The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

He was even more careful not to stare towards the enemy. The Raider’s automated and servitor-manned volkite array was more than capable of responding to threats. The last time Arkhan had looked too long out across the enemy horde, he’d been unable to summon speech for several minutes. No aliens, no matter their world of origin, walked as a host of blade-bearing, cyclopean corpses able to ignore the butchery of their own flesh. Many of the horned, graveborn entities seemed animated from Imperial dead. Shattered plates of golden armour still tumbled from their bloated flesh.

Zephon aided the Sister with her wound bindings. His metal hands twitched, but not enough to ruin his efforts. Land knew that the cure, such as it was, wouldn’t last long. It was too hasty, too fragile: fixed as it was to the back of the Blood Angel’s neck and crudely drill-locked into the meat beneath the armour, to say nothing of the cables and wires running along the outside of his ceramite to link in fifty places across each forearm.

Land had used a biometric current regulator of the kind used to dampen agony-twitches in Ordo Reductor cyborgs. He’d ripped it right from the rib bracing of a slain Thallax. It effectively blocked any sign of their inner spasms from translating visibly to their robotic bodies; reversing its purpose and amplifying its sensitivity was no leap of genius – it was a fundamental principle in the technology used by the very wealthy of many worlds in rectifying muscle wastage and paralysis. Still, Land felt a kernel of pride in his jury-rigged battlefield solution. Fragile as the cure might be, the Blood Angel had been firing his bolter with murderous precision.

‘This isn’t even language,’ Land said, a hand at his earpiece.

‘Cease listening to them,’ said Zephon.

Land offered a withering look by way of reply. Sweat had turned his clothing rank and his skin sour. He kept licking his dry lips to no avail.

Land guided the Raider into a whirring skid, aggravating its anti-grav plates. He scanned the last of the convoy, seeing damaged vehicles drifting into the curling golden mist. On this side of the gateway, the Mechanicum’s ingenuity was masterfully bolted in layers of gleaming metal over the plain hideousness of the original ancient artistry. The arch itself was carved from a material resembling ivory, marked by silver runes in no known language.

Even as Land watched a tracked conveyor crawl through, three skimmers bearing cadres of Silent Sisters raced back out. If ever there was a time for reinforcements, it was now.

The Raider glided between the other advancing tanks, turning and returning to the crash of the front lines grinding against one another. Spear-wielding male warriors in gold moved in bloodied, exhausted harmony with sword-wielding female soldiers in chainmail. They were being pushed back, step by step, each Custodian or Sister falling opened up another hole in the rapidly diminishing Imperial line. Land’s Raider vibrated with the squeal of its high-powered volkite arrays. Creatures and legionaries farther back in the enemy horde ignited beneath the beams, spreading the flames to their closest brethren.

Zephon rose again, clambering back up the crew ladder. The metal rungs bowed beneath his weight as he opened the cupola and looked out at the battle.

‘Blood of the Angel.’

‘What now?’ Land barked.

‘The Archimandrite. It is here.’

‘Unlikely, given that the Archimandrite is almost certainly dead.’

<It is time,> she had canted, and Land had mourned her treachery in disbelieving silence. He refused to follow her whims. He wouldn’t turn his back on the Omnissiah.

‘It is here,’ Zephon repeated. He reached for his chainsword, gunning it loudly in the oppressive, red-lit crew bay.

Land turned in his seat, reaching for the periscope. He dragged a sleeve across his face to clean his stinging eyes, and peered into the lenses. The thing he saw was bathing squads of retreating Sisters in coruscating beams of darkfire energy, atomising them in sweeping arcs. Custodian spears broke against its plating. Lascannon fire skewed aside from its flickering shields.

And yet.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is not the Archimandrite.’

2

Devram Sevik had named his Knight Aquila from the Ashes. He had worked on its tilt plate himself, daubing the new sigil of House Vyridion with his own hand. As much as he was a man who revered the peerless work of sanctified artistry-armourers and sacristans in their maintenance of a Knight suit, he was also given to a personal flourish here and there. And so the Imperial eagle upon his tilt plate was more stylised than the stencilled ubiquity of most, with flaring wings and trails of plumage below as it took wing above a field of black ash.

‘Engaging,’ he voxed to Jaya, to his fellow scions, to anyone still drawing breath and capable of hearing.