Brothers!” he yelled above the din of battle. “Forward! Down the line!”
Visical was first up, spraying the blessed flame along the battlements stretching westwards. Cultists screamed in the fire. Thane cut them down with his sword, his power armour protecting him as he strode through the burning fuel. They loomed from every side through the fire and smoke, and each scarred face was met by a sword or halberd crackling with the harnessed power of a Grey Knight’s mind. Alaric felt bones fracturing under his halberd, and saw wet rains opened up in enemy torsos from his storm bolter.
He barely had to think. He was a Space Marine, a Grey Knight, created almost whole to be a killing machine. Every fatal movement was hard-wired into him, as if a machine-spirit guided him, as if the Emperor himself was controlling his actions.
However, a Space Marine was not a machine. He was driven by passions that a normal man could not understand. The obscenity leading this horde had to be destroyed. That was the thought that drove Alaric on.
Thane wrestled a giant mutant as they went, something so foully warped there was barely any human left in it at all. A leathery winged creature swooped down to snatch Alaric off the wall. Alaric snatched it instead, crushing its throat in his fist while he tore its wings off and threw it into the fire still slathered over the battlements behind him.
“Here!” shouted Alaric. “Break through them!”
Hathrans were dying all around. The Chaos horde had forced the walls in a dozen places, and knots of combat were erupting everywhere. An explosion tore a massive chunk out of the battlements on the left of the line, and the horde surged forwards, a war machine walking relentlessly over the slope of the rubble, impaling Guardsmen on its mechanical talons.
And there were daemons. They were red-skinned and hideous, leaping amid the carnage, wielding swords of black iron that glowed and smouldered.
“Damn you!” shouted a voice that Alaric recognised as that of Colonel Dal’Tharken. “Hold to your post, Grey Knights! The flank will fall! Get back to your post!” Alaric caught sight of the colonel, covered in burning daemon’s blood, wielding his sword and plasma pistol, surrounded by the bodies of friend and foe.
He was a tough and unrelenting servant of the Emperor. The Imperium would miss him. Alaric ignored his words and pressed on.
The champion of Chaos was the key. Chaos adored its champions as m
uch as it despised everything else. It granted particularly foul-hearted men and women with the power to command their forces, and the authority to speak with their gods’ own voices. The Imperial line could not hold the enemy. It would barely make a dent in the vast force that had landed to claim Sarthis Majoris. It had, however, achieved a goal that, though the Guardsmen did not know it, was every bit as valuable to the Imperium.
It had brought Alaric and his Grey Knights face to face with the champion who represented the dark gods on this world.
“Use the Thirteenth Hand,” said Duke Venalitor. His voice was loaded with disdain, for the Thirteenth Hand were the lowest dregs of his army.
One of Venalitor’s heralds, black armour welded to its weeping skin, blew a long note from its war horn. The Thirteenth Hand, hunched subhuman creatures dressed in rags, hurried forward for the honour of dying at the wall.
The battle was going as planned. If any truly human emotion could be ascribed to Duke Venalitor, it could be said that he was happy with it. By the time the regiments of proper soldiers reached the front, the battle would be over and the refinery cities of Sarthis Majoris would be Venalitor’s.
A messenger descended on tattered wings of bloody skin.
“My lord,” it slurred, “their flank has fallen. The defenders have abandoned their posts.”
“Cowards,” sneered Venalitor. “Their skulls are not fit for the Brass Throne.”
“They were from the corpse-emperor’s legions,” said the messenger.
“Astartes?” Venalitor’s perfect, pale brow furrowed. “They would not run.”
The pit of Venalitor’s mind dredged up memories from a time when he had been a man. It was a weak and shameful part of his existence, before the Blood God had found him. That man recalled that Space Marines were the guardians of the Imperium, the last line against all horrors, soldiers who would never flee, never, not even with Venalitor himself bearing down on them.
“Close order!” yelled Venalitor. His sword was in his hand, its huge blade shining in the red-tinged dawn. “Now! Shields up! Give no quarter!”
[Grey Knights 03] - Hammer of Daemons Page 2
