Fury of Magnus Page 2

  Zytos rapped his knuckles on the pommel of his hammer and said, ‘Concerns of the spirit must be put aside until after the fighting’s done.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Abidemi. ‘We must win both together or else we lose everything.’

  ‘I’ll put my faith in this,’ said Zytos, swinging the hammer up from the ground and hefting its immense weight as easily as a mortal man might swing a walking cane.

  Barek Zytos had ever been the most direct of his brothers, as was only to be expected of a man born to the city of warrior kings. The drakes cut into the onyx skin of his skull were markers of the beasts he had hunted on the Arridian Plain, and his words provided a much needed anchor for Abidemi.

  ‘And though he’s young, I put faith in him,’ continued Zytos, nodding to where Igen Gargo stood scanning the ramparts atop the turret of a rust-brown Shadowsword. Above him, the unending barrage of shells and lasers flared and burst against the aegis shield: relentless impacts from orbit and plunging fire from distant batteries. The swirling patterns rippled like the violent borealis of the Time of Trial.

  The colours reminded Abidemi of looking deep into the fires of a forge ready to receive metal. It was said a master smiter could look into a furnace and know the exact moment to thrust the iron into its heat, when to turn, and when to withdraw it just by listening to its song.

  Zytos had led them back to Terra, but of the three of them, Igen Gargo was the master of reading the fire’s song.

  Gargo scanned the fighting, ready to call out any weakness or predict a rout. The burnished metal of his augmetic arms reflected the light of explosions, and fire danced in the red lenses of his battle helm.

  Abidemi followed his gaze, but it was impossible to guess where one part of the line would bend or break. Lightning-shot smoke all but obscured the fighting, and the sounds of clashing metal and gunfire was much the same at one point as it was at another. Vast shapes reared up, bloated silhouettes and angular snapshots of unnatural creatures the enemy had pressed into its ranks.

  Zytos lifted his helm and snapped it into place with a hiss of pressurised air.

  ‘Here,’ said Zytos, turning to retrieve a pair of battered breacher shields from the ground behind him and handing one to Abidemi. ‘It’s not Promethean craft, but it’ll do.’

  Abidemi nodded, scabbarding Draukoros and clamping the shield tight to his arm.

  The yellow-gold metal was thick and dented, the ebon fist at its centre chipped and silvered by a hundred or more impacts. It felt unnatural to bear wargear marked with the heraldry of a Legion not his own, but these were desperate times and the shields had not failed them yet.

  ‘It’ll be soon,’ said Zytos, looking back towards Gargo.

  Abidemi snapped his own helmet on and engaged the gorget seals. Even insulated from the atmosphere, the air tasted of ash and burnt iron. His visor lit up with targeting information, damage assessments and energy-depletion warnings.

  ‘How can you tell?’ he answered.

  ‘I can’t read the fire as well as Gargo, but I can read him,’ said Zytos.

  ‘Stand to!’ yelled Gargo.

  ‘Told you,’ said Zytos as the vehicles around them roared to life, reactors powering up and drive mechanisms shrieking like the magma vents of the Pyre Desert. Blue fumes belched from exhaust grilles, and commanders unfurled pennants of dead regiments upon their antennae.

  ‘Watch the right,’ ordered Gargo, pointing a silvered arm towards the wall.

  Abidemi scanned the fighting.

  ‘What does he see?’

  ‘I don’t–’

  A thunderclap of shield failure was swiftly followed by a titanic blast that shook the staging area with the force of an orbital strike. Colossal blocks of stone lofted skyward as something exploded just below the level of the rampart Gargo had indicated. Abidemi couldn’t see what had caused it, but a hundred-metre portion of the wall simply vanished in a blinding sheet of fire. The ringing echoes of its detonation were deafening, even within his helmet, and his auto-senses dimmed to shield his eyes against the incandescent brightness of the explosion.

  It seemed the battle paused for breath, as though death were admiring its handiwork.

  Gargo leapt from the Shadowsword’s turret as a ululating roar swept up the molten remains of the wall. He too hefted a breacher shield and ran to join his brothers at the centre of the line.

  ‘Into the breach?’ asked Gargo.

