Ruinstorm

by David Annandale

  Sanguinius defied the paralysis and jerked his head up. The two horrors had held him in place long enough to make him the target of a flying daemon. Its sinuous tail sliced the air as if swimming. Talons lined the edges of its wings. Its maw was framed by horns as long as a man’s arm. Another daemon rode its back. It was the same revolting pink as the abomination Sanguinius had dispatched, but its limbs were longer, muscled. Its horned head was jewelled with necklaces of golden bones. Two of its three hands held a curved dagger and a flesh-bound book. The third was open. The daemon extended it towards Sanguinius, revealing an azure eye in its palm. The daemon cocked its head, as if in greeting, and psychic energy blasted from the eye.

  Jittering lightning struck Sanguinius in the chest and wrapped itself around him. Change, hard and cold and inexorable, reached through his armour, into his marrow, into his mind. The daemon chanted, its voice twining around the scream of its mount. The words were beyond his understanding. No human tongue could make their shape. Yet they drove even deeper into the heart of the Angel’s being. They called up fate, like a stone, a cold yet molten stone, diamond and lava, the unalterable and the consuming. Horus’ blade pierced him once more, and beyond that pain was a darkness. It was not the abyss of his death. It was formed of the consequences of his death.

  The attack, the words, the agony and the vision all took barely a second to transpire. Sanguinius shouted, defying the paralysis that pulled at his limbs and soul. If my fate is decreed, then I do not die here. The daemon’s attack meant nothing, and with his left hand he thrust the Spear of Telesto upwards, impaling the winged daemon through its maw. He arrested its flight with that single gesture, grounding himself against the impact of its mass. The head of the spear tore through the upper jaw and emerged through the top of the daemon’s flat head. Impaled, the abomination shrieked mindlessly. It lashed its body around Sanguinius, spines gouging the surface of his armour. The rider sank the talons of its feet into the back of the monster and kept its position. It ignored the flailing wings and tail. The eye in its hand unleashed jagged blue lightning. The daemon held the book higher, and it chanted the words of its pages with greater ferocity, and greater knowledge.

  I know you, it seemed to be saying. I know everything you will say and do, and how you will end. I know how this battle will end. I know you, and you are the one who is impaled.

  It struck downwards with its twisted blade. Sanguinius blocked it with the Blade Encarmine. His movement felt slow, as if he were a puppet straining against his strings. Fate was inevitable, yet change tormented his frame, seeking to bend him to a new, more terrible arc, blackening the meaning of his death, turning sacrifice into atrocity. He pushed back against the daemon. The blades scraped against each other. Crimson and violet light collided. Flames that burned and flames that sliced made war against each other. The flying daemon sank lower on the spear. Its flesh boiled away from the weapon’s touch, and it wrapped the length of its tail around the author of its pain.

  The horned daemon chanted, and its eyes blazed in mockery.

  I know you.

  Sanguinius hurled his strength against the daemon. The Blade Encarmine began to slice through the edge of the abomination’s sword.

  His peripheral vision caught movement on his right. Something huge had broken through the Sanguinary Guard. It was charging him.

  Gold flashed to his left. His herald leapt past him, attacking in such a blur of speed that Sanguinius would have sworn he saw the flash of wings carrying the herald upwards. He landed beside the three-armed daemon and drove his powerblade through the side of its head. The warp light vanished. The book fell from the daemon’s grasp.

  The charging beast was almost upon him.

  Sanguinius turned in the coils of the winged daemon with such force that he shredded the creature’s muscle. The Spear of Telesto was caught in the monster’s body, but he swung the Blade Encarmine over his head as he turned. He brought it down with a roar. He hit his target before he could truly register what it was. Behind his blow was all his rage at the paradoxes of his fate, its certain arrival and uncertain meaning. He struck at the powers that laid claim to knowing him and the purpose of his being. The sword hit the skull of a daemonic beast. Scarlet of hide and of armour, a single razored horn rising from its forehead, its jaws were parted in rabid rage. It had trampled one of the Sanguinary Guard beneath hooves of brass, pounding the legionary into a mass of pulp and splintered ceramite.

