CHAPTER 22

  The Order of the Thorn did not wait for the heretic army to unleash the purging fires.

  The Tower of Grasping Faith had fallen to corruption. Aesura saw that it was beyond salvation the moment she crossed the threshold of the grand entrance on the north side of the parvis. The stones of the parvis retained their identity and solidity. They were not holy, but they had not become part of the flesh and bone of ruin. But Grasping Faith had become as tainted as the cathedrum. The necessary destruction of the cathedrum would be the one act that would pain Aesura. She would not hesitate when the time came. It had been defiled. It could no longer claim to be consecrated ground. She left it standing for now because it could yet serve a purpose. It suited her to let Cerastes see it as a prize he had already won.

  The Tower of Grasping Faith served a purpose too. It could not be levelled without compromising the structural stability of the palace and its environs. The time might come when Aesura would take such measures. She would preserve the palace if possible. The people of the renewed Legitur would need somewhere to look to, and to look up to, for the edicts to govern the new shape of their lives.

  Grasping Faith had also given her the battleground for her confrontation with the Traitor Astartes. So it would not fall.

  But the tower would burn. It and everyone who resided within.

  ‘We are the flame of the Emperor’s wrath, sisters,’ she voxed the Order. She stood astride the roof of the Immolator Molten Grace, just behind the throne of Sister Irella, who had the controls of the turret’s immolation flamers. Two Castigator battle tanks flanked the Molten Grace, and two rows of Rhinos followed behind, and the infantry squads came after. The vehicles filled the width of the hall, an advancing, dreadful wall. Aesura’s front lines formed not a spearhead, but an incandescent hammer. ‘Baptise these halls with the blessings of that wrath.’

  Her sisters obeyed. Flamers erupted on both sides of the column, bathing walls and streaming ignited promethium into the habs. Screams erupted from the interiors, and figures writhed their ends in doorways. Aesura felt no pity. Anyone who chose to remain in such a tainted building shared in its sin, and so must share in its fate.

  The phalanx of sanctified anger descended through Grasping Faith, and the tower burned at its passage. It became a torch, a burnt offering of repentance, whether its residents expressed regret for their sins or not.

  ‘There are no martyrs here,’ Aesura thundered. ‘There are only the con­­demned. Each death is an act of cleansing, and we shall surely see Legitur cleansed!’

  The Order of the Thorn dropped swiftly through the levels. The journey took long enough for Aesura to grow impatient. She had overestimated Cerastes’ speed of advance.

  ‘Our foe is a laggard,’ Repentia Superior Grieva voxed on a private channel.

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Should we have waited another hour or more?’

  ‘No, sister,’ said Aesura. ‘Though I share your eagerness to put an end to the heretic, I have chosen to meet him deep in the tower. He will be far from his goal of the palace, and far, too, from the ground level of the Lower Glyphs. He and the foul things that follow him will have nowhere to go or hide.’

  A short time later, she heard the sounds she had expected coming from below. She heard combat, screams of pain and shrieks of ecstasy. She heard running feet, a stampede gathering speed. She read a tale through those sounds. She did not need reports from the commanders of the Zealot Spears to know she heard the exultation of a victorious surge and the shame of retreat.

  ‘Our moment comes, sisters,’ she called. ‘In their weakness, the forces of the Astra Militarum deliver the heretic to our vengeful grasp.’

  The vehicle ramp of the hall reached its terminus, switched back on itself and descended to the next level. As the Molten Grace reached the halfway point on the ramp, and Aesura had a commanding perspective of the entire hall before her, the shambles of battle arrived at the far end from the level below. The remains of the contingent of the Zealot Spears rushed forward in full retreat. The troops staggered under the weight of war’s exhaustion. The moral and physical erosion caused by the assaults of the Ruinous Powers had taken their toll.

  Aesura brought her front line to a halt, holding position to retain the heights for the first shock of combat.

  She saw terror in the faces that came her way, and felt no pity. If the troopers’ faith had been stronger, they would have fought harder and been more able to ward off the corrupting touch of the plague. At the very least, they would have died for their Emperor rather than turn tail and flee the heretic.

