Brothers of the Storm Read online

  That made me feel alive. I felt unstoppable. I felt immortal.

  'For the Khagan!' I cried, my chest burning and my eyes blazing as I powered upward, ever upward.

  I knew he would be there, somewhere. I would kill and kill, slaying with abandon, purging every last one of them, driving my body beyond all limits of endurance, just for the chance to see it.

  Whatever Torghun thought, I had faith. I would see him fight again.

  And after that, everything that had happened on Chondax, all the long, long years of hunting, it would all be vindicated.

  I knew he would be there.

  As we sprinted, I caught glimpses of the combat raging down in the lower flanks of the citadel. Pitched battles raged across every surface. Gun platforms and defence towers were snarled up with overflowing scrums of close combat, pitting whole gangs of greenskins against tight knots of embattled White Scars. Raging fires broke out everywhere, fed by burst fuel-dumps in the bowels of the structure. Thousands of warriors were still streaming across the depression to join the fight, tearing across the plains and into combat. Thousands of defenders rose to meet them, staggering out of their smouldering dens and bunkers with fierce, violent desperation lit up in their twisted faces.

  As for us, we'd burned faster and higher than any others. We broke out of a shattered and burning elevator-shaft, clinging to the yawing metal struts before flinging ourselves clear. We burst out onto a wide, flat metal platform strung up amid the fingerlike pinnacles of stone. Jochi was with me, as were dozens of my brothers, their armour charred, cracked and glistening with gore.

  At the far end of the platform hung the lower jaws of the huge ork-head I had seen from the cliffs. It was even bigger than I had guessed - twenty metres tall and wide, a bulbous mass of riveted scrap and rust-crusted wreckage, suspended amid a sclerotic tangle of walkways and buttresses like some giant iron dirigible.

  I started to give the assault order, but the words died on my lips. The structure issued a low, grinding bellow that made the rickety gantries around us shake and tremble. I struggled to keep my feet as the flimsy platform beneath me swayed wildly.

  A heavy metal panel detached from the base of the grotesque artificial head, peeling away and clanging against the far end of the platform. Then another fell, revealing a glowing, smoke-filled void on the inside. I heard the sound of pistons withdrawing, and the hiss of heavy lifting gear wheezing into action. Earth-brown smoke belched out of the gap and rolled across the platform toward us.

  'Kill it,' I ordered, bracing myself against the juddering metal, taking my guan dao one-handed and drawing my bolt pistol.

  I fired, joining the torrent of bolter-rounds thundering out from my brothers. The barrage lanced into the ragged opening at the base of the head structure. I heard echoing explosions from within as the rounds went off, and muffled wails of rage. Something had been hit. Something was in pain.

  Only then, roaring and slurring, did it emerge.

  It burst out of the base of the head, crashing through the remaining walls with a drunken, lurching gait and throwing the remnants aside in a shower of smoking metal. A huge, muscle- bunched arm shot out, then another, hauling a vast and swollen body after it. A grossly distended head emerged, hung with low- slung jaws and drooling lips, clustered with weeping sores and marked with festering scarification.

  I saw two yellow, watery eyes sunk deep below a low, knobbly brow. I saw tusks grind against one another as the creature roared again, and gobbets of thick spittle flying from its gaping maw. When it moved, its obese frame shuddered, shaking the bones and armour-fragments that clung to it like barnacles around the yawing hull of a ship.

  I had never seen one so big. When it moved onto the platform, the bracings below it twisted under the weight. Its arms were encased in cages of metal, from which tubes ran directly into its flesh and sinew. Iron gauntlets encased its fists, each one of them bigger than my torso. Ripples of green energy sluiced across it, spitting and fizzing where they met the creature's skin.

  It stank - a pungent mixture of bestial musk, engine oil and the sulphurous discharge of shield generators.

  I had seen chieftains of their kind before of course; giant bulls that had roared their defiance to the heavens and charged into battle with reckless abandon. Those monsters were driven by savage lusts of battle, the burning desire to crush, to slay, to destroy and to feed.

