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Warlord Fury of the God-Machine – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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chapter 1

Duty and Pride

Does he really believe this is almost over? Ferantha Krezoc thought. He can’t. He isn’t stupid and he isn’t mad. He has to know better.

But he’s proud, she reminded herself.

Cursing the blindness of Adrel Syagrius, the princeps senioris of the Warlord Titan Gloria Vastator lashed out. The Belicosa-pattern volcano cannon of the god-machine’s right arm burned trenches through the enemy. Las so powerful it could melt armour and fortifications blasted monsters to steam.

Moments later, the trenches filled and the tyranids came on.

The land before Hive Gelon crawled and heaved. Destruction surged towards the walls of the city in waves of terrible life. The land had become a thing of claws and acid, of chitinous armour and swarming, monstrous hunger. There was nothing left of the marshlands that had stretched out before Khania’s capital city. Their entire biomass had been consumed, and now the tyranids came to devour the millions of lives within Gelon. The legio of the Pallidus Mor and the 66th Kataran Spears held the line.

While the legio of the Imperial Hunters chased trophies and glory.

The sky over Gelon flashed and burned. In orbit around Khania, an Imperial Navy fleet fought the tyranid bio-ships. Vox-traffic to the surface was fragmentary, transmissions broken up by the fury of ship-to-ship fire and the maelstroms of burning plasma left by the destruction of once-mighty vessels. The signs of the void war reached the combatants on the ground in the form of bright scarlet bursts, silver lightning and clouds that roiled like slow eruptions.

The fifteen Titans of the Pallidus Mor’s demi-legio blunted, then tore through, the mass of tyranids. They disrupted the flood while the 66th armoured regiment of the Kataran Spears created a blockade. The latter’s tanks had formed up along the ragged line where the industrial wastelands outside Gelon’s walls gave way to the sea of mud that had been the marsh. Warhounds loped along the flanks of the tyranid swarm and launched raids into the elements still miles from the front lines. Reavers patrolled the wastes, towering sentinels striding over hills of refuse and through rivers and lakes of toxic effluent. They were the rearguard, mobile annihilators taking down the xenos horrors that got through the Spears.

The Warlords pushed deep into the tyranid assault. Theirs was not a defensive manoeuvre. They were the counter-attack, the storm that had come to purge the tyranids from the face of Khania. They were the immense majesty of righteous war, high peaks that moved across the battlefield, their weapons obliterating the crawling, scuttling, lumbering monsters.

The land heaved, and the Warlords burned it back to the bedrock.

‘Krezoc,’ voxed Toven Rheliax in Crudelis Mortem, ‘there’s an energy spike to the west.’

In the manifold, Krezoc shifted her focus. Gloria Vastator had been incinerating swaths of ’gaunts and warrior bioforms, easing the pressure on the Spears’ blockade and on her secutarii, who were keeping the smaller tyranids from trying to climb the legs of the Titan. Krezoc looked west with the eyes of the auspex array and saw the spike. Gloria Vastator was closest to the position, still miles away, where bioenergy readings had surged red.

‘Incoming exocrine barrage,’ she told her moderati. The tyranids had hit the Pallidus Mor and Imperial Hunters with long-range artillery bioforms when the legios had first walked on Khania. Krezoc and her fellow princeps kept a sharp lookout for another such attack. ‘Pre-emptive strike west,’ Krezoc said. She fed the coordinates from the manifold to the moderati. Their wills were linked to hers and to Gloria Vastator’s machine-spirit, and the Titan turned its weapons to the new targets as if they were an extension of Krezoc’s body. On her right, Brennon Grevereign worked the volcano cannon with her. On the left, Agara Vansaak unleashed the Mori quake cannon. On the right shoulder of the carapace, Moderati Minoris Doran Konterus was linked to the Apocalypse missile launchers, while on the left shoulder, Ferrek Haziad kept the Vulcan mega-bolter trained on closer enemies. Missiles, shells and las-beams seared the gloom of the day. The massive recoil of the launchers thrummed through the body of the god-machine. The distant landscape lit up with explosions wide enough to engulf entire hive sectors. The bioenergy spikes vanished from the auspex, the readings overwhelmed by the cataclysm.

From within the firestorm, the barrage of burning bio-plasma arced up. There were large gaps in the attack, but comet flights of destruction soared towards Hive Gelon. And though the Pallidus Mor turned the battlefield into an ocean of flame, the tyranids pushed forwards, their numbers and hunger too great to stop.

‘Marshal,’ Krezoc voxed, ‘any word from the Imperial Hunters?’

‘Nothing new,’ said Eras Balzhan in Ferrum Salvator. ‘But Marshal Syagrius is aware of the situation.’

Perhaps so, Krezoc thought. Perhaps he even understood it. But his pride wouldn’t let him respond as he should. ‘He is still reporting bio-titans?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’ Balzhan spoke again after a moment, cutting off her curse. ‘That is his task, princeps senioris. This is ours. We shall complete it.’

‘So we shall,’ she said. The Pallidus Mor’s history was a saga of grinding conflicts, not a hymn of battle glory. Gloria Vastator fired into the distance again, this time joined by Merys Drahn’s Fatum Messor. As the western reaches of the battlefield erupted a second time, the bio-plasmic barrage came down. Shouts and reports across numerous vox-channels filtered their way into the manifold, and Krezoc registered the damage done with the edge of her conscious mind. The plasma balls struck a wide area of the wastelands. Kataran tanks exploded and chunks of the hive’s walls crumbled beneath the blasts.

‘Close up the formation,’ Balzhan voxed. ‘Concentrate on the centre of the mass. Smash the forward advance.’

Before Krezoc could begin Gloria Vastator’s turn, Vansaak warned, ‘Harpies!’

