The Lords of Silence Page 21

  This is the opening salvo, the softening-up. While the guns of the citadel are fully occupied, their operators’ zoom-sights blazing with light and their shield generators shrieking with overload, the twin battleships are emptying out somewhere up above, their hangars streaming with lines of attack ships, their drop-pod bays ejecting, their launch tunnels hurling landers along the rails and swinging out into the las-crossed void.

  Some landers are taken out by the remaining orbital defences, blasted apart before they can duck into re-entry. Other vessels remain in the low-void layer, going after those scraps of satellites and defence platforms in a hammer-rain of hard-round fire. Most, though, shoot straight down planetwards, spiralling through hails of beam-shards, kindling re-entry fires of their own before they smash into the up-racing world.

  As they emerge below the cloud layer, punching like bullets out into open air, gunners on the citadel walls unleash their first defensive volleys. Many incoming landers streak down far outside the guns’ effective range, but a few foolhardy or misaimed pods stray into the kill-zone and are blasted apart. The Oraun highlands are soon showered in blown ironwork, still burning from the descent, tumbling at high speed across the stone.

  The citadel is now shrouded in flame, doused in a void-hurled column that spits and smashes, turning the void shields white-hot and pushing them concave. The gouts of steam grow and merge and hiss up from the seas below, rearing high above the parapets. Return fire is overwhelmed, damped down by the volume of incoming ordnance from above.

  This gives greater cover to the landers, which are now falling freely across the peninsula. Drop pods slam down, throwing up smashed boulder fragments on impact. The doors cantilever open, thudding hard, and troops lumber out carrying bolters and flamers. Larger pods make planet­fall next, spewing forth the striding machine mountains of Helbrutes and other stalking, roaring, half-mechanical horrors. The biggest units, crowned with brass death-heads and embossed armour-plate, hit the earth in clouds of thrown smoke and grit. When their great doors swing open, corrupted tanks rumble down the ramps, rocking as their studded tracks grind against the crust of a new world to slaughter. Some of these are looted Astra Militarum vehicles, their armour marked with the octed and the sign of the god and crewed by spine-clamped, limb-locked cultists. Others are the preserve of the Legions – Rhino transports in crimson livery and flaming braziers, or daemon-bound crawlers with hunched spines and rust-streaked dozer blades.

  The pace of planetfall rises exponentially. Out of range of all but the largest of the citadel’s land guns, truly massive carriers wallow down, their thruster arrays kicking out columns of sooty flame. When their hatches crack open and the embarkation ramps telescope out, whole hordes of the lost and the damned charge out into the open. They are clad in scraps and armour fragments, snatches of Imperial military garb and rags from the bilges of Traitor warships. Some have no eyes, some obscenely bulging torsos. Those from the Word Bearers conveyers are cut and tattooed and marked with the ritual favour sigils of all four gods; those from the lumpen hulls of Death Guard landers limp more slowly, dragging club feet through the smouldering dust. They grin as they advance, hoisting hook-spears and stubber guns. They can’t help grinning. All they do, all the time, those half-dead sloggers, is grin.

  The impacts keep on coming. Yet greater transports thunder earthwards, many hit hard on the descent but able to absorb the strikes. They disgorge heavy artillery – daemon engines with towers of bronze that hiss with steam, malice and agony. The dust and flame mingle, swirling, making their outlines hazy. Eye-lenses glow in the miasma, and released bloat-drones wobble through the murk, lone seeker-lenses already whirring and loft-turbines buzzing.

  The tank squadrons grind ahead, angling long barrels to aim at the battlements. The outermost walls of Vigilia Carceris are already lost in a shaking gauze of heat and kicked-up dust, but their size is still apparent – a mountain of smooth dark adamantium, solid amid the hammering inferno. Artillery units grind into position, hauled by chain gangs and slavering mutant ogryns. Pot-bellied mortar cauldrons are stoked for their ignition spikes, lined up in long ranks.

  The ground is breaking up, split by the weight of treads and hooves. Flying debris joins the steam and dust, mixing into a maelstrom that clogs lenses and silts up viewfinders. It is not just the physical that suffers, for the weft between worlds has already been ripped by Abaddon’s Rift, and it only takes this incipient violence, this mustering of energetic hatred, to yank it aside completely.

