the cloying, hot air with shells and gunsmoke.
It was hard going, the Word Bearers forced to fight for every step of the mammoth climb up the interior of the Titan's lower leg. Kol Badar's destroyed eye, still with the shrapnel shard jutting from the socket, was throbbing in his head, but he pushed the sensation away as he stamped up the heavy, grilled stairway, blazing away with his combi-bolter.
He was at the front of the line of Terminators, the heavy-flamer wielding Anointed warrior Bokkar at his side. Between the flames of his comrade and the bolts of his combi-weapon, few of the Skitarii could stand against them. Those few that survived were ripped apart by the warlord's power claws and hurled over the railing to fall down the open expanse in the centre of the spiralling stairwell to join a growing pile of sparking, shattered corpses.
The resistance from above slackened. Clearly the last of the Skitarii had been neutralised, leaving just the inbuilt, servitor-guided sentry guns to hamper their progress. The going was unsteady as the heavy Titan foot smashed down into the ground with devastating force and rose once more into the air.
Kol Badar allowed a pair of cult members wielding reaper autocannons to advance past him, for their powerful guns were able to rip through the armoured plating protecting the sentry guns far more efficiently than flame or bolt. It was a torturous task, for they had to advance up through a barrage of gunfire before they could get a clear shot at the servitor housed just beneath the turret, but time was of the essence.
Up and up the Terminators wound, under constant, desperate attack from the Skitarii climbing behind them and the sentry turrets. Ammunition was running low, and with a blast of fiery promethium directed down over the open stairwell to melt the exposed flesh of a dozen enemy machine-warriors, the last of the heavy flamer reloads was expended. Even if they had not a bolt shell remaining, Kol Badar would fight on and succeed. He would die, with all his Anointed at his side, before he would allow the bitch of a Titan to best him once again. He would rip it apart piece by piece with his bare hands if need be.
The noise of turning machinery became increasingly loud as the Terminators neared the Imperator's knee joint. Abruptly, the last sentry gun was silenced, the milky life-blood of the servitor dripping down through the latticed grill to fall upon its brethren advancing from below. At Kol Badar's direction, blinking demolition melta-charges were attached to bulkheads where he indicated, as scattered gunfire roared up from below, shearing through the metal stairs. Scores of charges were placed, four times the amount that were used to blast away the mountainside. Kol Badar was taking no chances.
He nodded as he studied the placement of the blinking charges.
'Commence the descent,' he ordered and the Anointed warriors began to fight their way back down the staircase that they had just fought so hard to ascend.
'If he's failed, this war is going to be over very quickly,' replied Marduk.
He climbed atop a rocky outcrop, allowing the ranks of the Host to advance past him. Vehicles rumbled forward slowly, and Dreadnoughts and Defilers stalked across the broken ground. Burias climbed up behind him, planting the icon in the ground at the First Acolyte's side.
The Imperator raised its leg for another step. A series of internal explosions suddenly burst out around its knee-joint. Flames and smoke erupted from the mechanical joint, a mass of detonation within ripping through the thick, reinforced metal. The bastion foot touched down on the floor of the ravine and a secondary flash of timed demolition charges erupted. For a moment it looked as though they had had no effect, until the knee joint gave way beneath the immense weight of the Titan and it lurched to one side as if in slow motion, thousands of tonnes of metal teetering over the battlefield.
Its weapon arms flailed out as if trying to steady the toppling god-machine, but the Titan was falling, gaining speed as its weight bore it down on the ground. There was silence as it crashed to the ground, until the bastion of one shoulder slammed into the sheer cliff face, causing the mountain range to shudder beneath the impact, and an avalanche of rock was sheared from the cliff. Off balance, the impact caused the Imperator to swing towards the ravine wall and the leering head of the great machine smashed straight into the rock face with a resounding crash. The other leg of the Titan, bearing the entire weight of the colossal machine, buckled suddenly with a screeching sound of wrenching metal. The Imperator slammed to the ground with a deafening boom that echoed through the ravine. The impact caused avalanches of rock and rubble, and hundreds of Guardsmen and Skitarii were slain. A rising cloud of dust obscured the fallen, broken Titan.
As one, the Word Bearers roared victoriously at the sight of the mighty war god dying and Burias raised the Host's icon high into the air for all to see.
'Advance and kill!' roared Marduk and the Host descended upon the shattered vanguard.
After killing the traitor Pierlo, Varnus had expected to be slain by his captives, but if anything, his action seemed to have garnered a kind of hateful respect from the hunched, black-clad overseers. Oh, they had hurt him as they prised him off the corpse of the traitor, filling his body with agonising torment as the vile serums that filled their needle fingers assaulted his nerve endings, but he had been expecting far worse.
But no, he had been dragged from the tower and placed on the chirurgeons' familiar, cold, steel slab. There was no Discord there and he felt naked without it speaking to him. There the spindly creatures had prodded and probed him. They seemed particularly interested in the symbol beneath the skin of his forehead, chittering excitedly amongst themselves. They drew blood from him and fed burning black liquid into his veins. Small, black leech creatures with orange patterns on their backs were attached to him and he howled as they burrowed their heads into his skin. They were pulled back out, bloated and fat, some time later.
The joy of killing the man had filled him with warmth. The traitor had turned against the blessed,
The enemy had taken him back to the tower, transporting him back to the top, now hundreds and hundreds of metres above the ground. He was to work alone. Perhaps the overseers feared that he would kill again if he was teamed up with another slave, and perhaps he would have.
The tower was above the level of the black pollution hanging over the city, and it swirled beneath him. The mighty winds that were building didn't seem to touch the tower; it was as if he stood in the middle of the eye of one of the dust devils that raced across the plains, spinning the salt up in twisting cones of wind. The noxious fumes whipped around the tower and it looked to him like a great, black, whirlpool that stretched out as far as the eye could see.
He felt strange without the cover of the smog overhead. Now he could see the blaring white sun during the day and the stars by night. And always there was the red giant planet Korsis, drawing ever closer. It was so large that it almost filled the skyline and Varnus could see valleys, craters and channels criss-crossing its surface.
The brightness pained his eyes and the lack of oxygen made them heavy and sore. Twice a day he was held down as red-black, stinging drops were inserted into the centres of his eyeballs. He screamed as the sharp needles pierced the aqueous humour of his orbs and injected the substance that squirmed and burned within him.
Tirelessly he worked, doing the job of two men, but the toil no longer drained him as it once had. Indeed, time seemed to pass quickly and he was barely aware of the fall of darkness as the white sun disappeared over the horizon and rose again as he worked, smearing the blood mortar over the stones.
A Discord seemed to favour him, if such a thing was possible, and it hung at his side for hours on end, pounding his eardrums with its blare. He could hear the voices talking to him, teaching him and bolstering him when he felt weak.
Sometimes he shook his head as if waking from slumber and the horror of his predicament washed over him. He would cry out at such times, longing for the Emperor's soldiers to rescue him and his world. He would kick out at the Discord and it would retreat from him. But these moments passed quickly and Varnus would recover himself and be somewhat confused. He couldn't remember why he had been angry and he set back to work with vigour, the feel of the blood mortar familiar and comforting beneath his hands.
The daemon speaker would hover slowly forward until it floated less than a metre from him once again. Sometimes its usually limp tentacles would reach forwards and touch him on the neck or the back as he worked. He would recoil in shock and the thing would retreat once again. Over time, he came to ignore the touch of the thing and in a way he found it almost comforting. He felt a strange, warm, buzzing sensation at its touch, but it was not