A large flight of the winged monsters descended from the flame-ridden clouds. They launched tentacled missiles ahead of them.

‘Vulcan,’ Krezoc ordered as the view beyond the control chamber’s armourglass was filled with wings and the flashes of void shields straining from the electromagnetic shocks of the bio-missiles. The tyranids were attacking with a massive swarm, multiple bioforms striking at once. The Warlord entered its slow turn, spraying massive bolter shells into monsters whose reptilian forms were delirious echoes of humanity’s ancient nightmares.

‘South,’ Grevereign called. ‘Large movement to the south.’

There were too many attacks from too many directions. The mega-bolter took down enough harpies to ease some of the shocks to the void shields and for Krezoc to turn a portion of her focus to the new threat. Massive squat shapes shouldered through the cauldron of warrior forms. The auspex spiked again with a surge of bioenergy.

Biovores, Krezoc realised. Another artillery force, a short-range one this time.

There was no chance to hit them first. Before Krezoc and the moderati could bring the weapons to bear, the air of the battlefield was filled with a green gaseous cloud, spore mines making their lethal, floating descent.

Krezoc cursed Syagrius and his pride as she braced for the explosions.

Harth Deyers dropped into the interior of the Leman Russ Bastion of Faith and pulled the turret hatch shut just as the bio-plasma barrage hit. The firestorm swept over the wastelands. A monster roared outside the tank. A hurricane of flame shook the hull. The front of the Leman Russ bucked as it struck an obstacle.

‘Are we blind?’ Deyers called to his driver.

‘No, captain,’ Silas Medina answered. The tank levelled off again. ‘Just running some xenos into the ground.’

At the controls of the tank’s battle cannon, Lehanna Platen said, ‘Targets still visible,’ and fired. The recoil of the gun was reassurance that they were still in the fight. So was the vibrating shudder of the sponson heavy bolters.

The worst of the storm’s roar faded. Deyers slapped a new magazine into his bolt pistol and climbed back up. He trusted Medina and Platen, but he felt useless when he could not see the battle himself. He heaved the hatch back and raised himself into waves of heat. The initial devastating blasts had passed, but the fires still raged. Rivers of promethium had ignited. Ammunition in destroyed vehicles cooked off, setting off secondary explosions across the battered line of the blockade. Some of the tyranid bioforms caught in the barrage blew up as the flammable gases in their bodies ignited. Some of the tall hills of waste metal and rockcrete had melted. The bubbling, industrial lava spread everywhere, swallowing infantry and tyranids. Ahead, another wave of the enemy tide surged forwards. Bastion of Faith was near the centre of the Kataran Spears’ formation. Cannon and bolter fire was constant along the line to Deyers’ left and right. Shells slammed into the chitinous wave. The devastation the Titans were wreaking further ahead had thinned the swarm, and there had been a moment, before the artillery had hit, when Deyers had thought the tanks might hold the enemy, that the wave could be defeated. But there were gaps in the blockade now. The tyranids charged the tanks, and they raced between them too. The cannons did their work, and it was not a sea of the foe that swept into the wastelands.

Even so, the numbers were high.

Deyers opened up with his bolt pistol, punching through the armoured head of a hormagaunt that leapt over the sponson fire. The creature’s skull exploded, and its twitching corpse landed across the turret. Deyers fired around the body at more of the bounding horrors. The cannon swivelled right as Platen took aim at a cluster of larger monsters, and the body slipped to the smouldering ground. Bastion of Faith had to keep moving now, growling across wreckage and bodies on a short patrol running north to south. There were no longer enough tanks for anything like fixed positions, and any vehicle that was not constantly in motion was a target for the xenos beasts. The vox-traffic snarled with overlapping commands and cries. A hundred yards ahead of Bastion of Faith as it made its way north, the Leman Russ Cardinal Renhorn was covered in warrior forms. They stabbed into its armour with talons as tall as a man and blasted it with bio-plasmic cannons. The tank’s sponson bolters destroyed the monsters that came before their barrels, but there were several of the warriors riding the top of the hull, out of reach of the guns.

‘Platen,’ Deyers voxed.

‘Already on it, captain,’ she answered, and Bastion of Faith’s cannon rose slightly. There were few gunners Deyers had encountered that he would trust to attempt the shot, especially with the Leman Russ in motion. But if Platen thought she could make it, then she had to take it on. Cardinal Renhorn was helpless, even as its battle cannon still fired heroically into the rest of the enemy mass. Bastion of Faith fired. The shell screamed into the warriors, striking just above Cardinal Renhorn’s turret. The explosion ripped the tyranids apart. Jagged, smoking remains fell from the top of the hull.

The freed tank roared forwards, crushing ’gaunts beneath its treads, its weapons sending a torrent of fire into the horde. Then it exploded. The warriors had done their work, rupturing too many critical systems. Its last charge had been a dying stab at a foe that had already killed it. Deyers winced from the glare of the fireball. Cardinal Renhorn’s momentum carried the flaming wreckage deeper into the tyranids, adding more of its killers to its pyre. Burning fuel spread the inferno still wider, and then there was yet another gap in the blockade.

In the sky, there was a huge flare. Another ship had met its end. No way to know if that was a Navy victory or not. Deyers choose to believe it was. ‘Hope in the skies!’ he voxed to the regiment. ‘The fire of victory for Khania and for Katara!’

He had to be right. A few days ago, there had been the illusion of triumph. The orbiting bio-ship had been destroyed. The Pallidus Mor and the Imperial Hunters had destroyed an enormous bio-titan, and the remaining tyranids had been pushed back from Gelon. Marshal Syagrius, in overall command of the campaign, had declared the war was almost over.