  This one was different. It was fused with clanking technology, bolted into its armour like one of our lobotomised weapon servitors. Had they learned that from us too?

  And its anger was different. The noises it made, the way it moved, the swimming lack of focus in its animal eyes; all of that was different. I knew then that I was seeing what happened to the greenskin when nothing remained but defeat. They did not keep blindly raging, nor did they plead for mercy, nor did they learn at last how to fear their enemy.

  They went mad.

  'Bring it down!' I roared, aiming for its head.

  We opened up with everything we had left. We fired rounds directly at it and watched them explode across its shielding. I saw Jochi launch himself into a charge, ducking and wheeling under the fire-lines to bring his blade in close. He was swatted clear with a vicious backhand and sent cartwheeling over the edge of the platform, his breastplate crushed. I saw others try the same, all of them moving with their habitual speed and prowess. None of them even got close - they were crunched aside by those iron gauntlets, knocked to the ground as if they were children. The monster waded forward, flailing with cybernetic arms, vast and monstrous and slobbering with febrile madness.

  I holstered my pistol and grasped my guan dao two-handed, already breaking into the charge that would carry me into range. It saw me coming and lurched to meet me, swinging its huge arms in clumsy, devastating sweeps. I dived under one of the gauntlets and twisted around, aiming my glaive into the creature's wrist.

  The biting edges ground up against the shield in a shower of sparks. A sharp bang was followed by a stink of cordite, and the shimmering barrier over the creature's forearms flickered out.

  Before I could take advantage, the beast swung back at me, keeping its other fist low. I tried to scrabble away, but its gauntlet slammed heavily into my side.

  I was hurled clear, clattering across the platform, my blade still clutched in my hand. The world spun around me, and I had a brief glimpse of the fortress's topmost pinnacle above me swinging across the sky.

  I skidded to a halt, knowing that the monster would be right behind me. I leapt to my feet and angled my blade back. I connected again, severing one of the cables that looped from its shoulders. Fluid cascaded over me, hot and stinking. As my blade's disruptor slashed through, it ignited, dousing us both in flaring green flames.

  I pressed the attack, zigzagging the guan dao in a blur of speed, going for the active shielding.

  I had no chance. For all its huge bulk, it was fast. An iron-clad fist shot out, catching me below the throat and crashing into me with the force of a skidding Rhino. I was sent sprawling for the second time, nearly blacked-out from the impact and hurled hard over to the far side of the platform. I saw the fire-tattered edge coming and blurrily tried to grab on to something. My gauntlet almost closed on a splintered stump of wreckage, but the corroded metal collapsed under my grasp.

  I clattered over the edge, my armour gouging sparking trails in the steel. I looked down and saw the sheer sides of the citadel drop away below me, two hundred metres of empty air before the mass of burning structures near ground level.

  In that split second, suspended over collapsing shards of rust and about to plummet, I saw death coming for me.

  Then a hand grasped my wrist. I was hauled back, away from the crumbling edge, my armour-clad bulk heaved back onto the platform as if I weighed nothing.

  As I was dragged back up, I stared - disorientated and fog-visioned - into a pair of glittering eyes set deep in a scarred, brown face. For a split second I gazed into those eyes, rigid with
shock.

  Then a huge body swept up and over me, followed by the rush of a fur-lined cloak and the sound of boots striding purposefully into combat.

  Even then, my mind did not process what had happened. For a moment I did not know what I was seeing.

  Then the fog cleared. My senses returned. I looked up, daring to believe, and saw at last who had saved me.

  I do not know how he had made it up to the platform undetected. I do not know how long he had been fighting to get there. Perhaps his approach had been masked by the noise and violence of the melee, or perhaps he had been able to conceal his presence somehow.

  Nobody was ever able to tell me where he had been while the assault was underway, nor how he had managed to enter combat at just that moment, without warning, without announcement.

  I do not know whether he did such things deliberately, to add uncertainty to the shape of the battle, or whether it was just how matters were fated.

  None of that mattered. The Khagan, the Great Khan, the complete warrior, the primarch of the V Legion, had unveiled himself at last.