  ‘Once more,’ agreed Zytos.

  He lifted his hammer high and raised his voice beyond the tumult.

  ‘Indomitor! Into them!’

  With Abidemi, Gargo and Zytos forming the tip of a charging wedge, the reserves of Vulkan’s Own advanced into the fire and smoke. Abidemi saw the half-molten shape of a siege belfry, monstrous shapes surging from its buckled assault gates: migou giants in heavy suits of heat-resistant plate and iron helms beaten into the forms of daemons. Each was a hulking abhuman carrying a belt-fed chain gun and with a drum-like ammo hopper bolted to its spine. Roaring with idiot hatred, they braced themselves and unleashed the full fury of their weapons.

  Two-metre tongues of fire blazed from their flared muzzles. Hundreds of men went down in the first volley of scything, high-calibre shells. Indomitor’s advance faltered, but pushed on into the storm of fire and steel.

  ‘Into the fires of battle!’ yelled Gargo.

  ‘Unto the anvil of war!’ answered Abidemi and Zytos.

  Abidemi felt dozens of bludgeoning impacts on his shield, each one striking with the force of a forge-servitor swinging a sledge­hammer. He gritted his teeth, locking his arm at ninety degrees as he slotted his bolter into the shield’s firing notch.

  More of the migou gunners were mounting the walls, unleashing fresh torrents of fire into the flanks of the defenders.

  Clawed ladders and piston-driven grapnels bit stone. A tide of degenerates swarmed behind them, scrambling for a foothold on the walls. Little more than a howling mob wielding crudely stamped weapons and mass-produced guns, but there were so many. So very many.

  Prioritise. Execute.

  ‘Take out those gunners!’ Abidemi shouted.

  Hammering impacts buckled the curved plates of his shield, the power of the shells making Abidemi feel like he was advancing into the teeth of a pyro-storm. He lined up a shot and fired his bolter, the hard bang swallowed in the thunder of gunfire. One of the abhuman gunners fell back, its chest blown open. He fired again, and another dropped to its knees with half its torso ripped away. A third migou vanished in a pyre of streaking rounds as a mass-reactive detonated inside its ammo hopper.

  Abidemi’s visor pinged each of the migou in turn. Pull the trigger: an enemy dead.

  Single shots only. Not enough ammunition for any wasted shells!

  Another target lit up, limned by his visor. Another round, another dead.

  Then he was in amongst them. He clamped his bolter to his thigh and swept Draukoros from its sheath.

  ‘Numeon!’ he roared, hammering the foe with his shield and reaping a bloody harvest with every butcher’s cleave of his sword.

  His weapon was an extension of his arm, and he tore apart heavy plate and pallid flesh with every strike. The blade’s shrieking teeth chewed through the armoured migou with all the hunger of a Nocturnean drake, devouring steel and flesh and bone with every ripping roar.

  The enemy matched his bulk. Abidemi couldn’t just smash them aside with his own mass. He kept moving, giving the migou no time to bracket him nor give his mortal enemies a chance to pin him in place with their numbers.

  His shield was a bludgeon, pistoned forward to make space.

  Breathe and swing. Hack and cut.

  Each migou was a powerful foe, but they were slow. He slammed the hard edge of the shield into their faces. Ram the sword up and under their plates, twist, withdraw. Turn and mov
e, do it again.

  The slaughter was machine-like.

  Repetition made it instinctual and unthinking.

  Abidemi felt the presence of his brothers. Their grunts and oaths over the vox were wordless, but he understood every one. Zytos swung his hammer with a forging cadence as Gargo spun and lunged with his spear, scything and impaling men like wriggling fish.

  The men and women of Vulkan’s Own fought with rifle, pistol and bayonet; with iron bars or whatever else came to hand. The fighters were woven together so densely it was all but impossible to tell friend from foe. Men clawed at their enemies, bloodied fingers tearing off masks and thumbs gouging eyes.

  This was not the war the remembrancers had spoken of in the earliest days of the crusade.

  War, when it had come at all back then, had been filled with glory and heroics fit for song. Not this frenzied brawling in the mud of the Throneworld, scraping for a rusted blade to open a throat, or a chunk of fused masonry to bash in a skull. This was the true face of war: a desperate fight for survival; a scrambling, maddened horror in which only the insane survived.

