JAGHATAI KHAN WARHAWK OF CHOGORIS Page 9

  The Khan endured it all for three days, locked within the assembly hall of his new palace, his brows knotted and his fingers drumming on his cloaked knee. On the morning of the fourth day, he rose from his throne, gestured to Hasik and Yesugei, and said, ‘Enough. I forget what this world even looks like.’

  They saddled up then, just the three of them, and rode out through Quan Zhou’s northern mountain gate. The heavy rains that had marked the primarch’s arrival had passed over, leaving black earth glinting under a bright sun. The wind never rested, blasting all the way across the Altak and buffeting up against the Khum Karta’s long scarps. From the high paths, they picked their way down to the grassland below, finally breaking out into a canter that would carry them far from the bastion’s bleached rockcrete parapets.

  All three were dressed in the Talskar manner – calf-length deels, leather boots, hair tied back to expose the marker-scar on their faces. A Chogorian aduu was a powerful beast, but even those equines laboured when carrying an ascended warrior, and would have swiftly expired if they had been expected to support the weight of power armour as well. So it was that the three passed out into the west, tracing the old pilgrimage paths towards the Ulaav, just as they had done before the Emperor had destroyed the past in order to create the future.

  For a long time they said little, absorbing the familiar smells and tastes on the air. Yesugei had been stationed on the home world for some months by then, but for Hasik and the Khan it was still both always familiar and half-forgotten.

  Eventually the Stormseer looked to the skies, prompted by a sudden intuition. Far above, out of sight to all but the sharpest vision, was a faint blot in the empty blue. He pulled up, shading his golden eyes, and the others did likewise.

  A raptor circled far above them – a wild hunter, fearless and unchallenged, riding the high airs in wide arcs. Hot air rising from the sea of blue-green tilted it, but its eyes never shifted, locked in perfect stillness as it scoured the earth below for its prey. Slowly, its hunt took it away northwards, spiralling out of even a Space Marine’s visual range.

  The Khan watched it go.

  ‘That’s what they call you now, Khagan,’ Hasik said. ‘The Warhawk.’

  The Khan grunted a half laugh. ‘We all have these little names,’ he muttered. ‘Like calling cards.’

  Yesugei shrugged. ‘Not a bad one, as they go.’

  The Khan rolled his shoulders, flexing the muscles. He was breathing deeply again, more than his efficient lungs demanded, as if by drawing in the world’s air deeper he might hold on to it for longer.

  ‘Of all that has transpired, of all that we have had to learn,’ he said, the words sounding like something he had long been rehearsing in his mind, ‘the passage of time has been the hardest to master. My fleets engage in a hundred battles – some ships are gone for a month, others for a decade. A campaign I think will occupy me for a year takes me three, and a promise made in a heartbeat on one world can take a lifetime to fulfil on another. And yet it remains a promise.’

  Hasik and Yesugei listened. They were alone in the vastness, the three of them, as isolated and secure as if null fields had been clamped around them.

  ‘Some things are achieved, though,’ the Khan continued. ‘Our place in the Crusade is no longer in doubt. We have conquered all they asked us to conquer. Now the Emperor’s attention is beginning to move again. Certain old concerns are no longer with us, though others will come to take their place. In the interim, we have a rare glimpse of genuine choice.’ He looked up at Yesugei. ‘I spoke to Horus. More than that, we have fought together, twice now.’

  ‘So you took the Angel’s challenge,’ said Yesugei.

  ‘The choice was mine,’ said the Khan. ‘But he was right in one respect – Lupercal and I found kinship, against expectation. He fought in a way I could respect. We will do so again now, though on a greater stage.’ He turned to Hasik, and smiled. ‘The greenskins, noyan-khan, the greatest enemy of our race. We have not hunted them yet, and the time has come to do so.’

  Hasik frowned, looking uncertain.

  ‘You have a concern?’ the Khan asked.

  The noyan-khan shook his head. ‘They say the greenskin is a good enemy, but–’

  ‘They have empires,’ the Khan said. ‘The largest of them rival our own. This is prey after our own heart.’

  Hasik nodded, still slowly. ‘Then it will be an honour,’ he said.

