Lords Of Nocturne, page 145
Betheniel was dead. Her eyes were open as she lay on her back in a growing pool of blood. The shell shrapnel had only clipped her, but it was enough for a killing blow. Athena held the novitiate in her arms, muttering a prayer.
‘Saint Katherine, I beseech you, bring this faithful soldier to the side of the Emperor. Protect her soul for the journey to the Golden Throne…’
She did not weep. Her resolve was hard as marble. Athena tightened her grip around Private Kolber’s sidearm and stood up. She wasn’t unsteady, nor did she feel any fear or doubt as she approached the armoured giant in yellow and black.
‘You are a disgrace to the aquila,’ she spat, bringing up the laspistol.
The shot was almost point-blank. It made Nemiok grunt and stagger but otherwise left him unscathed. He tore off his helm, uncaring of the battle around them. Underneath, he wore a mask of pure hatred.
‘For that show of strength, I will let you see my face before I execute you,’ he snarled, letting the bolter drop to its strap and drawing his spatha. ‘This will really hurt,’ he promised.
The punch to his unarmoured jaw sent Nemiok reeling and the spatha spiralling from his grasp to land blade down in the earth.
‘You’ve shamed yourself enough.’
Nemiok looked like he was about to reach for another weapon but stopped when Varik shook his head.
‘Killing innocents in cold blood, there is no honour in that.’ Varik turned to Athena.
‘Get out of here. A warzone is no place for a sister of mercy,’ he told her. ‘Stay alive and do some good at least.’ He took the pistol, crushed it. ‘Draw on my brothers a second time and I won’t stay my hand.’
She nodded, realising what Varik had sacrificed so that she could live.
Athena rushed to Betheniel’s side. Another group of refugees had found them and helped lift the body onto an Imperial Guard half-track. They drove off south, away from Devil’s Ridge and the orks. There were still more greenskins thronging the edge of the camp, coming down from the mountains.
She didn’t know what had made Varik intercede. Perhaps there was more compassion in the Space Marines than she realised. It didn’t matter. Compassion wouldn’t win this war. Only Yarrick could do that.
Overhead the barrage began anew, stealing away her thoughts and keeping the orks pinned. It would be several hours before the battle was done. Many more civilians would die. Only a few would know the Emperor’s deliverance.
Varik kept his brother in his sights until he was sure his ire had cooled.
‘You’ll regret that,’ Nemiok told him.
‘You go too far.’
The dense throb of heavy engines interrupted and they looked up to see a squadron of gunships coming down to land in the distance.
‘Now there’ll be trouble,’ Varik muttered.
The gunships were forest green, emblazoned with the snarling head of a firedrake. They belonged to the Salamanders.
Vinyar yanked off a gauntlet as he reclined on his throne in the Marines Malevolent barrack house. It was gloomy within the boxy ferrocrete structure, furnished with all the austerity expected of his puritanical Chapter. The captain kept banners and trophies close at hand. It was the only ornamentation he allowed in the stark chamber, except for a broad strategium table where a host of maps and data-slates were strewn.
He reviewed one, a report of the bombing at Emperor’s Deliverance, not deigning to look at the two warriors standing silently in his presence.
‘How many human casualties?’
‘Around four thousand, sire.’
‘And the orks?’
‘Total annihilation.’
Vinyar set down the slate, smiled at the two warriors.
‘Acceptable losses.’
‘There was also significant structural damage.’
‘Negligible,’ Vinyar waved away any concerns. ‘The greenskins are in retreat, the Marines Malevolent are victorious.’
‘What of Armageddon Command? I have heard talk of sanctions against us.’
Vinyar’s laugh was derisive. ‘Destrier has been reminded of his place and purpose in this war, Brother Varik. There’ll be no further repercussions from him.’
The warriors lingered, prompting the captain to ask, ‘Was there something more?’
Varik awaited Nemiok’s damning account of what had happened with Sister Athena, but his response was surprising.
‘No, sire,’ he rasped, jaw tight.
