The Beast cursed as its myriad barrels whined empty and the auto-loaders set to work.
The remaining Sisters of Silence continued their fighting withdrawal and then, as their injured sister was still dragging herself away from the ork psyker, it detonated.
The ork’s mouth opened wide, a choking, gurgling sound trapped deep in its throat. Its head began to shake, like a loose bolt under pressure. Its eyes opened wide and bulged as though staring into the vivid core of the Primordial Annihilator. Koorland saw an ephemeral green shape swirl above the ork’s head. Sparks flew from its nose. It arched itself on the floor and then its head burst, slamming the back of it hard into the ground and spraying the mosaic tiles with blood and bits of skull.
The psychic blast wave tore the flesh from the last servitor and whipped around the wounded Sister like boiling water around a rock.
Emerald lightning sprayed from the glistening nub of the ork psyker’s exposed brain stem, like watching a weed flourish and die in accelerated playback, like current leaping from a broken wire in search of earth.
It found it.
Asger howled in triumph. Koorland had strength left only to remain upright. That felt like triumph enough.
Psychic feedback raced through the fighting ork mobs with the speed of lightning, a darting witchstorm manifested by the xenos’ collective mind that reached through the eyes into their skulls and tore out their souls. It ripped through the mob, a chain of cranial detonations following messily where it passed. A blood splatter suddenly painted the greasy driver’s window of a gargant from the inside. The war engines ground to a halt. One toppled over. Wet bursts and a pelleting sound evocative of skull fragments on metal sounded from the staircases leading up the galleries and the doors behind Olug and Brokk.
A snaking bolt snapped across the Beast’s tusked jaw, and it dropped to one knee, clutched the sides of its head in both hands and gave vent to a howl of pure, mental agony.
Then it looked up at him and snorted. Its eyes flared like wild things.
Something had gone wrong.
The wounded Sister.
Koorland aimed his storm bolter, range point blank, inside the Beast’s shield bubble, and unloaded the entire magazine into the ork’s face. Pyroclastic jelly burst over the ork’s armour and burned. With a dribbling howl, it knocked the storm bolter from Koorland’s gauntlet with a swipe of its left hand.
Largely unarmoured and unpowered, Koorland felt the reinforced bones of wrist, arm and shoulder shatter under the force. The storm bolter thumped into the wall and skidded off along the floor. His mind blacked itself out to block the pain.
Everything vanished but the feel of the power sword in his other hand.
The Beast slumped back, dazed. Its face was molten wreckage, eyeless, nostrils merged into one flapping gill, wobbling polyps of congealed fat hanging from its lips. It was blind as Koorland drew his blade back one-handed, imbued it with every last straining sinew of Dorn’s stubbornness, and then rammed it through the Beast’s open mouth. The Great Beast spasmed once, mighty enough even in its death throes to rip the sword’s grip from Koorland’s hands as it crashed face-first into the tiles.
And was still.
The whole throne room was still.
Koorland sank to the ground, a sudden weakness of the knees flushing out the battle-anaesthesia that had kept him on his feet for far longer than this one encounter. It was done. He had done it. His brain was, if anything, as numb as his body, and it refused to process the magnitude of what that meant.
He had succeeded where a primarch had failed.
They had succeeded.
Through the jangling tinnitus in his ears, he heard Tyris’ shout of congratulation. He saw Krule saunter across, a smile on his face as he spat on the Beast’s corpse. Surprising that the Assassin had been so close during the fight without Koorland noticing. If he had to guess, he would say that Krule had been protecting him. Laurentis emitted a joyful data-squeal, so overcome that he had slipped into binharic. Asger howled, though not like before. This was for the dead and for a victory to end all victories. It sent a shiver down Koorland’s spine, and he smiled for what felt like the first time in his post-human life, shaking with the withdrawl of adrenaline and the delayed creep-back of pain.
‘We won,’ he said.
What more was there to say than that?
Bohemond reared up over the fallen Beast then, on his knees, and impaled the ork’s heart with his blade. He sagged into it, took a moment, then withdrew a hand to disengage his helm’s gorget seals. It came away with a hiss of magnetic suction. Hands around the cross-hilt of his relic-blade, already on his knees, he bowed his head.
‘The primarch was right to entrust this role to you, brother. Forgive me my doubts, they were unworthy of a servant of the Emperor. What you have made be this day is the greatest victory since the destruction of Horus. If I achieve nothing more in my own service it will be to see your name spoken for eternity in the same esteem as Sigismund himself.’
Koorland took his brother’s hand and the two Space Marines allowed their weight to help the other stand.
The new Imperium began here.
As Koorland clasped the Black Templar’s fizzling elbow seal to congratulate him in kind, he saw the great doors at the far, far end of the throne room thrown open. He heard clamouring alien voices, the clank of a giant, armoured stride, and knew that he had been wrong.
About everything.
Eighteen
They had been wrong. So wrong. Koorland saw that now. He looked to the circular dais in the centre of the throne room and its six thrones. Six. He looked to the galleries and, again, six, unique identifiers that marked them apart. Illogical extrapolations ran through his mind as though the gates between what ‘could’ and what ‘could not’ be had been lifted. This was not like the ork empires of the past, not even the last true Waaagh of Urlakk Urg, carried by the iron rule of its single omnipotent ‘emperor’ figure.
There was not one Beast, and there had never been.
There were six. Prime-orks. Each a father to one legion within the whole.
From his position where the defeated ork had thrown him, some way around the circumference of the throne room from the slave’s entrance by which they had entered, Koorland could see the throne that had previously been hidden. It was larger than the others. It was covered with skins and furs, and adorned with black and white checks. As Koorland beheld it, struck by the familiarity of that particular pattern of black and white, the grinding clank of moving armour reached a crescendo and a second Beast passed through the massive main doors.
A second prime-ork.
Or was it the first?
It was greater in stature than the ork Koorland had just fought and encased in armour that was both heavier and more splendid, intricately wrought plates adorned with those black and white jags. A helm with a tusked face made a gory red with encrusted stones enclosed its head. It looked over the ruined gargants to either side of the gate, the hundreds of messily slain orks around the throne room, and emitted a rumbling growl like the war-horn of a Titan. Its gaze set upon the fallen prime-ork and it started forwards. Koorland felt the ground shake. The air around the brute whined as its gauntlets burst into writhing green flame.