But no sight in the Choral City compared to the Sirenhold.
Not even the magnificence of the palace outshone the Sirenhold, its towering walls defining the Choral City with their immensity. The brutal battlements diminished everything around them, and the sacred fortress of the Sirenhold humbled even the snow-capped peaks of the mountains. Within its walls, enormous tomb-spires reached for the skies, their walls encrusted with monumental sculptures that told the legends of Isstvan’s mythical past.
The legends told that Isstvan himself had sung the world into being with music that could still be heard by the blessed Warsingers, and that he had borne countless children with whom he populated the first ages of the world. They became night and day, ocean and mountain, a thousand legends whose breath could be felt in every moment of every day in the Choral City.
Darker carvings told of the Lost Children, the sons and daughters who had forsaken their father and been banished to the blasted wasteland of the fifth planet, where they became monsters that burned with jealousy and raised black fortresses from which to brood upon their expulsion from paradise.
War, treachery, revelation and death; all marched around the Sirenhold in endless cycles of myth, the weight of their meaning pinning the Choral City to the soil of Isstvan III and infusing its every inhabitant with their sacred purpose.
The gods of Isstvan III were said to sleep in the Sirenhold, whispering their murderous plots in the nightmares of children and ancients.
For a time, the myths and legends had remained as distant as they had always been, but now they walked among the people of the Choral City, and every breath of wind shrieked that the Lost Children had returned.
Without knowing why, the populace of Isstvan III had armed and unquestioningly followed the orders of Vardus Praal to defend their city. An army of well-equipped soldiers awaited the invasion they had long been promised was coming in the western marches of the city, where the Warsingers had sung a formidable web of trenches into being.
Artillery pieces parked in the gleaming canyons of the city pointed their barrels westwards, set to pound any invaders into the ground before they reached the trenches. The warriors of the Choral City would then slaughter any that survived in carefully prepared crossfire.
The defenses had been meticulously planned, protecting the city from attack from the west, the only direction in which an invasion could be launched.
Or so the soldiers manning the defenses had been told.
The first omen was a fire in the sky that came with the dawn.
A scattering of falling stars streaked through the blood-red dawn, burning through the sky like fiery tears.
The sentries in the trenches saw them falling in bright spears of fire, the first burning object smashing into the trenches amid a plume of mud and flame.
At the speed of thought, the word raced around the Choral City that the Lost Children had returned, that the prophecies of myth were coming true.
They were proven right when the drop-pods burst open and the Astartes of the Death Guard Legion emerged.
And the killing began.
PART TWO
THE CHORAL CITY
EIGHT
Soldiers from hell
Butchery
Betrayal
‘T
HIRTY SECONDS
!’
YELLED
Vipus, his voice barely audible over the screaming jets as the drop-pod sliced through Isstvan III’s atmosphere. The Astartes of Locasta were bathed in red light and for a moment Loken imagined what they would look like to the people of the Choral City when the assault began – warriors from another world, soldiers from hell.
‘What’s our landing point looking like?’ shouted Loken.
Vipus glanced at the readout on a pict-screen mounted above his head. ‘Drifting! We’ll hit the target, but off-centre. I hate these things. Give me a stormbird any day!’
Loken didn’t bother replying, barely able to hear Nero as the atmosphere thickened beneath the drop-pod and the jets on its underside kicked in. The drop-pod shuddered and began heating up as the enormous forces pushing against it turned to fire and noise.
He sat through the last few minutes while everything around him was noise, unable to see the enemy he was about to fight and relinquishing control over his fate until the drop-pod hit.
Nero had been right when he said he had preferred an assault delivered by stormbird, the precise, surgical nature of an airborne assault far preferable to a warrior than this hurtling descent from above.
But the Warmaster had decided that the speartip would be deployed by drop-pod, reasoning – rightly, Loken admitted – that thousands of Astartes smashing into the defenders’ midst without warning would be more psychologically devastating. Loken ran through the moment the drop-pod would hit in his mind, preparing himself for when the hatch charges would blow open.