  All else was but a soldier’s lie.

  Abidemi slammed three men from the walls, their broken-limbed bodies spinning over the rampart to fall two hundred metres to the ruins below.

  He let out a shuddering breath.

  Remember to breathe! Take in oxygen. Turn and fight!

  He’d fought to the very crest of the breach, where the vast detonation had broken the rampart. The full horror of the broken landscape before Indomitor was revealed, and the shocking sight of the enemy was like plunging into an ice bath after a hard march over the Pyre Desert.

  Abidemi had heard the estimates of the enemy’s order of battle, the impossible numbers thrown around by Lord Dorn’s strategos. He’d seen the vast shadows cast by the drop-ships blotting out the sky over Lion’s Gate space port, and had fought this war long enough to know just how many of his fellow Imperials had cast off their oaths of loyalty.

  But each time he saw the unending horde ranged against them, it broke his heart anew.

  The force attacking Indomitor spread like an undulant sea beneath a choking layer of petrochemical smog. To Abidemi’s eyes, it was like a host of pack predators swarming a leviathan at bay. Larger, battle-bred creatures moved among them: hideous by-blows of the fallen Mechanicum that walked on stilt-legs and loosed violent squalls of corrupt binharic hate, and things that might once have been living, but were now armoured, chimeric monsters transformed by warp-spawned rituals.

  Far to the south, the air rippled around the immense form of Titans as they strode from the Anterior Barbican to pummel the strongholds protecting the Eternity Gate. Heedless of the life-and-death struggles at their feet, the god-machines howled their fury from war-horns at their shoulders, but even those sounds were overwhelmed by the rolling thunder of explosions and shellfire.

  A series of seismic detonations smashed into the slope below, pulling him back to the present as a killing rain of debris hammered down. More of the mortals swarmed the breach below him. They fired their weapons into the air, hooting like maddened beasts. Huge stalk-tanks bristling with spikes and heavy ordnance stomped among them. Through the twitching smoke, Abidemi thought he saw the red-and-gold heraldry of swift-striding leviathans.

  Too small to be Titans, even predatory Warhounds. Knights…?

  He knew he was exposed here, backlit by the smoke and flames swirling around him, but didn’t care. He wanted them to see him, to know the Emperor’s warriors were not afraid of them, that the traitors would pay dearly for every step inwards they took.

  This was an enemy driven by a hate Abidemi simply could not fathom.

  A rippling string of ignitions bloomed in the smoke below, and the red-gold shapes strode from the fog banks in their wake. Low to the ground they came, heedless of the mortals they crushed beneath their splay-clawed feet: three giant bipedal forms with vast glaives and weapons mounted beneath wide pauldrons of bloody ­crimson and gold.

  ‘Morbidia,’ hissed Abidemi, recognising the spiked-helm sigil on the fire-blackened banner rising over the lead Knight’s skull-faced cockpit.

  A crackling voice blared a warning in his helmet vox. Gargo.

  ‘Incoming!’

  Abidemi looked up in time to see a salvo of Ironstorm missiles flashing downwards.

  He closed his eyes.

  ‘The man who looks to the ground does not see the winged dactyl…’

  Survivors

  The Field of Winged Victory.

  That was what they called this place, a vast marshalling ground older than Bhab, a place that had been here in the days before Unification, before even the Palace itself.

  Alivia Sureka remembered watching the first starships to leave Terra from terrain now occupied by the nearby towers of the Clanium Library, back when the marshalling ground’s name had seemed fitting.

  It had been a name to inspire greatness, to dream beyond humanity’s birthrock and seize the manifest destiny of the species.

  Now it felt like a grotesque joke.

  Back then, a hundred thousand soldiers left Terra every day from here. Close to ten times that number now filled the open esplanade, but they weren’t going anywhere: a living ocean of human misery. Numb with fear and daily atrocities, they huddled in makeshift refugee camps and shanties wedged between the Indomitor Wall and the canyon-precincts of the Hegemon. And this was but one of scores of such places jammed in wherever non-combatants could be accommodated.

