Fulgrim (50 page)

Whirlwinds and Army artillery units deployed on the desert flats, spreading out and zeroing in on enemy emplacements, added their own thunder to the constant crack and rumble of battle. Even heavier craft descended on burning columns of fire, and the super heavy tanks of the Army rumbled out, the barrels of their massive guns hurling huge shells against the glassy walls of the fortress.

What had begun as a massed strike against the traitors’ position was rapidly turning into one of the largest engagements of the entire Great Crusade. All told, over sixty thousand Astartes warriors clashed on the dusky plains of Isstvan V, and for all the wrong reasons, this battle was soon to go down in the annals of Imperial history as one of the most epic confrontations ever fought.

The loyalist attack was bending the line of the traitors back, a curving arc of battle with Ferrus Manus at its centre. The screaming raptors of Corax’s Raven Guard cut a swathe through the enemy’s right flank, his fearsome assault wings dropping from above on the fire of jump packs, and slaughtering their foes with shrieking sweeps of curved blades. Corax darted like a dark bird of prey, leaping through the air with his winged jump pack and killing with every stroke of his mighty talons. Vulkan’s Salamanders burned the traitors’ left flank, plumes of fire marking the extent of their advance.

But for every success, the traitors thus far had an answer. The terrifying form of the World Eaters primarch cut through hundreds of loyal Astartes as they tried to force a crossing through a killing zone of World Eater support squads. Angron bellowed like a primordial god of battle, his twin swords carving bloody rain through any who dared stand before them. As easily as the traitors died at the blades of Corax, Ferrus Manus and Vulkan, so too did the loyalists die at those of the Red Angel.

In contrast to the brute savagery of Angron, Mortarion, the Death Lord, killed with a grim efficiency, harvesting scores of loyalist lives with every sweep of his terrifying war-scythe. His Death Guard fought with grim tenacity. Where the traitor primarchs stood, none could live, the loyalist assault breaking against them like the tide on immovable cliffs.

Throughout the traitor lines, the Sons of Horus fought with bitter hatred in their hearts, First Captain Abaddon leading the Warmaster’s finest in battle, his wrath terrible to behold. He killed with unremitting savagery, while Horus Aximand fought beside him, his blows mechanical and forlorn as his haunted eyes took in the scale of the slaughter.

In the centre of the traitor line, the Emperor’s Children fought with unremitting cruelty, its warriors howling with savage glee as they killed their former brothers. Unnatural horrors of mutilation and degradation were visited upon the living and the dead as Fulgrim’s Legion repulsed every attack, though their primarch was yet to be seen.

Bizarrely clad warriors in Mark IV plate draped in stretched skin cavorted in the midst of the deadliest combats, fighting without helmets, their jaws wired open as they unleashed a hideous screaming. They bore unknown weaponry and fired echoing blasts of atonal harmonics that ripped bloody canyons in the massed ranks of the Iron Hands. Great pipes and loudspeakers fixed to their armour amplified the screaming vibrations of their killing music, and deafening sound waves tore apart warriors and armoured vehicles.

As the bulk of the heavier equipment was landed behind the ferocious battle, more and more explosions erupted in the traitors’ lines, and even Angron and Mortarion were forced to pull back out of range of the loyalist artillery. In the centre of the battle, Ferrus Manus pushed ever onwards, his Iron Hands pushing deeper and deeper into the heart of the enemy defences as they sought to punish the traitors and unleash their wrath on the Emperor’s Children.

Thousands were dying every minute, the slaughter terrible to behold. Blood ran in rivers down the slopes of the Urgall Depression, carving thick, sticky runnels in the dark sand. Such destruction had never yet been concentrated in such a horrifically confined space, enough martial power to conquer an entire planetary system having been unleashed in a line less than twenty kilometres wide.

Entire squadrons of armoured vehicles fought to reach the front lines, but the press of armoured bodies was so thick that their commanders were frustrated in their desire to crush the traitors beneath their armoured bulk. Firing lines of Land Raiders formed and collimated lines of ruby laser fire stabbed towards the fortress and the leviathan-like form of the
Dies Irae
.