  ‘It will be new,’ said the Khan. ‘The Luna Wolves can learn from us.’

  ‘If they learn from us,’ said Yesugei warily, ‘we will also learn from them.’

  ‘That is not something to be feared, is it?’

  ‘So that is the policy now,’ Yesugei said. ‘To edge out of the shell we have so carefully constructed.’

  ‘We must give thought to the future,’ the Khan said. ‘To an Imperium without enemies. There are ideas in play, some hanging by a thread. The more I see of the Crusade, the more I see its weaknesses. Confrontation is coming from those fault lines, and I wish to have our allies in place now.’

  Yesugei looked uneasy. ‘I understand the desire,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we will give your brother something to consider. I have not met him, though – I have no insight into his ways.’

  ‘Consider what models he has,’ said the Khan. ‘The remnants of Old Night. The sermons of my brother Magnus, which weary even me. These are powerful dangers, and they are talked of on Terra. To counter them, we must show a better way.’

  Yesugei hesitated for a moment. Then he bowed his head. ‘I do not know why I resist this. It is unworthy. You are right – we cannot remain isolated.’

  ‘My instincts were the same as yours, Targutai,’ said the Khan. ‘Let them squabble, let them strive for the ear of my Father, and we would have no part of it. But I have seen the way the argument is flowing now. I have spoken to Magnus, to the others, and heard their case. If we do nothing, and let the loudest voices dominate, they will not suffer us to keep our weather-magic.’

  ‘They could never compel us,’ said Hasik.

  ‘Not now, for sure,’ said the Khan. ‘They need us now. But one day, when all this is done?’

  He fell silent. The wind boomed around them, pushing the last tatters of high cloud west.

  ‘I want you to get alongside them, Hasik,’ the Khan said at last. ‘I want you to learn from them, discover how they think. Only by standing alongside a warrior in battle can you know him – do this for me. I will ask the same of Giyahun.’

  Hasik bowed.

  ‘And I?’ asked Yesugei.

  The Khan smiled. ‘I have another world in mind for you, Stormseer.’

  ‘Intriguing. Then it shall be as you command.’

  ‘But these are not commands, are they, truly?’ the Khan said. His face was still as severe as ever, but there was less care etched on it than there had been on Terra, on Hoadh, or on any of the many worlds raided since. ‘We are the heart of it all, both of you here, Xa, Giyahun. By rights we should have died years ago, but then this all happened. The pattern was set, locking us in.’

  ‘Nothing is eternal.’

  ‘So you always say. But it is worth something, to have brotherhood, here, just as we did in the past. I wonder how much it is the result of my Father’s design, or if it surprised Him too. I never got the impression He understood such things, but then again it is dangerously easy to underestimate Him.’

  He looked away from the skies at last, over the wind-blurred plains. The air was sweet from the rain.

  ‘In any case, eternity is a long way off,’ he said. ‘Until that changes, we should really learn to enjoy it.’

  GAR-BAN-GAR

  M30.906

  NINE

  Hasik smashed his closed fist down, striking the monster in its block-shaped forehead and breaking the bone beneath. It didn’t die. It roared back, its grotesquely oversized jaw snapping to maul at his wrist, so he punched harder, working his armour’s power system close to its limits and wrenchi
ng more physical energy from somewhere in his overworked body. It took two more heavy strikes to finally dull the rage behind those unearthly red eyes, then a third to send the enormous creature slumping to the ground and sliding down the trench’s inner wall.

  Hasik powered on up the slope, scrabbling amid a tide of falling crystal-scree. His left leg was throbbing with a sharp pain that was becoming harder to ignore, his bolter was smashed and his armour riddled with dents and gashes. The air was full of that terrible, never ending roar – the hain-ghallh – that came with every battle against these things. The sonic hell swelled and tore against his helm’s protective ear-shielding, wearing at his senses and dulling his reactions.

  He reached the lip of the slope and dropped heavily to one knee, panting for air. Above him a tortured sky opened up, as orange as nerve gas and scratched with the black contrails of hammer-munitions. A Stormbird growled low overhead, its atmospheric drives spilling thick smoke and making the ground shake. A tumbled terrain of cut crystal spread out before him, flashing from explosions like some continent-wide scatter of broken glass. The Saddleback northern massif rose up against the fiery horizon like a perennial insult, still too far off to assault directly but thumped now by ranged munitions. Everything in-between was in motion, a seethe of moving earth that boiled and crashed like the sea.