  He was there, right before my eyes, on Chondax.

  He was there.

  MY FIRST INSTINCT was to rush into battle at his side, to pick myself up and add my blade to his.

  I immediately saw how pointless that would be. He had come with his keshig, a whole phalanx of giants in bone-white Terminator plate, and even they did not come between the Khan and his prey. They hung back around the platform edges, silent and massive, ensuring that nothing - greenskin or White Scar - intervened. Below us, the battle continued unabated, but up on the platform, under the shadow of that massive, ruined alien head, only two warriors fought.

  He was tall, lean even in his ivory armour. A heavy crimson cloak hung from his shoulders, lined with mottled irmyet fur and covering the fine gilt curves of the ceramite plates beneath. He carried a dao sabre with a glass-polished blade that flashed in the sun. His shoulder guards were gold, engraved with flowing Khorchin characters and the lightning-strike sigil. Two Chogorian flintlocks nestled at his belt, ancient and opulent, studded with pearls and bearing the guild marks of their long-dead makers.

  On Ullanor I had seen him fight from a distance, marvelling at the tremendous destruction he wrought amidst the congested fields of total war. On Chondax I saw him fight at close quarters, and it took my breath away.

  I have never, before or since, seen swordsmanship like it. I have never seen such balance, such contained savagery, such unrelenting, remorseless artistry. As he whirled the blade around, sunlight shone from his gilded armour like a halo. There was a cruelty to it, a razor-edged note of aristocratic disdain, but there was also splendour. He handled his blade as though it were a living thing, a spirit he had tamed and now forced to dance.

  Yesugei had said that only poets could be true warriors. I understood then what he meant: the Great Khan distilled the sprawling language of combat to its core of dreadful, merciless purity. Nothing was extravagant, nothing was wasteful - every stroke carried the full measure of murder within it, just enough and nothing more.

  He hammered the maddened beast back, step by step, forcing it toward the far end of the platform. It raged at him, bellowing in a burbling frenzy of fury and misery. It swung its gauntlets wildly in massive, bone-breaking arcs, hoping to swipe him from the platform as it had done with us.

  The Khan stayed close to it, his cloak swirling as he worked back and forth, sending his blade darting out and cutting back, using the long curved edge to carve through the creature's shambolic armour and bite deep into the addled flesh beneath. Whole sections of shielding were shattered, overloading the generators on the creature's back and making the tangled wiring burst and pop.

  It tried to smash him to the floor with a wild haymaker, and he spun out of the challenge, plunging the edge of the sabre down hard as he moved. The ork's severed gauntlet-clad fist clanged to the metal, taken cleanly at the wrist and doused in a spray of steaming blood.

  The monster raged on, its eyes wild and froth bubbling from its open maw. Its other fist swung round, as fast as the blow that had felled me. By then the Khan had already moved, pivoting on one foot and angling his blade back to meet the incoming sweep.

  The gauntlet crashed against the dao, and I felt the platform shudder from the impact. The Khan held his ground, bracing his sabre two-handed, and the creature's iron fist cracked open, exposing a bloody, pulpy claw within, striated with cabling and corroded piston-sleeves.

  The greenskin was weaponless then. It reeled away from the onslaught, and its roars became weaker and more desperate.

  The Khan went after it, maintaining the icy, austere ferocity of his attack. His blade flashed out, slicing a weeping chunk of blubber from the creature's torso; then it switched back, cutting a long gash across its chest. Armour-pieces shattered and fell like rain from its heaving shoulders, mingling with the slurry of blood that pooled and bubbled at its feet.

  When the end came, it was quick. The beast rocked back onto its haunches, its stomach streaming blood and its jaws hanging limp. It stared up at its killer, its tiny eyes swimming with fluid and its chest trembling.

  The Khan raised the dao high, holding it in both hands, his feet planted firmly.

  The greenskin made no move to protect itself. Its damaged face was a piteous, weeping mess, marked by abject wretchedness and bewilderment. It knew what was being destroyed. It knew what had been lost.

