The Army – 19th Numinus, 21st Numinus, 6th Neride ‘Westerners’ and 2nd Erud Ultima – opens fire. Lasrifles volley, light support guns and crew-serveds chatter, grenade launchers clunk and pop. Heavier autocannon emplacements crank up, chewing into the moving lines.
Another slaughter. Black figures are mown down. Some explode in shooting fireballs as they die, slaying the men round them.
Braellen clutches his bolter, fighting back the urge to shoot.
‘Captain! Captain!’
Sergeant Domitian moves through the back of the line. Men turn as he passes.
Domitian reaches Captain Damocles.
‘Sir,’ he says. ‘The damn vox just lit.’
Sergeant Anchise turns sharply.
‘What did you say?’ he asks.
They’re on the fringes of Sharud Province, moving at best speed ahead of the conflagration that’s consuming the forests. They are the pitiful remnants of the 111th and the 112th.
Anchise has taken command now that the company captains are gone. He’s trying to rally something out of the men, but there’s no time to stand still. Pursuit is right there, constantly pressing them: Titans, Titans of the traitor Mechanicum, plus heavy armour columns.
The Word Bearers are in the burning woods, and every kilometre further means greater losses inflicted.
Warhorns, deep, lingering, mournful, echo through the blackness of the forest, summoning the Ultramarines to their doom.
‘We’re detecting a sporadic pulse code on the vox, sir,’ says Cantis, who’s been carrying the only caster set they dragged out of Barrtor with them.
‘Is it on the helm pick-ups?’ Anchise asks.
‘Too weak,’ says Cantis. ‘I really need to set this down, erect the portable mast.’
Anchise doesn’t have to tell him why he can’t. Three or four mass-reactive rounds spit through the canopy above them like game birds bolting for freedom, and punch into a mature quaren. The bole splinters in a spray of fire, and the head limbs of the tree come tearing down through the canopy spread in a blizzard of sparks.
‘Move! Move it!’ Anchise yells. Damn they’re close! He can hear whirring, the chug of treads. That’s a damn Whirlwind, or maybe one of the Sabre tank hunters.
There is simply no let up. They are going to be hounded until the last of them are dead.
Two Word Bearers rush the clearing. The trees are stark black, backlit by fierce fires that have erupted close by. Anchise can smell woodsmoke, burning brush, sparks, the burnwash of explosives.
The first of the XVII brutes fires his storm bolter, and kills Brother Ferthun with a hit to the lower back that blows out his spine and hips. The other is hefting a lascannon. He braces it and lets rip, flattening trees and retreating Space Marines with bright spears of las-energy.
Anchise decides to face his death. He goes at them, boltgun blasting in one fist, kinetic mace in the other. The mace belonged to his captain, Phrastorex. The captain never even got the chance to unlock it from its case this morning.
Anchise’s bolts blow the face off the Word Bearer with the cannon. The visor of the man’s helmet explodes, and he falls back, hard. The other clips Anchise on the shoulder, and then makes a cleaner hit to his left leg. The detonation of the mass-reactive shell hurls Anchise onto the loamy ground. Rolling, he swings the mace, and breaks both of the Word Bearer’s legs. The warrior goes down. Anchise finishes the job with another mace swing.
His own leg is broken. He can feel the bone trying to reknit, but the damage may be too great.
He looks around in time to see that the other Word Bearer is not dead.
He’s getting up. Anchise’s shots shredded his helmet, his gorget and part of his upper chest plate. The Word Bearer’s head and face are exposed.
It may just be injury: burns, contusions, swelling. The warrior has, of course, just taken substantial damage from a boltgun.
But the horror doesn’t look like that to Anchise. The flesh is puffed taut, like the necrotised swelling of a venom bite. The mouth is misaligned, but it looks as though it has grown that way, not been brutally configured by kinetic shockwaves. Blood streams down the side of the Word Bearer’s face and neck.
There are yellow scutes on his brow that look disturbingly like budding horns.
He throws himself at Anchise, a combat blade in his right hand. The dagger looks as though it’s made of obsidian or polished black rock. Its grip is wound with fine chains. Is it some kind of trophy?
Anchise lapses to automatic practical, taking his foe on in basic, close-hand measures to stop the blade. He half-rises to meet the Word Bearer, turning his left palm out to run in past the lunging knife, and turn the right wrist and forearm away. Simultaneously, he brings his right forearm up as a crossed block against the enemy’s face and chest.
Transhuman versus transhuman. It’s about mass and speed and power, about the application of accelerated strength and enhanced reaction time. Anchise’s hard block breaks the Word Bearer’s cheek, his pass turning the knife aside. But the Word Bearer is strong, and driven by a murderous fury. He circles the blade, stabbing at Anchise’s side and left arm. Anchise turns his right arm block into a jabbing punch, ramming his steel fist into the enemy’s throat which has been exposed thanks to the damaged gorget. The impact crushes something in the Word Bearer’s throat. His eyes bulge for a second, and blood jets from his mouth and nostrils. He attempts another savage stab, and the knifeblade scores Anchise’s right forearm through armour, flesh and muscle to the very bone.
Anchise is not going to lose the advantage. He places a second punch into the throat, and then a third, higher, into the misshapen jaw.
The Word Bearer’s head snaps back. Anchise feels rather than hears a sharp crack. He punches again to be sure. Then, as his foe drops, he wrenches the dagger out of his hand to make certain of things.
The hand that he uses to grasp it tingles. The wound made by the knife in his forearm throbs.
He freezes.
Something opens in his mind. Despite the burning forest around him, everything is very cold. There is a sterile blue light. Something pulses. Anchise can hear a deep, cosmic heartbeat. He can smell neurotoxin and molecular acid. He cannot see it, but he has a sense of something uncoiling, something vast, something black, something scaled and greasy, something coated in a heavy caul of grey mucus. He can feel it unwrapping, expanding out of a pit that’s older than all the eons, moving up through the eternal darkness of Old Night and the interstellar gulf, moving towards the light of the burning forest. Moving towards him.
It can smell him. It can taste his pain. It can hear his thoughts.
Closer. Closer. Closer.
Anchise cries out and hurls the black glass dagger away. The door in his mind slams shut.
He is breathing hard, shaking. The wound in his arm will not stop bleeding.
He knows he needs the vox. It doesn’t matter if they haven’t got the time or opportunity to stop and set up. He needs the vox.
If someone’s out there, if anyone’s listening, they need to hear him. They need to know.
They need to know what they’re facing.
On. Off.
On. Off.
On.
Maintain activation. Maintain. Wake.
Trapped and blind. Helpless. Deprived of consciousness for so long, he has lost all sense of when now is or what now is.
He knows fear.
He is Telemechrus.
He has been taught things, and one of them is to control his anger until it is needed. It is probably needed now.