Then more bio-ships had come. The void war had begun in earnest, and the second wave of the ground war had erupted, more savage than the first. In the first day, there had been more bio-titans. They had since become fewer and were landing in more distant locations, and the Imperial Hunters had moved off in their pursuit. The apparent mercy had been a false one. The waves of smaller bioforms were as ferocious as before, and larger. The marsh was gone, and the tyranids were hungry for the life of Gelon. Deyers felt like he’d been fighting inside the maw of a devouring beast without surcease for months.

He had not. The war was only days old. And the casualties of the Kataran Spears were mounting. The regiment still had fight in it. It was still holding fast for Gelon, but even with the terrifying strength of the Pallidus Mor in the field, Deyers could imagine the destruction of the 66th. And if they fell on Khania, what of Katara?

The home world. In the neighbouring Sevasmos System. As Bastion of Faith’s battle cannon fired again, blasting apart a cluster of warrior forms at such short range the heat of the blast cracked Deyers’ skin, his last sight of the city of Creontiades flashed before his inner eye. He fought for Gelon and for Khania, but his defence of this world was also in the name of protecting his home. The tyranids were closer to Katara than they had ever come before. He did not know what would be left of Khania by the end of this war. He would die before seeing the same fate reach Katara.

The thought came to him that he very likely would.

Further out on the battlefield, the immensities that were the god-machines shook the earth with the intensity of the fire they directed at the ground. Entire cities would have been razed to the earth by now, but the tyranids kept coming. Flying bioforms swarmed around the heads of the Titans, and the day pulsed with the discharges of clashing energies. Then a green cloud burst across the battlefield, rising high up the legs of the Warlords. Bright orbs floated down.

Deyers saw the new attack only for a moment. Then something exploded from the ground in front of Bastion of Faith. Briefings on the enemy forces gave him its name. Mawloc. Before the horror of its reality, the name ceased to be a means of classification, an imposition of nomenclature and of control. It became sounds. The hissing roar of a split-jawed maw spreading wide. The clacking chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk of six huge talons jabbing into the armoured flanks of the Leman Russ. The serpentine length towered over the tank, and then the monster lunged down to swallow Deyers.

Hoplite Alpha Venterras recognised the signs of an imminent spore mine attack before the first of the orbs began their descent. So did the rest of his squad assigned to guard Gloria Vastator. The Warlord had begun to turn, but now it stopped, its massive legs as immobile as the foundations of the world, as the crew of the god-machine braced for the impact of the barrage. The legs were colossal pillars, dozens of yards in circumference.

<Barrage countermeasures.> Venterras sent the order in binaric. His order was received and obeyed in a fraction of a second, as if every member of the hoplite squad had taken the same initiative at once. Alpha Trigerrix’s peltasts moved with equal purpose. Five toe-like supports, each larger than a man, jutted from the base of both of the Warlord’s legs. The hoplite and peltast squads of secutarii ducked into the spaces between the supports. The hoplites raised their mag-inverter shields. Both squads had respected proximity discipline, and their kyropatris field generators amplified each other. The interlocked harmonic fields created a protective sphere around the secutarii squads. The air hummed with holy energy.

The blasts came at every elevation from twenty feet in the air to just above the ground. The spore mines sprayed the dead marshlands with acid and chitinous shrapnel. The sound was jagged and wet, hail in a typhoon. The biovores’ assault was huge, spreading over the battlefield as far as Venterras could see. When the orbs in the green cloud exploded, Gloria Vastator’s lower void shields flared with the strain of repelling hundreds of blasts in cascading succession, and the shredding kinetic energy of the shrapnel. The shields could not stop the acid. It splashed against the adamantine armour. It rained down on the secutarii. Protected by the base supports from the worst of the corrosive’s horizontal flight, the hoplites angled their shields upwards to deflect more of what came from above. Venterras heard the hiss of dissolving metal. Streams ran down the Warlord’s leg, scoring the sacred metal. The energy of the kyropatris fields stuttered and spiked from the strain. Rivulets of acid fell upon Venterras’ helm and pauldrons, triggering warning runes in his helm’s lenses. Cogitators in his armour and his reconstructed body began calculating the rates of damage he could sustain and still act. There was very little organic weakness left in him. Beneath the armour, even those patches on his face and chest that resembled leathered flesh were bioplastic. The readings satisfied him. Despite its ferocity, the attack had failed.

He rose as the blasts lessened. The secutarii had kept the tyranids from scaling the legs of the Warlord, and now the spore mine explosions had scoured the area. For a few seconds, the illusion of emptiness reigned in a land of lingering fog and bubbling, smoking mud. Tyranids shredded by the shrapnel lay everywhere. They were lesser bioforms, common as insects, no sacrifice at all for the Devourer. In the distance, Venterras heard a terrible grinding. Somewhere, hidden from him by the corrosive gas, a Titan had suffered great injury. Machinery was crying out in anger and in pain. The grinding accompanied a limping rhythm of thuds. With some difficulty, the god-machine was walking. One of the Warhounds, Venterras judged by the speed of the footsteps. It was moving faster than a Reaver, but had been slowed badly, and would be that much more vulnerable to further attacks.

Above Venterras, Gloria Vastator’s void shields still flashed arrhythmically as the generators fought to re-establish stability.