  High above the grand domes of Imperial bureaucracy, the sky bled its horror in purple bruises of light on the shield overhead. The air buckled with shock pulses from the constant ordnance barrages bursting against it.

  Some of the plaza’s earliest occupants had considered themselves the privileged few for having been granted access to the inner precincts of the Palace, but the inexorable pressure of the Outer Palace’s systematic destruction had forced Terra’s grandees to admit everyone.

  Who was it that gave the order to open the gates?

  Alivia doubted it had been Dorn.

  Nor, she suspected, would it have been Valdor: the First of the Ten Thousand would have baulked at the notion of so many unknown souls this close to the Emperor.

  The Sigillite then? The Master of Mankind had His gaze fixed on loftier outcomes than the survival of Terra’s populace, but the Regent of Terra’s voice bore the Emperor’s authority.

  So, yes, it would likely have been Malcador, which only went to prove that you could know someone for an eternity and still be surprised.

  Alivia scanned the sea of faces around her, exhausted families aged by grief and coated in a fine layer of ash that fell like snow. No matter the money, position or power they had in the time before the Warmaster had invested Terra, they were all alike in fear. These were the survivors of Lion’s Gate, the ruination of Angevin, or the Dusk Wall’s breach, the razing of Magnifican. They had fled burning camps on the Gangetic Way, the Palatine’s collapse or the loss of Dhwalagiri. Filthy, frightened and stained with mud, they watched and prayed for the fighting to end, but most could care little for whoever stood triumphant at its end.

  The sound of prayers, despair and tears was a constant refrain.

  This is the sound of the end of the world: men weeping as their doom approaches.

  Alivia tried to keep her own anguish at bay, but she had heard enough horror stories to last all her many lifetimes: dead loved ones, grievously wounded partners, sons and daughters fighting on the walls, and – worst of all – tales of parents whose grip had slipped, and who now frantically scoured the camps in search of their lost children.

  Alivia remembered the sense of relief that had filled her at their arrival on Terra. The journey from Molech had been long and hard, but when she’d breathed the ferrous air of the home world, it felt like she’d managed t
o outpace the war at their heels.

  A fantasy, of course. It was inevitable Horus Lupercal would eventually lay siege to his father’s Palace, but the sight of what Rogal Dorn had wrought gave her hope it would be enough to stop the arch-traitor in his tracks. She’d believed they would be safe in Lion’s Gate space port, the Starspear’s incomprehensible bulk dwarfing the mountains from which the Palace had been carved. Its towering immensity was awash with weapons, plated from surface to space in fortifications, and manned by the gilded host of Lord Dorn himself.

  Surely such an invincible fortress could never fall?

  But fall it had. The enemy had driven a wedge into its heart and split it from its uppermost platforms to its deepest underways. The bridges linking its gantries to the Eternity Wall were still burning, its spires aflame beyond thick black clouds.

  She’d heard tales of red-spined things hunting across those bridges, of people dragged down into impossible shadows. Alivia had seen a man and woman running for the safety of the bridge gates plucked from the ground by invisible hands and torn limb from limb, the aerosol­ising mist of their blood limning the frenzied outlines of claw-armed monsters.

  Laughter had chased them from Lion’s Gate, malicious gales of throaty amusement that weren’t loud enough to overcome the deafening crescendo of battle, but somehow resonated within the vault of every mortal skull.

  When she closed her eyes she could still hear that laughter, buzzing like a furious insect trapped in a glass. It had been days since she’d slept, but the bone-deep tiredness was better than the alternative. Her dreams were plagued with dark visions: nightmares of snakes, a lightless cavern far beneath the world and a doorway to somewhere endless and terrible.

  The horrors of war broke many a soldier, even those who came through the fighting with their limbs and bodies intact. The psychic wounds of battle and the anguish of seeing fellow soldiers die or suffer horrific injuries was enough to sunder even the strongest mind beyond the power of any medicae to heal.

  Alivia saw those self-same wounds on the faces of everyone she passed.

  No matter who claimed the throne of Terra, they would inherit a populace as traumatised as any of the soldiers who had fought for it.