Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine Read online

  The Call of

  the Hunting Horn

  As the god-machines manoeuvred into formation, Syagrius had the luxury of time to survey the landscape that would host the coming battle. Beyond the trailing edge of Therimachus were rolling hills. The road from Deicoon came in from the east, rounding the coastal mountains. The south was forested. The region had been relatively untouched by the rapacious industry of Katara. Further south was the Klivanos Plain. Despite the richness of the promethium reserve, the region was too volatile to permit extraction. In the distance, visible above the trees, were the remains of the last attempt, two centuries old, to exploit its resources. The charred, twisted tops of derricks looked like the fossil remains of a leviathan caught by the ferocity of the Klivanos.

  Syagrius had seen the glow of flame geysers in the plain since his arrival in Therimachus. Now, though, what he saw looked more like curtains of fire, an incendiary aurora rising from the earth instead of descending from the sky. The burn had reached the edge of the forest and was spreading quickly.

  Syagrius looked south through the armourglass eyes of Augustus Secutor. He grimaced at the obvious symbolism of the conflagration. Katara was aflame. He had come to lead its liberation. Instead, more and more of the world was being consumed. The fire of war was licking at the edges of Therimachus now. The green of the hills to the east and of the threatened forest to the south felt like the last untouched region of Katara, just as Therimachus was the last city. Now the Iron Skulls were close. So was the judgement of his strategy on the planet.

  Syagrius did not believe in doubt. It was a poison, the creator of battlefield paralysis. He had been a stranger to it from youth. Upon his early induction into the Collegia Titanica, he had consciously ground even its trace beneath his boot heel. His refusal of doubt had served him well. He had the victories to prove it. Many had been hard won. There had been sacrifices. But there had never been any reason for doubt.

  Not until Khania. The initial battle against the tyranids had disturbed him. He had pursued a return to unblemished pride in the second phase of the campaign. He remained convinced the near-disaster at Gelon had been Balzhan’s fault. He was just as convinced his strategy on Katara was correct. Land at the cities. Hold them. Defeat the traitors when they rose to the bait.

  The campaign was sound. There were no doubts. There was only certainty.

  Only the fire was spreading. And there was something in his chest, a sharp knot he could not banish.

  Rekorus said, ‘I have Princeps Krezoc, marshal.’ The moderati had been attempting to make vox-contact with Krezoc since the preparations for the march had begun.

  ‘Patch her through,’ Syagrius said. He made the conversation private.

  ‘Marshal,’ said Krezoc. There was a lot of noise in the reception, as if the flames were burning the very ether.

  ‘What is your status?’ Syagrius asked her.

  ‘We have defeated the enemy at Deicoon.’

  There was no triumph in her statement. Only exhaustion, and a determination so dark Syagrius could almost see it.

  ‘I congratulate you, princeps.’ The words tasted of sawdust. He spat them out as quickly as he could.

  ‘How are you faring at Therimachus?’ Krezoc asked.

  ‘The enemy is not yet in sight, but will be soon.’ Syagrius paused for a moment. ‘Your orders stand. You are to make for Therimachus with all due haste.’ He said this because he had to. He had given the orders once. Rescinding them was not an option, even when he knew obeying them was impossible.

  ‘I understand, marshal,’ Krezoc said. The same bleak determination as before. She did not question the orders. She did not raise questions about his strategy. She did not suggest that it had gone awry. But as flat as her tone was, through the hisses and pops of the voxmission Syagrius thought he heard a deeper meaning to what she said. I understand, marshal. What did she think she understood. That disaster was inevitable?

  He shut his eyes for a moment and shook his head once. Disaster. There was no reason to think of that eventuality. Krezoc’s cold voice must be more insidious than he had thought, for it to imply such a thing. She had…

  Stop it.

  He opened his eyes. He looked down the road ahead, to where it curved shortly before the horizon to disappear behind the shoulder of the mountains. Now of all times, he must see clearly. There was no room for illusion.

  ‘Will you come?’ There was relief in the honesty of the question.

  ‘The road has been cut,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, it has.’

  Silence. Then Krezoc said, ‘The Pallidus Mor will walk on Therimachus, marshal.’