‘Then you’re dismissed.’
Both warriors saluted, turned on their heel and left.
Vinyar was poring over the maps on his strategium table, planning the next assault, when he heard the barrack house door opening again.
‘Changed your mind, Nemiok?’ he asked, looking up but finding someone else in his chambers. Vinyar sneered. ‘You.’
An onyx-skinned warrior was standing before him, armoured in forest green. A scaled cloak hung from his broad shoulders, attached beneath gilded pauldrons. Iconography of drakes and fire, hammers and anvils emblazoned his battle-plate. His voice was abyssal deep.
‘I have spoken with Colonel Destrier,’ he said. ‘I have also witnessed the excessive force used at Emperor’s Deliverance and been told of the civilian casualties.’
‘There is collateral damage in any war,’ protested Vinyar. ‘If I had not acted as punitively as I did, there would still be orks roaming that camp. Besides, cowards are unworthy of being spared.’
The green-armoured warrior had unhitched a thunder hammer from his back and slammed it on the strategium table, cracking data-slates and tearing maps. He was unbuckling a holstered pistol when he said, ‘You misunderstand the purpose of my visit, Vinyar.’ He looked up and his eyes flashed fire-red. ‘This isn’t a discussion.’ He glanced at the gauntlets the Marines Malevolent captain had discarded. ‘Put those back on. I want this to be even.’
Vinyar was belligerent, but reached for his gauntlets anyway. ‘What are you talking about, Tu’Shan?’
‘Penance and restitution,’ said the Chapter Master of the Salamanders. Bones cracked in his neck as he loosened them.
‘I’ll give you one piece of advice,’ he added, clenching and unclenching his fists to work the knuckles. ‘Don’t go for a weapon.’
Then he closed the barrack room door.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Kyme is the author of many Horus Heresy novels, novellas and audio dramas, including Old Earth, Promethean Sun and Nightfane. His novella Feat of Iron was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection The Primarchs. For Warhammer 40,000, Nick has written Volpone Glory and the Dawn of Fire novel The Iron Kingdom. He is also well known for his popular Salamanders series and the Cato Sicarius novels Damnos and Knights of Macragge. His work for Age of Sigmar includes the short story ‘Borne by the Storm’, included in the novel War Storm, and the audio drama The Imprecations of Daemons. He has also written the Warhammer Horror novel Sepulturum. He lives and works in Nottingham.
An extract from Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son.
‘I was there at the Siege of Terra,’ Vitrian Messinius would say in his later years.
‘I was there…’ he would add to himself, his words never meant for ears but his own. ‘I was there the day the Imperium died.’
But that was yet to come.
‘To the walls! To the walls! The enemy is coming!’ Captain Messinius, as he was then, led his Space Marines across the Penitent’s Square high up on the Lion’s Gate. ‘Another attack! Repel them! Send them back to the warp!’
Thousands of red-skinned monsters born of fear and sin scaled the outer ramparts, fury and murder incarnate. The mortals they faced quailed. It took the heart of a Space Marine to stand against them without fear, and the Angels of Death were in short supply.
‘Another attack, move, move! To the walls!’
They came in the days after the Avenging Son returned, emerging from nothing, eight legions strong, bringing the bulk of their numbers to bear against the chief entrance to the Imperial Palace. A decapitation strike like no other, and it came perilously close to success.
Messinius’ Space Marines ran to the parapet edging the Penitent’s Square. On many worlds, the square would have been a plaza fit to adorn the centre of any great city. Not on Terra. On the immensity of the Lion’s Gate, it was nothing, one of hundreds of similarly huge spaces. The word ‘gate’ did not suit the scale of the cityscape. The Lion’s Gate’s bulk marched up into the sky, step by titanic step, until it rose far higher than the mountains it had supplanted. The gate had been built by the Emperor Himself, they said. Myths detailed the improbable supernatural feats required to raise it. They were lies, all of them, and belittled the true effort needed to build such an edifice. Though the Lion’s Gate was made to His design and by His command, the soaring monument had been constructed by mortals, with mortal hands and mortal tools. Messinius wished that had been remembered. For men to build this was far more impressive than any godly act of creation. If men could remember that, he believed, then perhaps they would remember their own strength.
