There are so many burning ships and orbitals in the sky, it looks like a hundred sunsets all happening at once. The actual sun, the Veridian system’s pure, blue-white star, is lost behind circumfulgent smoke.
Ekritus wants to kill them all. He wants to face them and kill them, one by one, until there are none left, and the heat of his outrage is finally quelled.
He senses movement. The first of the Word Bearers appears. Behind him, two more, toiling up the earthwork slope. More come behind them. Ekritus stands to meet them.
They do not shoot him.
He hesitates, boltgun in one hand, power sword in the other.
He is red, like them. Except not by choice.
They see his true markings under the sticky sheen of blood only as they draw close. By this time, as they react, he is already killing them.
He shoots the first in the face. There is no time to appreciate the satisfaction of seeing the grilled helm explode, the pieces of bone and hair and brain-matter eject in all directions. The second he hits in the gut. The third in the left shoulder, tipping him backwards down the hill into the men behind him.
The fourth is another headshot.
There is no fifth. No rounds left.
Ekritus goes into them with his sword. He severs a wrist, a thigh, a neck. He impales a body and lifts it, hurling it like a sack down the earthwork rise. It crashes into its kin below. Two-handed, he buries the edge of the blade in the cranium of another helm, splitting it in half.
One has dropped a bolt pistol. He snatches it up out of the bloody moss and fires twice into the chest of the next traitor on him, killing him cold. He kills the next two, then side slashes a man off the bulwark ridge to his left.
But they’re on him. There are too many. Enough to take a world. Enough to bring a Legion to its knees. They hit him. They beat him with gun-butts and sword hilts. They pin him and club him down to his knees, chipping and denting his armour until some of the blue shows through again.
One of them tears off his helm.
‘Bastards! Bastards!’ he yells at them. A fist pulps his face, repeated blows to mash flesh and crush bone. He drools blood and teeth through swollen lips. One eye has gone.
They drag him up. He’s a captain. He’s a trophy.
A figure towers over him. Ekritus, half-blind, realises it’s one of the Titans, advanced to face the earthwork. Its speaker horns boom. The Word Bearers roar an answer and punch the air.
When the Titan resumes its advance, knocking down the old earthwork and trampling the trees, Ekritus is crucified on its torso plates.
Hol Beloth, recently teleported to the surface, commands the advance on the port at Lanshear. Hosts of the Kaul Mandori, the Jeharwanate, and the Ushmetar Kaul sweep before his engine formations. A brigade of the Tzenvar Kaul is encircling the port to the north.
The brotherhoods fight with supreme devotion. Beloth or his immediate officers have selected and anointed many of the zealots personally. They are conduits for the warp-magicks used by the highest ordinals of the XVII to enrapture their warhosts.
Hol Beloth is ambitious. He wishes to be more than a commander and more than a conduit. Such status has been promised to him by Erebus and Maloq Kartho and other, unnamed shadows that stand beside them sometimes and mutter in the twilight. He will be invested. He will be greater than even the Gal Vorbak. But he must prove himself, though he has proved himself in war a thousand times before.
This is a new form of war. This is a warfare that has never been unleashed openly before. Beloth must achieve his objectives, and perform his duties well. He must prove that he can command and control men and un-men alike.
He is hungry for power. Erebus and Kor Phaeron were always the greatest adepts, since the earliest days, but now the primarch seems to have exceeded them. His essence is frightening. Lorgar is transcendent. It is not simply the power, it is the fluid subtlety with which he employs it. Just being near Lorgar is a privilege. Being apart from, like here on Calth... it feels like the sun has gone out.
Hol Beloth believes that Erebus and Kor Phaeron are painfully aware of the way they have fallen behind. He believes they watch the primarch and crib from him, borrowing tricks and talents they have learned by observation, and then deploying them with stiff, crude proficiency. They are not adept any more. They are struggling to keep up with Lorgar’s mastery.
It is as though they are borrowing from another place, while Lorgar has become one with that place.
Hol Beloth intends to ascend to a place beside his primarch. He will burn Lanshear for the right to do so.
Numinus City is mortally wounded. Actinic light shivers along the skyline. Criol Fowst knows that the blessed dark masters of the XVII are already loosening the interstices of Calth. They are displacing it; they are rocking it in its clasp like a thief twisting a jewel out of its setting. Hoar frosts keep forming then thawing on the walls and roofs of the city. Fires gutter and die for no reason, and then reignite spontaneously. Twice, Fowst has looked up and seen, through the smoke cover, patterns of stars that do not belong to Calth or the Veridian System; patterns of stars, indeed, that he has never seen before, but which seem so familiar they make him weep for joy.
He rallies his men. The Ushmetar Kaul are dedicated. They have already gutted the Army encampments along the south bend of the river and left them in flames. They have killed thousands. Fowst has inspected the heaped dead. Almost a division of men went into the river in a thrashing attempt to escape, and were cut down by cannon and rifle. Their bodies, those which have not washed away downstream, have formed several new jetties at the water’s edge; slipway ramps of corpses jutting out into the stained current.
Where there is resistance, the Brotherhood does not flinch. They walk into return fire, soaking up the hits. It is a process of gleeful sacrifice that leads to overwhelm. Some of his men are strapped up with explosives, and walk in amongst the masses of the fleeing enemy to find their ascension.
In the ransacked encampments of the Numinus 61st, the Brotherhood has found crates of rifles, las-weapons, new issue Illuminators ready for distribution. The Ushmetar Kaul took them, ditching their old pieces in favour of the powerful new firearms. Fowst has one. It is tough and lightweight, with virtually no kick. It has a folding wire stock that he can clip back out of the way. He has killed six men with it already.
He is an educated man. The irony is not lost on him.
Orders are coming from the Legion. The spaceport must be secured, and then the outlying palaces on the plains.
Fowst wonders about the planet’s southern hemisphere, primarily ocean and more sparsely inhabited. He believes it is about to have more comprehensive fury meted out upon it. Great power, both ritual and actual, has been unsheathed today. But the task at hand will take much more than that.
The Samothrace steers in through the slip gates of the Zetsun Verid Yard. Behind it, Calth’s main shipyard is burning. No one challenges the Samothrace. It’s a vessel of the XIII fleet, running for cover, and besides, the vox is choked and the noosphere is dead.
No one aboard the Zetsun Verid Yard questions the fact that the yard structure has remained untouched either. Too small? Overlooked? Yet it is a vital specialist facility, and yards around it have been targeted and obliterated.
The ship docks between the two fast escorts sheltering in the yard space.
‘How long?’ Kor Phaeron asks the senior magos of his shadow techpriests.