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Ghost of Nuceria – Ian St. Martin

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Heralds of the Siege’

A Black Library Publication

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Ghost of Nuceria

Ian St. Martin

Jochura woke, if the brief, shivering yield to his exhaustion could be called sleep. The smell of ash and stale sweat greeted him, along with the coppery tang of blood, all blunted by intense cold. Claustrophobia set in as the rest of his senses cleared, and he began the slow, aching process of separating himself from the mound of his brothers and sisters in the darkness of the cave.

Huddling together for warmth, none of them ever truly slept. You were either on the outside, half-frozen and fighting to reach the centre, or fighting to stay there. Jochura had passed from one role to the other half a dozen times, never awake but never fully asleep either. Considering their options, though, he was grateful for whatever rest he could get. Hozzean had taken half of their number, and the cliffs of Desh’ea were swiftly seeing to the rest.

Fylaete was at the edge of the huddle, still and not squirming inwards for warmth, and Jochura shut his eyes for a moment as he knelt by his friend’s side. Every time they slept, fewer and fewer awoke. They were too cold, too hungry, too hurt from when they had broken free from the pits and the maddened, joyous slaughters that followed. They had cut the high-riders a deep scar they would not soon forget, but after Hozzean had burned, the cost in blood had begun to take its toll.

Brotherhood had sustained them, though. The hot dust had bonded their rebellion stronger than any iron. The high-riders’ laughter had quickly faded as their lines shattered and their cities burned. But Jochura knew the final day was coming, even with the Eater of Cities at their head.

The thought of him sent Jochura peering into the darkness of the cave, gently tugging at the chains wound around his arms to loosen them from where they had frozen to his skin. He looked to the cave mouth, seeing someone there just clear of the howling wind and stinging snow. It was not his leader, not the brutal giant who had bled with them, his rope unbroken red.

‘Klester,’ said Jochura, his voice a hoarse croak.

She turned to look at him, the chains rattling from where they bound the stump of her right leg to the barbed chassis of her shriekspear. The blades of the wicked thing were still dark with high-rider blood, and she had refused to clean it from them.

‘Jochura,’ she answered, her fingertips tapping against her spear. Cold and hunger had drained her, as it had them all, yet the fire of the huntress still blazed undiminished in her eyes.

‘Where is he?’ he asked, coming to her side to stare out of the cave mouth with his sister. ‘Where is Angron?’

‘He is hunting.’

There was only one of them that he could see through the blizzard, and none could see further or better than he. It had come up to the cliffs from the riverbed below, where the blood spilt was only now vanishing beneath the new snow. The lone figure slid through the storm on its silver vines, cast out beneath it like some mechanical sea creature so that its feet need not touch the ground.

A hateful name formed in his tortured mind, flaring down his synapses, cursing him for watching and not snapping, not rending, not killing.

Kin-guard.

They were the iron fist of the high-riders’ armies, the tool they wielded to keep all of Nuceria beneath their feet. The silver vines were everything to the kin-guard: their transport, their armour, their weapon. He had seen them used as shelter, wound into cones around their bodies to keep out the wind and the snow. He had seen the vines form bridges to span chasms, pull a pit fighter into quarters, and take a blow from a berserker’s axe full bore without breaking. They were formidable, strong and versatile, yet the warrior within their confines was still a man, just a man.

Men could bleed. Men could die.

The wailing gales masked his footsteps as he stalked, any trace of his path quickly disappearing in the storm. The kin-guard slowed. He closed to within a leap’s distance, every muscle coiled like a spring and screaming for violence. He stopped, still as the dead, watching as the silver tendrils ceased their undulation.

There had been honour, back on the hot dust. Nobility had existed, a martial brotherhood between the warriors of the pit even though they spent their short lives bleeding and killing one another. There were salutes, and declamations of kills. You would bear your triumph rope for them to see, and they would show you theirs, each of you bellowing that you would twist red that day, while your opponent would twist black in defeat.

Out here in the wider world, free of his chains, Angron fought a different way. For there was no camaraderie between master and slave, between tyrant and rebel. There was only hate, the letting of blood and a vengeance dreamt of after a lifetime languishing in the pits.

The kin-guard was quick to react when Angron struck, to his credit. Angron pounced through the whirling curtains of snow, suddenly upon the Nucerian without making a sound. A portion of the silver vines tightened reflexively around the man’s body to protect him from the blows that were sure to come, while others lashed out to ensnare Angron’s limbs and strangle his throat. But they only found air.

Angron was too quick, and he was too strong. The kin-guard’s snapping mechanical tentacles could not turn him away no matter how they lashed and stabbed at him. Even the vines could not withstand his rage, and the axe in his hands hacked deep, buried to the haft in the kin-guard’s hip, nearly splitting legs from torso. The deadly controlled dance of the vines became a spasmic flail, their lethality withering away to nothing as their wielder succumbed to agony.

Wrenching the axe free sent a torrent of dark blood spurting onto the snow, crimson pools that sank down in curling whorls of steam. The kick to the Nucerian’s chest that followed flipped the man onto his back, helpless to do anything but stare up at Angron as he glowered down.