Void shields flickered and, realising the danger, the monstrous Titan switched its fire from the infantry to the armour. Rippling blasts of plasma energy sawed along the line of tanks, and a dozen exploded as the white heat of fire torched their energy magazines.

The slaughter continued unabated, on a scale never before seen, with neither side able to press home their advantages. The traitors were well dug in and had defensible positions, but the loyalists had landed virtually directly on top of them with vast numerical superiority.

The bloodletting was a truly horrific sight as warriors who had once sworn great oaths of loyalty to one another fought their brothers with nothing but hatred in their hearts. No Legion fared well in the slaughter, the scale of the fighting rendering tactics meaningless as the two armies battered each other bloody in a remorseless conflict that threatened to destroy them all.

J
ULIUS DANCED THROUGH
the combat, the sights and sounds of the killing causing rushes of physical pleasure to spasm through his body as he fought with savage joy. His armour was dented and gashed in a dozen places, but the wounds he had suffered only spurred his frenetic killing dance to greater heights. In preparation for the fighting, he had repainted its every surface in a riot of colours that stimulated his freshly reborn vision.

He had similarly enhanced his weapons, and the looks of horror and disgust that accompanied his every killing blow fired his senses.

‘Look upon me and realise the greyness of your lives!’ he screamed as he fought, delirious with slaughter. He had long since discarded his helmet to better experience the chaos of the battle, the roar of guns, the buzz of swords through flesh, the explosions and the vividness of shell traceries across the heavens.

He ached to have Fulgrim next to him in this most exquisite of battles, but the Warmaster had plans enough for the Primarch of the Emperor’s Children. A petulant frown creased Julius’s ecstatic features, and he spun to deliver a perfectly aimed decapitating strike at a dark armoured Iron Hands warrior. Horus and his plans! Where amongst these plans was the time to enjoy the spoils of victory? The powers and desires awakened within him by the
Maraviglia
were for the using. To deny them was to deny one’s own nature.

Julius swept up the helmet he had just cut from his enemy and plucked the head from within, taking a moment to savour the stink of the blood and scorched flesh where his blade had cauterised it.

‘We were brothers once!’ he cried with mock gravitas. ‘But now you are dead!’

He leaned in and kissed the cold lips of the Iron Hand, laughing as he hurled it high into the air, where it was ripped apart in the near constant hail of bolts. Whooping howls of manic laughter and thrumming bass explosions swept towards him, and he threw himself flat as a killing wave of sound roared overhead. The musical wave was excruciatingly loud, but Julius screamed in pleasure as the noise sluiced through his flesh.

Julius rolled to his feet in time to see a burnished group of Terminators lumbering towards him, and he grinned in feral glee as he saw they were led by Gabriel Santor, the first captain’s markings on his armour standing out like a beacon in the darkness.

A whooshing roar of clashing noise tore a great furrow in the ground beside him and blasted upwards from the black sand like a volcanic eruption. Behind him, Julius saw the flesh-wrapped form of Marius, and roared with the pleasure of seeing his fellow captain alive and fighting.

Marius Vairosean had embellished his armour with jagged iron spikes, and had torn the skin from the dead of
La Fenice
to decorate its blood-slathered plates. Like Julius, he had not walked away from the
Maraviglia
without alteration, the monstrous distension of his jaws locking his mouth open in a constant, howling scream. Where his ears had once been were two great gashes carved in his flesh, and his eyes were stitched open, forever prevented from closing.

He still carried the great musical instrument he had taken from Bequa Kynska’s orchestra, modified to bear spiked handles and grips to render it into a terrifying sonic weapon. Together, he and his fellows unleashed a barrage of discordant scales that sent a dozen of the Morlocks into convulsions, and Julius screamed his appreciation as he leapt to meet Gabriel Santor with his sword aimed at his throat.

T
HE HORROR OF
what he was seeing almost cost Gabriel Santor his life. The Emperor’s Children before him were like nothing he could ever have imagined in his worst nightmares. Though the enemies he had fought before had been honourless traitors, at least they had still been recognisable as Astartes. These were degenerate perversions of that perfect ideal: warped and twisted freaks who openly displayed their perversions.

A mutilated monster in power armour draped with bloody flaps of skin shrieked as he swept some bizarre weapon back and forth, its deadly sonic energies tearing warriors apart in explosions of ruptured armour and liquefied flesh.

