The streets were winding, maddening routes through a city that already made no sense. Reports rattled at the edges of Sagittarus’ perception, some streaming across the red lens of his visor slit, others coming in a stream of conflicting vox voices. He processed all of them with unconscious focus, concentrating on pushing forwards.
The Custodians at his side were veterans of centuries of war at the Emperor’s side. They moved in the loosest amalgamation of a squad, more akin to a pride of hunting lions than a squad of soldiers fighting their way through city streets. Yet they never hindered each other – they had transhuman senses and reflexes coupled with absolute familiarity with each other warrior in their midst. Theirs was a unity that needed no artificial synchronicity. It lacked the gene-bred precision of the Legiones Astartes moving in the cohesion of their lifelong squads, but the Emperor Himself had engineered it to be thus. His Space Marine Legions were built upon the principles of tradition, brotherhood and conformity. The Ten Thousand weren’t bound by such crude rote and militancy to foster obedience. They were left to possess greater individuality, and their bindings of loyalty took the form of other, subtler restraints.
Sagittarus led Ra’s own squad for his strike team. Armed with guardian spears and paired meridian blades, they were Squad Dynastes – called the Lords of Terra by the Emperor Himself, not without a sense of irony. Each one was the scion of now-dead royal Terran bloodlines: the sons and nephews of warlords and witch-queens, taken as tribute in conquest and inducted into the Ten Thousand. Once they had been twenty souls, bled down to twelve after five years of fighting in the webway’s tunnels.
They now moved at a dead sprint, their spears reaving through corroded bronze swords and hewing through unnatural flesh. Sagittarus led them, his Contemptor shell more than able to keep pace with even a grav-Rhino.
Somewhere, a Titan sounded out its war-horn cry, abrasively projecting its machine roar through external augmitters. Another railed in answer, beginning a chorus of distant, arguing metal godlings.
We’re going to lose the city. Sagittarus had no blood left to run cold; whatever synthetic haemovitae sustained him in his amniotic sarcophagus didn’t mimic human blood in such poetic, pointless ways. Without orbital surveillance he couldn’t be sure of the battle’s wider scale, but the voice-shattered vox was alive with unwelcome revelations regarding the enemy’s numbers. More legionaries, more creatures, more Titans than any of the Ten Thousand’s outriders had reported. Horus – or, more likely that accursed witch-king Lorgar – had found a way to flood the webway with his minions.
We’re going to lose the city.
Beasts with rugged red hides and primitive brass armour howled and spat and cursed in a heaving tide, moving with inhuman vigour on their backwards-jointed legs. The blades in their hands were great axes and swords of primitive metal, marked with runes that made the Custodians’ eyes ache just to witness them. Chariots raged through their midst, crescent wheel scythes tearing their own ranks as often as through Imperial formations. Artillery hurled profane payloads upon the defenders, not with the Mechanicum’s volleys of massed energy but in mimicry of the battlefields of Ancient Terra, when such skyfire took the form of crude, physical rain. The enemy launched everything at their disposal, from the hulls of wrecked Mechanicum tanks and great hunks of the city’s broken architecture, to the severed, ensorcelled heads of the Imperial dead.
They were especially fond of the latter. Skulls rained from above, coming down upon Sagittarus in a crashing hailstorm. They broke upon Dynastes’ auramite plating, detonating into clouds of choking blood-mist. Hundreds more burst across the wraithbone buildings nearby or fell to shatter on the rising street.
The mist thickened quickly, rendering automatic vision filters useless and unable to pierce the red fog. Blinded, he sensed shadows in the mist reaching for his hull with gripless clutches, their shadowed embraces ghosting through him. A more superstitious man might have believed them the spirits of whomever had lost their skulls to give the daemonic artillery something to fire. Sagittarus weaved away from the reaching shadows; they didn’t register on his sensors the way that the warp entities did, but real or false, he wouldn’t let them touch him.
Sagittarus moved, unseeing and unbreathing, fighting by sound alone. He swung his fist at disturbances in the air nearby when he heard the creak of daemonic muscle tissue, parrying with his armoured forearm when the whispery song of blade edges cut the air. He panned his kicking, shell-torrenting cannon down alleyways he couldn’t see, butchering daemons he could only sense by their howls.
Some of the creatures could speak Gothic. Sagittarus loathed these most of all. With voices of shrieking fever and drowning gargles, they called out in a language they had no right to know.
‘When will the sun rise?’ they cried. Could he hear fear in those demands? ‘When will the sun rise?’
Sagittarus gave them no answer beyond the fall of his fist and the hot roar of his Kheres-pattern cannon. He clutched at a horned form in the smoke, lifting the thrashing, shrieking thing from the ground and engaging his pneumatic compression. The beast burst after a mere three seconds, falling to the ground in two pieces. One of the halves was still howling; Sagittarus silenced it with a descending metal foot.
Turning, still blind, he opened the ichor-wet fist and discharged the thrumming plasma gun in its palm. The magnetic accelerators whined and spat a sphere of caged fusion. Another of the monsters collapsed headless at his feet, steaming as it dissolved.
Sagittarus ran on, weaving to the left as the roar of bolt shells passed by on his right. He heard them impact and detonate, felt the wet spattering of ichor painting his hull plating. The foul, hissing fluid sent the temperature gauge on his lens readouts spiking high.
He heard wheels ahead, wheels of metal upon streets of shaped bone. He saw it – it was big enough for its silhouette to show through the mist – a chariot, yet another crude echo from the Bronze Epoch battlefields of Old Earth rattling along the curving road, pulled by thrashing, serpentine creatures. A feminine shadow drove the beasts on with cracking whiplashes from the vehicle’s back.
Even as Sagittarus was voxing the warning to Dynastes the driver fell, impaled through the chest by a thrown spear. The vehicle careened from the sloping road, the beasts tangling themselves in their reins as they scattered in bestial indecision. Sagittarus spared a glance for several of his squad plunging their spears through the prone bodies. Whatever the creatures were, they died screaming, sounding almost human.
He covered his men as more of the horned foes drew closer, his assault cannon levelled and groaning as it fired. Above the eternal crackle of the vox he heard the dull crumps of shells punching home.
‘Advance!’ he voxed to Dynastes. The same word, yet again. How many times had he given the order since the walls fell? A hundred? A thousand? ‘Advance!’
His squad broke from the mist at the next junction. Sagittarus took stock of his men as they materialised from the blood vapour. Their armour was marked with molten ichor, their spear-blades smoking as energy fields crisped away the last of the clinging blood.
Eight, he counted. Nine. Ten. Eleven, as Mycorian emerged.