  So the daemons come, spilling out of fleet drop-ships or jerking into reality from the curdled air. Little Lords bounce and wriggle, shrieking with high-pitched glee even as they are trodden on by the advancing Unbroken kill-squads. Slack-bellied plaguebearers lurch out of the brume, swarming with bloatflies and dripping with butter-yellow bile. Other summoned horrors slide and jump in the broken light, creatures with bloody horned faces or stretched, bestial limbs. A stench rolls ahead of them, one that catches in the throat and chokes with vomit. The cultists scream and go mad, running wildly from a mix of terror and elation. The noise is deafening, swollen by the engines and the war cries and the massed trample of armoured boots.

  For a moment, a gust of the world’s stormwind briefly pulls the walls of flame and dirt aside, and a glimpse of the citadel flashes before them all, gaunt and ravaged and burned down to black. Faint lights shine along the parapets, and banners snap in the skirling tornado. The void shields are still in place, a ceiling of reactor-fed energy that resists the orbital barrage and sends it rolling in cataracts down the far cliff edges. There are walls within walls, towers ranked atop towers, all crammed with guns and defenders and the stubborn pride of an Astartes Praeses Chapter. An aquila can be seen, etched in royal blue on a white ground.

  Then it is gone, blotted out, just another burning mountain amid the murk. The guns roll, the tanks drag, the ranks of Traitor Space Marines begin the long haul under scything lines of fire. They are hungry, they are famished, and the feast has only just begun.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Time has already run out. Dragan is impatient, primed for battle, and yet still Solace imprisons him. He strides down the dark ways, his shoulderguards scratching against the overhanging roofs, hunting.

  This far down, things would normally be crowded. Multitudes live down here, whole spawn families of the Unchanged, eking out meagre snatches of existence in the stink and the cold. He used to come down here with Slert, who liked these places, and they would explore the farthest reaches together.

  ‘This is where I do my best work,’ the Putrifier had always said, grinning in the gloom. ‘These people. Incubators, all of them.’

  Dragan is moving faster now. The empty halls echo from the wet tread of his boots, for the inhabitants have been herded into landers and sent down to the surface. Some will not survive the journey. Many more will die before they get anywhere close to the walls, but they will each absorb a round or two before they do. That is the calculus in these things – a single round, manufactured at cost to the enemy, is of greater value than a human life, created without thought within a fertile sump of pointlessness. Dragan wonders if Vorx approves of that exchange, or whether all that cant about the god and their high purpose is just so much bilge fodder when the necessities of battle call.

  The signs are here, now. There is fresh blood on the walls, black and glimmering under the sweep of his helm lumens. He can smell the beginnings of the spoor – machine oils fused with the over-sweet stink of mutation. An hour ago he heard noises too. Big, echoing bangs, like iron beams being slammed into unyielding decking.

  This is another insult, this errand. A part of him almost refused, but to make the challenge now, at this juncture, feels wrong. There is already too much in motion, too many things he doesn’t understand. There can be no argument with this battle, and so the only objective remaining is to play his part in it, to win glory in the eyes of the Unbroken who
are yet unpersuaded by his talents. That is the truest course, the patient one. Those who doubt him doubt his impetuosity, so he must demonstrate his ability to play the long game too.

  The smell grows stronger. The copper taint of new slaying becomes intense. The bulkheads around him are slippery with fear. Dragan guesses that even before the Unchanged were rounded up and sent stumbling into their transports, they avoided this place. There are many monsters in the dark and the deep, but some are worse than others.

  He feels his knives slide against the puffy flesh of his killing hand. He does not draw his pistol with the other one – such a weapon is of little use here – but he goes more warily, sensing closeness. These are gaping places, chambers that swell and resound, their ceilings lost in fly-thick clouds, their floors knee-deep in oily water.

  One day, he will understand the need for this grime and gunge. He will revel in it and see it as a badge of identity. He remembers what Typhus told him on the Terminus Est.

