He climbed atop a rocky outcrop, allowing the ranks of the Host to advance past him. Vehicles
rumbled forward slowly, and Dreadnoughts and Defilers stalked across the broken ground. Burias
climbed up behind him, planting the icon in the ground at the First Acolyte’s side.
The Imperator raised its leg for another step. A series of internal explosions suddenly burst out
around its knee-joint. Flames and smoke erupted from the mechanical joint, a mass of detonation
within ripping through the thick, reinforced metal. The bastion foot touched down on the floor of the
ravine and a secondary flash of timed demolition charges erupted. For a moment it looked as though
they had had no effect, until the knee joint gave way beneath the immense weight of the Titan and it
lurched to one side as if in slow motion, thousands of tonnes of metal teetering over the battlefield.
Its weapon arms flailed out as if trying to steady the toppling god-machine, but the Titan was
falling, gaining speed as its weight bore it down on the ground. There was silence as it crashed to
the ground, until the bastion of one shoulder slammed into the sheer cliff face, causing the mountain
range to shudder beneath the impact, and an avalanche of rock was sheared from the cliff. Off
balance, the impact caused the Imperator to swing towards the ravine wall and the leering head of
the great machine smashed straight into the rock face with a resounding crash. The other leg of the
Titan, bearing the entire weight of the colossal machine, buckled suddenly with a screeching sound
of wrenching metal. The Imperator slammed to the ground with a deafening boom that echoed
through the ravine. The impact caused avalanches of rock and rubble, and hundreds of Guardsmen
and Skitarii were slain. A rising cloud of dust obscured the fallen, broken Titan.
As one, the Word Bearers roared victoriously at the sight of the mighty war god dying and
Burias raised the Host’s icon high into the air for all to see.
“Advance and kill!” roared Marduk and the Host descended upon the shattered vanguard.
After killing the traitor Pierlo, Varnus had expected to be slain by his captives, but if anything, his
action seemed to have garnered a kind of hateful respect from the hunched, black-clad overseers.
Oh, they had hurt him as they prised him off the corpse of the traitor, filling his body with agonising
torment as the vile serums that filled their needle fingers assaulted his nerve endings, but he had
been expecting far worse.
But no, he had been dragged from the tower and placed on the chirurgeons’ familiar, cold, steel
slab. There was no Discord there and he felt naked without it speaking to him. There the spindly
creatures had prodded and probed him. They seemed particularly interested in the symbol beneath
the skin of his forehead, chittering excitedly amongst themselves. They drew blood from him and
fed burning black liquid into his veins. Small, black leech creatures with orange patterns on their
backs were attached to him and he howled as they burrowed their heads into his skin. They were
pulled back out, bloated and fat, some time later.
The joy of killing the man had filled him with warmth. The traitor had turned against the
blessed, hated, False Emperor and had deserved death. Taking his life had been a great release and
it made him feel strong and rejuvenated.
The enemy had taken him back to the tower, transporting him back to the top, now hundreds and
hundreds of metres above the ground. He was to work alone. Perhaps the overseers feared that he
would kill again if he was teamed up with another slave, and perhaps he would have.
The tower was above the level of the black pollution hanging over the city, and it swirled
beneath him. The mighty winds that were building didn’t seem to touch the tower; it was as if he
stood in the middle of the eye of one of the dust devils that raced across the plains, spinning the salt
up in twisting cones of wind. The noxious fumes whipped around the tower and it looked to him like
a great, black, whirlpool that stretched out as far as the eye could see.
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He felt strange without the cover of the smog overhead. Now he could see the blaring white sun
during the day and the stars by night. And always there was the red giant planet Korsis, drawing
ever closer. It was so large that it almost filled the skyline and Varnus could see valleys, craters and
channels criss-crossing its surface.
The brightness pained his eyes and the lack of oxygen made them heavy and sore. Twice a day
he was held down as red-black, stinging drops were inserted into the centres of his eyeballs. He
screamed as the sharp needles pierced the aqueous humour of his orbs and injected the substance
that squirmed and burned within him.
