'To breach a fortress you need to break the men inside, not the walls. And to break a besieging army you must wear its warriors down to the point where they would rather turn their guns upon themselves than take another step forward,' said Honsou. 'We must make every one of Berossus's soldiers feel he is living beneath the muzzle of one of our cannons: that he is nothing more than meat for the guns.'
Obax Zakayo nodded in understanding and said, 'We can do that. My guns will sow the ground before the walls with their shredded flesh and the rocks will flow with waterfalls of their blood.'
'To the warp with that, Zakayo, so long as they die!' snarled Honsou, pleased to see the ember of fear smouldering within Obax Zakayo flare to life once more. 'Or else you will be down there with the scum next time. Ever since you lost those slaves bound for my forges to the damned renegades, your promises have been as worthless as the filth I scrape from my boot.'
'I will not fail you again, my lord,' promised Obax Zakayo.
'No, you won't,' said Honsou. 'Just remember that Forrix is no longer your master, I am, and I know that you are a true protege of his. He may have become so jaded that he tolerated your lack of vision, but do not think for one second that I will.'
Suitably chastened, Obax Zakayo returned his gaze to the slaughter below. 'What will Berossus do now that he has the lower bastions?' he asked.
'He will send the daemon engines,' said Honsou.
As though on cue, the monstrous silhouettes of scores of hulking, spider-legged war engines and clanking dreadnoughts could be seen advancing through the pillars of smoke and blazing wreckage. Berossus's daemonic war engines stalked through the ruined bastions, forcing their way through the fields of corpses, and began clambering across the rocks towards the battered slope of the next level of redoubts.
'Just as you predicted he would,' said Onyx, watching the approach of the daemonic machines.
Honsou nodded, listening as the ululating shrieks of the terrifying war engines echoed towards the next level of defences, hundreds of the clawed and snapping monsters hauling their spiked bulk towards the defenders above them. The next rampart was some five hundred metres above the lower bastions, many levels below where Honsou and his lieutenants watched, but the daemon engines would not take long to reach the defenders. They poured their fire into the climbing machines, but nothing could stop them.
The artillery fire from below resumed with a thunderous crescendo, the first volley exploding against the rock between the defenders and the climbing daemon engines. Boulders the size of tanks tumbled down the sloping rockface, smashing a number of dreadnoughts to flattened hunks of metal as the bombardment continued, the gunners shifting their aim as they found their range.
'Now?' asked Obax Zakayo.
Honsou shook his head. 'No, let the dreadnoughts get closer first.'
Obax Zakayo nodded, watching as the first of the spider-like daemon engines reached the next level, their massive, clawed pincers snatching up soldiers and ripping them apart. They howled as they killed, revelling in the slaughter and hurling the corpses from the battlements.
'Now,' said Honsou.
Obax Zakayo nodded and spoke a single word into his power armour's vox unit.
Honsou watched with relish as the ground of the bastions below shook and trembled as though an earth tremor had struck. Huge, gaping cracks ripped across the bastions, splitting the rock with a hollow boom that rivalled the thunder of the guns. Smoke and flames blasted from the cracks as the ground beneath the entire front half of the bastions sagged and splintered. With a groaning creak, millions of tonnes of rock exploded and detached from the side of Khalan-Gol, sliding ponderously down the face of the mountain.
Thousands of Khalan-Gol's soldiers were carried screaming to their deaths, the avalanche of rubble and debris smashing every one of the daemon engines from the mountainside, crushing them beneath the unstoppable tide of rock. Hundreds were buried beneath the mountain: their shrieking roars billowing from the rubble as their mystical bindings were smashed asunder and the daemons within them were shorn from their iron vessels.
Honsou laughed as he watched the dreadnoughts and the thousands of enemy soldiers below turn to flee the avalanche, knowing that they were already doomed. The tide of rock swept over them all, pouring down the slopes they had fought and bled to capture.
The rumble of grinding rock slowly faded, as did the bellowing roar of the guns, Berossus realising that their fire would be wasted without an escalade.
Honsou turned from the mass destruction he had unleashed.
Now Berossus would know he had a fight on his hands.
The unchanging sky and static sun made it impossible to discern the passage of time through their surroundings, and the internal chronometer on Uriel's visor had only displayed a constantly fluctuating readout that he eventually disabled. Days must surely have passed, but how many was a mystery. He had heard that time flowed differently in the Eye of Terror, and supposed he should not have been surprised at such affronts to the laws of nature.
'Emperor, I hate this place,' said Pasanius, picking his way over a pile of twisted iron jutting from the rock of the mountain. 'There is not one natural thing here.'
'No,' agreed Uriel, tired and hungry despite his armour's best efforts at filtering and recycling his bodily excretions into drinkable water and nutrient pastes. 'It is a wasteland of death. Nothing could live here.'
'I think something lives out here,' said Pasanius, glancing at the darkened peaks all about them. 'I'm just not sure what or that I even want to find out.'
'What are you talking about?'
'Haven't you felt it? That we're being watched? Followed.'
'No,' said Uriel, ashamed that his instinct for danger appeared to have deserted him. 'Have you seen anything?'
Pasanius shook his head. 'Nothing for sure, no, but I keep thinking I can see, I don't know, something.'
'Something? What kind of something?'
'I'm not sure, it's like a whisper in the corner of my mind's eye, something that vanishes as soon as I try to look at it,' said Pasanius, darkly. 'Something red…'
'It is this place,' said Uriel. 'The lair of the Enemy will attempt to mislead and betray your senses. We must be strong in our faith and resist its evil magicks.'
Pasanius shook his head. 'No, it is something not of the Enemy, but something that lives here. I think it's what killed those people in the cave.'
'Whatever killed and skinned those people was evil and an enemy of all living things. Let them come, whatever they are, they will find only death.'
'Aye,' agreed Pasanius as they climbed onwards. 'Death.'
The besieged fortress was lost to sight for now, the path from the tunnels leading them down into the rocky gullies and crevasses of the mountains. The white sky beat down upon them, harsher than the fiercest sun, and Uriel deliberately kept his eyes averted from its flat emptiness. Once, he thought he caught a glimpse of the red things Pasanius claimed were following them, but they defied his every attempt to see them properly. Eventually he gave up, unable to catch sight of them, and concentrated on simply putting one foot in front of the other.
The harsh, metallic shale of the mountainside grated beneath his boots and every now and then they saw grilled vents piercing the rock that disgorged a hot steam that tasted of beaten metal. The vents plunged down into the mountain, the darkness impenetrable, even to a Space Marine's enhanced eyesight.
Uriel saw billowing smoke stacks hundreds of metres above them, thousands of blocky chimneys lining the ridge like great pylons that spewed corrosive fumes into the atmosphere. Yet no matter how much black waste was released into the air, the dead sky was always above them, blank and oppressive.