‘Hnng,’ Angron snorted, spitting bloody phlegm onto the snow as he sank to his haunches over the kin-guard. The Nails had turned his blood to acid, burning him alive from the inside unless he fed them more violence. He reached down, clawing away the vines shielding the Nucerian’s face, and snarled in revulsion at what he found beneath.

The kin-guard was young, little more than a boy. He could not have made war in the high-riders’ name for more than a summer. Angron had been fighting since the day he was captured, snared and cast into slavery by those whose way of life this man fought to uphold.

‘I expected more,’ Angron whispered, his voice soft for all its guttural brutality. ‘Once, when I was still growing down in the pits, I thought you all were gods, divine beings who shaped the lives and fates of us who lived in chains. Then I tore your gates down, and what did I find? Men. Weak, paper-skinned little men did this,’ he jabbed at his Nails, ‘to me.’

Angron traced a grubby finger along the man’s skull, sneering as the Nucerian cried out at his touch. ‘But there are no gods. Nothing to stop me from vindication, and nothing to save you from it.’ He lowered his face, until the breath slashing from his nostrils made the man beneath him squirm. ‘Make plenty of room, in whatever darkness I am sending you to. All of your masters shall be joining you shortly.’

A twist, a cry cut short, and Angron rose to his full, towering height. He turned at the sound of blades carving air, as little Klester darted towards him on her shriekspear. She hung beneath the two-metre spar of bladed metal and its armoured anti-grav generator, holding on with one hand as she flew. Angron had witnessed her wield the spear in several ways, utilising any combination of her hands, her free leg, or the length of adamantine chain that connected it to the stump of her other leg. Seeing her brought a smile to Angron’s face, the steel plugs that replaced his teeth flashing from within a lipless maw. Oh, the magical violence she had wrought with that spear. His sister had made sure their former masters cursed the day when they had taken her leg and bound her to it.

Klester skidded to a halt beside Angron, disabling the anti-grav unit of her spear and spinning it to drive it point down into the snow. She looked down at the Nucerian kin-guard, summoning up a wad of phlegm to spit onto him. Her eyes flicked to Angron, as he looked at the man’s severed head in his frost-bitten hands.

‘A scout?’

Angron nodded. ‘More will come.’ He wrenched one hand back, tearing the silver lace from the Nucerian’s skull. He dropped it, immediately forgotten, and wound the still bleeding neural implants around his fist. ‘We need to go back, now. They know we are here.’

Back within the cave, Angron took stock of what remained of his rebellion. Fifty-six gladiators were left alive, from the hundreds he had freed from the pits. He remembered every one of their names, their faces, their victories. He remembered fighting with them, and against them, turning their triumph ropes together and never gloating as they twisted black and he always red.

The dead had been laid in the back of the cave, their weapons taken, their rags now wrapped about those who survived to keep out whatever of the frigid cold that they could. This was neither callous pragmatism, nor disregard for their fallen kin. It was the spirit within each of them that mattered: with it fled from the flesh, those whose hearts still beat knew that more than anything else, their dead brothers and sisters would have wanted them to have whatever they could offer to keep bleeding their masters.

Angron looked to his army, his warriors. He looked into their eyes, seeing resolve and readiness smouldering there despite the fighting that had bled them and the mountain that was starving them. More fighting, Angron could give to them. To feed their bodies, he would also provide what he could.

He found the new scar along his palm and ran the blade across it. He sliced slowly, making sure that the cut was deep. It had to be deep, else it would clot before he had bled enough for everyone to eat.

They had first resorted to his blood eight days ago, when the last of their food had run out. Here amongst the mountaintops, there was nothing to forage, and so Angron did what he could to keep his family alive. Many had been unable to take the richness of it, for his blood was so different to their own, more potent, more vital. Those who could stomach it used what they could to cut it, mixing it with snow from the mountain or even their own blood.

Angron had not eaten since they razed Hozzean. For the weeks they had been in the mountains – striking out to raid and destroy whatever force the Nucerians sent for them, steadily withdrawing to their peaks and cliffs as their numbers dwindled – any sustenance they had found had gone to his brothers and sisters. They all knew Angron was different; it had always been clear to see, even if none could explain how, or why.

When the last of Angron’s warriors had taken his blood, they sat in a circle around him, huddling together for warmth. He closed his fist, already feeling the blood clot and the flesh reknitting. They all knew what was coming, but Angron could find no fear in any of their eyes. They were gladiators; fighting and death were all they had ever known. Now, here against the Nucerians, they were killing for something that mattered. Something that was worth fighting for, and worth dying for.

‘It is only a matter of time now,’ Angron finally said, casting the dead kin-guard’s silver lace onto the floor of the cave. ‘They will find their scout’s corpse–’

‘Though not his head,’ Jochura smirked. He looked to Klester, and she rattled her shriekspear with the Nucerian’s severed head impaled upon it. The gladiators laughed together, the joyous sound echoing from the walls of the cave.

Angron grinned, knowing that mirth warmed the body better than anything, before continuing on. ‘They will find him, and it will not take long before they reach us here on the cliffs.’

