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The Lightning Hall – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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THE LIGHTNING HALL

Graham McNeill

‘Our brothers’ bones were naught but dust,
Their swords of steel all gone to rust.
Typhon’s Causeway sealed their fate,
A house brought low by traitors’ hate.’

– Taranis Invictus, Verse XCIV

It never rained on Mars.

Lord Commander Verticorda only ever told the tale of his meeting with the Emperor when he had supped too much at the most auspicious feast days of House Taranis. Always the provocateur, Caturix would coax him to tell it, the younger lord commander the volatile firebrand to Verticorda’s steady hearthfire. Wine flowed, the consorts would cheer, and the young scions would begin hammering their fists upon the tables until the venerable warrior inevitably relented and rose from his onyx throne with one arm raised.

He would stand at the end of the Lightning Hall, its colossal vaulted expanse hung with wheel-patterned banners amid columns carved from basalt lifted from the dead volcanic depths of the Arsia Mons chapter house.

And so he would tell of that day – the golden city-ship descending from Terra, the sublime being within, and the baptismal rain that fell upon the slopes of Olympus Mons. A rain that nourished the red soil like never before, bringing new purpose to the legions of toiling adepts and thralls.

Platters of roasted meat and ewers of strong wine were consumed at such feasts, and the entirety of Verticorda’s mien would transform as he turned to Ares Lictor, the Paladin-class Knight behind him, its ivory-edged plates resplendent in a deep, midnight blue. He would climb to its once wounded knee and lay his palm upon it as the Emperor had done, and he would weep tears of joyous remembrance as the house scions shook the walls with their valorous cries.

Days of glory. A time of heroes.

But those days were gone. No longer did the Lightning Hall echo to shouted oaths and sworn bonds of honour. No longer did its scions raise their fists to the sky in proud boasts.

House Taranis was dead.

Nothing could survive long in the ash wastes of the Pallidus.

The bone-white desert stretched as far as the eye could see, a desolate expanse that no sane adept would ever seek to traverse or colonise. Lunatic dust devils carved its caustic landscape into wondrous spirals, and the air flickered with spontaneous coronal discharges that had given rise to legends of electrostatic gods battling in the deep dust. Storms of such fury they could topple the mightiest of the god-machines were birthed deep in its hinterlands, freighted with heavy metals swept up from the toxic regolith.

One such supercell, in truth the merging of a dozen such storms, surged north in the direction of Arsia Mons. The shield volcano’s fiery heart had cooled in ages past, but the geomancers of Koriel Zeth, Mistress of the Magma City, had reignited it after excavating its hardened interior and filling it with a labyrinth of titanic arming halls and engine forges.

The towering storm front of flaked iron and dust stretched for over sixteen thousand kilometres, and forks of lightning danced before its anvil head, which seethed nearly nine thousand metres above the ashen ground. This particular storm was vast, but not even half the height of the volcano, and it had roared to life in the atomic wastelands surrounding the ruptured Memnonia Deep Core mining fields. A furious exchange of atomics early in the Martian schism had destroyed the controlling infrastructure, setting off a cascade of detonations that turned the region into a nightmarish hellscape which vomited up storm after storm.

Two loping forms raced ahead of the advancing storm into the endless battlefield of Daedala Planum, bent low in the shrieking winds of the supercell’s forward shelf cloud. Hurricane-force winds chased them, scouring their armour with micro-fragments of metal, but they marched on undaunted. Only the scattered wreckage of war engines and the machine parts of once living combatants gave the forms scale: ten-metre-high bipedal walkers. Their outlines were humanoid, but with pneuma-piston-driven legs, heads like skulls of silver steel and arms hung with powerful weapons.

Knights, but with no heraldry to mark them, no banners to identify them.

The carapace plates of their armour had once been a rich, midnight blue, but after the years they’d spent in the Martian dead zones without access to refitting or repair, only patches of stubborn colour remained on plates mostly scoured back to bare metal.

The two Knights had followed the storm from the rumpled skirts of Medusa Fossae, using the cover of its auspex-fouling e-mag squalls to conceal their presence. Mars was enemy territory now, especially the Tharsis quadrangle, where the fire that consumed Mars had begun. This landscape had once been theirs to roam with impunity, but now was entirely hostile.

Snatched blurts of ancient binharic crackled on the manifold, crackling whispers borne on the storm winds that repeated random numbers and letters over and over again. Such phenomena were not uncommon on Mars, but they could make nothing of the numeric patterns, and whatever truth they might possess was encrypted by means now forgotten.

Some said they were simply vox echoes from the past, bouncing from the roof of the world and endlessly circling the planet in search of meaning. Others claimed they were ghost code from the earliest sentient machines who lay buried in forgotten tombs deep in the heart of the Pallidus, hoping to one day be resurrected.

Perhaps all of these explanations were true, perhaps none.

To Raf Maven they were the voices of the dead.

They plagued Maven every night. He heard them all whenever he closed his eyes, whenever he let himself think of the life he had once known. Sometimes he thought he saw them too, manifold ghosts lurking at the edges of his vision: fellow scions of Taranis, the lord commanders, the sacristans and the consorts. Their voices mingled in a forlorn lament, his dead family condemning him with an endless litany of accusation.

Where were you?

We needed you!

You should have died with us!