  I did not like to see that face. It was an ignoble end for something that had fought so hard and for so long.

  Then the sword whistled down, trailing lines of gore as it plunged. The beast's head fell to the platform with a dull, booming thud.

  The Khan withdrew his blade with a cold flourish. For a moment he stood over the vanquished warlord, gazing imperiously down at it, his long cloak lifting in the smoke-drifted air.

  Then he stooped to retrieve the beast's head. He swivelled smoothly, holding the agonised skull high above him in one hand. Blood streamed from the beast's fleshy neck cavity, slapping against the metal floor in thick slops.

  'For the Emperor!' roared the Khan, and his voice rang out across the bowl and high into the sky.

  From below us, from the levels where the fighting still burned, a massed shout of acclimation rose up, overmastering the animal howls of the surviving orks and the crackle and rush of the flames.

  I heard them answer him, hurling the same word up into the air, over and over.

  Khagan! Khagan! Khagan!

  That was the moment when I knew we had won at last. Years of ceaseless campaigning had finally come to an end.

  The war on Chondax had ended in the only way it could have ended: with our primarch holding the head of the defeated enemy in his fist, and with the voices of his Legion, the ordu of Chogoris, rising in savage joy toward the vaults of heaven.

  I joined them. I cried out his name, my fists clenched with euphoria.

  I was glad we had won. I was glad that the white world was cleansed at last, and that the Crusade would grind onward, taking another step on the road toward galactic hegemony.

  But that was not the main source of my fervour. I had seen the terrible power of the Great Khan unleashed - the spectacle I had coveted for so long.

  It was not a disappointment.

  I had seen perfection. I had seen the poetry of destruction. I had seen the paragon of our warrior breed in the full flood of his matchless glory.

  My joy was complete.

  I MET TORGHUN one more time on Chondax.

  It took many hours to subdue the citadel entirely. The green- skins, true to their nature, never stopped fighting. By the time the last of them was hunted down and killed, the fortress had begun to disintegrate around us, consumed by explosions from below and raging fires from above, and we had to withdraw.

  I led what remained of my brotherhood out on to the plain at the base of the depression. Many tasks remained for us: we needed to make a tally of the slain, to direct Sa
ngjai to those wounded who might live, to recover what we could of our fleet of damaged mounts for onward transport.

  I remember only fleeting impressions from that time. My head was filled with visions of the Khan, and it made me distracted.

  Even as I worked, I could not shake the images of him in action. I rehearsed the blade-manoeuvres he had made, over and again, running through them in my mind and resolving to adopt those that I could once back in the practice cages.

  Amidst all the devastation, with the fortress before us blazing and smoking in its ruin, all I saw was his curved dao flashing in sunlight, his gilded armour moving smoothly under the cloak, his jewel-like eyes that had looked, briefly, into mine.

  I would never forget it. One does not forget the fury of living gods.

  Other brotherhoods, nearly a dozen of them, had done the same thing as we had and were reordering themselves in the aftermath of the battle. Once the bulk of my brotherhood had been extracted and had regrouped, I went to find Torghun. I guessed that the minghan would disperse quickly, and I did not wish to leave without making the appropriate courtesies.

  When I found him, I saw that his brotherhood had fared better than mine. I learned later that they had fought with honour, seizing many of the gun mounts on the walls and destroying them. Their actions had allowed many other squads to break through the perimeter without enduring the losses that we had taken.

  He had done well, and had enhanced his reputation for solid, competent command. For all that, though, I could not help but pity him a little. He had not seen the things that I had seen. He would leave Chondax with only a glimpse of glory from afar.

  'Did he speak to you?' Torghun asked me, showing more interest than I had expected.

  He had taken his helm off - the lenses were cracked and useless - but otherwise he looked almost unscathed.

  'He did,' I said.

  I was in much worse shape. My battle-plate was riddled with dents, breaks and gouges. My gorget was shattered from where the beast's gauntlet had hit me and much of my suit's sensory array was inoperative. The fleet's armoury would be busy with us for months before we would be ready to deploy again.