‘You left it for them to find,’ said Cromach, fingers dancing along the haft of his brazier glaive. ‘You wanted them to find us.’

‘It doesn’t matter what any of us want,’ Angron replied, gesturing to all the occupants of the cave. ‘Look around you. Each day we grow weaker. Soon this mountain will steal the strength from our hands to even lift our blades. So we fight them here, now, while we still can. If we die, we die, but not to this mountain. We fall free people, fighting together as brothers and sisters, and taking as many of those paper-skinned high-rider bastards with us to hell as we can.’

They all remembered the last night in the caves, before Angron tore the gates down from their hinges and unleashed the slave war upon Nuceria, when each of them had sworn their lives to one another. To shatter their chains and rise, a glorious revolt against the tyranny of the high-riders. There were no thoughts of victory, of how to rule over the world afterwards, only a determination to fight. To make the Nucerians suffer before they breathed their last.

‘Sleep now,’ said Angron as he rose and walked to the mouth of the cave. ‘And dream of high-riders screaming for the mercy they never thought to give to you. I will wake you when they come.’

The gladiators formed the huddle once more, trading the jokes and insults of bonded brethren as they jockeyed for the centre. Angron sat at the cave’s entrance, looking out through the swirling veils of snow, towards the high-riders as they drew ever nearer to the cliffs, and their last battle.

‘You should rest,’ he said, hearing footsteps coming behind him along with the soft rattle of chains.

‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’ Jochura gave Angron his usual crooked grin. ‘Tomorrow.’

Angron chuckled, and gestured for his fellow gladiator to sit beside him. It was difficult sometimes to remember that Jochura was still just a boy of barely fifteen summers. The hot dust had a way of either ageing boys into men, or never letting them age at all.

‘Air never tasted so good as it does up here,’ said Jochura. He had picked up the dead kin-guard’s silver lace from where Angron had dropped it, running the delicate strands through his fingers like prayer beads.

‘That’s because you’re free,’ said Angron. ‘The world can be– hnng,’ he snarled, fighting off a stabbing wave of pain from his Nails, ‘beautiful, when you finally get to see it without chains.’

‘I’ll hold on to these, though.’ Jochura wove his chains through a gap in the lace, pulling it taught and snapping the neural implants apart. ‘Need to show the masters all the new tricks I can do with them.’

Angron smiled, his lip spasming from the Butcher’s Nails to warp the expression into a ghoulish leer. They sat for a while in silence, watching the snow twist and glitter in the air, savouring that which they had spent their entire lives dreaming of, to breathe as free men.

‘We’ll make them hurt, won’t we?’ Jochura looked up at Angron, appearing more than ever as a boy his age should. ‘Before it’s over?’

‘We already have, my boy,’ said Angron. ‘We are the Eaters of Cities, and we have feasted on them well, you and I. They’ve twisted black, Jochura, and no matter what comes, they will always carry that black twist with them. They’ll never forget what we did to them, that we made them pay for all they did to us.’

Angron glanced down, seeing Jochura leaned against him, finally succumbing to the exhaustion that was marrow-deep within them all. He peeled off a layer of rags from his shoulders and draped them around the boy. The Nails railed against Angron being touched, as they always did, but he shoved the pain they sent him down and away. The accursed implants had stolen so much from him, but he would not let them take his brotherhood. Not yet.

The morning was bright, the sky a light steel grey and clear of the blinding snow. Angron stood at the centre of his army, the anchor of their shield wall, watching for their enemy to come within sight.

He could hear the low rumble upon the mountain slopes as the armies of the high-riders amassed. Thousands of kin-guard, the ground a quivering morass of their silver vines, moving in formation to surge up the cliffs in a lashing wave. With them were mercenaries, private armies and militias – any force the Nucerians could raise, buy or threaten into fighting in their name.

Let them come, Angron thought. A sellsword’s blood spilled just as well from his axe. He was going to paint the mountain red this day.

When they came, they arrived riding upon a wave of terrible noise. As soon as it reached his ears, Angron’s blood caught fire, the Nails boring deep into the meat of his mind. It was a horrific sound, the sound he heard before every fight upon the hot dust, trumpeted out by his masters as they watched him and his kindred suffer and die for their amusement.

Music.

‘Look at that.’ Klester gave her wolfish grin as a loose flock of grey dots grew in the sky above. ‘The high-riders finally show themselves.’

Each of the Nucerian nobles was unique, every one of them a monument of gilded excess wholly different from their fellows. Some of them sailed through the air on great silver wings, while others were borne aloft by bulky gauntlets or reclined upon filigreed couches. They wore animal masks, horses and lions and great birds of prey, all exquisitely crafted into a gaudy overindulgence and inlaid with enough gems to feed a kingdom.

Angron sneered up at them, the perfect manifestation of all that he had ever despised. Their mere presence alone confirmed how severely he and his Eaters of Cities had cost them. Here, on these cliffs, he would hurt them more.