He gripped his bolter tightly, and checked for the tenth time that his chainsword was in its scabbard at his side. Loken was ready.
‘Ten seconds, Locasta,’ shouted Vipus.
Barely a second later, the drop-pod impacted with such force that Loken’s head snapped back and suddenly the noise was gone and everything went black.
L
UCIUS KILLED HIS
first foe without even breaking stride.
The dead man’s armour was like glass, shimmering and iridescent, and his halberd’s blade was fashioned from the same reflective substance. A mask of stained glass covered his face, the mouth represented by leading and filled with teeth of gemlike triangles.
Lucius slid his sword clear, blood smoking from its edge, as the soldier slumped to the floor. A curved arch of marble shone red in the dawn’s early light above him and a swirl of dust and debris drifted around the drop-pod he had just leapt from.
The Precentor’s Palace stood before him, vast and astonishing, a stone flower with the spire at its centre like a spectacular twist of overlapping granite petals.
More drop-pods hammered into the ground behind him, the plaza around the palace’s north entrances the main objective of the Emperor’s Children. A nearby drop-pod blew open and Ancient Rylanor stepped from its red-lit interior, his assault cannon already cycling and tracking for targets. ‘Nasicae!’ yelled Lucius. ‘To me!’ Lucius saw a flash of coloured glass from inside the palace, movement beyond the sweeping stone panels of the entrance hall.
More palace guards reacted to the sudden, shocking assault, but contrary to what Lucius had been expecting, they weren’t screaming or begging for mercy. They weren’t even fleeing, or standing stock still, numb with shock.
With a terrible war cry the palace guard charged and Lucius laughed, glad to be facing a foe with some backbone. He leveled his sword and ran towards them, Squad Nasicae following behind him, weapons at the ready.
A hundred palace guardians ran at them, resplendent in their glass armour. They formed a line before the Astartes, levelled their halberds, and opened fire.
Searing needles of silver filled the air around Lucius, gouging the armour of his shoulder guard and leg. Lucius lifted his sword arm to shield his head and the needles spat from the glowing blade of his sword. Where they hit the stone around the entrance it bubbled and hissed like acid.
One of Nasicae fell beside Lucius, one arm molten and his abdomen bubbling.
‘Perfection and death!’ cried Lucius, running through the white-hot silver needles. The Emperor’s Children and the Palace Guard clashed with a sound like a million windows breaking the terrible screaming of the halberd-guns giving way to the clash of blade against armour and point-blank bolter fire.
Lucius’s first sword blow hacked through a halberd shaft and tore through the throat of the man before him. Sightless glass eyes glared back at him, blood pumping from the guard’s ruined throat, and Lucius tore the helm from his foe’s head to better savour the sensation of his death.
A plasma pistol spat a tongue of liquid fire that wreathed an enemy soldier from head to foot, but the man kept fighting, sweeping his halberd down to cut deep into one of Lucius’s men before another Astartes ripped off his head with a chainsword.
Lucius pivoted on one foot from a halberd strike and hammered the hilt of his sword into his opponent’s face, feeling a tight anger that the faceplate held. The guard staggered away from him and Lucius reversed his grip and thrust the blade through the gap between the glass plates at the guard’s waist, feeling the blade’s energy field burning through abdomen and spine.
These guards were slowing the Emperor’s Children down, buying precious moments with their lives for something deeper in the palace. As much as Lucius was revelling in the sensations of the slaughter, the smell of the blood, the searing stink of flesh as the heat of his blade scorched it and the pounding of blood in veins, he knew he could not afford to give the defenders such moments.
Lucius ran onwards, slicing his blade through limbs and throats as he ran. He fought as though following the steps of an elaborate dance, a dance where he played the part of the victor and the enemy were there only to die. The Palace Guard were dying around him and his armour was drenched with their blood. He laughed in sheer joy. Warriors still fought behind him, but Lucius had to press on before the palace guard was able to stall their advance with more men in front of them.
