Honsou gripped onto a splintered corbel of rock and watched the approaching army with a mixture of exhilaration and dread.
Logistically Berossus had the upper hand, and he was using it to strangle the life from the defenders of his fortress - or what was left of them. Onyx was right, they could not defeat this army conventionally.
But Honsou did not intend to fight conventionally.
'Come on, damn you!' he shouted into the deafening crescendo of noise. He straggled to penetrate the gunsmoke, but could see nothing through the acrid fog.
Onyx looked at Honsou in confusion, but said nothing as more shells landed nearby. Whizzing shrapnel ricocheted from the walls and Onyx leapt before Honsou, allowing several plate-sized blades of metal to hammer into his daemonic flesh rather than shred his master.
'Onyx!' called Honsou, dragging the daemonic symbiote to its feet. 'Look towards Berossus's army and tell me what you see!'
Onyx staggered over to the edge of the wall and shifted his vision patterns until he could see clearly across the entirety of the battle. Streamers of fire and starbursts of explosions flickered like distant galaxies, but his eyes pierced the chaos and confusion of the battle with ease.
The lead elements of Berossus's army had smashed their way onto the spire's plateau and were less than a hundred metres from the last wall that stood between them and final victory. Dreadnoughts howled in battle fury and the Titans strode behind them like avatars of the gods of battle, weapons roaring with prayers to their dark masters.
'Berossus is at the wall!' shouted Onyx. 'He will be upon us in moments!'
'No! The ramp!' returned Honsou. 'What's happening at the end of the ramp!'
'I see tanks, hundreds of tanks,' yelled the daemonic symbiote, barely audible over the concussive booms of artillery fire. 'They are gathered beside the entrance to the mineworkings at the base of the ramp and are simply awaiting their turn to begin the climb.'
'Excellent,' laughed Honsou. 'Oh, Berossus, you are even more of a fool than I took you for!'
Satisfied that there was just the right amount of explosives, shaped and arranged to explode upwards into the fortress, Corias Keagh retreated swiftly from the gallery beneath Khalan-Ghol, unwinding a long length of insulated cable from the servo-rig on his back. Darting pincer arms mounted on the rig kept the cable from fouling and ensured that it remained straight and level.
'Here should do it,' he said to no one in particular as he turned into the armoured bunker he had constructed for just this moment.
The pincer arms cut the cable and craned over his shoulder to hand him the brushed copper end of its length. Synchronous timers had been calibrated from his armour's own power unit and he hooked the end of the cable into a power port on the chest of his breastplate. A winking red light on his helmet's visor turned to gold and he felt a physical stirring as the charges he had set armed.
He opened a channel to his lord and master and said, 'Lord Berossus, the charges beneath the fortress are set and ready to be detonated.'
'Then detonate them now,' came the familiar growling rasp of his master's voice. 'We are almost at the head of the ramp.'
Pausing to savour this moment of his greatest triumph, Keagh allowed the dim silence of the tunnel to enfold him before sending a pulse of energy along the length of the cable.
The mountain itself shook with the force of the blast far below, thousands of tonnes of ordnance and fuel exploding in one simultaneous blast that instantly atomised a whole swathe of the bedrock of Medrengard. Honsou staggered and fell to his knees as the Shockwave rippled throughout the fortress. Tall towers that had stood for millennia crashed down to ruin and every fighting man was knocked from his feet.
Tanks, and even one of Berossus's Titans, tumbled from the ramp as the Shockwave fanned upwards from below. Cracks split the stonework of the battlements and hundreds died as they fell to their deaths upon shattered ramparts. The main wall crumbled, torn like paper and breached in a dozen places by the shear forces twisting the mountain.
Aftershocks continued to rumble, shaking Khalan-Ghol to its foundations and Honsou heard a deep, answering roar, as though the fortress itself cried out in rage at this violation.
His fortress had been breached, but Honsou felt nothing but elation as the growling tremors that gripped his fastness began to fade.
'Now I have you, Berossus!' he snarled. 'Iron Warriors, ready yourselves!'
PART FOUR
THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY…
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Corias Keagh felt the thunderous roar of the explosion force its way down his tunnels like the bellow of an angry god. He braced himself against the wall of his underground bunker, confident that his works would survive this violence he had unleashed. He heard the metal of his tunnel supports groan in protest at the power of the Shockwave, but Keagh had been digging mines and bringing ruin to fortresses from below for thousands of years and knew his craft well.
Only when the temperature readout on his visor leapt upwards did he realise that something was amiss.
He heard it first as a whooshing rush of superheated air, forced through the tunnels ahead of something unimaginably hot. He rushed out into the tunnels as a terrible fear suddenly seized him.
Leaping from tunnel to tunnel, a flashing cloud of incandescent vapours foamed along the length of his workings. Behind it came a roaring, seething orange glow of molten metal and Keagh heard the screams of the soldiers as the lethally hot steam boiled the flesh from their bones.
He knew then that every one of the thousands of men in the tunnels beneath the ramp was going to die. His tunnels had not breached the sepulchres of Khalan-Ghol, but somewhere else entirely.
But how could that be, when the location of Keagh's breaching gallery had come straight from Obax Zakayo…?
In the split second Keagh had left of life, he realised that that they had been horribly deceived - that all they had striven for was ruined.
He turned to run, but even one as enhanced as an Iron Warrior could not outrun millions of tonnes of roaring molten metal as it spilled from the forges of Khalan-Ghol, destroying everything before it and liquefying the earth of the ramp as it went.
Keagh was engulfed in the rushing torrent of fire and had the exquisite horror of a last few seconds of life before his armour was melted away and his flesh vaporised.
Uriel felt the immense power of the subterranean explosion spread through the landscape and stumbled, gripping the sharp rocks of Khalan-Ghol's peak tightly as the tremors shook the foundations of the world itself. Plumes of glowing, orange steam geysered from the foot of the mountain and, as he watched, more and more began bursting from channels cut into the monstrous ramp.
'What in the Emperor's name?' breathed Uriel as he looked up and saw the top of the ramp sag and collapse upon itself as though the weight of earth supporting it was being steadily removed.
'A countermine?' shouted Pasanius.
'It would need to have been colossal to cause such damage,' said Uriel, shaking his head.
'Emperor angry at iron men,' roared the Lord of the Unfleshed. 'Strikes them from heaven!'