The uncanny may not have built the gate, but it threatened to bring it down. Messinius looked over the rampart lip, down to the lower levels thousands of feet below and the spread of the Anterior Barbican.
Upon the stepped fortifications of the Lion’s Gate was armour of every colour and the blood of every loyal primarch. Dozens of regiments stood alongside them. Aircraft filled the sky. Guns boomed from every quarter. In the churning redness on the great roads, processional ways so huge they were akin to prairies cast in rockcrete, were flashes of gold where the Emperor’s Custodian Guard battled. The might of the Imperium was gathered there, in the palace where He dwelt.
There seemed moments on that day when it might not be enough.
The outer ramparts were carpeted in red bodies that writhed and heaved, obscuring the great statues adorning the defences and covering over the guns, an invasive cancer consuming reality. The enemy were legion. There were too many foes to defeat by plan and ruse. Only guns, and will, would see the day won, but the defenders were so pitifully few.
Messinius called a wordless halt, clenched fist raised, seeking the best place to deploy his mixed company, veterans all of the Terran Crusade. Gunships and fighters sped overhead, unleashing deadly light and streams of bombs into the packed daemonic masses. There were innumerable cannons crammed onto the gate, and they all fired, rippling the structure with false earthquakes. Soon the many ships and orbital defences of Terra would add their guns, targeting the very world they were meant to guard, but the attack had come so suddenly; as yet they had had no time to react.
The noise was horrendous. Messinius’ audio dampers were at maximum and still the roar of ordnance stung his ears. Those humans that survived today would be rendered deaf. But he would have welcomed more guns, and louder still, for all the defensive fury of the assailed palace could not drown out the hideous noise of the daemons – their sighing hisses, a billion serpents strong, and chittering, screaming wails. It was not only heard but sensed within the soul, the realms of spirit and of matter were so intertwined. Messinius’ being would be forever stained by it.
Tactical information scrolled down his helmplate, near environs only. He had little strategic overview of the situation. The vox-channels were choked with a hellish screaming that made communication impossible. The noosphere was disrupted by etheric backwash spilling from the immaterial rifts the daemons poured through. Messinius was used to operating on his own. Small-scale, surgical actions were the way of the Adeptus Astartes, but in a battle of this scale, a lack of central coordination would lead inevitably to defeat. This was not like the first Siege, where his kind had fought in Legions.
He called up a company-wide vox-cast and spoke to his warriors. They were not his Chapter-kin, but they would listen. The primarch himself had commanded that they do so.
‘Reinforce the mortals,’ he said. ‘Their morale is wavering. Position yourselves every fifty yards. Cover the whole of the south-facing front. Let them see you.’ He directed his warriors by chopping at the air with his left hand. His right, bearing an inactive power fist, hung heavily at his side. ‘Assault Squad Antiocles, back forty yards, single firing line. Prepare to engage enemy breakthroughs only on my mark. Devastators, split to demi-squads and take up high ground, sergeant and sub-squad prime’s discretion as to positioning and target. Remember our objective, heavy infliction of casualties. We kill as many as we can, we retreat, then hold at the Penitent’s Arch until further notice. Command squad, with me.’
Command squad was too grand a title for the mismatched crew Messinius had gathered around himself. His own officers were light years away, if they still lived.
‘Doveskamor, Tidominus,’ he said to the two Aurora Marines with him. ‘Take the left.’
‘Yes, captain,’ they voxed, and jogged away, their green armour glinting orange in the hell-light of the invasion.
The rest of his scratch squad was comprised of a communications specialist from the Death Spectres, an Omega Marine with a penchant for plasma weaponry, and a Raptor holding an ancient standard he’d taken from a dusty display.