  She did not say how. She did not say when they could arrive. Those were not answers she could give. He did not ask them of her.

  ‘What of the heretics, marshal?’ Krezoc asked. ‘Did the cult reach Therimachus?’

  ‘It is not a threat,’ Syagrius said.

  ‘We thought the same in Deicoon. I let my guard down. I was wrong to do so.’

  ‘We learned from that,’ Syagrius told her. He surprised himself by not saying your error. Berating Krezoc was pointless. He had no energy for it. He felt himself suspended in a sphere of stilled time. Outside its confines, war and an avalanche of consequences waited. Within, he floated in an atmosphere of rarefied clarity. It was important that he not squander the crystalline moments. Antagonising Krezoc would be a waste. ‘The enforcers looked hard. They found some pockets of cultists. They were disorganised, easily purged. The heresy did not have time to take root here.’

  ‘Good,’ said Krezoc. ‘And what was planned here was disrupted. Perhaps we will be spared further surprises.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘Marshal,’ Trovalis said, ‘auspex readings of large movements.’

  ‘Thank you, moderati.’ To Krezoc, he said, ‘Our moment has come.’

  ‘Fight well, marshal.’

  ‘We shall. And we will look for you when you join us.’

  ‘See that you do.’

  It was the closest he had come to a friendly exchange with Krezoc.

  When he ended the conversation, Syagrius saw Rekorus looking at him.

  The younger man raised an eyebrow. ‘Are they on their way?’ he asked.

  ‘They are.’

  ‘When will they get here?’

  ‘When they do. Until then, the glory is ours alone.’

  Rekorus grinned, recognising a hard truth rather than vainglory in Syagrius’ answer. ‘So much the better,’ he said, answering in kind.

  Syagrius opened a command channel to the entire demi-legio. ‘Imperial Hunters,’ he said, ‘our moment has come at last on Katara. Our prey approaches. Let us fall on its neck. Let us cover the land with its blood. We hunted well on Khania. I am honoured now to lead you on our greatest hunt yet. Sound the horns, comrades! Let the foe tremble before our coming!’

  He finished speaking, and the war-horns of every Titan in the demi-legio blasted. The sound was colossal. It was immense, and it was hungry. It roared over the landscape and bounced against the mountainsides. It was a fanfare of gods, so loud it would have been heard by every citizen of Therimachus, no matter how deep underground they might be.

  Do you hear us, you coward? Syagrius thought, picturing Markos in his bunker. The governor had refused to emerge. He was issuing commands to the militia from his hole in the ground. Coming from such a man, his directions were not orders. They were miserable pleas.

  ‘Sound the horns again!’ Syagrius called. ‘Tell the enemy we are here! Announce our coming! Let all of Katara know that the Imperial Hunters walk!’

  The maniples were in formation, and with the second blast, the colossal majesty of the Imperial Hunters began to march. The wind was blowing from the north, pulled towards the firestorms of the promethium plain. The banners of the Imperial Hunters streamed in the
gusts, snapping proudly. Augustus Secutor strode forwards. With each footfall, Syagrius felt his mark etched more deeply on the face and history of the world. The Warlords leading the four maniples marched in synchrony. They left Therimachus behind. They walked over the hills, giants of eternal magnificence. The formation stretched over a line miles wide. Syagrius smiled at the thought of any foe that thought to pass through the spaces between the Titans. Markos was distressed that Therimachus did not have a wall. He was wrong. The Imperial Hunters were that wall, and the wall moved. It marched across the land, and it would grind anything that tried to break through it to dust.

  The horns sounded again, warning and exulting. Here was strength and here was pride. Here was the most august of powers. Dark clouds scudded overhead, but they could do nothing to dim the lustre of the Imperial Hunters. The legio’s colours were the green of the Imperium’s glory, the white of purity and the red of nobility. The icon of its banner was the claw of the predator, but it was also a sun bursting above the field. The Imperial Hunters were the sun of every world on whose surface they marched. And they carried in their weapons the fury of a star.

  Yet again, the war-horns shouted.

  Here we are, Syagrius thought. Will you face us? Do you dare?