Despite their overwhelming advantages of technology, Angron saw the flaws, the weaknesses of the high-riders as they rode out to meet them. Vanity had stolen their cohesion, and they showed none of the unity possessed by his own warriors. And he knew in his soul that their masters lacked the stomach for a real fight. Once things got bloody, and they were torn down to the mud with their slaves, the real flesh-parting would begin.

Angron tasted destiny in the wind. He knew that this would be his final battle, yet seeing his family beside him and his truest enemy before him, he swelled with pride. They had hurt the high-riders, to stir them from their gilded nests atop the spires. They had made their masters see them. And Angron vowed that he would bleed them badly before he fell.

‘Dearest Angron, how we have missed you!’ said the lead high-rider, a morbidly obese man barely kept aloft by massive anti-grav boots and gauntlets wrought into gilded cherubs. Angron recognised the voice immediately: the voice had that buzzed out at them through the horrid maggot’s eyes, the arena’s announcer who gloated and mocked them in their dying moments, so that his ilk might gamble over their blood.

‘Come back to the arena,’ the Nucerian continued, coming to a halt with his fellows over Angron. ‘Without you all it’s got so dreadfully stale for us. Throw down your sticks and stones and all will be forgiven. The crowd wants its champion back, Angron. Won’t you oblige them and cease this little tantrum?’

‘I’m bored.’ Jochura shifted with a soft rattle of his chains. ‘Why don’t they just attack?’

A sickening realisation dawned on Angron then; he understood why they were trying to lure him back with their honeyed words. Why they would not simply crush them here on the cliffs, eradicate the rebellion and end it all.

They needed him. The grip of the high-riders over their people was slipping, and they needed to keep them pacified. Without the bloodshed of the arena to distract them, the common folk were left to look upon their lives, and the gilded towers above them, and ponder why they had so little, and their overlords so much.

‘You’ll never have us in chains again, paper-skin,’ Angron bellowed up at the Nucerian. His brothers and sisters howled, rattling their weapons and pounding their chests. Angron pointed his axe to the armies advancing towards them. ‘Afraid to come down and fight us yourselves?’

‘Now, we’ve had quite enough of that,’ chided the announcer from the arena, his sing-song accent grating Angron’s already frayed nerves. ‘You have caused quite the uproar, Angron. You’ve had your fun, now it’s back to the arena with you.’

Angron spat on the ground, spinning his axe and pointing its blade up at the high-riders.

‘Come down and take me, then. If you think you can.’

For a moment, the masters hesitated. They flocked together, shouting and hissing in an angry congress before finally spreading out in an arc over the gladiators.

‘Very well,’ the announcer sighed. ‘We did not want this. Remember that.’

In the first moment, nearly half of the shield wall died. The weapons wielded by the high-riders were as varied as their trappings, but all of them were lethal. Sonic disruptors reduced flesh and bone to mist. Microwave blasters boiled blood to steam, and clouds of monofilament silver vines burrowed into bodies to rupture organs and grind skeletons to powder. All the while the Nucerians’ armies closed, coming within charging range of the bloodshed to add their weight to the fray.

Chaos ensued. Angron saw Cromach fall, the brazier glaive tumbling from his hands as he was turned inside out by a conversion beamer. Klester ululated in tune with her bladed steed as she took the heads from a pair of high-riders, before Angron lost sight of her.

Angron spotted the announcer in the melee, and sprang into the air. He leapt higher than any of their arrogant masters thought possible, and the Nucerian wailed as Angron seized hold of a dangling leg with each hand.

‘What are you doing?!’ shrieked the announcer, his usually dulcet tones now shrill with fear. ‘Let go!’

Angron obliged him. He yanked down, and heard screams accompany the oiled-sackcloth sound of flesh tearing, before falling to the ground.

Angron tilted his head back, savouring the shower of blood and entrails that cascaded over him from above. He threw the high-rider’s legs aside, watching the man’s torso as it rose up lazily into the sky on his anti-grav gauntlets, like a balloon that had lost its tether.

Another Nucerian rode down on him, wrought into a gilded chariot, and Angron launched himself forwards, fist first.

His punch never landed.

Time froze. He watched blood spray from a dying kin-guard, spurting into the air in a spreading nebula of crimson. Though his body was locked in place, Angron found his mind and senses were still within his control, and they gravitated immediately to the presence that appeared before him in a blinding sphere of light.

+What have they done to you?+

The voice was thunder and ice in his brain. Angron’s Nails bit deep, punishing him and the invasion, demanding that he kill the speaker, and then everything else.

‘Who– hnng,’ whispered Angron, finding that he could still speak. ‘Who are–’

+I am the Emperor, and you are coming with me.+

‘Where?’

+Beyond this place. To the stars.+

‘My brothers,’ gasped Angron. ‘My sisters. I won’t abandon them.’

+They, and this planet, are no longer your concern.+

‘No. Whatever it is you want of me, I refuse. My place is here, with my true kin. I fight here. I die here.’

The voice was silent for a moment. Angron almost sensed regret in the thunder that echoed through his mind when it spoke again.