Tirelessly he worked, doing the job of two men, but the toil no longer drained him as it once
had. Indeed, time seemed to pass quickly and he was barely aware of the fall of darkness as the
white sun disappeared over the horizon and rose again as he worked, smearing the blood mortar
over the stones.
A Discord seemed to favour him, if such a thing was possible, and it hung at his side for hours
on end, pounding his eardrums with its blare. He could hear the voices talking to him, teaching him
and bolstering him when he felt weak.
Sometimes he shook his head as if waking from slumber and the horror of his predicament
washed over him. He would cry out at such times, longing for the Emperor’s soldiers to rescue him
and his world. He would kick out at the Discord and it would retreat from him. But these moments
passed quickly and Varnus would recover himself and be somewhat confused. He couldn’t
remember why he had been angry and he set back to work with vigour, the feel of the blood mortar
familiar and comforting beneath his hands.
The daemon speaker would hover slowly forward until it floated less than a metre from him
once again. Sometimes its usually limp tentacles would reach forwards and touch him on the neck or
the back as he worked. He would recoil in shock and the thing would retreat once again. Over time,
he came to ignore the touch of the thing and in a way he found it almost comforting. He felt a
strange, warm, buzzing sensation at its touch, but it was not unpleasant.
The Discord told him many interesting things: what the other slaves were thinking, that the
overseers were afraid of him and that his power was growing. It talked of the early years of an
ancient hero who had been turned into an immortal godling and lived on in a great palace far away,
and the warriors that he had trained to spread his word. He wondered if it was the Emperor, but his
head had begun to hurt when that thought had crossed his mind and he quickly dismissed it.
Yet even as he had come to bear his hellish existence, he prayed for release. Not death, no, he
had lived through too much to simply perish. He was filled with a new vitality and fervour that
made him determined to cling to life for as long as he was able, to see this through one way or
another.
He prayed for deliverance and tears ran down his face as he felt himself becoming lost. Had the
Emperor forsaken him? Did His light no longer shine upon Tanakreg? Had he been abandoned to his
fate? For the first time since the occupation, Varnus felt true despair pull at him. He prayed vainly to
the Emperor, but felt no comfort in his soul. No, he felt nothing but emptiness.
The next moment he had forgotten why he had been crying and wiped away his tears in
bafflement. Shrugging, he continued his work. The Gehemehnet needed tending.
The slaughter had been immense and the valley was filled with the dead and dying. A cloying stink
rose as the temperature soared, the hot-white sun overhead baking the earth. The wreck of the Titan
was like the discarded shell of some giant colossus and scattered debris littered the ravine floor. The
battle had been intense. The Word Bearers advanced into the confused Imperial lines after the
Imperator’s fall, killing thousands of their foes as they tried to realign their battle line and draw
support up past the massive frame of the Exemplis.
The enemy had inflicted a terrible blow and had retreated once the Imperial reinforcements were
brought forward. They had suffered relatively few casualties.
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A day had passed and the giant Ordinatus Magentus rumbled towards the valley. It was so
massive that it was barely able to fit through the ravine and there was no possible way that it would
be able pass the fallen Titan. It came to a halt some kilometres back, where the valley was wider.
A dozen, giant, spiked stabiliser legs unfolded to either side of the titanic vehicle, steam hissing
out into the hot air as their mechanics were engaged. They reached out to either side of the massive
structure and drove down into the ground.
The air tingled with power as giant energy cores were readied and the massive ribbed cone of
the Ordinatus’s main gun was raised. A sound like a thousand jet engines began to whine, soon
reaching a screaming intensity that reverberated through the earth. Elysians within a kilometre of the
giant machine clutched hands to their ears as the giant creature made ready to unleash its power.
The air around the ribbed cone-tip of the giant weapon began to shimmer and waver and then the
Ordinatus fired.
A deafening, sharp crack like the sound of a planet ripped in two resounded through the valley.
Pre-warned, all the Elysians in the vicinity had engaged the sound mufflers within their helmets, but
even so the blast of sound was deafening, making Havorn’s eardrums vibrate painfully. An ungodly
silence followed as if all noise had been sucked out of the valley by the focused blast of sonic
energy, and the air between the gun and the valley wall wavered and reverberated.
