the roiling heavens. From these buildings came the tolling of bells and the sound of monotonous chanting. He awoke covered in sweat, and instantly the pain of separation struck him; he longed to be back atop the tower, working.
Discords blared and told him that the tower had a name. They told him that it was a Gehemehnet. He did not know the word, but it felt right.
It seemed to him that the Gehemehnet breathed, and that he could feel the pulse of its massive heart reverberating through the stone beneath his touch.
He prayed to the Emperor when he thought such things, but it was increasingly hard to remember the words of worship that had been drummed into him by the priests of the Ecclesiarchy.
He looked at Pierlo as the man worked, smearing the blood mortar across the stone face. The man's robes had fallen open and there was something underneath, a shape on the man's shoulder that even the lumps of congealed mortar could not hide.
'What's on your shoulder?' he hissed, his voice alien to him.
Pierlo looked up in irritation, as if rudely interrupted mid-conversation. He pulled at his tattered robe, covering up the mark, and continued with his work, head down.
Varnus risked a glance around and saw that there was no overseer anywhere nearby. His mind feverish and the din of the Discord blaring,
There was a symbol there on the meat of his shoulder, a symbol that he recognised, for he had seen it hundreds of times every day. It was embossed on the sides of the spider cranes and it was stamped into the foreheads of some of the head overseers. He had seen it on the shoulder plate of every cursed traitor Space Marine on the planet. It was a screaming daemon's face and he knew exactly what it proclaimed.
'You are one of them!' he hissed. Instantly the pieces fell together in his mind. He had seen the man leave the meeting room in the palace just moments before it had exploded. He was one of the traitor insurgents that had aided the forces of Chaos.
Pierlo's face twisted hatefully as the two scuffled. Dully, Varnus heard the yells of other slaves, but he paid them no heed. All he could hear was the pounding of blood in his head. This bastard was one of those who had opened the door to the invaders. Hatred swelled within him. His hand snapped out towards Pierlo's face, fingers spread like claws.
The man was no stranger to unarmed combat and he grabbed Varnus's hand as it came close, twisting his wrist painfully. Pierlo's other hand slammed into his solar plexus, fingers extended, and all the breath was driven from him. He sank to the stone. Where Pierlo was of high birth, and had clearly been trained in the arts of combat, Varnus had learnt how to brawl on the streets of Shinar, and he knew that fighting as an art form and fighting tooth and nail for daily survival were two very different things. Varnus had suffered countless beatings in his youth as a hab-ganger and had dished out far more. Even when he had tried to go straight and had secured a job on the salt plains, he had fought in bare-knuckle brawls at night to supplement his meagre income. All that had changed when he had been recruited into the Shinar enforcers, but his skills had come in just as useful there.
Varnus surged up suddenly, landing a fierce blow to Pierlo's chin, quickly followed by a vicious swinging elbow that connected sharply with the man's head. He reeled backwards, about to fall off the wall and probably drag Varnus and half a dozen other slaves with him. Varnus grabbed the thick, spiked chain, yanking the man back onto the stone and straight into a knee that he slammed into Pierlo's groin.
As Pierlo bent forwards in pain, the ex-enforcer drove the point of his elbow down onto the back of his head, dropping him to the stone. Pierlo was motionless, but Varnus had not finished there. His hatred suffusing him, he made a loop with the spiked chain and hooked it around Pierlo's neck, placing a foot on the back of the man's neck. He crossed the chains in his hands and strained, pulling on the chain with all his strength. Though Pierlo wore the same blood-red metal collar as all the slaves, the chain bit deeply around his throat, cutting off his breathing as the spiked barbs sank into flesh. Blood ran from the man's throat, mixing with the mortar atop the stone.
Pain jolted him as the needles of the overseers plunged into his flesh, but he didn't care. His muscles bulged as he hauled on the chains one final time before the searing pain the overseers delivered made him collapse, twitching and convulsing, to the stone alongside Pierlo.