  He never let us clean the filth from our armour. Over time, we stopped wanting to.

  That must be how it begins. First you ignore it. Then you accept it. Then, finally, you are defined by it.

  He hears a sound – a faint hurr-hurr, sunk down, hissed through such clogged oxygen arteries that respiration must surely be an impressive achievement.

  Dragan halts, taut as a hamstring, looking into the wall of darkness.

  ‘Unsleeping,’ he calls out, and the word echoes from the columns and the vaults around him.

  For a long moment, punctuated only by the heavy drum of his heartbeats, nothing.

  Then, far off, at the end of this great hall, something moves. It is bigger – far bigger – than it ought to be, even for one of its cursed kind. Solace is a fecund place, stuffed with rotting meats and nutrient-rich fluids, its airways viscous with the changing harmonics of the daemonic. All things grow here, sucking in the fungoid and the decaying, slowly becoming just another tumour on the face of this withered ship-corpse.

  The thing moves, shifting one massive leg, and Dragan sees the expanse of dark-grey flesh spilling over the joints and cables. There is more of it than there was, the last time. Every time it grows a little more.

  A pair of tiny eyes blink. Those eyes are the worst thing, sunk within a harrowed face, almost entirely lost behind a nest of rusted cabling. They are red, wholly bloodshot, with matte-black irises. They do not focus well. They seem almost independent of one another, as if the mind controlling them has begun to lose the last grips of control.

  ‘I do not… know you,’ comes a voice from the gloom, high up, ­muffled by matted gunk over its gigantic vox-emitters.

  ‘You do, Naum,’ says Dragan, holding his ground. It is rare that he is dwarfed by anything, but this mass of twisted organics and galaxy-old ceramite has become bloated beyond any reason, towering, thrust out, as misshapen and ill made as an infant’s first scratchings at construction. ‘We fought together. Remember? On Erveb?’

  The eyes blink. Tears run down from them, pale and twinkling in the faint lumen-flash. The creature shifts on its centre of gravity, a fraction of movement that makes pistons sigh, and more of its face emerges into Dragan’s helm-beam.

  Naum’s face structure is much as it must have been ten thousand years ago. The bone is visible in places where the last of the skin has flaked off, but there are sinews and gristle still clinging on, gilding the profile with a faint vestige of old humanity. On an Imperial walker-sarcophagus, that face would have been locked away, shielded by a frontal plate, as if embarrassed by the things they do to their fallen. Here, the faces are kept proudly on display, surrounded by a high collar and disfigured by the random insertion of gurgling pipework. All that remains of Naum of Barbarus cannot be forgotten, but becomes a badge of failure to look out once more on the battlefield.

  ‘Erveb,’ Naum hisses. His voice is very soft, very deep, generated in worn-out boxes slung somewhere in that cavernous chest cavity and piped through clogged speaker-maws. ‘No. Hungry.’

  He takes another step, a single heaving, hesitant step, and it is as if the entire wall before Dragan has detached and come swinging for him.

  ‘We are above another world,’ Dragan says, avoiding the urge to speak faster. Naum will not be seeing any of this as he sees it. Even Vorx, his mind rotted by devotion, sees the world of the physical with more clarity than this one.

  Naum blinks again. Lines of dry brown staining run down his chin, and there is a stray human finger there, dangling from his collar on a last thread of sinew.

  ‘Am I asleep?’ Naum asks.

  ‘You know the answer to that,’ says Dragan patiently.

  This wretch ought to be asleep. All of his kind ought to be chained down, locked away, dosed with soporifics and dream suppressants, only roused when their prodigious killing power is required. Others of his order do as they are supposed to, staving off complete madness through the blissful imposition of tranquillisation and only having to contend with the horror of living for those few brief hours of bloodletting.

  But Naum does not sleep. Something went wrong with him, and now he cannot. He has been awake for a long time – for more than nine thousand years, so they say. Given that, the fact that he can speak at all is something of a miracle. One sent from the god, no doubt.

  ‘Eat… you?’ Naum says, licking bony lips with a black tongue. Dragan can see that he has been weeping a lot.

