She heard several of the others draw in their breath as the column entered the first void. Mist and mist and mist met their eyes and scanners alike.
Objectively, she knew what this must be. Objectively she knew this must be one of the immense regions capable of allowing transit for–
Entities
–eldar wraithbone vessels, the size of Imperial warships. Their own pathway had finally threaded through one of the vast thoroughfares that made up the webway, where–
Alien monsters
–swam through space without need of the warp. She had seen the tale told by the walls of the Imperial Dungeon. She knew what this was. This was the Emperor’s hope for the species. These passages were supposed to be safe.
Why, then, am I trembling?
Jaya had ceased forward locomotion and twist-unlocked the seals of her cockpit. She wanted to stand up in her throne and look out upon the nothingness with naked eyes.
The first thing she sensed was the faint smell of ice, as if this passageway led to some clean, frozen world with aspects of precious normality like a sun and a moon and sane dimensions that complied with physics.
The second thing she sensed was the enormity of the absolute nothingness above her. Around her. Beneath her. Pure void existed with her at its heart. Jaya felt as she always did when looking at images of the deep ocean. The endless murk in every direction, forming an entire reality where creatures of impossible size writhed in the salty, silty dark.
She resealed her hatch and enthroned herself once more. The Knight strode on.
Jaya heard music drifting down several of the misty tunnels, as teasingly familiar and ultimately unrecognisable as the murmurs had been. Half-remembered melodies played on instruments she couldn’t imagine. This, it seemed, was the harmonic accompaniment to the shadows that beckoned to her. More than once she panned her hull-mounted stubber at the capering, thrashing silhouettes, her gloved finger curled against the trigger, stroking with slow need.
Later passages – farther into the webway? she wondered. Deeper? – offered indistinct geometries that no pict resolution could refine. Walls veered away at angles that caused the human observers to blink their watering eyes and turn away from the threat of headaches. Buildings stood in the misty shadows, towers and arches and domes wrought by alien thaumaturgy, either lost to time or far along the path to the oblivion of the forgotten. They seemed out of phase and somehow untouchable, as if imperfectly recalled by a wounded mind.
The path rose. Some tunnels sloped sharply enough to almost be considered a fall. Slants and askew angles became commonplace. Even gravity began to follow its own erratic choices: noting an incline of yaw beneath her Knight’s iron tread, Jaya cast an auspex probe ahead through the convoy, realising that fully half of the procession was travelling along what she’d believed was the tunnel’s westward side, treating it as though it were the floor.
Wonder and adrenaline made for poor sustenance over a protracted period of time. Jaya was tired, having scarcely slept in days. Her leaden limbs were beginning to click and crackle with cramping sinew.
Still she refused to vox Diocletian and ask for an estimation for when they would reach their destination. Vyridion would show no weakness throughout its penitence.
Again the passages divided. Again they branched. Again they rejoined other arteries, meshing into one.
She had advanced to the column’s front when the vox exploded in a storm of static, the white noise shrouding dozens of male voices all speaking over each other in deathly calm. A ripple spread through the convoy, section by section. Servitor motors whined. Tanks rattled and growled.
Jaya slammed both boots into their control holsters, switching to active manipulation.
Is that the main army? Are these the voices of the Ten Thousand? She couldn’t see anything beyond the ghostly buildings in every direction, at odd slopes as the passageway rose. Are we here, at last?
‘Diocletian,’ she voxed. ‘Prefect Coros, are we close?’
‘We are in vox-range of Calastar,’ he replied, distracted. She could almost feel him straining to filter through the conflicting voices.
The Archimandrite entered the channel with a tuning screech of her internal comm system. Her monotone voice followed, ‘I have established cognitive grips within Calastar. The city is heavily besieged. Every war-servitor currently engaged reports overwhelming force arrayed against the defenders.’
Diocletian whispered a curse, some cultural slang from his childhood that made no sense to her. Nevertheless, it was the first time Jaya had ever heard him swear. ‘The walls are already down. The enemy is inside the city.’
Sixteen
War in the webway / Dynastes, the Lords of Terra / The Golden and the Soulless
The enemy was without number, an ocean without an end. No two figures in their uneven ranks were exactly alike, each one seemingly born into its own breed, conjured from a unique nightmare. The alien air carried the sounds of crashing blades and waves of searing heat, and above all it brought the creatures’ stench, too strong for even respirator masks and the Custodians’ own helmet filters.
War had a scent of its own, the spice of human carrion underlying the fyceline reek of spent bolts and the ozone tang of air ionised by las-rounds, but this was a reek beyond reason. The smell of unearthed plague graves, with the killing sicknesses living on in the stripped bones. The charnel stink of hopelessness as blood runs from riven flesh. The salt scent of dirty sweat that lines a murderer’s brow. And above all of it, the charred porcine stench of sizzling meat fat, that pyre smell of burning human bodies.
Sagittarus held his ground against this rank tide. Never had he felt farther from the Emperor’s light. One thought played out through his mind, again and again.
We’re going to lose the city.
The stench of the unburied dead outside the city walls was near toxic. For what seemed like days even in this timeless place, the enemy had hurled themselves at the Ten Thousand upon the walls, achieving nothing but the running of their own blood.
The true battle had begun when the Legio Audax pulled down the Impossible City’s walls. Beneath the barrage of fire and plasma and explosive shells spat down from the high barricades, a host of Warhound Titans had done the work almost alone – achieving triumph at the cost of their lives. Each of the war machines staggered and burned beneath burst shields and blistering armour plating, as their harpoons cracked through Calastar’s wraithbone walls. In ragged disorder they pulled back, dragging sections of the wall with them, tearing rifts for the masses of infantry to spill through.
Not a single Warhound survived to enter the city. Their smoking wreckage lay as monuments in the great tunnel expanse, amidst the stilled tide of slain Space Marines and rancid smears of daemonic ichor.
A warmer welcome lay in wait once the foe pushed into the city itself. The Silent Sisterhood and Ten Thousand manned every bridge and junction, reinforced by hordes of Mechanicum battle-servitors and the towering colossi of the Legio Ignatum. Every wall and tower still standing had long ago been fitted with turrets, and the city’s defenders funnelled the advancing tides into courtyards that became slaughterhouses; across bridges that were detonated beneath the teeming press of daemonic creatures and sent plunging into the abyss; into avenues that became killing grounds.