+Then I am sorry.+

There was a storm of light, and an excruciating sense of tearing. Angron thudded to the ground, but it was no longer covered in snow. His knee smashed down, cracking a floor of shining mosaic tile. The scent of blood was gone, replaced by stale ozone. His eyes stung from a sudden golden light – not from the weak sun of Nuceria, but a constellation of floating orbs gifting illumination to an immense vaulted chamber. The largest of them hung at the centre of the chamber, a brilliant sphere of radiance like a captured star. Angron recognised it as the source of the voice.

Priceless artworks covered the walls, taking pride of place between torn banners and a myriad of exotic weapons. The floor shook beneath Angron, and his ears itched from the electric thrum of machinery. He fought to shake off the disorientation, and realised he was not alone.

A phalanx of golden-armoured warriors surrounded him, each holding a crackling halberd longer than they were tall. Seconds before, Angron had been in the centre of a battlefield, and the Butcher’s Nails were still in command of him. He saw strangers on all sides of him, brandishing weapons. The Nails saw blood, begging to be spilled.

The closest of the golden warriors took one step further, and Angron killed him for it. The blink of an eye was all it took before he cast the corpse to the ground, torn in half from collar to groin by his bare hands. The others advanced, their halberds at his throat and spasming with angry chains of lightning. Angron found a dozen weaknesses in each of them, angles left open and postures vulnerable. He would make this entire room red, until you couldn’t see the gold, he would–

+Cease.+

Angron cried out at the renewed invasion of his consciousness. The Nails rebelled against it, and did the only thing they had the ability to do. He fell to his knees, stomach clenching as it sent a torrent of blood-laced vomit onto the deck.

The searing light he believed a caged sun was in fact a being. Angron saw the silhouette of a man, or at least the shape of one, at its centre. The source of the voice stabbing into his skull.

The golden warriors backed away in an instant, parting to allow the Emperor to come closer. Angron snarled, the very proximity of the entity causing his Nails to bite.

‘Where am I?’ he managed to hiss between clenched teeth.

+You are on my ship, away from that planet.+

‘My brothers,’ Angron glared up. ‘My sisters. Where–’

+What has been done to you is regrettable. What transpired below was regrettable. But we have not the time. You are meant for far grander things than a mere servile war.+

The arrogance of the voice, the preening familiarity of it, roused Angron’s ire to boiling.

‘If you are so mighty, why not help us? Why not step down from your golden palace here, down into the mud where the real struggle is borne out? Instead you rip me out from my destiny – from the only chance I had to ever grasp serenity, to fall a free man beside those with whom I twisted the rope and cast off the shackles.’

+Because I am the Emperor, and my eyes are set upon this galaxy, all her stars and worlds, and not simply the wars or tyrants of any single one. So shall your eyes be set, as you take up the mantle you were brought into this life to bear, the mantle of primarch, to command your Legion and unite the stars beneath my banner.+

Something cold and crumbling welled up inside Angron at those words. It was the same sickening realisation he’d had on the cliff. The reason why this Emperor, this blazing, incomprehensible being, had robbed him of a noble death. Why He hadn’t let Angron fall with his brothers and sisters as he’d sworn he would.

He needed Angron. Just like the high-riders did. Blood sport on the hot dust, conquest of the galaxy, it was all the same. Two different masters, but in the end, Angron was always the slave.

‘I died down there,’ Angron said bitterly, drawing the radiant Emperor into his fiery gaze. ‘With my brothers and sisters, freezing, starving and free. Emperor or no, creator or no, all you will ever get of me is a shell, the ghost of Angron, who never left Nuceria.’

The Emperor looked back at him, expressionless and aloof. Angron felt static crawl over his skin, and the reek of ozone flood his nose.

+Then a ghost will have to suffice.+

The storm of light seized hold of Angron again. The sonic boom that folded and curled him in upon himself, the nauseating dislocation. An instant’s agonised terror as he witnessed a billion twisted, fleshless faces leering at him with impossible hunger, and then he was in another place.

He found himself now in the centre of a grand hall. Light flickered from blazing braziers and sconces, bathing the stone walls in their warmth. Like the last place, the stone floor thrummed beneath Angron’s feet, and he heard the same endless clanking, clattering cacophony all around him, as though he were within the belly of a vast mechanical beast.

Banners of cream and dark ocean blue hung from the walls, with the icon of a scarlet hound proud at their centre. Rolls of parchment accompanied them, filled with lines of inscriptions in a blocky text that was alien to Angron yet increasingly comprehensible with every passing moment he looked upon them.

A deep thunk drew Angron’s eyes to a pair of great double doors at the end of the hall, up a flight of broad stone steps. The doors opened.

A solitary figure descended. He came alone, though Angron saw many more like him crowded behind the threshold as the doors closed. He was larger than a man, far larger, though Angron still dwarfed him in stature. He carried the bearing of a warrior chieftain, his flesh speaking through its scars of wars fought and blood spilled. But for who?

‘My lord,’ said the man, his voice deep and low yet cowed by wonder. ‘Sire, my primarch, long have we awaited this day. Long has your Legion made ready for the hour you would come to lead us.’