  All this, Sanguinius took in after his blow. The blade split the monster’s skull in two. The blazing eyes fell to either side, their wrath flaring once more, then fading as dissolution took hold of the behemoth. Its legs buckled on the instant and it slammed into the ground. The sword-wielding daemon that rode its back was pitched forwards. Bolter fire took it apart before it landed. Sanguinius leaned into the collision, crushing the winged daemon’s coils between his armour and the fallen beast. Daemonic flesh merged and melted. Freed, he spread his wings and took to the air.

  Sanguinius hovered briefly over the melee. The herald had only just withdrawn his blade from the body of the chanting daemon. He saluted the Angel and turned back to the fray. The war called, yet Sanguinius felt compelled to watch the herald a moment longer. He had the vertiginous impression of seeing himself wade into the crush of monsters.

  Amit had detached his company from the main advance, leading his men in an arc around the edges of the flood of daemons pouring from the gate. Now he took them back in, cutting across the flow before the doorway. Amit sent a flight of rockets just ahead of them. The legionaries charged into the dust of the explosions. They went in fast, reckless in fury, bolters and blades punishing the reeling monsters while the fireballs were still fading. Amit’s anger was who he was, and it could take him too far, but it was not the Thirst. It was the shadow of the Blood Angels’ nobility, the brutal reality of warfare. They aspired to the sun, but they drew blood too. Right now, the burst of Fifth Company’s anger was the exemplar for the Legion.

  The main advance of the Blood Angels was less than a hundred yards from the narrowing gap between the doors. The swirl of daemons was confused. There were fewer emerging from the manu­factorum, and the ones at the entrance were striking out in every direction, momentarily unsure of the primary threat.

  Sanguinius rose higher, faster, his wings beating hard against the thin air to hold him aloft, the confluence of events giving him speed.

  ‘Lord primarch,’ Azkaellon voxed. Sanguinius was pulling away from his escort.

  ‘Be ready,’ Sanguinius told him. ‘We are about to take the forge. All heavy weapons,’ Sanguinius voxed. ‘Fire forwards, and fire now.’

  Lascannons and rockets by the hundreds obeyed his command a second later. The sudden holocaust cut through the ranks of the daemons, punching craters in rock and gouging out trenches of incinerated warp flesh. Sanguinius streaked downwards, and he was another flame, a comet of war. He held the Spear of Telesto before him as he flew to the nexus of daemons. He charged the spear with the psychic force of the angelic war, and unleashed its judgement.

  The beam was a blinding sear in the gloom of Pyrrhan. It sliced through clusters of sinuous, hooved, long-necked abominations. It turned them into ash. Sanguinius flew in on the path of the beam, wings folding back. Spear extended and blade sweeping before him, his descent was a bloody streak. He decapitated daemons with the speed and force of his strike. He was unstoppable.

  He landed just ahead of Amit’s company. He stood between the closing doors; their edges, wide as mountain faces, rumbled in. The ground shook without cease. Around Sanguinius, daemons of wrath closed in, swords raised. Their numbers looked thin. Too many had rushed forwards to try to counter Fifth Company. Before Sanguinius were the mouths of thousands of tunnels, blurring in the great heights above. The daemons had stopped their advance. They were on the defensive, guarding the entrances. Some capered, eager for the Blood Angels to make their a
ssaults. The creatures of disease rang bells, so many that the funereal clamour rivalled the grinding thunder of the doors.

  Sanguinius attacked the abominations trying to encircle him. They stalked forwards on hoofed legs that angled backwards. With their long, curving horns and crimson skin, they truly were the daemons of ancient Terran myth. In the crimson of their hide, though, Sanguinius saw a dark mirror of his Legion’s colours. The daemons came to fight angels, but in their snarling rage, they were the image of the angels’ threatened fall. Sanguinius fought them in a sweeping run, hitting them like a scythe. He deflected swords and cut abominations in half. The Spear of Telesto flashed again, burning purity sending the rage that walked back into the abyss of the warp.