The moment of emptiness passed, and a new wave of termagants snarled out of the mist. They raced for the bases of the legs, straight into the secutarii’s fire. They were a scuttling horde, their fleshborer forelimbs sending a hail of insects against the defenders. The vermin were tiny, their mandibles fierce. They sought to chew through armour to get at the flesh below, but the greatest mass of them hit the mag-inverter shields of the hoplites’ forward line. Half of Venterras’ squad hit the termagants with frag launchers while he and the others marched on the tyranids with arc lances at the ready. The fields of the shields repelled the foe’s attacks, hurling the bulk of the swarms back. Some of the burrowing vermin made it through the physical and energy barriers, yet there was little flesh for them to eat. Their jaws could eventually damage circuitry and cables, but there was no nourishment for them here. They were an assault on the wrong kind of foe.

Behind the hoplites, the peltasts fired their galvanic casters. Laser-guided projectiles arced overhead and dropped with murderous precision into the tyranid hordes. Bursts of explosive flechettes shredded the termagants, and then the short-range blasts of the hoplites’ arc lances ate further into the charge. Gloria Vastator walked again, and the secutarii advanced with it.

Yet the field of battle was wide. The secutarii were few. The Pallidus Mor had only a single echelon to defend the entire demi-legio. The enemy’s numbers dropped, but they were still legion. The centre of the swarm broke under the secutarii advance, and its flanks circled the feet of the god-machine.

<Climbers,> Hoplite Krightinus warned.

A handful of termagants had leapt onto the left leg when it came down, and they were moving up, clinging fast as it took another step.

<Maintain unit cohesion,> Venterras said. He ran hard for the leg. His omnispex overlaid vectors of speed and angles of approach on his view of the landscape, breaking down his next moves to calculations of physics and efficiency. It projected his path to every target on the leg. This was a war between the purity of the machine and the organic at its most pestilential. It turned every arithmetical breakdown into a sacred act.

Venterras shouldered his shield, mag-locking it to his back as he covered the last few yards to the leg. His arc lance fired a concussive blast ahead of him, hurling bioforms out of his way. The leg came down, shaking the ground. Venterras leapt. He landed on the top of the foot’s central toe. He held his arc lance in his right hand and jumped again, seizing a pitted handhold in the leg with his left. Cables contracted. With a movement that would have dislocated a biological arm, he hurled himself upwards. He followed the red-lined path from handhold to handhold. Where there were none, he sent an electrical charge through his palm, magnetising himself to the leg long enough to leap again. He came up fast behind the termagants. They were scrambling towards a service hatch a few yards past the Warlord’s knee.

Venterras fired the arc lance. The coruscating energy skimmed the surface of the adamantium. The burning impact was enough to jolt two bioforms free of their grip, and they hurtled to the ground. Three others turned and scrambled back down to attack Venterras. Two more kept climbing.

Three streams of fleshborer vermin blasted against him like sand whipped up in a hurricane. He could not use his shield, and he was too far from the squad for the kyropatris field to link with the others. His lone generator could do little to blunt the attack. Xenos jaws, minuscule but ferocious in strength, ground away at his plate. Venterras launched himself upwards again and stabbed with the arc lance, striking with it instead of firing. He hit one of the termagants directly. The explosion consumed its forelimbs as it fired again. The beast disintegrated in a storm of fire and bioelectricity that swallowed Venterras and the other termagants. Venterras channelled a draining burst of his own power to keep his hold on the leg. Two more tyranids fell.

Gloria Vastator took another step. Venterras clung to a vertical world, and it swung with majestic impassiveness, the movement alone almost enough to shake free the insects fighting on its surface. Venterras climbed again. He moved past the knee, his bionic auditory sense filled with the thunder of enormous pistons. The last two termagants had almost reached the hatchway. Venterras lunged and fired again. The blast jarred the tyranids loose. They fell, cartwheeling as they bounced against the side of the leg. One of them sailed past Venterras and dropped into the void. The other slammed into him. It knocked him back, jerking his magnetised palm from the leg. It scrabbled at him with its claws. They fell in a tangling struggle. The leg sloped away from the vertical as the Warlord took a step, and the combatants slid down the adamantium cliff. Venterras’ arc lance became a liability. He could not strike the tyranid with it, he could not use his right hand to arrest his fall, and to release the arc lance would be an unforgivable mark of shame.

The termagant’s jaws snapped in his face. The teeth gouged the front of his helm. The wind of their slide shrieked. In another moment, they would fall past the knee and into mid-air.

Venterras fired the arc lance at zero range as the tip struck the Warlord’s armour. The blast was point-blank. A ball of lightning lashed at him and the termagant. A galvanic spasm shook the tyranid’s limbs, its chitin armour smouldering. The beast lost its grip on Venterras and dropped away. His optics buzzed in and out of focus, warning runes overlapping as the damage to his armour and machined body mounted.

But he was a servant of the Omnissiah, and a secutarii of the Pallidus Mor. Nothing except his complete destruction would prevent him from fighting in the defence of the god-machines of his legio. Though his internal circuits were beginning to misfire, sending micro-tremors down his arms, he sent a powerful energy spike through his left hand once more. His palm smashed against the leg just as he fell past the knee, and the angle of the Warlord’s leg returned to the vertical. The yank would have wrenched an organic shoulder from its socket.

Venterras paused long enough to calculate the trajectory of his descent. The pause lasted a fragment of a second. Then he was dropping back down the limb of the colossus, rushing back to the cauldron of the ground war.

‘These are poor game,’ Adrel Syagrius muttered.

‘Their destruction still burnishes the glory of the Imperial Hunters,’ Princeps Messina Lukretus voxed from the Warlord Primum Victor. ‘And we are gutting their numbers.’

The marshal grunted. He kept his attention on the advancing cluster of carnifex bioforms. They were huge specimens. They could have hurled Leman Russ tanks through the air. Against the maniples of Syagrius’ demi-legio, though, they were hardly more than an irritant.

They were a greater irritant for not being the targets he sought.

‘Sunfury barrage,’ Syagrius voxed to the entire demi-legio. ‘Banish these vermin from my sight.’