  There could be no consideration for them in what happened next. They would survive or they would not. Their fate lay in the hands of the God-Emperor. It did not concern her.

  Little remained of the Zealot Spears that had been holding this tower. They had not crossed a third of the hall’s length when the enemy appeared, a horde of everything that was Legitur and everything that had led to its fall. The rags that adorned the distorting flesh of the heretics told the tale of what these creatures had been. They had been the destitute and they had been the privileged. They had been enforcers. They had been troopers and officers of the Zealot Spears. They had been students and lecturers of the Collegium Sanctificatus. They had been members of the Ecclesiarchy. No corner of Legitur’s society had been immune to the temptations of the Ruinous Powers. No corner would be safe from Aesura’s wrath.

  Aesura could not see Cerastes yet. No matter. Time to scythe her way through his cultists until she found him.

  ‘Open fire,’ Aesura commanded. ‘Let the Emperor’s wrath consume the heretic.’

  A storm of shells, las and flaming promethium raged across the hall. The storm of judgement roared ahead of the advancing Battle Sisters. The Zealot Spears rushed to get out of the way of the oncoming juggernaut. They parted before the Order of the Thorn, fleeing left and right to the other side of the pillars from the heavy armour. The cannons fired straight ahead as the vehicles clanked down to the level floor. They neither targeted nor avoided the troopers. Many made it to the relative safety of the flanks. The conflagration caught up many others. They died along with the heretics, incinerated and blown apart. The storm pulverised human bodies, enemy and ally vanishing, reduced to ash and vapour.

  The Sisters surged along the hall, their barrage unceasing. Its edges sliced through pillars at the far end of the hall. They fell, bringing down broken slabs of rockcrete with them, crushing the struggling ants below, and then the next volleys blew the rubble to choking powder. The heretics kept rising from the lower level, hurling themselves into the blasts as if the strength of their abominated faith would give them victory.

  Aesura looked at the retreating troopers. Her jaw tightened in contempt. That heretics should show greater zeal than the sworn and trained soldiers of an Astra Militarum regiment disgusted her beyond words.

  ‘Where do you run to?’ she shouted, the vox-speakers of the Molten Grace projecting her rage above the roaring booms of the guns. ‘Do not disgrace yourselves further! Turn and face the enemy!’

  They obeyed, terror splashed across their faces. They feared her more than their foes, Aesura decided. Satisfied, she looked ahead once more. The Adepta Sororitas phalanx had crossed more than half the length of the hall, and the cultists could not advance beyond the arch of the hall’s entrance. Hundreds had died in seconds, their remains little more than black fragments on a cratered and scored floor.

  ‘Cannons, hold your fire,’ Aesura commanded. The far walls had suffered enough damage. She did not want to bring the tower down with her forces inside. The Immolator maintained its stream of fire. Retributor squads moved up on the flanks and in front of the tanks, their heavy flamers widening the wall of incineration. Overhead, a flight of Seraphim soared to the end of the hall and rained bolt pistol fire on the foe. The heretics screamed in pain and fanaticism, but their cries fell more and more beneath the triumphant thunder of the Order of the Thorn. When Aesura did not require the vehicle vox-casters, Dialogus Vexillia used them, her praise of the God-Emperor overwhelming the unspeakable oaths of the enemy.

  Molten Grace approached the arch, its treads crunching over charred fragments of bone. Heretics still climbed up the ramp from below, but fewer, even less of a threat.

  Aesura quashed the perverse sense of disappointment that tried to rise in her chest. She knew better. Satisfaction did not belong in meeting an adequate challenger, but simply in the enemy’s extermination. She also did not believe for a moment that she had turned the tide so quickly. She had a low opinion of the Zealot Spears and Marshal Provallak’s enforcers, but she did not believe them to be utterly incompetent.

  Their weakness of faith condemned them quite sufficiently.

  The ramp turned sharply as it descended. Aesura could not see what waited beyond the bend.

  ‘Resume the full barrage as we make the turn, sisters,’ she voxed. ‘Expect a trap, and reveal to the enemy their foolishness.’