‘Squad Quemondil! Rethaerin! Kill these and then follow me!’
Fire sawed from every direction as the Emperor’s Children forced their way towards the junction Lucius had reached. The swordsman darted his head past the corner, seeing a vast indoor seascape. A plume of water cascaded through a hole in the centre of a colossal granite dome, and a shaft of pink light fell alongside the water, sending brilliant rainbows of colour between the arches formed by the petals of the dome’s surface.
Islands rose from the indoor sea that took up most of the dome, each topped by picturesque follies of white and gold.
Thousands of palace guards massed in the dome, splashing towards them through the waist-deep sea and taking up positions among the follies. Most wore the glassy armour of the men still dying behind Lucius, but many others were clad in far more elaborate suits of bright silver. Others still were wrapped in long streamers of silk that rippled behind them like smoke as they moved.
Rylanor emerged into the dome behind Lucius, his assault cannon smoking and the chisel-like grips of his power fist thick with blood.
‘They’re massing,’ spat Lucius. ‘Where are the damned World Eaters?’
‘We shall have to win the palace by ourselves,’ replied Rylanor, his voice grating from deep within his sarcophagus.
Lucius nodded, pleased that they would be able to shame the World Eaters. ‘Ancient, cover us. Emperor’s Children, break and cover fire! Nasicae, keep up this time!’
Ancient Rylanor stepped out from the junction and a spectacular wave of fire sheared through the air around him, a storm of heavy caliber shell casings and oil-soaked fumes streaming from the cannon mounted on his shoulder.
His explosive fire shredded the stone of the foremost island’s follies, broken and bloodied bodies tumbling from the shattered wreckage.
‘Go!’ shouted Lucius, but the Emperor’s Children were already charging, their training so thorough that every warrior already knew his place in the complex pattern of overlapping fire and movement that sent the strike force sweeping into the dome.
Savage joy lit up Lucius’s face as he charged the thrill of battle and the sensations of killing stimulating his body with wondrous excess.
In a swirling cacophony of noise, the perfection of death had come to the Choral City.
O
N THE SOUTHERN SIDE
of the palace, a strange organically formed building clung to the side of the palace like a parasite, its bulging, liquid shape more akin to something that had been grown than something built. Its pale marble was threaded with dark veins and the masses of its battlements hung like ripened fruit. From the expanse of marble monument slabs marking the passing of the city’s finest and most powerful citizens, it was clear that this was a sacred place.
Known as the Temple of the Song, it was a memorial to the music that Father Isstvan had sung to bring all things into existence. It was also the objective of the World Eaters. The word that the invasion had begun was already out by the time the first World Eaters’ drop-pods crashed into the plaza, shattering gravestones and throwing slabs of marble into the air. Strange music keened through the morning air, calling the people of the Choral City from their homes and demanding that they take up arms. The soldiers from the nearby city barracks grabbed their guns as the Warsingers appeared on the battlements of the Temple to sing the song of death for the invaders.
Called by the Warsingers’ laments, the people of the city gathered in the streets and streamed towards the battle.
The World Eaters’ strike force was led by Captain Ehrlen, and as he emerged from his drop-pod, he was expecting the trained soldiers that Angron had briefed them on, not thousands of screaming citizens swarming onto the plaza. They came in a tide, armed with anything and everything they had in their homes, but it was not the weapons they carried but their sheer numbers and the terrible song that spoke of killing and murder that made them deadly.
‘World Eaters, to me!’ yelled Ehrlen, hefting his bolter and aiming it into the mass of charging people.
The white-armoured warriors of the World Eaters formed a firing line around him, turning their bolters outwards.
‘Fire!’ shouted Ehrlen and the first ranks of the Choral City’s inhabitants were cut down by the deadly volley, but the oncoming mass rose up like a spring tide as they clambered over the bodies of the dead.
As the gap between the two forces closed, the World Eaters put up their bolters and drew their chainswords.
Ehrlen saw the unreasoning hatred in the eyes of his enemies and knew that this battle was soon to turn into a massacre.