Primarch. Legion. Those words again. He understood the speaker, though he couldn’t guess how. Angron looked closer, poring over every detail of the man before him, not bothering to listen to the words passing from his lips. Icons gleamed at his shoulders and throat, a golden bolt of lightning. That Emperor’s sigil, and that was all that Angron needed to know.

Angron roared. Finally he ceased to hear the machine noise devouring him, the rumble beneath his feet swallowed by the thunder of his heart. The stale, ozone cling of the air vanished, replaced by the wet copper tang of blood splashing his face.

The man – he had never learned his name – came apart in Angron’s hands. He threw the bleeding chunks aside, howling again as he tore out the lights of the hall and cast it into darkness.

There were more up the stairs, on the other side of the door. Let them come. Warriors. Legions. He would fill this hall with bodies before they dragged him down to hell. He would be a slave no longer. No matter who claimed him as his master, be it the Nucerians or this Emperor and His paper-skinned lackeys. Never again. Angron would fulfil his oath to the kin he had been stolen from. Until the day he breathed his last, and joined them in oblivion’s embrace, Angron would be free.

About the Author

Ian St. Martin is the author of the Horus Heresy: Primarchs audio drama Konrad Curze: A Lesson in Darkness. He has also written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Of Honour and Iron, Lucius: The Faultless Blade and Deathwatch: Kryptman’s War, along with the novella Steel Daemon and several short stories. He lives and works in Washington DC, caring for his cat and reading anything within reach.

An extract from Heralds of the Siege.

The Martian soil trembled. Beneath the Temple-Tarantyne assembly yards, something was rising.

Once a glorious spectacle of magna-machinery and Titan production, the southern installation had produced the mighty god-machines of the Legio Excruciata. Now its great production temples glowed with the unholy light of corruption. Chittering constructs went to work on towering perversions – looming monstrosities that should have been Warlord Titans but instead were metal monsters of daemonic infestation and heretek weaponry.

Row upon row of such beasts stood silent in the storage precincts, waiting for the orbital mass conveyers that would take them to bulk freighters destined for the Warmaster’s forces.

But those mass conveyors would not come.

With the Forge World Principal blockaded by the VII Legion, nothing was leaving Mars. Like the monstrous tanks, fevered warrior-constructs and ranks of empty battleplate sitting in storage bays across the surface, the Chaos Titans gathered Martian dust.

Dust that now rained down about the towering abominations as the bedrock quaked beneath them.

A Warlord Titan was a walking fortress of thick plate and powerful shielding. As any who had ever faced such an apocalyptic foe understood, it had few weaknesses. As a former princeps of the Collegia Titanica, Kallistra Lennox had the distinction of both piloting and felling such god-machines. She knew that one of the few vulnerabilities the Mars Alpha-pattern Warlord had was a weak point on its command deck, but the deck was almost impossible to reach for ground troops.

Standing in the gyroscopic interior compartment of the Mole burrowing transport Archimedex, Lennox felt the adamantium prow drilling a phase-fielded tunnel through the Martian bedrock and soil, then finally breaking the surface into the assembly yards. While the large tunnelling vehicle emerged upright, like a rising tower, the crowded troop compartment maintained its rolling orientation within, which would make disembarkation a smooth affair. The princeps had directed the translithope to rise up next to a Warlord Titan identified as Ajax Abominata. Loyal constructs had been watching the installation for weeks from the scrap-littered sides of the surrounding mountains. The construction of Ajax Abominata was all but complete, although its armoured shell was still covered in a scaffold, complete with mobile gantries.

It was a target ripe for sabotage – and the princeps knew exactly how to do it.

Not that she looked very much like an officer of the Collegia Titanica any more. While she still wore her uniform amid scraps of flak and carapace, it was tattered and stained with oil. The black leather of her boots was scuffed and her gloves crudely cut to fingerlessness. She wore an eyepatch where her ocular bionic had been torn out, and a short chainblade sat heavy upon her belt where a ceremonial sabre used to hang. Grenades and hydrogen flasks dangled from a bandolier while in her hands the princeps clutched the chunky shape of a plasma caliver.

‘Stand by,’ she said, sternly.

The loyalist Mechanicum cell to which Lennox belonged had been dubbed the Omnissian Faithful. Like all its adherents, Lennox was a Martian survivor. Left behind in the exodus to Terra, she had become a rebel on her own world. While the scrapcode tore through the Forge World Principal, corrupting everything it touched, there had been some Martians and constructs who had followed their instincts. As part of a disgust response – like a person making themselves sick after ingesting a toxin or poison – some true servants of the Omnissiah had had the strength to mutilate themselves. They tore bionics from their bodies, severed hardlinks and burned out wireless receivers. Ports and interfaces were gouged out, their bodies and minds cut off from the code-streams of the Martian networks. They had saved themselves from the infected data that brought madness, spiritual pollution and the warping of flesh and form.

It was a corruption that had claimed nearly all who had not escaped the Red Planet, even the Fabricator General himself: Kelbor-Hal, now no more than a withered bundle of polluted workings. Like the magi below him and the constructs below them, he had become a slave to darkness. A puppet controlled by the renegade Warmaster Horus, light years distant.