  The Retributors pulled back, letting the three tanks take the lead again. The phalanx made the turn and unleashed the full storm of its fury once more. The explosions tore into a mass of heretics, reaping a huge harvest of death. The thousands barely seemed to notice. They rushed the Order of the Thorn from the front and from the sides, swarming in from between the pillars. They dropped from above. Many had mutated to the point that they could cling to vertical surfaces. They leapt from the columns. They had clustered like bats on the ceiling where it was still low above the ramp. A rain of foul, ragged creatures came down on the Sisters of Battle and scrabbled over the vehicles. They fought with blades and clubs and pistols. They clawed and bit. Individually, they were no threat. Aesura swept them from the top of Molten Grace with her power sword, heads and limbs bouncing and rolling from the armour. The heretics died, their blood washing the implacable forms of the Sisters of Battle. But their mass took its toll. Their corpses piled up on the ramp, slowing the march. They were a cloud of huge insects, a swamp of flesh that turned the advance into a slog.

  The enemy’s captured vehicles lined the hall a few hundred yards ahead, and they met the Order’s fire with their own.

  The hall turned into a cyclonic inferno. Its details vanished in the fury of explosions, flame and searing streaks of las. Aesura could see little beyond the Immolator. ‘Forward,’ she cried. ‘There must be no pause. Here we shatter the strength of the heretic!’

  Molten Grace left the ramp and rumbled ahead on the level floor. The blast of a shell washed flaming promethium back over the Immolator. Aesura shrugged off the burn, merely another purging baptism. In its wake, the air cleared for a moment, and she saw Cerastes. Astride a captured Taurox, he stared back at her. Their hatred burned more brightly than the flames surrounding them. They fired their bolt pistols at the same moment, and then the storm of explosions concealed them from each other once more.

  ‘He is here!’ Aesura shouted. She leapt from the Immolator. She charged forward, slicing through foes with blade and pistol. The cannons held their fire once more, and the heavy flamer turrets aimed their flames higher, arching high over Aesura’s head. The Order of the Thorn had been a hammer. Now it became an incandescent trident, with Aesura the tip of the middle tine, Dominion and Retributor squads backing her charge. On the flanks, the Sisters Repentia met the shrieks of the heretics with their own howls of maddened faith. Driven by Repentia Superior Grieva, they chewed through the enemy with their eviscerators, the snarling teeth of the blades shredding tainted flesh. The heretics fought back with burning fervour, and Aesura now heard what urged them on. She had not at first realised the sounds that assaulted her ear and soul came from a human throat. Cerastes’ voice, deep and grinding, chanted in a tongue no world of the materium had ever spawned. Its unholy rhythms coiled around the paroxysms of battle, a serpent of ruin. The heretics answered its call with their shrieks, their tortured vocal cords shaping syllables they could not possibly understand but that enflamed their blood.

  Cerastes’ chant clawed at Aesura. It sought to plunge fangs and venom into her soul. ‘I am the Emperor’s scourge!’ she shouted back. ‘I am the blade of His judgement! His arm wields me, and His fury is my strength!’

  Her sisters echoed her, and she drove forward. The edges of the materium began to curl and smoulder. Arriving in answer to Cerastes’ prayer, unholy fire threatened to tear open the reality of the hall. Visions of monstrous, lethal transformation gathered just beyond the horizon of Aesura’s consciousness. She drove harder into the mass of the enemy. Cerastes’ witchery could not concern her. It could have no purchase on the sanctity of her mission. It did nothing but bring her closer to destroying him. She could still not see him. She could not see more than a few feet into the blinding maelstrom that consumed the hall. But she could hear him. He marked himself as a target, and she drew nearer. A few more seconds, and she would tear his throat wide open.

  She pushed forward, through flame and flesh, and still forward. She reached the Taurox on which Cerastes had been standing, and found it a burning shell, blown open by a concentrated attack by the Seraphim squad. Cerastes was not here. She could still hear him chanting, but more faintly. Already, the materium had begun to reassert its solidity.