The command was also a warning. Three of the Warlords were equipped with the Sunfury-model plasma annihilator. The simultaneous firing of the full complement of the guns was an event the other Titans had to be ready for, as did the secutarii on the ground. The plasma annihilator was not a precision armament. Its function was total obliteration. Every shot carried risks. Every shot was an enormous drain on a Titan’s power plant. And every shot was the act of a wrathful god.

Three shots were the divinity of flame.

Augustus Secutor, Primum Victor and Eximius Gladio fired. Three suns burst upon the carnifex advance. The arc of the horizon flashed with devouring brilliance. A firestorm engulfed the land. Entire cities would have vanished into its maw. The flames rose to the clouds, a towering wall of roiling crimson. The silhouettes of the tyranids disintegrated. Monsters that were the nightmares of full regiments of the Astra Militarum were burned to ash in seconds. The maniples of the Imperial Hunters halted their march until the devastation faded. Before them, the land was a smoking plain of cracked, melted rock.

Syagrius looked at the wasteland he had created. His mood did not improve. The extermination of the bio-titans had been an act of frustration more than a tactical decision. When he had seen the nature of their quarry, he had been unwilling to waste a second longer than necessary on their destruction. The long-range auspex readings of a huge, concentrated biomass had given him false hope yet again.

There had been no hierophants, no true bio-titans since the one that had appeared during the initial tyranid attack. He had taken Augustus Secutor into single combat against the hierophant before the gates of Gelon. He had almost lost. Ferantha Krezoc and Gloria Vastator had intervened. The Pallidus Mor Warlord had inflicted severe damage on the colossal tyranid. It was true that the mortally wounded monster had seized Krezoc’s Titan in a lethal embrace. It was true that Syagrius had fired the shot that had destroyed the hierophant. It was true that, technically, the trophy kill was his. The mark of the victory had been added to the upper torso of Augustus Secutor.

Syagrius did not feel any triumph in that outcome. The battle was a canker on his pride. He could not think of it without seeing his errors of judgement. He could not stop reliving the helplessness he had felt in the moments just before the arrival of Gloria Vastator, when the hierophant had overwhelmed his god-machine, and he had seen doom reach for him. The memory ate at him, and he could not turn from it. Honour demanded redemption. The only way of lancing the boil was to prove to himself and to others his supremacy as a hunter. He needed more kills on the same scale. He had to crush the spectre of the hierophant. That victory would come only when Augustus Secutor stood over the ruins of bio-titan bodies.

The Imperial Hunters had travelled hundreds of miles from Gelon, and exterminated scores of biovores and carnifexes. The promise of greater prey drew Syagrius on, but the promise had been an illusion so far.

‘Marshal Balzhan is on the vox,’ Rekorus said.

Syagrius glanced down and to the right at the moderati. He had redirected all vox-feeds not originating from within his maniples to Rekorus. He was tired of the endless hectoring of the Pallidus Mor marshal and the insubordination of Krezoc.

Syagrius had assumed supreme command of the Khanian campaign from its inception. He had done so with full justification, due to the larger force fielded by the Imperial Hunters. Balzhan had not protested. Yet he was constantly second-guessing Syagrius’ decisions at the strategic and the tactical level. Balzhan concerned himself even with battles at which he had not been present.

Such as the one against the hierophant.

‘You used your Sunfury on the enemy?’ Balzhan had asked afterwards. He had caught up to Syagrius outside the Mechanicus dry docks of Gelon, where the wounded Titans were being repaired. This was during the false dawn before the coming of the second wave of bio-ships. Skyscraping gantry cranes clustered around the motionless god-machines. Tech-priests, enginseers and mono-tasked servitors swarmed over them, healing the bodies of the Titans and soothing their machine-spirits. The air was filled with the sound of industry and ritual chanting.

‘Yes, I used it,’ Syagrius said.

Balzhan’s eyes were bionic, and so impossible to read. His bald head, enclosed by a metal brace, looked like a bronze skull in a cage. ‘You felt that was necessary?’

‘Are you in the habit of using weaker weapons against more powerful foes?’ Syagrius asked, looking down at the squat, wide-shouldered marshal. He intended the contempt in his tone to be all the answer Balzhan would require. It was impossible not to see crude, proletarian stock in the leader of the Pallidus Mor. Syagrius’ family was nobility, and traced its service to the Imperial Hunters back millennia.

‘I deploy the weapon the moment calls for,’ Balzhan said. ‘The hierophant’s wounds were already severe. It did not require a plasma cannon to finish it off. You put Gloria Vastator at risk.’

‘My aim was true. I’m surprised, marshal, that you aren’t thanking me for having saved Princeps Senioris Krezoc and her Warlord.’

He knew, as he spoke, that he was leaving himself open to the unpleasant reminder that Krezoc had lured the hierophant away from Augustus Secutor before launching her attack. The truth was that Gloria Vastator had come close to sacrificing itself to save Syagrius’ Titan. As he waited for Balzhan to point out his shame, Syagrius tried to think of a satisfying answer. He failed. Balzhan regarded him impassively, and said nothing. The awkward silence stretched out.

Ferantha Krezoc chose that moment to walk by, on her way back from inspecting the work on Gloria Vastator. She glanced towards the two marshals. She and Balzhan exchanged slight nods, the understated greeting of old comrades. Her eyes were still organic, but the look she gave Syagrius was as machine-like in its cold neutrality as Balzhan’s. She was much taller than her marshal, and perhaps an inch or so taller than Syagrius. She walked with a slight hunch forwards, like a bird of prey on the hunt. Where Balzhan was built like a wall, Krezoc seemed made of cable, a narrow, coiled silhouette in her princeps’ greatcoat. Her scalp, like Balzhan’s, was clean-shaven. A line of mechadendrite ports ran up the back of her neck to her crown. She was not much younger than Balzhan, and though she moved with the ease granted by juvenat treatments, her face bore the experience of many decades of war. It was a thing of gaunt stone, fractured by deep canyons. Her eyes looked out from their sockets as though from the bottom of wells. They were a blue so pale they were almost white, and were hard as shell casings.

