The temperature could not reach Thane through his armour. The readouts of his auto-senses told him what it was. Yet he sensed it, too. The dark and the cold of the nameless world cried out with such force it was as if there were a huge wind, howling loss at the cosmos. This was a place beyond mourning, beyond the grave. Abandonment, rejection, betrayal, judgement, punishment — they were all part of the great night. They were, he thought, the very mortar of the fortress.
The shoulders of the ork Titan were broad and flat, landing pads, Thane guessed, for aircraft. They were clear except for a single anti-air cannon at the rear of each pad. The barrels were long, stretching across half the length of the shoulders. The Penitent Wrath roared towards the left-hand pad. In the last moments of the approach, the orks finally realised there was an airborne enemy in the field. The turrets began to turn. The cannons opened fire immediately, when they were still facing away from the gunship. Their massive shells burst in the air, brief suns in the endless night. Qaphsiel pushed the Penitent Wrath harder, racing against the left turret’s rotation.
Still behind the Titan, the Thunderhawk dropped below the shoulder, then came back up, flying level. The platform came closer. The turret was a third of the way through its rotation. In another moment, the length of its barrel would be in the gunship’s flight path.
Thane braced. He heard the whine of the turbofans as they began to alter the ship’s trajectory. Qaphsiel fired the retro-nozzles, slowing the flight. The deck angled up. Thane began his leap with the landing pad still ahead. He was in the air just as the Thunderhawk passed over the edge of the Titan’s shoulder. He and the squad landed, rolling off the momentum. The engine whine became a scream. The Penitent Wrath climbed sharply, pushing up with all the force of its turbofans. Its nose passed over the cannon. The anti-air guns fired interlocking streams of shells, but the gunship rose faster than the orks could adjust their aim. It flew on, higher, gathering yet more speed as it made for the high spire of the fortress.
Thane rose to his feet. His Deathwatch brothers at his side, he ran towards the Titan’s head. The platform tilted up and down with each rocking step of the weapon. The head was a massive, grimacing icon of a monstrous deity. It was surrounded by a rampart of teeth, the gaps between them like huge, clumsy crenellations. Their construction was as rough, patchwork and monolithic as the rest of the monster. Thane found plenty of handholds. Gladius climbed the teeth and dropped into the space beyond. It was wide as a town square.
In the head’s left eye, heavy-calibre guns opened up. Their fire swept across the empty space towards the Deathwatch.
Close in, the fortress was just as angular and bladed as it had appeared from a distance. The towers were clusters of close-standing spikes. They made Wienand think of a forest of lightning claws jutting from mailed fists. Turrets tracked the Penitent Wrath as it climbed the heights of the fortress. They tracked, but they did not fire.
‘A good sign?’ Wienand said to Veritus.
‘Not the worst, at least.’
The high tower had a small landing pad just below its tapered peak. It was the site of that single, harsh light. Qaphsiel approached it slowly. A gun mounted into the wall of the spire followed silently. The Thunderhawk came down on the pad. Wienand approached the open side door. The gun, five metres up, was pointed directly at her. She jumped down to the flagstones. Veritus followed her. The gun did not move.
Far below, the monstrous ordnance of the Titan struck the mountainside. The tremors reached all the way up.
At the other end of the platform was an iron door. In the landing lights of the Thunderhawk, it was a stark black, glinting with methane frost. Wienand walked to the door. There were no handles. She stifled the impulse to knock. They know we’re here, she thought. Veritus stood beside her. ‘Now what?’ she asked. ‘Did you have a speech prepared?’
Veritus shook his head. The harsh light mounted on his helmet bleached his features. The shadows of his face were deep as canyons. As he gazed at the door, so utterly closed and cold, he did not resemble the dangerous inquisitor Wienand had struggled against on Terra. He did not look like the zealot who had sent assassins after her. He looked like a very old man, one who had seen too much, who stood at the brink of despair, and who had to fight hard not to fall into its abyss.
No, he did not have a speech.
Wienand wondered again why Veritus had insisted on coming. To observe the Deathwatch? Certainly. There was much to know there. There would be matters to prepare as a consequence. But here, why come to this locked door? He could have just as well waited aboard the Herald of Night.
Perhaps he had come to bear witness. So had she. Though she felt another need as she stood here like a supplicant. She did not know what she should call it. She recognised the imperative, though. Even if Thane had not turned this part of the mission over to her, she would still be here.
A minute passed. Then another. Silence deeper than the absence of sound, a silence of the soul, hard and cold, surrounded the tower. At last, Wienand said to Veritus, ‘You must go.’ When he started to object, she interrupted him. ‘You know I’m right. You can’t be here.’ She looked back at the Penitent Wrath. ‘That can’t remain idle. It needs to be elsewhere. You need to not be here.’
Veritus looked at her. His face was still, unreadable. His eyes were nothing but glinting black. In the end, he nodded and walked back to the gunship.
‘Leave me,’ Wienand voxed Qaphsiel.
‘Understood.’
She faced the door. She didn’t look as the gunship took off. Light faded. There was only her helmet lamp now, and the night pressed close. The silence gathered weight. Wienand’s awareness of the war faded. There was only the door, and the myth behind it. She could not summon the myth. She could not make the door open. But she could wait. To stand here and meet the tower’s silence with her own was the most direct action she had yet taken in this war.
Then the silence changed. There was no noise in the thinning, falling, snowing atmosphere. But the silence changed, because there was movement. Frost cracked. The shadows changed.
The door opened.
From the dark of the Titan’s eye, massive stubber fire battered the Space Marines. They fought back with light. Forcas stretched out his arms. Energy flashed from his fingers, golden and pure, a blaze of righteousness in the night. The light became a wall. It was a shimmering nobility. The orks trained their fire onto the barrier. The shells exploded against the golden aura. Forcas strained. The shield trembled, flickered for a moment, then held.
‘Get beneath the guns!’ Thane yelled. ‘They’re our way in.’
The Space Marines broke left and right. Forcas stayed where he was, preserving the shield, holding the orks’ focus. Thane and Warfist went left around the wall, ran back into the dark. It was lesser, the glow of Forcas’ barrier spreading over the entire open area before the Titan’s skull. The Space Marines were visible to the gunners, but the barrier was the lure, dazzling them, frustrating them as it resisted their shells. On the other side of the wall, Straton and Abathar had almost reached a point directly underneath the eye turret.
The barrier flickered again, buckling under the sustained fire. In another moment, Forcas would be exposed.
The eye was three metres up the wall of the skull. Abathar fired upward with his plasma cutter. He sliced through the barrel of one of the guns. The weapon exploded. Straton threw a grenade through the socket. There was a second blast. The eye glared red at the night, blazed as ammunition cooked off, then went dark.
At the base of the head, a door in the shape of a maw rose with a deafening metallic screech. Orks boiled out of the opening. Thane and Warfist strafed them with bolter fire and hurled frag grenades into their midst. The charge stumbled into chaos, giving Forcas time to run across the space to join Straton and Abathar.