  The answer came, first with a countering roar of war-horns. This sound was deeper, cacophonous, a braying howl of anger issuing from ulcerous, deformed throats. The layered madness of the echoes had not faded when the Iron Skulls appeared. Massive figures of rage thundered out from behind the mountainside and made for Therimachus.

  Anger and majesty closed with each other.

  Ornastas gazed up at Gloria Vastator. It stood astride a ridge only a few hundred yards away from where the Company of the Bridge had gathered. The head of the Titan was almost lost to his sight in the blowing ash. The Warlord, and the other giants that stood with it, faced away from the city. They had done with it.

  So his duty was clear.

  ‘We’re going back in,’ Ornastas said.

  ‘To what?’ Brennet objected. He had been staring at the caldera of Deicoon. Now he looked at Ornastas in disbelief.

  Ornastas understood his doubts. Lava still fountained from its centre. It poured in torrents down the ruined streets, its angry glow slowly dimming to black as it spread out into the land beyond. The air here, beyond the reach of the eruption, was thick with ash, and harder to breathe than it had been in the centre of Deicoon.

  ‘We will go back,’ Ornastas told him, ‘because we are called.’ He raised his voice as much as he could, though he was rasping and coughing again. The rumble of the city’s collapse continued, thunder cracked in the ash cloud, and the wind howled. Only those standing nearest Ornastas could hear him. He climbed on top of a nearby boulder, making himself as visible as possible to the company, and he gestured with his staff as he spoke, pointing back towards the city. Those who could not hear him would see him, he hoped, and they would understand something of what he was urging them to do. He would have to rely on word of what he said spreading. He had no doubt it would be shared by those closest to him.

  ‘But there’s nothing left,’ Brennet objected.

  ‘Isn’t there? Look to the ruins. Look to the broken ramparts. Do you see what I see?’

  What was left of Deicoon was a smouldering ring. Not a single building had been left intact. Their shells stabbed upwards, hollow and fractured. The wall was slumping rubble, the heaps separated by wide gaps. The city reminded Ornastas of the shattered teeth of a lower jaw surrounding a fiery maw. Just visible through the billows of smoke and the sheets of fire that roared through Deicoon, figures struggled. They had taken refuge from the lava atop the mounds of wreckage, and they fought there. Some ran in the streets, fleeing the molten judgement, and they did battle there, too. All who were still alive in Deicoon were locked in combat. The daemonic Titans had been destroyed, and the god-machines of the Pallidus Mor had gathered outside the city. They would be leaving soon. Their battle here had ended, and Therimachus had need of them. But Deicoon was more than its pyre. The city bled. The city fought.

  ‘The war in Deicoon is not over,’ Ornastas said. ‘We must not turn away from it. Who will be its champions and its guardians if not us?’

  Brennet looked uncertain. ‘What will we champion? Soon there won’t be anything left.’

  ‘There will be,’ Ornastas said, his confidence absolute. ‘We will wait a short while, but then we will return. There will be a Deicoon to save. Already there is a Deicoon to avenge.’ He pointed again, this time to figures struggling on the side of a fallen hab block. ‘The heretic must be destroyed.’ Somewhere in the fire and ash, he thought, there were leaders of the cult. He prayed some had survived the devastation so he might punish them himself.

  Brennet turned his head to watch the fight, and when he looked back at Ornastas, the confessor saw renewed determination in the face of the enforcer.

  ‘Deicoon calls us back,’ Ornastas told him. ‘Will you answer?’

  ‘I will,’ said Brennet. ‘I will!’

  ‘Will you answer?’ Ornastas shouted to the company.

  ‘We will!’ the people chanted back as he bent over double, coughing up black phlegm. ‘We will! We will! We will!’

  Ornastas refused to wait. With the fervour of the company resounding, he climbed over the boulder and took the first symbolic steps back towards Deicoon. The radiant heat of the lava felt like a benediction.

  Krezoc met with the other princeps, the secutarii alphas and Deyers at the base of Gloria Vastator’s right leg. The massive limb and the ridge behind it provided enough shelter from Deicoon’s storm for them to talk without having to shout.

