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.
2
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.
Erebus realises he is bleeding from the mouth. He wipes the blood away.
‘Begin,’ he says.
Sorot Tchure watches Kor Phaeron’s face as he receives the message from the surface. There is glee. The time is at hand.
The bulk coordinates are already set. At a simple nod from Kor Phaeron, Tchure instructs the magi at their control consoles. The entire planetary weapons grid is retrained on a single new target.
Kor Phaeron’s eagerness is evident. He has played with the grid, annihilating battleships, orbitals and moons, but quickly wearied of the sport. A pure purpose awaits.
The Word Bearers affect a communion with the stars. The suns of the heavens hold deep meaning for them. The strata of their Legion’s organisation are named after solar symbols. Through superhuman effort, Erebus and Kor Phaeron have transformed the entire planet of Calth into a solar temple, an altar on which to make their final tribute.
Erebus has worn the skin of reality thin, and opened the membrane enclosing the Immaterium. The altar is anointed.
Kor Phaeron steps forward and places his left hand upon the master control.
He presses it.
The weapons grid begins to fire. Concentrated and coherent energy. Shoals of missiles. Destructive beams. Warheads of antimatter sheathed in heavy metals. The rays and beams will take almost eight minutes to reach their target. The hard projectiles will take considerably longer. But they will all hit in turn, and continue to strike again and again and again as the merciless bombardment continues.
The target is the blue-white star of the Veridian system.
Kor Phaeron begins to murder the sun.
‘We feared you had perished,’ says Marius Gage.
Guilliman has just walked onto the auxiliary bridge of the Macragge’s Honour with his battered kill squad escort.