The look she gave Syagrius was just long enough for him to think he felt judgment, but too brief for him to be sure and demand Balzhan call his subordinate to order.

Krezoc was, Syagrius thought, a perfect, grim match for the god-machine she controlled. He glanced up at Gloria Vastator. The Warlord, like all the Pallidus Mor Titans, was an engine of death, not of glory. He assumed there was pride in the legio, but it was not the one he knew in the Imperial Hunters. The green, white and red panoply of the Hunters was resplendence itself. What he saw in the Pallidus Mor, though, was a dark embrace of the fatality of war. The bone colour beneath the black of Gloria Vastator’s primary armour plates was the shade of an old skeleton. Even the silver trim was cold and pale, turning the glint of sunlight into the shine of ice. Its heraldry showed the same darkness. On the Warlord’s right-hand tilt plate, a skull floated in the black void. The left plate was a shield of gold and black, upon which a skeletal arm raised a scythe. Three drops of blood fell below the blade, through the gold. On the banner that hung between the colossal legs, a sun in eclipse glared over golden wings.

Night, shadows, pallor, death. All was death with the Pallidus Mor. Syagrius was not surprised his actions were baffling to the likes of Balzhan and Krezoc. He cursed the fates that had brought him to share a campaign with them.

Krezoc moved on.

‘I am sure you did as you saw fit,’ Balzhan said dryly.

‘Meaning what?’

‘Exactly what I said.’

‘Our work on Khania is not finished, Marshal Balzhan. Our legios need to continue to work together effectively.’

‘I could not agree more,’ Balzhan replied. He said no more.

And when the tyranids had come again, Syagrius divided the efforts of the Titanicus task force. The Pallidus Mor defended Gelon, and the Imperial Hunters took the aggressive role, pursuing the enemy and destroying its largest threats before they could reach the hive. That was the principle behind the strategy – a two-pronged counter to the swarming invasion. This was what Syagrius explained to the princeps of the legios. He admitted to himself that the battle plan served his purposes by putting distance between himself and the grey fatalism of Balzhan’s maniples. He had never encountered warriors so deaf to the calls of glory.

But he had not freed himself of the thoughts of that flawed victory over the hierophant, of the judgment of the Pallidus Mor. None of the promising auspex returns had borne fruit. His campaign had been as much of a repetitive grind as the one he had left at Gelon. And the emotionless, remorseless voice of Balzhan kept calling on the vox, respectfully requesting his return. At length, he had funnelled those communications to Rekorus so he could ignore them. In particular, he wanted to shut out Krezoc’s voice. Her exchanges stopped just short of being cutting, and he could not hear her without feeling the acidic stab of the bad memory.

Balzhan had been trying to reach him now for several hours. Syagrius sighed, resigned. ‘Patch him through,’ he said to Rekorus.

‘Marshal Syagrius,’ Balzhan said a moment later, ‘the tactical situation at Gelon is becoming more serious. This is where the greatest concentration of the enemy is to be found, and it is growing. The presence of the Imperial Hunters is needed.’

‘Are you implying the Pallidus Mor cannot complete its task?’

‘I am saying the realities of this war have changed.’

Syagrius gritted his teeth. ‘Those realities will grow worse if we abandon our hunt. Our roles are clear, marshal. We must both fulfil them if victory is to be ours.’

Krezoc came on the line. ‘Is your hunt justifying the effort?’ she asked. ‘Have you considered the possibility that you are being lured away?’

‘By a mindless foe?’ Syagrius cursed himself for letting his irritation speak for him. He knew better. For all that the tyranids attacked as an all-devouring swarm, that swarm was directed. Every force that had underestimated the tyranids had suffered for doing so.

Krezoc said, ‘Will you consider the possibility?’

Syagrius hesitated. He gazed at the empty, smouldering region ahead of the Imperial Hunters. Krezoc’s logic was sound. The fact that the Hunters had found tyranid bioforms in the size and quantity that they had was a bit surprising. The biomass of this region of the continent was significantly less dense and more spread out than what the tyranids hungered for at Gelon. Yet their bio-ships continued to drop more of their monstrosities in the barren hinterlands.

Syagrius sent his consciousness deeper into the manifold. At one with Augustus Secutor, he absorbed the incoming auspex readings. The data streamed through his mind like water through fingers. He filtered it for dense clusters, the points of data accumulation that were the echoes of large movements. He found what he was looking for. He was sceptical. At the same time, this was the biggest echo yet. Syagrius and the machine-spirit of the Warlord saw the signs of vast prey thirty miles to the east. The instinct to hunt was overwhelming, princeps and god-machine feeding each other’s hunger, fusing them into a single, shared, primordial instinct. It would not be denied. Syagrius had no intention of fighting it.

‘The enemy is moving to the east of our position,’ he said to Balzhan. The formation of audible speech felt distant from his true self, here in the wash of the power and the hunger of the Titan. ‘That is our target. Each legio has its duty. We must see to them.’

‘Marshal,’ Balzhan began, ‘Princeps Senioris Krezoc is correct. You are being pulled further and further–’

Syagrius cut him off. ‘Fight well, Pallidus Mor,’ he said. ‘The Emperor protects.’ And he shut down the vox-feed.

