Hydragyrum ignored the words.
‘What is it that you would ask of the Ordo Sinister?’ he asked.
‘We ask that you walk to war,’ Tual replied.
The beam rips across the space between Borealis Thoon and the tide of daemons.
Blackness runs down the beam’s core. Light shatters around it. Sound flattens. Screams, howls and hoots lose distance and volume. The beam strikes. The first daemons in its path vanish. One moment they are bounding forward, and the next, they do not exist.
The beam begins to shriek. Cold light whips around it. Colours pour into it.
The daemons run, clawing at each other, leaping up the curved walls of the Lychway to get away from the darkness shearing through them. They are creatures without fear, without the nature to feel any true emotion. Yet they run from Borealis Thoon.
Hydragyrum watches as the beam carves through them. The crucible is spinning into a new alignment around him. Borealis Thoon will not be able to maintain fire for more than a few more seconds. He pushes the black globe back into orbit amongst the elements spinning in the crucible.
The beam blinks out of existence. Light and sound roar back into full force. The daemons hold still for an instant and then flow down the walls again.
The third and first cardinal elements are smoking as they spin past Hydragyrum. Blood will be staining the amniotic caskets of the two psykers. They will last only a little longer, but Borealis Thoon has other teeth. The crucible slows its spin. Hydragyrum reaches for the sigils for sulphur, fire, silver. The turbo lasers on the Titan’s back gather charge.
The daemons cross the distance in a stuttering blink. Their substance thins as they close. Flesh unravels from them like sand blown from the face of a dune.
The turbo lasers fire. Sun-white beams lance out, punching into the horde, cutting through plague-bloated bodies, blasting gleaming skin and muscle to black slime. Inside Borealis Thoon’s skull, the governor named Silence is breathing hard, trembling with the connection to the machine’s weapons.
The daemons keep pouring down the spiral of the Lychway. The glowing tips of alien pillars project from the surface of the swelling flow of monsters. The air is blazing with ghostlight.
Slaved weapons fire from beneath the Borealis Thoon’s carapace. Bolt-rounds and las-fire sleet down as the flow of monsters spills around its feet. Fanged mouths bay in its shadow. Ash falls from them as they try to hold on to their forms.
Hydragyrum notes the daemons’ proximity as a flash of hololithic light in the crucible. Elements and symbols shift to his will. Void shields snap into being around the Titan, wrapping it in layers of energy. A pulse of telekinetic force rips out from the Titan’s body, and half-dissolved daemons scatter into the air. Borealis Thoon strides into the sea of horrors. The Lychway quakes under its tread. The ghostly substance of the webway trembles, as though fighting the presence of the Titan. Bone and crystal pillars shatter as it passes. Hydragyrum notes each effect and alteration, and pushes Borealis Thoon on into the tide even as it rises to meet him.
The plan had been simple, its need direct. The war waged in the labyrinth of the webway was not like battles fought on planets, or in the void. The enemy faced by the Custodians, Sisters of Silence and machine-cultists was endless. The daemons of the warp could not be killed. Their power would wax and wane. Sometimes they were few, sometimes they were numberless. Their strength could be terrifying and it could not be defeated. It was a constant pressure beyond the walls of the webway, always trying to find a way in, always seeking for weaknesses. The aim of the Emperor’s forces was not to destroy the daemons, but to push them back and shut them out of the sections of webway that they could hold.
It was not like fighting an army. It was like trying to control a wildfire.
Lightning crackles through the air before Borealis Thoon as it marches up the spiral curve. The daemons retreat before the black Titan, but they are not defeated. Hydragyrum has faced them before. He can read the pattern of their disorder. Just as the brightest flame brings the largest insects to its light, so does the greatest battle attract the greatest of daemons.
The horde of lesser creatures parts, draining from the broken pillars. Bloated things of forge-red metal and bleeding muscle scuttle forwards. Some hoist into the air on tattered wings. They grow as they move, sucking aetheric power into themselves. Multi-coloured fire pours at Borealis Thoon from every direction. Glowing bullets rattle into the air and kiss its void shields. The layers of energy shimmer, popping and foaming with explosions.
Hydragyrum feels the fields begin to flutter. His mind is a blur of transpositions as he tries to reshape the intricate balances of the Psi-Titan. A telekinetic enfolding could make them proof against the deluge, but only for a time. If he shifts the aetheric elements to repel the daemon engine’s fire, then they will be expended. Renewal will take time. That is why the void shields are there – to buy him precious minutes more.
The half-machine daemons are swarming forward, spitting energy and acid. The light beyond the Titan’s eye ports is a migraine smear of colour. The first layer of void shields collapses with a whip-crack of thunder. Then the next, and the next. The crucible whirls, elements moving out of alignment. Hydragyrum feels his muscles clench as he braces.
The first kiss of daemon fire touches Borealis Thoon’s metal skin.
The Titan shudders in pain and rage. Hydragyrum feels it. He is not a creature of emotion, his soul a black mirror that reflects no light of joy or anger. But he feels the rage and pain of the machine he walks with.
His hands snap the crucible around. The governor servitor called Pain vomits blood from the plug of his mouth. Worms of witch-fire wash through the Titan’s bridge. A glowing arc earths in the sphere of the crucible and vanishes. The obsidian globe spins towards Hydragyrum’s fingers and he catches it from the air.
The beam of unlight lashes from Borealis Thoon’s left arm. The half-machine daemons cease to be. Hydragyrum holds the crucible still as the elements try to wrench free of the alignment he has set them in. The Titan is shuddering as it walks. Light is falling into it, spiralling into its shadow. The three governors beneath Hydragyrum’s throne spasm. The black beam of annihilation continues to pour from the Titan, slicing through daemons like a scythe set to corn.
Then the beam is no longer there.
There is a stitch of time, a second pulled out to an eternity.
Hydragyrum still has his hand on the black sphere, but two of the four cardinal elements have swung out of place. Data spirals around him. All of it is red.
‘Alkahest,’ he says, and yanks two levers set into the right arm of his throne.
Deep within Borealis Thoon, two blood- and amnion-filled sarcophagi pull out of their sockets as machine arms hoist them away. Cables and pipes snap free of the crystal cases. Cooked meat and blistered skin floats in the sloshing fluid. For a brief moment, both sarcophagi hang, and then they drop through a hatch and into the waiting fire. Fresh caskets are already in place. Cables lock into their sockets.
‘Animus,’ says Hydragyrum, high up in the Titan’s skull.
The figures in the crystal sarcophagi twitch. Drugs pour into their veins, ripping back the comfort of sleep. Frost flashes over the cases and up their conduits. Matrices of crystal threaded through the Titan’s bones light with fresh fire.