  The deep thudding of bolters and the snarl of chainswords drew closer. The din of war echoed up the edges of the doors. Less than two hundred yards of space remained. Fifth Company broke through at the same time as the Sanguinary Guard. Amit and Azkaellon converged on Sanguinius. Amit’s armour dripped with ichor. His breathing rasped from his helm grille. It was almost a snarl.

  ‘Captain Amit,’ Sanguinius said. ‘Are you the master of your anger?’

  ‘I am, lord.’ The breathing became slightly more regular. ‘We all are.’

  ‘That is well. Then we go forwards.’

  The main body of Blood Angels was between the doors now. The legionaries marched shoulder to shoulder, their boots tramping in unison. They were a single mass, indivisible, unstoppable. They left a stinking, dissolving wake of foulness behind them. The Stormbirds maintained their bombardment, concentrating their fire on a smaller area as the closing doors hampered the attempts of the daemon army to return to the manufactorum.

  The IX Legion moved at a brutal run between the doors, racing to get through before they shut with crushing finality. There was a mile of open floor between the doors and the tunnel mouths. The surface was metal, though it looked like knotted flesh. With the Sanguinary Guard as point again, Sanguinius crossed the threshold in the manufactorum and directed the phalanxes to the left and right.

  ‘We take the widest halls,’ he ordered. ‘One company in each path. Captains, choose your terrain to fight upon.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’ Raldoron asked.

  ‘We’ll know when we find it,’ Sanguinius answered. ‘Believe that this is still a manufactorum. We can destroy its ability to function without having to destroy the structure itself. Go now, for Baal, for Terra and the Emperor!’

  He was running forwards as he spoke. His army was spreading out behind him, escaping the doors. He chose the central hall for the Sanguinary Guard and First Company. Halfway across the floor of the towering vestibule, Sanguinius looked back. The doors were almost closed. The last of the Blood Angels were inside. He could just see a narrow slit, flickering with the flames of the battle outside the manufactorum. ‘Brothers,’ he voxed Guilliman and the Lion, ‘we are inside.’

  ‘Well fought,’ said the Lion. ‘We will scrape the land clear of the abominations for your extraction.’

  ‘Does the interior suggest how you can shut the forge down?’ Guilliman asked. ‘I would think–’

  Vox contact with the exterior of the manufactorum cut off. The doors closed with a tectonic boom.

  As Sanguinius led the march to the central tunnel, to where daemons gibbered and snarled and chanted, a psychic shudder rippled through the immense forge. It passed over Sanguinius. It was the touch of malevolent sentience. It felt like a welcome.

  Guilliman leads the Legion into battle

  Ten

  The Cleft

  The manufactorum breathed. It was metal and stone, a monstrosity constructed on a framework of brass and iron girders the size of cities that gave shape to the bones of the planet. It was a work built in the materium, of the materium, and yet it breathed. The taint of the warp oozed from every crack in the metal, every pore of stone. The floor beneath Sanguinius’ boots heaved up and down with the slow inhale and exhale of lungs. It slithered too. Footing was treacherous. The metal felt as if it were covered by a thick, viscous slick of ichor. It was not. It was dry. Serpentine tremors moved through it, shifting and pulling, the surface changing from rough to smooth in the space of an instant.

  The manufactorum bled. Where bolt shells or daemon claws struck the walls, rotting blood ran. The wounds puckered and sucked like hungry mouths.

  And the manufactorum sang. The conduits were the pipes of an organ. Whatever moved through them summoned notes of cancerous music. The deeper the Blood Angels ventured into the forge, the more complex the song became. The mouths of open conduits had teeth, and tongues lapped at their edges. They shaped themselves to the demands of the tune. The tongues vibrated. The octaves of the sick melody plunged so far beneath hearing, the vibrations would have shattered a mortal’s skeleton. They rose so high, Sanguinius tasted blood. The music was a polyphonic symphony of dark industry and darker intent. It was a hymn to ruin, and a threnody for hope. In the complex nodes that developed, he thought he heard the formation of a whisper. It was at the edge of perception, unwilling to declare itself yet. There were no syllables. It was the hesitation that came before a familiar word was pronounced.

  Sanguinius was not alone in hearing the whisper. Raldoron spoke to him when First Company and the Sanguinary Guard broke through another horde of the corpulent, plague-bearing abominations. ‘Something is speaking here.’