  ‘Make planetfall here, Naum,’ Dragan says calmly. ‘The casket is waiting. Then you can eat all you like.’

  For a moment, Naum does not respond. He does not understand. His colossal body, with its growths and its metal struts and its swollen armour plates, shifts uneasily. Dragan wonders what on earth he must be experiencing. Existence on this ship is already like a dream, or a nightmare – for Naum, the boundary between states has long since ceased to exist. All that remains is a fog of pain, of sensations he no longer has names for. He is not visibly enraged and psychotic, as a Helbrute of Kharnath might be, only… obstinate.

  ‘Eat… them,’ Naum says at last, seeming to grasp something.

  ‘Yes. As many as you like,’ says Dragan again, feeling like a barrier has been broken.

  There is endurance, that is known. Some feats within this Legion make the mind turn, some expressions of that old capacity for resilience, but for this – this – there are no words. Not that Dragan knows, anyway. What is left in there to endure? What remnant of an old willpower still burns away, refusing the siren embrace of complete insanity?

  Condensation runs down Naum’s outer shell. In the dark, he flexes power claws bigger than Dragan’s whole body. Ancient bone shards click, rotting flay-skirts rustle. The eyes blink, once, twice, squeezing tears down wrinkled, ash-dry flesh.

  Then the black gums are exposed – something like a smile, or the dream image of one, semi-remembered and blurred by the fog of being.

  ‘Show me,’ he says.

  Night comes to Sabatine. This is the darkness of battle-smog and burning wreckage, the palls over vehicle carcasses and gun emplacements, and it smothers the skies and engulfs the land.

  Slert is there, along with his six battle squads of Unbroken and hundreds of Unchanged. The entire plain ahead of him is crawling – infantry masses and tank columns, grinding and yammering under the flickering flame cover. It is hard to gauge numbers in the gloom and the movement, but there must be many tens of thousands of troops now engaged or moving to engage. Solace has landed almost all its Unbroken, committing close to six hundred to the battlefield. The Ayamandar has landed, if anything, more, and the Word Bearers terror troops stalk through the drifting smog like dark-crimson revenants.

  The citadel has two land-facing gates, both encrusted with lascannons and overhung with defensive strongpoints. The Word Bearers are pushing towards the far gate on the northern flank of the battlefield, driving their armies of cultists s
traight into the fire-lanes. It’s brutal work, and they’re losing hundreds, but the gap is closing, and now the mobile armour is beginning to find its mark.

  The orbital barrage has slowed now, cutting out as the invaders close in around the citadel in a huge swathe. It is replaced by a more targeted pattern of ranged fire – thumping volleys from the landed artillery lines and the first strafing runs from the atmospheric gunships. The enemy has its own flyers, but these are kept close to the citadel’s protective las-cover, hovering virtually under the eaves of the towers within. The exchange of solid-round fire is blistering, carving tracer-lines through the hot dark and lighting up the parapets in flashes of impact.

  ‘By the god, they’re weak now,’ comes a familiar voice at Slert’s shoulder.

  He turns to see Garstag stomping up behind him, kitted out for the siege warfare to come. He carries his chainsword two-handed, and his lenses flare a soft pale green in the murk. Three Little Lords cling one-handed to his pauldrons, swinging happily as the Kardainn-master swaggers.

  ‘They don’t have the guns to clear the plain,’ Garstag spits contemptuously. ‘Those walls won’t hold long either.’

  Slert shrugs, just as another arc of stone-eater artillery screams overhead to smash into the parapets beyond. ‘Maybe, maybe,’ he says. ‘Stronger than they look, I would suppose. So are you here to grumble, Garstag, or to get that blade wet?’

  Garstag growls. He does not have much of a sense of humour. ‘Just get me inside.’

  Slert goes back to what he was doing. His position is a few hundred metres back from the southern gate’s causeway, and the terrain in-between is now seething with marching plaguewalkers. Few Unbroken­ march with them, for the rate of attrition from the wall-mounted gunnery is brutal. Even the Death Guard tanks are holding back, though the largest of the superheavies are beginning to find ways to blast holes in the parapets.