With debris raining down about him, Thane tried to roll over and crawl away. One of his power fists was smashed and the Chapter Master had to fire the locks and purge the weapon. Clawing at the chamber floor, he fought to haul himself out of the path of the collapsing ceiling.
Rising like a behemoth of the deep, the enraged Beast shrugged off the mound of masonry in which it was buried. Still aflame with green brilliance, the giant ork reached out with its colossal claws. Snatching up Thane, the monstrous Beast lifted him up to its furious face. Green flame raged about him as the monster’s claw tightened, crushing plate and bone. With a bellow of alien rage, the monster prepared to slay a second Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists.
Squeezing his hand down between the Beast’s titanic grip and his ruined plate, Thane got his fingers to the Sword of Sebastus where it sat mag-locked to his belt. Resting his palm against the Dornsblade — the weapon wielded by the primarch himself — Thane pushed the blade down into the flesh of the Beast’s palm. The ghost of a snarl passed across the monster’s mouth, and Thane felt the grip about his waist slacken slightly. Tearing the Sword of Sebastus up, he thrust the weapon at the creature’s face. The tip of the blade thudded into one of the Beast’s blood-red eyes, before Thane tore it free of the ruined socket.
The monster shrieked. Its grip tightened once more with pulverising force as the pain broke its concentration. It howled at the chamber ceiling, a terrible sound that shook the very foundations of the palace.
The Beast’s claws suddenly opened, allowing Thane to crash to the floor. It was an ugly fall but from the ground, Thane watched the Beast of Ullanor stumble back. It clawed at its face and blinked gore from its punctured eye.
Looking around, the Chapter Master saw Lady Brassanas. She was heaving at the heavy chain, the links biting into the column like a pulley. Her movements were restricted by the armoured bodies on the ground and the stumbling footfalls of the Beast. It was clear to Thane that she and the captive ork were locked together in a dance of death, neither able to escape the other. With one final haul of the chain, the Lady drew her own glinting blade.
As the last Sister of Silence slid down onto her knees she momentarily locked eyes with Thane. In that moment, the Chapter Master understood what she was going to do. The ork psyker needed to be activated. Right here and now. Right next to the alien abomination that held the Imperium in its bloody claw. Thane nodded grimly to her. With the determination of a true servant of the Emperor, Lady Brassanas nodded back, and made the sign of the aquila.
Grasping her knife, she turned the hilt about in her gauntlet and rested the tip of the blade against her stomach. She closed her eyes, and with a supreme effort of will thrust the knife into her abdomen. Even in her last moments of agony, the Silent Sister never uttered a sound.
Thane knew she was dead when the ork shaman fell to its knees and clutched its grotesque skull. With the nullifying effect of the Sister’s presence gone, and being in such close proximity to the Beast and so many other of its brother greenskins, the psyker’s head blasted apart with the force of a small bomb.
The Beast of Ullanor felt the effects of the psychic backwash immediately. Forgetting about the agony of its eye, the warlord grabbed at its head and fell back into the ruin of a throne. It bellowed. It raged. Blood gushed from its nostrils and ears. Then — incredibly — it died. With a fountain of gore and colossal shards of skull, the Beast’s head exploded. Its arms fell down at the sides of the throne with a thud, before the hulking body of the monstrous warlord fell still.
The effect beyond was instantaneous. Shrieks could be heard from within the gargants as the crews of the war machines succumbed to the psychic backwash of the psyker’s overload. The barrels of gargantuan weaponry drooped and the walkers’ engines died. In the galleries and chambers beyond, Thane heard greenskins die horribly as the feedback effect blasted their ugly skulls from their armoured shoulders. In the darkness beyond the remaining lesser Beasts were rocked by the resonance, clutching their heads before the great ugly skulls detonated in their grasp. A psychic shockwave ripped through the chamber. The palace. The planet. Feeding back through the monstrous connection the Beasts had with their savage hordes, a chain reaction of gore-fountaining destruction rolled through the ork warhost.
Thane lay for a moment in the silence, his only movement the rise and fall of his shattered chest. It was over. The Beast of Ullanor was dead. He felt… nothing.
Slowly, he became aware of sounds coming across his vox. Across the crackling channels he could hear shouts and cheering, faint at first, then becoming louder. The battle was over. The Imperial forces fighting inside the palace and beyond had witnessed the heads of their enemies explode in an endless chain reaction that stretched across the whole planet, leaving their headless bodies crashing to the ground.
Thane could not find it in himself to indulge in such jubilation. The orks’ leader was dead; the Imperium was saved. That was enough for a son of Dorn.
With excruciating agony he forced his body and shattered plate up. The throne room floor was covered with the armoured bodies of Imperial Fists. The dead, the dying and the broken. Holding himself awkwardly, Thane limped towards the body of Lady Brassanas and knelt beside her, resting the tip of his blade on the ground for stability. There he waited and became one with his pain.
Eleven
Dawn broke over the Imperial Palace and once more, Drakan Vangorich found himself enjoying the feeble rays that felt their way through the hive-world smog of the capital. Another dawn meant that he was still breathing. He had lived another day and might live through another still. His enemies were either dead, or lived on in frustration and fear. In a life of death, there was a great deal that could be accomplished in a single day.
Vangorich sat for a while. Somewhere above his head, across the vastness of the void, men and supermen were dying. Alien monsters were being fought. The destiny of empires was being decided. And yet for Vangorich, the Beast — the horrific enemy who had brought the Imperium to its knees — had become a necessary evil. The greenskin apocalypse was a warning to humanity not to become complacent, that the Imperium of mankind was but one of many powers vying for control of the galaxy. There would only ever be war, and the Imperium had to be ready for such challenges, with capable leaders worthy of the God-Emperor’s trust. Men like Thane, like Koorland… like himself. Men who would not flinch from doing what had to be done.
The Imperium had always been an unwieldy entity. Even with His warlord sons to oversee peace across His realm, the Emperor had allowed His people and His domain to slip away from him. And now, barely a thousand years since the terrible civil war that had turned the Imperium into a galactic battleground, the rot had returned.
A self-righteous torpor dominated everything. Terra had long been buried in scrolls, reports and data-slates burdened with more information than could ever be read or responded to. Mars was a runaway monitor train with no one at the controls. The planets of the Imperium were like fruit spoiling on a tree. Heresy and mutation were a canker running wild. One by one worlds and sectors were forgotten and allowed to shrivel on the stalk. Meanwhile the aggressive alien species of the galaxy would routinely tear through the branches, gorging themselves on the precious fruit. Species like the orks, that had been forgotten as backwater barbarians until the Beast had arisen to lead them.