Land guided the Raider into a whirring skid, aggravating its anti-grav plates. He scanned the last of the convoy, seeing damaged vehicles drifting into the curling golden mist. On this side of the gateway, the Mechanicum’s ingenuity was masterfully bolted in layers of gleaming metal over the plain hideousness of the original ancient artistry. The arch itself was carved from a material resembling ivory, marked by silver runes in no known language.
Even as Land watched a tracked conveyor crawl through, three skimmers bearing cadres of Silent Sisters raced back out. If ever there was a time for reinforcements, it was now.
The Raider glided between the other advancing tanks, turning and returning to the crash of the front lines grinding against one another. Spear-wielding male warriors in gold moved in bloodied, exhausted harmony with sword-wielding female soldiers in chainmail. They were being pushed back, step by step, each Custodian or Sister falling opened up another hole in the rapidly diminishing Imperial line. Land’s Raider vibrated with the squeal of its high-powered volkite arrays. Creatures and legionaries farther back in the enemy horde ignited beneath the beams, spreading the flames to their closest brethren.
Zephon rose again, clambering back up the crew ladder. The metal rungs bowed beneath his weight as he opened the cupola and looked out at the battle.
‘Blood of the Angel.’
‘What now?’ Land barked.
‘The Archimandrite. It is here.’
‘Unlikely, given that the Archimandrite is almost certainly dead.’
<It is time,> she had canted, and Land had mourned her treachery in disbelieving silence. He refused to follow her whims. He wouldn’t turn his back on the Omnissiah.
‘It is here,’ Zephon repeated. He reached for his chainsword, gunning it loudly in the oppressive, red-lit crew bay.
Land turned in his seat, reaching for the periscope. He dragged a sleeve across his face to clean his stinging eyes, and peered into the lenses. The thing he saw was bathing squads of retreating Sisters in coruscating beams of darkfire energy, atomising them in sweeping arcs. Custodian spears broke against its plating. Lascannon fire skewed aside from its flickering shields.
And yet.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is not the Archimandrite.’
Devram Sevik had named his Knight Aquila from the Ashes. He had worked on its tilt plate himself, daubing the new sigil of House Vyridion with his own hand. As much as he was a man who revered the peerless work of sanctified artistry-armourers and sacristans in their maintenance of a Knight suit, he was also given to a personal flourish here and there. And so the Imperial eagle upon his tilt plate was more stylised than the stencilled ubiquity of most, with flaring wings and trails of plumage below as it took wing above a field of black ash.
‘Engaging,’ he voxed to Jaya, to his fellow scions, to anyone still drawing breath and capable of hearing.
Aquila from the Ashes crashed bodily into the Archimandrite at full stride, shoulder charging the machine with a hammer-blow bang and the choral whine of protesting, warping metal. They stood deadlocked, living machine-flesh against industrial piston-muscles, metal grinding, armour scraping, spraying sparks. Aquila from the Ashes had size and weight against the Archimandrite’s original husk, but the Archimandrite was blasphemously altered now. The fruits of the Fabricator General’s vision and the possessing daemon’s strength shoved back against the taller machine, its taloned feet seeking purchase and clawing into the nameless material of the webway’s ground.
Devram’s cockpit flooded with alarms and warning runes. He felt his suit’s stance buckling as the creatures around his knees began hacking away at his stabilisers. A strained look at one of his torso-feed screens showed the Custodians and Sisters fighting their way to him, but they were fighting through an ocean of heaving, seething flesh with mere mortal blades.
It was down to him. This deed would mark his shield or mark his grave.
Enough left for a four-second burst. Devram forced his gunlimb up, sacrificing his last shot against the beasts around his legs, jamming the gatling cannon into the Archimandrite’s sloping, featureless face. It cycled live, rotating, spinning–
His knee buckled, burst. He fell, the last four seconds of his ammunition screaming wide, arcing up into the golden mist as wasted thunder. The sickening lurch in his stomach told him what the failing pict-feeds didn’t, as his Knight toppled sideways. Impact gel squirted from his support cradle to cushion him but the excretors were poorly maintained; his helmed head slammed against the cockpit wall and something – the wall? his helmet? – crunched.
His visor went black, denying all input. Unseeing, feeling hot wetness in his mouth, Devram fought to pull his helmet clear. Fingers that had turned suddenly clumsy scraped at the helmet’s bindings as all around him metal bent, wrenched, tore.
The pressure of enclosing metal was unrelenting, first squeezing him into his throne, then crushing him into it, breaking his knees, his shoulders, his hips, his elbows, his ribs with vicious slowness. He screamed as he was compacted beneath the Archimandrite’s iron tread, silenced only when his neck and jaw gave with wet, clicking snaps.
The creature stepped over the malformed remains of the taller machine, unknowingly crushing Sevik’s hand-painted tilt shield into a mangled ruin. It hunted the Anathema’s Daughters now, and all else was but a distraction.
Its lessers among the weaker Choirs lashed out blindly, unable to even sense the human maidens slaughtering them. The weakest of them all, the most wretched and insignificant within their ranks, dissolved even before the fall of the Daughters’ killing blades.
The daemon of the first murder was prey to no such gullible weakness. It didn’t need to sense them or see them in order to kill them. Its clustered node of hunger-senses flowed outwards over the hundreds of warring bodies, sensing the dissolution of its own kind. Wherever its lessers were drained of their strength, wherever their corpuses haemorrhaged potency, there it turned its guns. Blinded by the Sisters’ soullessness, it hunted the holes in its perceptions, firing streaming volleys of solid shot or bolts of dark energy wherever its kindred suffered against foes it couldn’t see.
The weapons so preciously crafted by ancient hands and recovered by Arkhan Land did their duty once again, chewing through the embattled Sisters with murderous precision. It raked them with explosive fire or reaved them down with energy beams – one it even managed to destroy by crushing her beneath its foot when it sought to impale the daemon’s stolen metal corpus.
The daemon exhaled blackness, its breath staining the golden mist around its maw. Its tongue slithered free, hanging long and undulating in the fog. It wasn’t capable of pleasure beyond the fulfilment of its nature, but there was satisfaction here. These hollow impressions of human females were far easier to kill when they could be torn apart with mortal weapons that vomited killing energy.
Though it wasn’t born of war, it sensed the ebb and flow of the battle around it. Each of the Anathema’s Daughters’ deaths was a lessening of pressure against the creature’s pained perceptions. Each burst body let the warp’s song grow louder once more. Every one that fell allowed the daemon’s lesser kindred to rise again, to fight harder.
Floating war machines raged at the creature, blasting portions of its stolen body apart. This punishment scarcely slowed it. Blood, old and new, painted its armour plating. The mist around its towering form was rancid and red with the shrieking of souls torn from their bodies since its arrival in this realm. Flesh-machine growths added to its size, quivering pods and birth-sacs of lesser daemons in rapid gestation, and thrashing tentacles of sinewy, veined metal that drilled through battle tanks to seek the mortals within. Its back-mounted weapon arrays annihilated whole swathes of the front lines, feeding the warfare while the daemon itself paid no heed to it. The creature butchered only the Golden and the war machines that sought to oppose its advance on the Anathema’s Daughters.