  But it wasn’t earth, and it wasn’t sea. This was a living tide, a carpet of dark-green flesh, banded by heavy iron armour and overlaid with the nightmare roar that had a life of its own and swamped all else under its thickening boom and roll.

  Nothing else in the galaxy was like it. No other species could do this. No other sentient lifeform could meld and twist itself into a single amorphous glut of fused and overripened fury, ever expanding and powered by some locked-deep gestalt furnace that only grew and grew until it felt inevitable it would reach out and smother the stars themselves. No other army marched under flickering green-edged pressure waves that split eardrums and shrivelled timid hearts. No other army ran into the clash of blades out of nothing more than primordial instinct, with no other thought but to feel the rage and the hot blood spatter, and to gorge on it. There was no deliberative malice there, no thought for wider strategic goals; there was just a will-surge to murder, thrumming up from clotted basal ganglia and boiling through black blood vessels, animating the steel-hard muscle-bundles that swung blunt-edged cleavers like turbohammers and split the ground apart beneath clawed feet.

  The hain. The ork. The greenskin. Greatest and most numerous of all the xenos threats ever faced by humanity, so perfectly evolved into instruments of violence that Imperial scholars had even postulated the wild conjecture that they had been purposely bred for it. Fearless, incredibly strong, horrifically belligerent, fecund and tenacious, there had never been and would never be – many reckoned – a more deadly enemy.

  And now they were on the charge again, roused to apoplexy by previous attacks and faced once more by the spear’s edge of a Legiones Astartes assault.

  Hasik was joined on the ridge by his keshig guard master, Goghal, then by more warriors as they fought their way out of the trench lines. Three brotherhoods – over a thousand fighters – cut and hacked and shoved and kicked their way to the tipping point, their blood-soaked progress overshadowed by the thudding boom of Legion artillery pieces. Stormbirds and Thunderhawks hung in the air on smoggy columns of downdraught, pouring heavy bolter-fire into the oncoming hordes.

  On the right flank, a column of mobile armour from the 88th Cohort Solar Auxilia trundled out of crystalline cover, shattering glassy outgrowths and opening up from main battle cannons in a rolling, echoing series. On the left flank, perfectly timed to join the combined assault, more Legion warriors in pale ivory battleplate poured up the trench slopes and out into the open, charging in tight-set ranks and chewing up ground at a ferocious pace. Despite the similar livery, they were not of the V Legion, but the 21st Company of the XVI Legion: the Luna Wolves, led into battle by their captain Galkusa Rheor. The scions of Horus were as battle-worn as their cousins in the ordu, and fought through the pain just as doggedly.

  Every metre of ground was taken after exhausting bouts of brutal hand-to-hand combat. Every ork downed was replaced by another, then another, each one swarming up out of the infinite well of bodies that churned and erupted like some vast organic magma well. Bolter magazines clattered empty after perilously brief intervals, and then the hand-to-hand fighting would begin in earnest. Space Marines crunched in face to face with the enemy, power fists and energy weapons snagging with neon disruptor charge. Tanks surged up out of the tangled trench lines, rocking on the uneven terrain and unloading las-beams into an oncoming tsunami of unbound slaughter.

  Hasik was running again now, forging his designated path towards the distant Saddleback, lashing out with his glaive in withering circles. His honour guard stayed close, bludgeoning any xenos that weren’t dispatched by the heavy blows from his guan dao, unleashing precious blasts of bolter shells into the swirl of thrown bodies.

  Progress slowed. The Legiones Astartes were at their best in fast-moving battles where superior dexterity and accuracy could be brought to bear, while the greenskins prospered where their greater numbers could deaden the vigour of combat. The xenos understood this perfectly, whether by instinct or through battle-cunning learned over decades, and so their onward race into the emptying barrels of the Imperial guns was hardly mindless, but instead played to a dreadful innate strength. In that choked, dagger-edged terrain, their unmatched kinetic energy was unleashed in a lead-heavy wave, and so the contest slowed once more under the wearyingly familiar weight of grinding, punishing attrition.