Maven heard their echo in the whispered voices carried on the storm wind, scratching at the vox like a distress call just beyond reach. He tried to keep the voices out, but no matter how far he dampened Equitos Bellum’s manifold, he couldn’t entirely silence them. He felt their presence everywhere within his Knight. Their silent stares were an ever-increasing weight upon his shoulders.

Equitos Bellum had ever been a fractious mount, its machine-spirit as wilful as its pilot, and before Mars had fallen to madness, their temperaments had suited one another well. But the years spent hiding and raiding isolated supply hubs for ammunition, food and water had worn at his mortal spirit with gnawing guilt and a creeping sense of hopelessness.

After he and his Taranis brother Leopold Cronus had escorted the companions of the golden-eyed girl to the automated research facility deep in the Medusa Fossae, Maven had wanted to ride straight back out and fight, to strike back against the traitors who had brought shame to the red planet. Only the calm, sage counsel of Cronus had convinced him of that plan’s suicidal folly.

And so they had hunkered down to wait out the storm.

But the storm had not abated, had not been a sudden squall whose very ferocity burns it out all the faster. This storm had endured, and now all of Mars was engulfed.

The treachery within the priesthood of Mars had run deeper than any of them could have suspected, with one forgemaster after another declaring fealty to Kelbor-Hal and the Warmaster. In the years since, Maven and Cronus had come to know their companions in exile: Caxton Torgau and Zouche Chahaya. Both were faithful servants of the Omnissiah and fiercely loyal to the Throneworld. Together they had endured, hidden deep in an isolated scrap of desert, and waited.

And waited…

Caxton had once been a lowly component assembler in the Magma City, while Zouche had served as a machinist in its deep fabricatus halls, but they had risen to the challenge of keeping Equitos Bellum and Pax Mortis functional after each sortie. Like Maven and Cronus, they were horrified by what had happened to Mars, but each overcame their grief in their own way – Caxton by obsessively scraping the noospheric networks for word of a golden-eyed girl named Dalia Cythera, and Zouche by burying himself in an obscure tome he had borne from the Noctis Labyrinthus.

As the years wore on with only scraps of hard data filtering through the insane babble polluting the noosphere, it had become harder and harder to sort meaning from the chaos.

Until four days ago.

A brief signal of perfect clarity, a rallying call prefixed by command codes authenticated by both Equitos Bellum and Pax Mortis.

Coming from the depths of Arsia Chasmata. The chapter house of Taranis.

Maven tried to keep his focus on the striding form of Pax Mortis through the dust and smoke as they circled the southern flank of Arsia Mons. Amber clouds seethed above the towering mountain, and the tar-black smoke of the Magma City’s destruction still gathered in its deep caldera.

Though many years had passed since its sinking, the bones of the city’s corpse were evident in the stubs of support columns and leaning adamantium towers jutting from the cooled magma lagoon in which it had once stood. The cantilevered remains of Typhon’s Causeway jutted out into the lake like an unfinished transitway, still strewn with battlefield debris. Maven looked up and saw the gaping void in the mountain’s flank where Aetna’s Dam had once concentrated the reactivated heart of the volcano. The arched loops of magma ducts that once flowed with the golden light of molten rock lay in ruins, partially buried in hardened flows of lava.

‘Hard to believe it’s gone,’ said Cronus, leading them through the shattered remains of the dead city’s outworks and gutted infrastructure. His friend’s voice came over a short-range, line-of-sight vox to avoid being triangulated by enemy surveyor sweeps, which made it so faint and rich with static that Maven had a hard time separating it from the whispers of the dead.

He didn’t respond, his mouth dry and tasting of tin. His neck and shoulders ached with low-grade infection where the neural connectors of the Throne Mechanicum plugged into his cranial sockets. The counterseptics had run out over a year ago, and the flesh around his ports was swollen and necrotic, wet with leaking blood and cloudy spinal fluid. His Knight’s enormous limbs were twitchy and hesitant, the past overlaying the present in stuttering auspex echoes.

‘Maven?’ said Cronus. ‘Are you with me?’

Sweat beaded Maven’s skin like a layer of frost. He nodded, and the Knight mirrored the gesture. He swallowed and blinked shadow-rimmed eyes, the pupils dilated and whites bloodshot from lack of sleep and overuse of stimms.

‘I’m with you,’ he said, his lips dry and his voice cracked.

‘You’re moving erratically,’ said Cronus, sounding like they were out on a training mission, rather than deep in enemy-held territory in barely functional machines.

‘Residual pain memory,’ said Maven. ‘All the damage Equitos Bellum has taken in these years still lingers in the manifold and we don’t have the equipment to properly purge it.’

‘Caxton and Zouche are doing their best, but they’re no sacristans,’ agreed Cronus. ‘Do what you can, and try to keep Equitos Bellum’s spirit in check.’

‘Easier said than done,’ snapped Maven. ‘She’s chafing on my mind, restless and bellicose. She’s twitching at every phantom image on the auspex.’

As if to prove his point, the surveyor panel flickered with life, and a blurred image swam into being, tall and wide-shouldered, hunched over and warlike.

Engine sign. A big one too. A Reaver at least. Maybe even a Warlord…

Without any input from Maven, Equitos Bellum switched to a war footing, its weapon generators firing from idle to active, and the high-energy cells that drove the war machine switching to battle mode.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-349-9

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