There was a greater urgency to his sermon tonight. Confessor Lehrn Ornastas felt the fire in his heart ignite his words. Though he had written notes for the sermon, when the moment came, he ignored them. In the pulpit of the Chapel of Saint Kaspha the Unbending, Ornastas looked out over the congregation and burned with the need, as never before, to give warning. The people were manufactoria serfs and a few lower Administratum bureaucrats. The sectors of Creontiades served by Saint Kaspha’s were not wealthy ones. The jewelled spires of the city were a long way from this industrial region. This was as it should be. The dangers Ornastas had seen were in the shadows and grime of the streets. It would be in those same streets that the battle must be fought.

It was his sacred task to warn and to inspire. He must send the cleansing light of fanaticism through the doors of the chapel.

‘The might of the Kataran Spears is on Khania,’ Ornastas said. ‘The salvation of Khania will mean the preservation of Katara. But do not think we have no ramparts to protect, nor battles to fight. Brothers, the heretic is never far. Sisters, I have seen the signs of his foulness.’ Ornastas paused. He stared at the anxious eyes looking up at him. The banners hanging from the galleries seemed to move slightly, as if in anticipation of the coming struggle. ‘To arms!’ Ornastas shouted. ‘Do you think yourselves faithful? Do you call yourselves children of the Emperor? Then take up arms! Seek out the heretic! Burn him from his places of concealment! The danger is now! The time of action is upon us!’

He exhorted the congregation for several more minutes. He did not speak for as long as he usually did, and he had made some changes to the order of the service. Nothing that stepped outside the acceptable form of the rite. It was simply that tonight, he needed to end with the sermon. So he preached until the faces in the amber light of the glow-globes were red with fearful anger. Then he let the people go. As they filed out of the chapel, Ornastas listened to the chatter of thousands of voices. He heard the currents of alarm and determination. Good. He wanted to hope he had done enough.

He knew he had not. Unless they encountered slavering cultists in the next few hours, most of the people would lose their fear over the course of the night. Many of them would barely remember the sermon by the next morning.

Ornastas was trying to teach them to read the signs. He didn’t think they would be able to. Not until it was too late. He had the insight. He knew what to look for, and even he was flailing about, uncertain as to how to fight.

Ornastas left Saint Kaspha’s an hour later. He exited through the small south door. It opened into a warren of alleys that wound between the rockcrete façades of manufactoria and cramped, stinking hab blocks. The sewer gratings overflowed with human waste and the leavings of the forges. The smell was thick as fog. It stung the confessor’s lungs and nose. He coughed, his throat filling with gritty phlegm. He took the passageways at random. He had no destination in mind. He was searching. He was hunting. He struck the pavement with the tip of his staff with every step. He was announcing his presence, calling on the darkness to face him or flee.

When had he seen the first signs? He wasn’t sure. The awareness had come to him gradually. He was used to seeing the markings on the sides of buildings here. Sometimes they were desperate, illiterate prayers. More often, they were the territorial symbols of the underhive gangs. Their scrawls were meaningless to him, and he had never seen them as more than a background piece of the sector’s squalor. Very gradually, Ornastas had become aware of other, more disturbing markings. It took many days before he was sure he was seeing anything wrong. There were stray lines added to other symbols, the hint of something obscene lurking beneath mundane scrawls. Never anything he could identify, never a sign he could point to and say, This. This is the work of heresy. Even as his unease grew, he spent sleepless nights doubting whether what he was seeing had any meaning at all.

After the departure of the Kataran 66th, the markings became more frequent. They seemed to be emerging from beneath the overlapping tangles of graffiti. Meaning was pushing its way to the surface. The angles were more aggressive. The lines were sinuous, their lengths trailing off as if they were dropping into an abyss. The makers of the defacing art were becoming more brazen.

This morning, Ornastas had found his certainty. Instinct, or perhaps the guidance of the God-Emperor, had made him stop and look into a darkened recess. It was the doorway to a narrow hab block, barely fifteen feet across, squeezed between two manufactoria. The building had been gutted by fire. Its interior had collapsed. Rubble blocked the way a few yards past the rubbish-strewn entrance. On the left-hand wall, just visible in the gloom, Ornastas had found the harsh angles of a complete rune. Its design made him think of a skull. He could not look at it for more than a few seconds. It hurt his eyes. Something sharp jabbed into his mind. If he did not break off his gaze, he felt the rune might start to glow.

For a moment, he thought he heard, coming from a great distance, beneath the ground or beyond the sky, the tolling of a brass bell.

Now he walked the gloom of the alleys, searching for revelation and an enemy to fight. He had sounded the alarm, but lacked a target for the faithful. He would find it. He would preserve the sanctity of Creontiades.

The lighting in the alleys was poor. The lumen poles were few. Many of their globes were broken. Weak illumination, flickering and red, came from within the manufactoria. Wan glows leaked from the hab windows. Ornastas moved through a night of shifting, pooling shadows. The alleys were almost deserted. Ragged, emaciated figures fled at the sound of his staff. They ran with heads bowed and shoulders hunched in anticipation of punishment. If an ecclesiarch walked among them, they must have been found wanting in some measure.

Ornastas could well believe they were worthy of judgement. Beggars, thieves, the cast-offs of the gangs, they stood condemned by their poverty and desperation. They were undeserving of the Emperor’s light, and dwelt in the darkness of their failings. But they were not what he sought.

Knock. Knock. Knock. His staff struck the ground with sharp raps. It bounced off the high, smoke-darkened walls. The echoes ran far ahead of his advance. Ornastas turned a corner, and this alley was completely empty. The walls were blank expanses of rockcrete. Heaps of refuse as high as a man lined both sides of the pavement. The passageway should have been pitch-dark, but Ornastas could see his way forwards, very faintly. A crimson haze, like the promise of a fire to come, hung in the air. It grew stronger as he walked further into the alley. The light was no brighter, but the haze began to hum with tension.

