He had taken one step when a flash of dark prescience made him look up and he yelled, 'Down!'
Whether it was by sheer luck or great artifice, Honsou would never know, but a salvo of shells from the guns below impacted on the edge of the ramparts upon which he and his warriors stood, shearing the rock clean from its supports in a cataclysmic ham-merblow. Honsou picked himself up and desperately scrambled for the safety of the esplanade behind the ramparts, but it was already too late.
With a grinding crack of splintered stone, he and hundreds of his finest warriors were swept down the mountainside in a raining avalanche of rubble and blocks of sundered stone.
Emerging from the smoke was like being born into hell, thought Uriel. At first he had been frustrated not being able to see their ultimate destination, but upon passing through the dark clouds of the mountain and seeing it up close for the first time, he soon wished for the sight of it to be snatched away from him.
Stretching up to pierce the dead sky, the fortress of Honsou was a madman's conceit made real, stone laid upon stone so that each angle was subtly wrong and violated the senses on a deep, instinctual level. Its dark veined walls reared up in defiance of the laws of perspective, looming and huge with pierced garrets leaning from the wallhead and spiralling, lightning-sheathed spires. Blades and spikes stabbed from its glistening fabric, and black rain, like the very lifeblood of the fortress, spilled from where artillery shells had struck. Fast-flowing rivers of molten metal poured from glowing culverts and ran down the mountainside like streams of lava from an erupting volcano.
Guns fired from daemon-visaged portals and burning, daemonic blood spilled from vast iron cauldrons onto the screaming soldiers below. Flames danced on the ramparts and in the mass of struggling soldiers. Death and destruction stalked the battlefield this day, and they hunted well.
Tens of thousands of soldiers thronged the rubble-strewn reaches of the fortress, fighting their way up a rained screed slope that had once been a bastion. Explosions tossed corpses through the air as buried mines swept hundreds to their deaths and the monstrous forms of a pair of Titans straggled in the rubble, crushing men and machines beneath their great footsteps as they fought amid the flames.
Uriel and the Space Marines watched the terrifying battle rage above them, the car grinding as it approached the upper platform where it would deposit them and begin the journey back down the mountain.
'Emperor protect us,' breathed Vaanes. 'It's like nothing I've ever seen before.'
'I know…' agreed Uriel, drawing his sword as the car clanged home against the platform and the bronze gate in the railings squealed open.
'How can we hope to survive this?'
Uriel turned to Vaanes and said, 'Remember what I told you: death and honour. If one brings the other then it is a good death.'
'No…' hissed Vaanes. 'No death is a good one. Not like this.'
None of the Space Marines moved, too in awe at the terrible and magnificent spectacle of war on a scale few had ever experienced. Uriel realised he had to get them moving before the vastness of this battle and their impulse for survival overcame the newly-rekindled sense of honour and duty he had instilled in them.
He was saved when Pasanius shouted, 'Come on, get moving! Everybody off!'
Ingrained reflexes took over and the Space Marines swiftly debarked from the funicular car, chivvied all the way by a bellowing Pasanius. Only Uriel and Ardaric Vaanes remained on board.
'Come on,' said Uriel. 'We have work to do.'
Vaanes said nothing, but nodded and followed Uriel from the car, climbing up past the platform and unsheathing the crackling claws from his gauntlet.
'What are you doing?' called Uriel.
'Funicular cars work on the principle of counterbalancing one another,' explained Vaanes, slicing his claws clean through the thick cables that held the car.
The platform groaned and the cable snapped with a metallic twang, whipping around and sending the car plummeting back downhill through the smoke. The sound of screeching metal and showers of fat orange sparks followed it down.
'No one will be coming up here in a while,' said Vaanes, climbing back to join Uriel.
'Clever,' said Uriel.
The two Space Marines jogged over to where the rest of the warrior band had sequestered themselves, hidden in a fold in the rock below an overhanging bastion where they could observe the battle in relative safety. Missiles and shells crisscrossed the air, and the noise of explosions and gunfire was deafening. The mountain trembled to the footsteps of the Titans, both of which lurched heedlessly through the battle as they grappled and struck at one another. Snarling daemon heads slammed together and massive blades tore at each other's armour as whipping, barbed tails brought down whole swathes of the wall.
'Now what?' shouted Pasanius, barely audible over the cacophony.
'Now we have to get in!' said Uriel.
'You mean we join the assault?' asked Vaanes. 'Impossible!'
'What choice do we have?' yelled Uriel.
'We can get the hell off this mountain! I told you I'd help you get in, Ventris, but I also told you I wasn't going to get killed for your death oath!'
'Damn it, Vaanes, we're here now! We have to keep going!'
Vaanes looked set to reply when a salvo of shells streaked overhead and struck the lip of the overhanging bastion directly above them. Dust and debris showered them, rocks tumbling down the slopes as it split from the mountain with a splintering crack.
'Look out!' shouted Uriel as the bastion crumbled and toppled, falling towards them in an avalanche of rubble and blocks of sundered stone.
Honsou felt rocks pummelling him as he fell, battering him and threatening to crush him utterly. He tumbled end over end, his senses whirling in a kaleidoscopic flurry of noise and light. The breath was driven from him as he landed, and he rolled aside as huge, tank-sized blocks of rubble smashed down around him. Choking clouds of black dust and smoke billowed, and though he felt painfully battered by the fall, he didn't feel any broken bones or ruptured organs.
'Onyx!' he yelled hoarsely. 'Zakayo!'
'Here!' coughed Zakayo. 'I am alive!'
'As am I,' said Onyx, 'but I require assistance.'
Honsou struggled over to where his champion lay almost completely buried beneath a pile of jagged lumps of rockcrete with twisted iron bars protruding from them. Onyx's torso and lower body were trapped beneath a volume of rubble that would have crushed even a power-armoured warrior flat, but immaterial energies had saturated the daemonic symbiote's flesh and it was proof against such things.
Honsou gripped the debris and strained against its massive weight, but it was too great even for one as enhanced as he. Obax Zakayo joined him, the hissing mechanical arms sprouting from the armature of his back to grip the reinforcement bars.
Iron Warriors began picking themselves up from the rubble, those who hadn't been crushed beneath falling masonry or otherwise killed in the bastion's collapse lending their strength to freeing Onyx.
Honsou moved out of the way and looked around him as glowing afterimages of the battle flashed on his visor. He shook his head to clear it and get a better idea of where their fall from the fortress had brought them.
More rubble had been dislodged from above by the thunderous battle of the nearby Titans and Honsou saw that they would have little difficulty in getting back to the fortress. The lucky artillery strike had collapsed a good portion of the wall beneath the bastion that now formed a ready-made slope that led straight to the walls.