  A crowd of heretics, their faces scarred with burns, threw themselves in Aesura’s way. She cut them down, flanked by flamer and bolter fire. Past the hulk of the Taurox, the way ahead had become clearer. The enemy still had two vehicles, but one of them only managed sporadic salvos, and the mass of heretics had begun to thin. The visibility had extended to several yards, though the flashes of blasts and the rolling clouds of smoke brought it back down to zero every few seconds.

  ‘Sister Narcoria,’ Aesura voxed the Seraphim Superior, ‘do you see the Word Bearer?’

  ‘No longer, Sister Palatine,’ Narcoria answered. ‘We did see him retreat, though. After he had slain two of my sisters.’

  ‘We will exact vengeance from the coward’s hide,’ said Aesura. ‘You have my oath on that.’

  Cerastes’ voice had grown fainter still, but was not yet inaudible. He could not be far.

  The spearhead plunged through the heretics, and the air cleared a bit more as the return fire lessened. The stench of burned flesh filled the hall. Aesura breathed in the harsh scent of judgement, and she marched faster. Now the arch at the end of the hall came into view, and for the first time in many levels, the path split. Straight ahead, the floor dipped and turned into the ramp going down. To the right, a narrower way led out onto a crossway connecting the Tower of Grasping Faith to Belain Tower. Heretics clustered in both directions.

  ‘We take the crossway,’ Aesura voxed the squads.

  ‘Might the enemy be seeking to draw us away from Grasping Faith?’ Sister Superior Beghentsia asked.

  ‘I believe the reverse is true,’ Aesura answered, decapitating two more cultists with swift strikes of her powerblade. ‘The Word Bearer has retreated along the crossway, and the forces below are the distraction.’

  Cerastes had fallen silent, but he had chanted a few moments too long, and Aesura knew his voice had not come from the next level down.

  The Order of the Thorn turned onto the crossway, chewing through the enemy blocking that path without having to slow, and emerged into the open air.

  The smoke of battle billowed up. It spread itself over the crossway like a storm cloud. The way forward was narrower than in the tower. The crosswalk, delicate in its proportions, was long and narrow, with just enough room for the Adepta Sororitas tanks to advance one at a time. The heretics crowded it. If they thought the constricted space would give them an advantage, Aesura thought, then their delusions were almost worthy of pity.

  ‘Drive them to their doom!’ Aesura called, and charged along the crossway.

  A thick cloud of smoke rolled over the far end. A sudden, withering storm of bolter fire burst from within. A shell struck Aesura in the pauldron, hurling her back against Molten Grace. The skull of Dominion Imasora blew apart. Retributor Cardya’s heavy flamer exploded, bathing her in flaming promethium. Dying, transformed into a blazing torch, she saved her sisters from the spread of her doom by hurling herself over the side of the crossway. She fell, a candle and then a spark, tumbling and dwindling until swallowed by the gloom of the depths.

  A gust of wind cleared the smoke, and Cerastes appeared, crozius raised in triumph. He marched forward, accompanied by the impossible.

  A squad of Word Bearers marched with him.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Eightfold Bane was reborn.

  My brothers, Cerastes thought.

  The circumstances of the host’s resurrection were not ideal. Even so, Orthaon had been able to forge thirteen Word Bearers out of the raw material of the Abandoned and the progenoid glands he had saved. Only two had not been viable, then. Another victory.

  There had been no time for training. These new legionaries would not fight with the skill Cerastes and Orthaon could bring to bear. They would have to depend primarily on the strength of their new bodies, and on the capabilities of their weapons and their power armour.

  That would be enough, Cerastes thought. The training would come, and war was a fine tutor.

  And the nature of their baptism bore the blessing of the gods. The first blood the new Eightfold Bane drew was from the Order of the Thorn.

  The Raptured between the Word Bearers and the Adepta Sororitas shrieked in ecstasy. They died in the crossfire, many taken down by the bolter shells of the Eightfold Bane. That only increased the intensity of their frenzy. They welcomed the exaltation of death, whether theirs or their foe’s.

  ‘Let all Legitur learn the lesson of this day!’ Cerastes called. ‘Teach well, my brothers! Teach the enemy fresh dimensions of terror!’