The effect was astounding. Where the centre of the focused beam of sound struck the wall the
rock was turned to dust, exploding outwards in a massive blast as it was shattered down to the
molecular level. A wave seemed to spread from the epicentre and the rock rippled as if it were
liquid, huge cracks appearing in its wake. Vibrating and shattered, the entire rock face broke apart
and fell to the valley floor with a crash that rumbled along the entire mountain range. A huge cloud
of salt dust rose up into the air.
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The battle for Tanakreg had ground down into a brutal war of attrition. Within five days, the ravine
had been levelled by the sheer power of the Ordinatus machine. Its sonic disruptor had reverberated
through the mountains, shattering stone to powder and causing vast avalanches that could be felt
halfway across the continent. Laron had only ever read about such a weapon and to see it in action
was awe-inspiring.
The steep cliff walls had been reduced to dust and the valleys were filled with crumbled salt
rock, creating a vast expanse that the Imperial Guard and Mechanicus forces rolled across. The
going was difficult, but with the steep ravine walls reduced to nothing, they were able to attack on a
wide front. The enemy was unable to contain the sheer number of the Imperial troopers and they
were relentlessly pushed back.
The enemy had launched several vicious assaults to destroy the potent weapon, but Havorn had
charged Laron with the protection of the Ordinatus and he had coordinated effective battles to stall
the attacks. He had used his Valkyries effectively, rapidly redeploying units of his 72nd to launch
counter-attacks into the flanks of the foe as they advanced, while the tech-guard of the Mechanicus
had taken the brunt of the frontal attack. As he dropped more troopers into the flanks of the enemy,
Havorn had directed heavier support forwards. Assailed on all sides, the enemy advance had been
quashed time and again. He relished these battles. Now that the terrain had been levelled out, he had
found the enemy much easier to deal with.
He snorted, easier to deal with indeed. He had fought the traitor Astartes only once before and
they were the toughest and deadliest foes that he had ever encountered in all his days of soldiering.
Still, without having to advance up narrow defiles, the small number of the enemy meant that the
vast Imperial war engine could grind on. Though their attacks on the traitors became more directed
and hate fuelled, they were unable to close on the Ordinatus Magentus.
Tens of thousands of Imperial troopers had been slaughtered and, wherever the enemy dug in for
a concerted battle, they inflicted horrendous casualties. But it was not enough to halt the neverending
tide of Guardsmen, Skitarii warriors and vehicles. The foe was spread too thin and their
flanks were surrounded and overrun. It was simply too wide a front for them to cover and there were
too few of them to fight the type of war that suited the massed ranks of the Imperial Guard so well.
Laron had capitalised on this and had ordered hundreds of Valkyries ahead of the main Imperial
entourage. Already his storm troopers had assaulted and destroyed several of the enemy anti-aircraft
guns emplaced on the foothills of the mountains and he knew that the time would soon come when
the Imperials would be able to push forwards and take the fight onto the plains.
Vast lines of siege tanks ground inexorably forward behind the infantry, pounding the enemy
with ordnance outranging anything they had.
Slowly the enemy had been driven back, pushed out of the mountains and onto the salt plains
that spread out like a rippling blanket towards Shinar. If they could push the foe back to the
peninsula on which Shinar sat then they would eventually grind them down and destroy them
utterly. Though he saw that the old brigadier-general grieved for every soldier that they lost, he
could also see that the Imperial commander was confident of their eventual victory.
It was not the type of war that Laron liked, for it was more suited to the style, or lack of it, of
other Imperial Guard regiments. His soldiers of the 72nd were drop-troopers, and in this war of
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attrition, the unique skills and talents of his units were not being utilised to their full capacity. As
soon as the battle reached the plains though, it would be a different matter.
The sheer number of casualties amongst the tech-guard had been staggering, but ever more of
the mindless tech-soldiers marched from the vast facto-rum crawlers that ground over the earth in
