Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

The blast is savage. A light flash. A searing beam. It hits the daemon in the body. The blindingly bright light seems to dislocate against the daemon’s darkness, obscured. Dark vapour wafts from the creature’s body, but it shows no sign of damage.

It turns on the tank.

Ventanus starts to run again, across the shredded lawn, past the bodies of men killed by the daemon, towards the palace wall. He has a theoretical. It isn’t much, but it’s all he has. The daemon is impervious to harm in its body, but its head might be vulnerable. Brain or skull injuries might slow it down or impair its function. Maybe even drive the damn thing away.

It’s got the Shadowsword. The superheavy tries to recharge its cannon, but that famous slow rate of fire...

The daemon seizes the tank by the front of the hull, buckling the armour skirts and tearing the track guards. It shoves the three-hundred-tonne tank backwards, gouging up the turf like a tablecloth. The tank revs, pluming exhaust, trying to drive against the horned thing, tracks slipping and squirming. Mud sprays. Divots fly. The Shadowsword tries to traverse to aim at the daemon point-blank. The daemon slaps at the massive cannon muzzle, ripping the assembly around like a chin turned by a punch. Ventanus hears internal gearing and rotation drivers shred and blow out. The gun mounting falls slack and loose, lolling on the mighty chassis, weapon flopping sideways.

The daemon bends down, snuffling, and takes a bite out of the hull. Then it shoves the tank again, driving it back through an ornamental bed of fruit trees, and smashes it into the terraced wall.

Ventanus runs up a slope of rubble, leaps, arms wide, and lands on the flat roof of a garden colonnade. He runs along it, leaping over a section brought down by the daemon’s attack, and then jumps again, this time onto the marble parapet of the palace roof itself. He runs along it, drawing level with the daemon, almost above it. It is killing the tank, killing it like a hound killing a rabbit.

Ventanus can see the nape of its neck, wrinkled and pale, almost human. He can see the tufts and wisps of foul black hair roped across it. He can see the back of the skull, where mottled skin hangs slack behind the knotted bur of the preposterous horns.

Ventanus accelerates. He reaches for his sword, but the scabbard is empty.

All he has is Cxir’s ritual knife.

He rips it out, holds it in both hands, blade tip down, and runs off the roof, arms raised above his head.

There’s nowhere to go. Word Bearers stream from the cargo spaces, blitzing the area with gunfire.

Thiel ducks and dodges, bolts slicing past him on silent flame trails.

His kill squad is done. Mission over. The odds are too great.

‘Break!’ he voxes, and fires his void-harness on full burn.

The violent acceleration lifts him in a wide turn, up and curling back, streaking clear of the killing field. Four, maybe five of his squad lift clear with him. Zaridus, the last to come, is shot by down-raking fire, and his slack body spins away into the stars, jerking and zagging as the harness jets cough and misfire.

Shots chase them. Banking, Thiel sees flashes of noiseless light burst against the flagship hull below him and spark off the buttresses and struts.

He lands, hoping he has decent cover. He has to reload. He tries to calculate the enemy spread and assess the angles they will be coming from. He shouts marshalling orders to his surviving squad members.

The Word Bearers are on him anyway. Two come over the top of a thermal vent, another two around the side of the plating buffer. He gets off two shots. Something wings him in the shoulder.

No, it’s a hand. A hand dragging him backwards.

Guilliman pushes Thiel aside and propels himself towards the Word Bearers. His armoured feet bite into the hullskin as he gains traction. He seems vast, like a titan. Not an engine of Mars. A titan of myth.

His head is bare. Impossible. His flesh is bleached with cold. His mouth opens in a silent scream as he smashes into them.

He kills one. He crushes the legionary’s head into his chest with the base of his fist. Globules of blood squirt sideways, jiggling and jostling. The body topples back in slow motion.

Guilliman turns, finds another, punches his giant fist through the legionary’s torso, and pulls it out, ripping out his backbone. A third comes, eager for the glory of killing a primarch. Thiel guns him apart with his reloaded boltgun, two-handed brace, feet anchored.

The fourth storms in.

Guilliman twists and punches his head off. Clean off. Head and helm as one, tumbling away like a ball, trailing beads of blood.

Cover fire comes across. Another kill squad finally reaches the hull section. A fierce, silent bolter battle licks back and forth across a heat exchanger canyon. Struck bodies, leaking fluid shapes, rotate away into the freezing darkness.

Thiel triangulates his position. He signals to the bridge to open the Port 88 airgate.

He looks at Guilliman. He gestures to the airgate.

The primarch wants to fight. Thiel knows that look. That need. Guilliman wants to keep fighting. There’s blood around him like red petals, and he wants to add to it.

It’s time to stop this fight, however, and fight the one that matters.

Erebus stands, surrounded by daemonkind.

He is still high in the north, on the now-accursed Satric Plateau. The sky is blood red, the colour of his Legion’s armour. The horizon is a ring of fire. The earth is a cinderheap. The black stones marking out the ritual circle, the stones taken from the graveworld of Isstvan V, throb with an incandescent power. A wind howls. In its plangent notes, like voices chanting, is the truth. The Primordial Truth.

The truth of Lorgar.

The truth of the words they bear.

The surviving Tzenvar Kaul have long since retreated to a safe distance some fifteen kilometres away down the valley. Only the Gal Vorbak warriors remain, led by Zote, their obdurate forms proof against the lethal wind and the unnatural fire.

Erebus is tired, but he is also elated. It is almost time for the second sunrise. The second, greater Ushkul Thu.

He signals to Essember Zote.

Around Erebus, on the charred slopes and blackened rocks, the daemons slither and chatter, disturbed by his movement. They are basking in the luciferous glow, glistening, glinting, chirring; some sluggish, others eager to be loosed.

He calms them with soft words. Their forms stretch out around him as far as he can see, like a colony of pinnipeds basking on a blasted shore. They loop around one another, bodies entwined, embraced, conjoined. They writhe and whine, yelp and murmur, raising their heads to utter their unworldly cries into the dying sky. Fat blowflies buzz, blackening the filthy air. Horns and crests sway in ghastly rhythm. Batwings spread and flutter. Segmented legs stir and rattle.

Erebus sings to them. He knows their names. Algolath. Surgotha. Etelelid. Mubonicus. Baalkarah. Uunn. Jarabael. Faedrobael. N’kari. Epidemius. Seth Ash, who aspects change. Ormanus. Tarik reborn, he-who-is-now-Tormaggedon. Laceratus. Protael. Gowlgoth. Azmodeh. A hundred thousand more.

Samus has just returned, dipping into the circle to clothe himself in new flesh. There is still some fight left in the enemy then, for the likes of Samus to be turned back.

It will not be enough. It will not overcome what is descending.

Reality is caving in. Erebus can hear it creaking and ripping as it buckles. Calth can only stand so much stress.

Then ruin will break, like a storm.

Zote carries over the warp-flask.

Erebus tunes it to link with Zetsun Verid Yard, with Kor Phaeron.