In the Mole’s troop compartment stood a motley collection of blank-faced adepts, battle-smashed skitarii, liberated tech-thralls, indentured menials, gun-servitors saved by their masters, vat-engineered work-hulks, harnessed ferals and bastardised battle-automata. All were pledged to the Omnissian Faithful but had needed a leader in the field. Someone of a tactical mind and destructive disposition to help the rebels in a campaign of sabotage and subversion.

When Lennox had joined them, they had found just such a leader.

‘Ten seconds,’ the princeps told the rebel constructs about her. Her seconds, Omnek-70 and Galahax Zarco, waited either side of the bulkhead. Omnek-70 was skitarii – a Ranger who carried the length of a transuranic arquebus. Zarco, meanwhile, was a hulking enginseer who hefted a power axe in the shape of an Omnissian cog. Lennox listened for the sound of the drill and phase fields on different materials. She stamped on the deck.

‘Ratchek,’ she called to her former moderatii and the Mole’s goggled operator. ‘Kill the main drive. Open outer doors.’

The layered bulkheads sighed hydraulically, and slipped aside to reveal the shadowy interior of the scaffold complex.

Lennox nodded. ‘Go.’

The structure was swarming with afflicted constructs going about their duties, and before long Lennox and her rebels found themselves fighting up through the blind spots and gauntlets of the scaffold interior. Meanwhile, heavily armed security forces – drawn from their perimeter posts by the Mole’s emergence – were running across the assembly yards and converging upon the Titan.

The compartments and ladderwells of the towering complex were filled with the cacophony of gunfire. The Omnissian Faithful had to make use of whatever untainted weaponry they could scavenge and could not afford god-pleasing uniformity. Laslocks blasted bolts across the darkness of the decks. Shells from stub-carbines tore up through catwalks. Arc rifles threw streams of lightning along gantries. Lennox anticipated the arrival of the rebels by tearing grenades from her bandolier and throwing them up through the ladderwells and into the levels above.

Ajax Abominata, even in the final stages of its dread assembly, was what she had come to expect from a corrupted god-machine, swarming with twisted artisans prattling scrapcode and insanity.

The rebels moved up at speed and with merciless gunfire delivered at point-blank range. The corrupted army of constructs tending the monstrous Titan were ill-equipped to repel such a direct attack. The assembly yard’s security forces and shock troops hadn’t entertained the possibility of an assault on Temple-Tarantyne coming up through the installation’s foundations. While they babbled and ran towards the towering scaffold, Lennox and her rebels hauled themselves up through the structure. Heavy servitors and cyborg corruptions shrieked as they were blasted aside. Chainblades opened up the traitor constructs in fountains of blood and oil before sending them flailing off the scaffold’s edge.

The rapid advance was not met without resistance. About them the very metal of the Titan’s outer hull and the surrounding scaffolding warped with daemonic presence. Infernal eyes opened in the walls. Hatches opened explosively to vomit acidic ichor or shoot grasping tentacles at the rebels. Deck openings became fang-lined mouths that cut insurgents in half. The fighting got close and tangled on a platform crowded with strapped-down stores and cargo nets. They were rushed by servitors with black filth bubbling from their mouth-grilles and a fell light behind their eyes. Lennox ordered her expendable ferals with their limb-fused weaponry into the fray, supported by engineered hulks who tore the traitor servitors limb from corrupted limb.

Higher up, the rebels became caught in a furious exchange of fire as a twisted member of the Titan crew took charge on the scaffold deck, joined by sentries running up the mobile gantries. The stairwell turned into a horrific kill-zone. Lennox didn’t have time or bodies to spare in pushing on through and so cut up through the mesh flooring with her chainblade. Sending a small group up through the hole with Galahax Zarco, she watched the enginseer swing his power axe about him. With heavy footfalls he took apart possessed servitors and buried the crackling weapon in the Titan crewmember with a sickening thud. With the gauntlet broken, Lennox ordered the rebels onwards and upwards.

The compartments about the Titan’s command deck had been locked off by the time the rebels reached it. Engineering constructs gargled corruption at them through the metal.

‘We don’t have time for this,’ Lennox said to Omnek-70 and Zarco. Levelling his arquebus at the doors, Omnek-70 punched round after transuranic round through the bulkhead and into the cavity compartment beyond. As the sound of the tainted constructs died away, the enginseer buried the crackling cog of his axe in one of the round-punctured doors and heaved it aside. Lennox slipped through, her plasma caliver hugged in at her chest.

The compartment stank of corruption and was wreathed in a lead-coloured smoke. There were warped bodies on the floor with gaping holes through their polluted workings where Omnek-70 had shot them through. A tech-adept came at the princeps, wielding a heavy multi-tool like a club. Leaning into the kick of the caliver, she blasted the thing into oblivion, before turning to face another filth-spewing construct, burning it from existence.

