Then they were running again. The stench began to grow once more, cloying in their nostrils as they panted. Spinoza looked over her shoulder, trying to gauge the condition of Lermentov’s ramshackle army. The ogryns were driving ahead just as powerfully as ever, their heads swinging as they snorted and bucked. Most of the vanguard, including the better-equipped of the Angel’s Tears, were keeping up, but many more were struggling with the pace.
‘They will not last more than moments,’ she voxed to Khazad.
‘No,’ the assassin agreed. ‘But grotesques not masters. There will be master. Kill it, and there is chance.’
‘If we can get to it.’
The ground started to rise again. Soon they were moving up, and the brickwork walls gave out, replaced by stands of ancient stone. The ambient temperature started to rise, and Spinoza began to sweat. The stench, the claustrophobic tunnels, the endless dark — it was interminable and hateful, just like everything else on this damned world.
They came across bodies. Like most of the catacombs under the shadow of the walls, these places had harboured a kind of life, scratching food and shelter in the grim holes of the underworld. These corpses were ripped apart, a collection of strips and entrails, thrown in a madness of rage against the stone. They must have been fleeing, disturbed by the xenos suddenly emerging from the deeps, and had never stood a chance.
‘Getting close to the walls, lord,’ voxed Hegain, studying his auspex. ‘This was the target, then. The Lord Crowl-’
‘-was right, sergeant,’ said Spinoza. ‘I am aware of it. Your squad is prepped? We will not get much help from the others.’
‘All ready, lord. All prepared. And very much in the mood, lord, if you take the meaning of it.’ Hegain’s tone was grim. ‘I’ll look forward to seeing more of those things. I’ll look forward to it very much.’
The slope became steeper. Soon they were struggling up old rough-cut stairways, smoothed by age and erosion, overlooked by half-lost galleries in the heights above. The air was foul — a musty clag that spoke of millennial confinement. Slinking amid the mess of smells was the growing aroma of perversion and extremity, the musk of the xenobreed.
‘Now I hear them,’ voxed Khazad.
Then Spinoza did too — a high-pitched whine, almost unbearably thin, echoing down the shafts from up ahead.
‘Prepare flares,’ ordered Lermentov. The perfect dark made them vulnerable, even with massed lumen coverage.
The ragged army swept up through the twisting paths, scrabbling on loose rocks, stumbling over broken steps. They never saw the graven images of angels and daemons in the alcoves high above, carved before the Master of Mankind had ever come here, hung like petrified ghouls over the empty vaults and rotting into lumpen twists of stone. All hearts were beating rapidly now, all palms twitching with sweat.
‘Remember your orders,’ said Spinoza on the closed channel. ‘The master. Let all else go.’
And then they were out, pushing up through a final derelict archway and into a chamber paved with cracked flagstones and withered columns. It was still pitch-dark, and the lumen beams switched and swayed, oval pockets sliding over snatches of half-glimpsed detail.
‘Flares!’ roared Lermentov, and the first of the charges spiralled up into the high void, blowing apart to expose a rock-bored hall of immense proportions.
Flickering light spread across a mass of uncurling horror, an ophidian swarm of alien surfaces. Black hooded masks swung their way, already laced with glowing drool. Wasp-waists twisted unnaturally, straining warped spinal cords. Claws unclasped, some clutching long serrated cleavers, other terminating in thickets of dripping syringes. Bloodshot eyes lit up behind slits in the masks, deranged and famished.
Lermentov hesitated, his gun frozen in his hands. The rabble-army spilled into the chamber, then slowed, halted by what they saw. Even the ogryns, too dull-witted to dread, stumbled in their onward charge.
‘For the Emperor!’ cried Spinoza, igniting Argent in a blaze of gold. She and the storm troopers sprinted forwards, accompanied by a burning halo of lasfire from the hellguns. Khazad came with them, picking up speed for the leap that would take her crashing into the ranks of horrors ahead.
That roused the rest. ‘For the Throne!’ Lermentov shouted, opening fire. His bodyguard did likewise, adding to the blistering volley of las-bolts that sent overspill flashes swinging up into the distant heights. The abhumans lumbered back up to full tilt, roaring in wild aggression, followed by the masses still arriving from the tunnels, the hundreds who had limped and scampered through the under-dark in hope of exterminating the nightmares that preyed on them.
Ahead of them, vast and smooth, rose an expanse of pure black adamantium, curving gently away until it disappeared through the rocky roof a hundred metres up — the base of the wall, its roots laid deep underground, cutting down into the corpse of buried cities older than the Imperium itself. These were foundations of foundations, planned in outline by the Emperor Himself, bolstered by the labour of the blessed Dorn, sunk into the honeycombed layers of mankind’s forgotten empires as a marker of permanence, of stasis, of domination.
Between the army and the wall were the xenobreeds, a teeming mass of black-pinned, grey-skinned giants. There must have been more than sixty there, twice the tally of counted cages, hunched, contorted, massive. As the las-bolts slapped and scorched across their hides, they screamed in an overlapping chorus of blind hatred, and loped jerkily towards the threat.
They were huge, malefic terrors, three times the height of the humans — far faster, far stronger, implanted with spines and wires and spike-clamps, berserk and blood-hungry. Spinoza met the first of them as it bore down on her and swung her crozius heavily. It connected with an outstretched gauntlet, frying the metal glove and hurling the xenobreed’s arm back out wide. Then Hegain’s squad hammered a barrage of las-bolts into it, puncturing the stretched flesh and shattering capsules of glowing fluids.
Still it came on, screaming with something like a human’s voice. Hegain kept firing, round after round. Spinoza smashed it again with the crozius, showering it in crackling energy. Khazad leapt across its turning back, slicing into its exposed spine and blowing a row of feeder-vials.
Still it came on, crunching aside a storm trooper with a heavy lunge, punching a spiked gauntlet into an oncoming fighter from Lermentov’s command group. Blood streamed down its muculent chest and arms, but it waded further, tearing the head from a third warrior even as las-beams lanced directly into its screaming facemask. Spinoza slammed her maul into the creature’s trailing calf, crunching through muscle and bone and cauterising the wound with disruptor-flare. Hegain’s soldiers kept up the fire-rate, punching more holes in its pale grey flesh.
Still it came on, pushing past Spinoza, throwing her to the ground and limping straight into the oncoming mass of the rabble army, shrugging off its wounds, reeling drunkenly as it bludgeoned fighters aside in a whirl of thrown blood.
Hegain dropped down by Spinoza, firing steadily as more neared. ‘Tough bastards,’ he spat, panting.
Khazad hadn’t given up. She raced towards the next grotesque, her sword slashing in wild arcs, matching it for speed if not strength. The bulk of Lermentov’s troops were now shambling into contact, filling up the floor of the huge chamber. The ogryns were leading something of a charge up the left flank, the only ones able to come close to physically matching the xenobreeds; the rest were already being ripped apart.