‘Why did you take that, Brother Kryvesh?’ Messinius asked, as they moved forward.
‘The palace is full of such relics,’ said the Raptor. ‘It seems only right to put them to use. No one else wanted it.’
Messinius stared at him.
‘What? If the gate falls, we’ll have more to worry about than my minor indiscretion. It’ll be good for morale.’
The squads were splitting to join the standard humans. Such was the noise many of the men on the wall had not noticed their arrival, and a ripple of surprise went along the line as they appeared at their sides. Messinius was glad to see they seemed more firm when they turned their eyes back outwards.
‘Anzigus,’ he said to the Death Spectre. ‘Hold back, facilitate communication within the company. Maximum signal gain. This interference will only get worse. See if you can get us patched in to wider theatre command. I’ll take a hardline if you can find one.’
‘Yes, captain,’ said Anzigus. He bowed a helm that was bulbous with additional equipment. He already had the access flap of the bulky vox-unit on his arm open. He withdrew, the aerials on his power plant extending. He headed towards a systems nexus on the far wall of the plaza, where soaring buttresses pushed back against the immense weight bearing down upon them.
Messinius watched him go. He knew next to nothing about Anzigus. He spoke little, and when he did, his voice was funereal. His Chapter was mysterious, but the same lack of familiarity held true for many of these warriors, thrown together by miraculous events. Over their years lost wandering in the warp, Messinius had come to see some as friends as well as comrades, others he hardly knew, and none he knew so well as his own Chapter brothers. But they would stand together. They were Space Marines. They had fought by the returned primarch’s side, and in that they shared a bond. They would not stint in their duty now.
Messinius chose a spot on the wall, directing his other veterans to left and right. Kryvesh he sent to the mortal officer’s side. He looked down again, out past the enemy and over the outer palace. Spires stretched away in every direction. Smoke rose from all over the landscape. Some of it was new, the work of the daemon horde, but Terra had been burning for weeks. The Astronomican had failed. The galaxy was split in two. Behind them in the sky turned the great palace gyre, its deep eye marking out the throne room of the Emperor Himself.
‘Sir!’ A member of the Palatine Guard shouted over the din. He pointed downwards, to the left. Messinius followed his wavering finger. Three hundred feet below, daemons were climbing. They came upwards in a triangle tipped by a brute with a double rack of horns. It clambered hand over hand, far faster than should be possible, flying upwards, as if it touched the side of the towering gate only as a concession to reality. A Space Marine with claw locks could not have climbed that fast.
‘Soldiers of the Imperium! The enemy is upon us!’
He looked to the mortals. Their faces were blanched with fear. Their weapons shook. Their bravery was commendable nonetheless. Not one of them attempted to run, though a wave of terror preceded the unnatural things clambering up towards them.
‘We shall not turn away from our duty, no matter how fearful the foe, or how dire our fates may be,’ he said. ‘Behind us is the Sanctum of the Emperor Himself. As He has watched over you, now it is your turn to stand in guardianship over Him.’
The creatures were drawing closer. Through a sliding, magnified window on his display, Messinius looked into the yellow and cunning eyes of their leader. A long tongue lolled permanently from the thing’s mouth, licking at the wall, tasting the terror of the beings it protected.
Boltgun actions clicked. His men leaned over the parapet, towering over the mortals as the Lion’s Gate towered over the Ultimate Wall. A wealth of targeting data was exchanged, warrior to warrior, as each chose a unique mark. No bolt would be wasted in the opening fusillade. They could hear the creatures’ individual shrieks and growls, all wordless, but their meaning was clear: blood, blood, blood. Blood and skulls.
Messinius sneered at them. He ignited his power fist with a swift jerk. He always preferred the visceral thrill of manual activation. Motors came to full life. Lightning crackled around it. He aimed downwards with his bolt pistol. A reticule danced over diabolical faces, each a copy of all the others. These things were not real. They were not alive. They were projections of a false god. The Librarian Atramo had named them maladies. A spiritual sickness wearing ersatz flesh.