Even as Santor raised his energised fist to block a sword cut aimed at his head, he recognised the twisted features of Julius Kaesoron. The warrior was a thrashing dervish, laughing and howling as he spun like a lunatic around Santor, slashing wildly as he attacked. Kaesoron’s weapon was a fearsome, energised glaive that was easily capable of carving through his armour, and Santor turned as fast as he was able to block each ferocious stroke of the blade, but even one as fast as he could not hope to match his opponent’s serpent-like speed.

He caught the descending blade of his opponent’s weapon between the digits of his energy wreathed fist and a fiery explosion burst between them. He twisted his wrist, and Julius’s blade snapped, leaving only the length of a forearm above the quillons.

Santor grunted in pain as he felt the skin of his fist fuse with the melted plates around his hand. He saw Julius sprawled on his back, the ceramite armour of his breastplate bubbling with the residue of the explosion, his face a screaming, burnt horror of seared flesh and exposed bone.

Despite the pain of his burned claw of a hand, Santor grinned beneath his helmet and stomped forwards to deliver the avenging deathblow to his hated enemy. He raised his foot to stamp down on Julius’s chest, the power of his Terminator armour easily able to crush Astartes plate.

Then he saw that Julius wasn’t screaming in pain, but in orgasmic pleasure.

He paused in revulsion for the briefest second, but that second was all that Julius needed. Sweeping up the broken edge of his glaive, the blade alive with flaring energies, he rammed it into Santor’s groin.

The pain was unimaginable, surging agonisingly around his body. Julius Kaesoron tore the remains of the weapon upward, molten gobbets of armour dropping to the dark sand in the midst of a spraying rain of Santor’s blood. The blade tore through his pubis and ripped into his breastplate as Julius rose to his feet with the motion of his sawing weapon.

Santor’s entire body convulsed in agony, not even the frantically pumping pain balms able to mask the horrifying agony of having his torso carved open. He tried to move, but his armour was locked in place as Julius looked directly at him. His face was horrifically illuminated in the firelight of the battle, the skin peeled away from the musculature beneath, and the white gleam of bone jutting through his cheeks.

Even amid the thunder of battle and with his lips burned away, Julius’s next words were horribly clear to Santor as his life slipped away.

‘Thank you,’ gurgled Julius. ‘That was exquisite.’

T
HE BATTLEFIELD OF
Isstvan V was a slaughterhouse of epic proportions. Treacherous warriors twisted by hatred fought their once-brothers in a conflict unparalleled in its bitterness. Mighty gods walked the planet’s surface and death followed in their wake. The blood of heroes and traitors flowed in rivers, and hooded adepts of the Dark Mechanicum unleashed perversions of ancient technology stolen from the Auretian Technocracy to wreak bloody havoc amongst the loyalists.

All across the Urgall Depression, hundreds were dying with every passing second, the promise of inevitable death a pall of darkness that hung over every warrior. The traitor forces were holding, but their line was bending beneath the fury of the loyalist assault. It would take only the smallest twists of fate for it to break.

And then they came.

Like fiery comets from the heavens, the thrusters of countless drop-ships, landers and assault craft broke through the fire-shot clouds of smoke and descended to the loyalist landing zone on the northern edge of the Urgall Depression. Hundreds of Stormbirds and Thunderhawks roared towards the surface, their armoured hulls gleaming as the power of another four Legions came to Isstvan, their heroic names legendary, their mighty deeds known the length and breadth of the galaxy: Alpha Legion, Word Bearers, Night Lords, Iron Warriors.

TWENTY-FOUR

Brothers with Bloody Hands

F
ERRUS
M
ANUS SMOTE
all around with his fists, twin balls of silver steel that crushed bone and clove armour wherever they struck. His gun was discarded, his load of ammunition long since expended, but he needed no mere weapon to be a lethal killing machine. No blade could wound him and no shot could penetrate his armour, his every movement a fluid economy of motion as he killed with every stride, pushing the fighting wedge of the Morlocks deeper into the traitor lines.

The sword at his waist hung like a lead weight of cosmic justice at his side, but he would not draw it, not until he faced his traitorous brother and revealed its terrible purpose before taking his revenge.