‘Open it up,’ Lennox said to Galahax Zarco as they strode through the compartment and climbed up onto the outer shell of the Titan’s head. From there they could see many other Titans in the gloom of the colossal assembly yard. They were all in different stages of completion, some surrounded by warped scaffolding. Lennox looked down at the corrupted hull of Ajax Abominata beneath her boots. The princeps could feel the suffering of the afflicted machine-spirit within.

‘Princeps,’ Omnek-70 called from the scaffold exterior, his optics whirring through different filters. He pointed out across the assembly yard. ‘The Ventorum is powering up.’

Lennox grunted. The Warlord Titan Belladon Ventorum was one of the many god-machines waiting in the assembly yard precincts for transportation off-world – and it had stood there a long time, judging by its relatively uncorrupted appearance. While most of its weaponry was too powerful to use without damaging the precious Ajax Abominata, its mighty gatling blaster was capable of turning the scaffolding upon which they stood into a blur of shredded scrap.

‘Enginseer, work fast,’ she called.

‘As fast as I can,’ Zarco replied. While a simple hatch, even a reinforced one, shouldn’t have been a problem for a priest of Mars, the corrupted metal sickeningly retracted from Zarco’s tools.

As he finally forced the grotesque thing open, Omnek-70 pointed his arquebus down into the musty darkness of the bridge space. There was no crew on the command deck and Lennox didn’t have time for the intricacies of sabotaging such a complex machine. All she knew was that the most sophisticated piece of equipment on a Titan was the manifold interface and mind-impulse technologies that would link the crew to the machine. Zarco stood aside to let Lennox get past him to the hatch.

‘Pass them along,’ the princeps ordered, as her rebel followers formed a line.

One by one they passed along the demolition packs they had carried with them. Zarco primed the timers before handing the devices over to Lennox, who dropped them down through the hatch.

‘Go!’ she called, moving the Omnissian Faithful off the Titan’s afflicted hull and back into the scaffold complex.

A mobile gantry completed its ponderous swing into position, connecting with the scaffolding, and Lennox’s constructs began exchanging heavy fire with enemy forces running the length of the groaning platform. A tech-thrall exploded in gore and workings as the beam of some tainted weapon hit him. Servo-automata were blasted to shreds and gun-servitors received glowing auto-rounds to the head.

‘Get back!’ Lennox ordered, unleashing a storm of plasma up the ladderwell.

She felt the metal of the walls about her retract and tremble with fury and pain as the plasma stream burned up through both opening and flooring to turn the deck above into a light storm. The half-bodies of smouldering constructs thudded down on top of them.

A daemoniac artisan screeched at the rebels. ‘And you, afflicted thing!’ Lennox roared back, slapping another tri-flask into her plasma caliver and blasting a response. She felt the metal hand of Omnek-70 on her shoulder.

It was time to leave.

‘Tactical withdrawal,’ she ordered, prompting a vat-engineered work-hulk carrying a heavy stubber to stream suppressing fire along the length of the mobile gantry, allowing the rebels time to slide back down through the lower decks. Throwing the caliver across her back on its strap, Lennox clasped the edge of a ladder with the inside of her boots and a loose-gloved grip. Sliding down through the corpse-strewn decks of Ajax Abominata’s rig, she hit the bottom and got out of the way for Omnek-70 and the much larger Zarco.

The ground floor was a storm of thin, dark beams and arc streams tearing through the scaffolding from reinforcements closing in from outside. The assembly yards were huge and it had taken the installation’s sentries some time to converge upon the Mole and the targeted Titan. The gunfire of Dark Mechanicum constructs cut through the jabbering scrapcode and klaxons shrieking across the assembly yard. As rebels stumbled through the lower level, many were cut down by infernal shock troops closing on their transport.

‘Ratchek, reverse drill,’ Lennox called to the moderatii as she hauled herself up to the scratched hull of Archimedex. Slapping thralls and limping battle-automata in through the Mole’s hatch, Lennox felt the scaffold’s superstructure tremble.

The explosives fired.

Ajax Abominata’s command deck exploded, blasting the head of the Titan into nothing more than shattered wreckage, raining flaming debris down through the scaffold rig.

‘Princeps,’ Omnek-70 said with a cyborg’s lack of emotion and urgency, and pulled Lennox towards the waiting Mole. She nodded. The mighty Belladon Ventorum was also sending quakes through the assembly yards with its every step, the monstrous Titan moving into position. The rebels’ work here was done. Ajax Abominata would be going nowhere without a command deck.

With Zarco and Omnek-70 in, Lennox stepped inside the transport and heaved the bulkhead shut.

Safe once more below ground, Archimedex nonetheless rocked with the quaking force of the explosions above as Belladon Ventorum opened fire upon the scaffolding complex of its sister engine.

Climbing down through the Mole, Lennox felt the rumble fade as they ploughed down through the bedrock to safety. Not even a Warlord’s terrible weaponry could reach them down here.

It was a job well done. She had denied the Warmaster Ajax Abominata, saving the countless loyalist lives that the monstrous machines would have claimed. She turned and hit the internal vox-stud.

‘Ratchek, fire up the noospherics,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘Have Invalis Base advised – mission success. Tell them we’re inbound.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by Mikhail Savier.

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