In his mind's eye he saw the sky running red with blood. He knew that Gehemehnet was pleased.
He smiled as he looked into the dead eyes of the traitor.
The earth shook, and as Marduk ripped his chainsword from the guts of a Guardsman he raised his head to pierce the gloom. Rain still lashed the bloody battlefield, but he sensed, as much as he felt, something approaching, something
Lightning flashed, silhouetting a shape that Marduk had initially mistaken for a mountain. This was no mountain though, for it moved inexorably forwards, and the earth shook as it took another laborious step.
With a curse on his lips, Marduk's gaze rose as the immense shape of the Titan was revealed.
It was like some ancient, primeval god from an antediluvian age that continued to stalk the lands long after its kin had passed into myth and legend.
Its metal hide was pitted and scored by wounds that it had suffered during the battles it had waged over its ten thousand year lifetime. It's leering, dull metal face was fire scorched and scarred, though its eyes still burned with red light. Within that metallic cranium sat the Princeps and his Moderati, psychically linked to the Titan. They felt its pain as their own and experienced savage joy as the behemoth laid waste to everything before it.
Advancing through the press of soldiers and tanks, it dwarfed everything in its path. A multi-towered bastion the size of a walled stronghold sat atop its massive, armoured carapace shell. Siege ordnance and battle cannons, of such size that a small tank could drive through the barrels, were housed within this massive structure, and the pennants and banners that adorned it whipped around in the gale. Scores of symbols were emblazoned on the ancient kill banners that hung from the pair of monstrous main guns that the Imperator Titan wielded in place of arms, marking the enemy Titans and super-heavy vehicles that it had destroyed throughout its long history. The air around the giant war machine shimmered with the power of its void shields.
The siege cannons upon the hulking shoulders of the Imperator thumped as they launched their first salvo, and the air was filled with screaming shells that erupted amongst the Word Bearers. Warrior-brothers were thrown through the air and tanks smashed asunder beneath the barrage, but that was as nothing compared to the awesome destruction that was to come. Super-heated plasma fed into the annihilator cannon on the beast's right arm, filling the air with potent hissing that hurt the unprotected ears of the Guardsmen, and the massive barrels of the deadly hellstorm cannon began to rotate, the wind beating fiercely as it picked up speed.
The hellstorm cannon let loose with a torrent of fire from the spinning barrels that tore along the line of Word Bearers, cutting from one side of the valley to the other, ripping through warriors and vehicles alike. The plasma annihilator cannon flared with the power of a contained sun and a gout of white-hot energy roared from its barrel, engulfing a handful of tanks that were instantly returned to their molten base elements.
The destruction that the Imperator wrought was awe inspiring, and a roar rose from the ranks of Imperial Guardsmen as their god-machine unleashed the power of its weapon systems upon the hated foe.
Marduk bared his sharp teeth, hissing up at the monstrous, unstoppable beast. Stabbing beams of energy flashed from the mountainside as the lascannons of the havoc squads positioned there targeted the Imperator. The powerful blasts looked like little more than pin-pricks of light as they strobed towards the Titan. Scores of predator tanks, Land Raiders, Dreadnoughts and daemon engines added their fire to that of the havoc squads as they directed their heavy weapons fire towards the towering behemoth. Missiles, lascannon beams, heavy ordnance shells and streaming plasma speared towards the Titan. Its void shields flashed as they absorbed the incoming firepower, leaving the deadly machine unscathed, and it returned fire with dozens of battle cannons situated in the leg bastions.
The ranks of the Imperial Guard renewed their attack, bolstered by the arrival of the Titan that unleashed the power of its plasma Annihilator once more, firing up into the darkness and blasting away a ridge top, causing salt rock, debris and daemon engines to crash down the sheer cliff in a mass avalanche. Its hellstorm cannons smoked as they spun, tearing along the ridge. Rain turned to steam as it lashed against the super-heated barrels of the mega-weapon. Barrages of ordnance continued to pound at the void shields atop the carapace of the Titan, and