  ‘And it wants us to listen,’ Sanguinius said. ‘Shut your ears to it. There will only be poison in the words.’

  They were in a hall hundreds of yards wide, and they had a clear run for at least a mile. The space was lit by the conduits. They ran in thick clusters along the walls and the ceiling, two hundred feet up. Each was almost as wide as a Rhino, and they glowed, lit from within by the burning fusion of warp and matter they carried. They tracked their way down the curving tunnel like veins, their lines irregular, merging and branching but always feeding deeper.

  ‘The voices want us to advance,’ Raldoron said. ‘They are pulling.’

  ‘And we must advance for our reasons too,’ Sanguinius said. ‘There are matters where we have no choice. There are actions we are bound by destiny to take. That does not mean the consequences of the action are preordained.’ He needed this to be true. Please, Father, let it be so. ‘The foul song of this place may want us to go deeper. We will, and we will overwhelm the power within. It will rue its desire to lure us in.’

  The tunnel curved sharply. Its immensity sighed. A great choir resounded, and the hall opened up into a chamber of even larger dimensions. Filling the centre was a nexus of conduits. They arrived from a score of corridors, from multiple levels. They tangled with each other, forming a gigantic knot.

  ‘A nerve cluster!’ Sanguinius shouted. It could be nothing else. The unwholesome light within flashed with maddening intensity, illuminating the chamber with a blinding stutter. ‘This monstrousness mimics life, and so makes itself vulnerable. Teach it pain!’

  The song of the manufactorum became a wail, punctuating each flash with the celebration and lamentation of the materium twisted, and the impossible made real. Hundreds of the pink-fleshed daemons gathered around the base of the nexus, adding their babbling to the chorus. They turned at the sound of the Blood Angels’ arrival. The daemons sent a wave of warp sorcery ahead of them. The Sanguinary Guard and First Company hurled themselves through it. It washed over armour, boiling ceramite and melting it. The wills contained within were strong, made stronger by the crucible of Signus Prime. The Blood Angels withstood the wrenching attempts of change and blasted the abominations out of existence. They waded through the twitching mess of blue matter that remained, and gathered, squad by squad, around the nexus.

  Raldoron joined Sanguinius before the mass of the conduits. ‘Melta bombs?’ he asked.

  Sanguinius smiled. ‘It seems so mundane a means of destroying the extraordinary, d
oesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Raldoron. ‘If the myths of the past are real, it seems they should be banished by rituals too.’

  ‘Naturally.’ Sanguinius was conscious of the feathers of his wings trembling very lightly in response to the vibrations of the manufactorum’s song. He knew more than he cared to about myths. His life had been a constant struggle to avoid becoming one. ‘Only rituals banish nothing. Actions do.’ He swept an arm, taking in the smashed and burned remains of the daemons. ‘They have become material, and so can be destroyed by material means.’ He examined the nexus a moment longer. ‘Melta bombs,’ he agreed, then said it again, voxing the order to the company.

  Howls came from the other tunnels. They grew louder in the time it took to set the charges.

  Azkaellon drew the Sanguinary Guard more tightly around Sanguinius. ‘Reinforcements are coming,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed.’ Sanguinius scanned the tunnel openings, choosing the next path. He settled on a corridor on the opposite side of the chamber from where the Blood Angels had entered. It was as large as the passage they had left, and had as many conduits. He saw now that not all of the pipes fed into the nexus. Perhaps not even all those that did were bringing material to the junction. They might be carry­ing something away, too.

  There was another consideration. The roar of an approaching mass of the enemy was louder down that tunnel. If a larger force was coming, it might be from something worth defending.

  There was a score of melta bombs, keyed to a single detonator, placed on the nexus when the company moved on. The junction was that big. The Blood Angels moved down the next tunnel, retreating from the blast they would unleash, and advancing on the foe. Raldoron ordered Sergeant Vahiel to hold the rear, trigger the detonator and note the results. The noise of the daemons was deafening, though still subsumed to the song of the manufactorum, but they were not yet in sight when Vahiel set off the bombs.