  Hasik, seeing it unfold again, roared in frustration, lashing out with his blade and decapitating a hulking xenos warrior in a single strike. Even before its stinking head had thumped to the earth, three more were lumbering into contact.

  ‘We will not make the objective, khan,’ voxed the earthy voice of Rheor from a long way away.

  There was no condemnation there, just a statement of fact. The combined Legion forces had been prosecuting their exhausting fight against the greenskins for too long to expect any easy victories, and there had been no disagreement about making the attempt to break out of the trench-line salient.

  Hasik fought on grimly, driving himself onwards through force of will. His warriors surged with him, but the attack front was becoming ragged. Over on the right flank, the Auxilia armour was slowing down, caught by a vicious countercharge from heavily armoured xenos infantry. Pulverising fire from the swooping air support seemed to do little to slow the onslaught, and even the metronomic detonation of the tanks’ main battle cannons only cleaved paths ahead for a few moments before the gaps were filled.

  ‘We will not miss the rendezvous,’ Hasik growled into the vox, spinning on his heel before plunging the point of his weapon into the chest of a racing greenskin. He only just hauled it out before another one launched itself at him, and thick blades clashing in a welter of thrown sparks.

  ‘Take the secondary target,’ Rheor grunted, his voice betraying similarly heavy exertion. The huge battlefront was slowly dissolving into a thousand static engagements. Orks seemingly burst from the ground underfoot, hauled into snarling life and thrown into contention by the omnipresent species-roar that made the crystals resonate, splinter and crack.

  Hasik roared back at them, screaming his frustration out. He slashed wildly, severing tendons and slicing armour, gaining a few precious metres before the ranks closed again. The secondary target loomed over to his right – high ground topped by a thicket of translucent geodesic facets; easier to reach than the Saddleback, defensible, but several kilometres south of where he had promised to bring them. The harrowing fighting in the trench network had taken too much out of his forces, and now they were paying the price.

  The red sun sank a little further, sliding through turbulent skies towards the jagged eastern horizon. The tips of the crystal forest glinted pink and lilac, glowing
from the last of the heat that would soon drain from the air and turn the battlefield into a semi-frozen wasteland.

  Goghal caught a heavy blow from a xenos warrior and was sent sprawling, shattering the ground beneath him. Hasik heard screams as an Auxilia tank hatch was breached, its crew butchered as the xenos swarmed inside the shell.

  He fought on, head down now, felling the ork that had floored the master of his keshig and shouldering into the next in line. Goghal got to his feet, ignoring the long slick of blood along his breastplate, slaying with an edge of shame now.

  But this could not go on. Forward progress was at a crawl, and if it slowed any further the assault risked stalling, collapsing and becoming a massacre.

  Hasik ran a visor-overlaid tactical scan for the twentieth time that hour, glancing in a split second over a swinging virtual hemisphere of locator-runes.

  It could be done. It could be salvaged. But only at the cost of more precious time.

  ‘Secondary target,’ he voxed to Rheor, then the same to Marshal Mothe of the Auxilia field command, then to the brotherhood khans under his watch. ‘Repeat – secondary target. All units switch trajectory. We take it before the sun sinks.’

  The reaction was instant. Every warrior had been waiting for it, guessing it would come, drilled to respond without hesitation. The Luna Wolves squads ploughed right, sweeping back from their forward positions and pulling away under the cover of shortening mortar barrages. The Auxilia tanks swivelled and powered eastwards, making for vantages picked out in aerial reconnaissance three local days ago. The White Scars maintained their trajectory, pushing along the gore-soaked path that would take them under the lengthening shadow of the rise, but now their aspirations were more limited, and soon their allies would be drawing close in on either flank to cut off any counter-attack.

  The orks sensed the change of focus, and their infernal roar ramped up further. The world’s dying light tinged green, a lurid mix with the deepening orange, and they pushed back harder, knowing they had the chance to shatter the attack now. From somewhere deep within their horde, unearthly shrieks pierced the tumult, and lancing strands of glowing emerald danced across the incipient storm.