  ‘News from Therimachus?’ Deyers asked. The captain’s face was pinched. His left cheek twitched from strain.

  ‘Marshal Syagrius is leading the Imperial Hunters into combat against the Iron Skulls,’ said Krezoc. ‘Our orders are to join him.’

  Deyers blinked. ‘Meaning he doesn’t favour his chances.’

  The other officers were silent for a moment. Then Carrinas said, ‘I will not stand for any insults to the marshal, or to the honour of the Imperial Hunters.’

  Deyers stared at him, then shook his head. ‘I meant no insult.’ There was something dead in his voice. He seemed to have moved into a kind of blankness beyond despair.

  ‘The marshal’s valour on the battlefield is second to none,’ Krezoc said carefully. That, at least, was true. She cursed his strategy, but she could not fault his courage. ‘We have defeated the enemy here. Of course we should make for Therimachus.’

  ‘As fast as possible,’ Deyers said.

  ‘Are you in the habit of taking your time on the way to a battle, captain?’

  Deyers shook his head.

  ‘What is it that is really on your mind?’ Krezoc asked.

  Deyers looked towards the conflagration of Deicoon, then back at Krezoc. ‘Have we come to save Katara or destroy it?’ he said.

  ‘We have come to do our duty,’ she told him, her tone full of iron and ice. ‘We are here to destroy the enemy. If we do not, there is no salvation possible for Katara.’

  Deyers nodded, but said nothing.

  ‘Are the Kataran Spears ready to do their duty?’ Krezoc insisted.

  ‘They are,’ Deyers said. There was still no real hope in his eyes.

  Drahn said, ‘I can’t dispute the need to reach Therimachus with all speed, but how do we get there with the road gone?’

  ‘Heading west isn’t an option, is it?’ said Rheliax.

  ‘No,’ Deyers said. ‘It would take weeks.’

  ‘Then how do we get there?’ Drahn said, frustrated.

  Movement to the right caught Krezoc’s eye. She turned to look. The ecclesiarch who had freed the secutarii at the Cathedral of Saint Chirosius was climbing over the rocks and walking towards Deicoon. His civilian
warriors, over a thousand strong now, followed him. He leaned into the wind-blown ash and held his staff high and angled at the burning walls. He was leading a charge to battle. He was taking his followers into the flames because that was where they must go to fight their holy war.

  Krezoc continued to turn until she faced north. The ridge blocked her view of Deicoon. She could see the angry glow of the eruption colouring the sky. That was where Ornastas was heading. She thought about another fire, larger yet.

  Krezoc turned back to the other officers. ‘We must walk through the flames,’ she said.

  Rheliax stared at her. Drahn began to grin at the audacious madness of what Krezoc proposed.

  ‘Will we reach Therimachus in time?’ said Deyers. There was hardly any expression, and even less hope, in his voice.

  Krezoc noticed he did not ask what route she meant to take. Perhaps he guessed. Perhaps he was beyond caring. ‘We will not be expected,’ she said.

  His grimace told her that he understood he could hope for nothing more.

  The Banelord struggled in the crossfire of Syagrius’ maniple. The Traitor Titan had advanced at its full, lumbering speed, its strides outpacing its smaller escorts. It came on, lured by the challenge of Augustus Secutor’s war-horn, answering with its own blasting howls of rage. Syagrius made his Warlord the single focus of the Banelord’s attack by hammering the traitor’s shields with mega-bolter and Apocalypse missiles. The beast hit back with a punishing barrage of shells. Its right arm was a power fist, crackling with corrupt energy, already reaching forwards in hunger for Augustus Secutor. Syagrius walked the Warlord back a few slow paces, drawing the Banelord in further. The traitor stormed past the positions of the Reaver and Warhounds of the maniple. They opened fire on its back and flanks. The Banelord took two more steps before reacting, and now it was assailed by a steady assault.

  The monster’s horn became a roar of anger and pain. Its tail-mounted energy cannon whipped around, firing at all of its attackers in turn.

  Syagrius took Augustus Secutor in a lateral movement around the Banelord. ‘Keep circling it,’ he ordered. ‘Destroy it in the net of our fire.’