Ornastas stopped. In his peripheral vision, he saw lines glowing red on the walls to his left and right. They disappeared when he faced them directly. He stared straight ahead, and the patterns gradually forced themselves into his consciousness. It was like having a brand slowly burned onto his brain. It hurt. He winced, and his eyes watered. He was standing between two immense iterations of the runes he had seen earlier. The angular skulls towered over him. They were at least fifty feet high.

Ornastas shook his head, trying to push the images away. He was starting to feel as if the walls themselves were thirsty for blood. He shivered, his skin running cold. The danger was much worse than he had thought. Something was eating into the soul of Creontiades, and now he feared he had come to the realisation too late. There was power here, something he dared not try to understand fully. It was lethal, and it was contagious. The psychic pressure of the runes squeezed harder. The haze pulsed with gathering violence.

‘The Emperor is my ward, and His vigilance is without rest,’ Ornastas intoned. His voice began as a croaking whisper, but as he recited the Psalm of Blessed Intolerance, he spoke louder. Soon he was shouting. ‘The Emperor’s light is without limit and without mercy. The xenos and the mutant are as ash before its glory. I walk in faith and righteousness, and the heretic burns in my sight!’ He was walking again, striking the ground with his staff to punctuate each line of the psalm. His voice boomed with the strength of the prayer. Ornastas marched between the giant runes, and they had no power over him.

Figures burst from the refuse heaps. Their clothing was tattered filth. They came at Ornastas with hands crooked into vicious claws. Their faces were a mass of ritual scars. Some of the wounds still bled, as if in their need for violence, the wretches slashed perpetually at themselves. Their teeth were filed into fangs. Some had no lips, and should not have been capable of speech, but all of them shrieked in a choir of rage.

‘Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!’

Ornastas leapt back a step and swung his staff to the left at the same moment as he depressed a stud in the shaft. The head of the staff was the winged skull of the Emperor, and it flashed with the holy energy of a shock maul. He hit the nearest cultist with the edge of one wing. He smashed the wretch’s chest in, and the electrical shock jolted his limbs rigid. The cultist fell, jerking and smouldering. Ornastas took down another with a swing to the right. There were four more, and they were on him now, clawing and biting, trying to pull him to the ground. They were emaciated, as if their fury, unable to find other prey, had consumed their bodies. They were savage, but they were weak. Fuelled with a spiritual disgust, Ornastas kicked the legs out from the cultist clawing at his face, then threw himself back, throwing the others off balance. They tried to pull the staff from his hands. He yanked it free and it hit again. The stench of ozone and burned flesh filled his nostrils as the staff flashed and flashed.

Hands gripped Ornastas’ head from behind, jagged fingernails sinking into his forehead. Blood ran into his eyes. The cultist pulled his head back sharply, as if trying to rip it off by brute strength. Ornastas lunged forwards, tearing himself free. The cultist’s nails left deep gouges in his flesh. He whirled and struck hard with his staff, bringing it down overhead and burying a wing in the skull of his attacker.

‘The Emperor is with me!’ Ornastas shouted. ‘His light is with me! His judgment is upon you!’ He smashed at the cultists as fast as they could grapple with him. He broke arms and legs, then trampled spines with his boots while he held the others at bay with electric shocks. His attacks took on their own frenzy, but he did not lose himself in them. He heard the shrieks of heresy, the howled allegiance to a false god of rage, and he clung fast to his faith.

The Emperor protects.

Ornastas swung the staff twice through empty air before he realised the struggle was over. He stumbled away from the bodies, gasping for breath. The cultists were broken and burned, nothing more than fresh refuse in the alley.

Ornastas heard the peals of the brass bell again. The sound was still distant, still beyond a veil, but it was louder, closer. The tolling faded after a few moments. Ornastas strained his ears. The bell was silent. There was only the muffled, clanking beats of the manufactoria.

Had the crimson haze diminished? He wanted to think so. It had not gone, though, and on the walls, the runes glowered at the edge of sight.

When he had found his breath again, Ornastas examined the bodies. The rags draped around one of the cultists drew his attention. Dirt-encrusted and torn as they were, they also looked familiar. Ornastas knelt over the wretch, looking closely at the markings. They were crude runes, daubed in blood. Beneath the runes, torn and defaced, were other symbols. There was so much filth, so much dried blood, so much hate expended on them that Ornastas had difficulty making them out. At last he did, and he gasped. He saw a fist, and the remnants of scales.

The rags had been a uniform belonging to a trooper of the Adeptus Arbites.

Stolen? Ornastas wondered. Throne, let it be stolen. The murder of a trooper was a brazen act, like the assault against his person. It was another sign of the danger being worse than he had imagined. But if it wasn’t stolen… He didn’t want to complete the thought. If the wretch was the trooper, then corruption had taken deeper root. And the body was so wasted, so degraded, the clothes barely fit. If this man had been a servant of the Adeptus Arbites, he had fallen some time ago.

Ornastas straightened. He breathed a prayer that somewhere, the body of a missing trooper lay, unmourned until now. He left the alley, heading back towards Saint Kaspha’s. He had preparations to make, authorities to warn. The exhortations of the sermon were no longer enough. Spiritual war had come to Khania.

As he turned the corner, putting the alley behind him, he heard the brass bell again. It tolled once, mocking him. It presaged and summoned doom.

Click here to buy Warlord Fury of the God-Machine.

For Margaux, and the odysseys of summer.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2017
This eBook edition published in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Akim Kaliberda.

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