The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Armoured in jade and brass, House Donar boasted seven functional Knights and had kept vigil at the Preceptor Line for thirty generations. That regiments of Belgar Devsirmes and armoured squadrons of the Kapikulu Iron Brigade were also stationed along its length was, in Lord Balmorn Donar’s opinion, hardly worth mentioning.

Flocks of azhdarchid, flesh-hungry mallahgra or roaming packs of xenosmilus rarely emerged from the jungle, but when they did, House Donar was there to drive them back with chainsabres, battle cannon and thermal lances.

Lord Donar ducked beneath the lintel of the main curtain-wall, though the rusted iron arch was easily tall enough to accommodate his Knight’s bulk. His son’s Knight limped after him, one leg stained with oily blood where an azhdarchid matriarch had gored him. Towering, flightless birds with oversized necks and crocodilian beaks, azhdarchid were comical in appearance, but fully capable of wounding a Knight.

As Robard Donar had found to his cost.

Behind the wall, redoubts of dug-in Shadowswords and Baneblades, Malcadors and Stormhammers covered the two Knights as the gate slid shut. Thousands of soldiers mustered on the martial fields, embarking onto armoured transports. The invasion of the traitors had shifted the mobilisation up a gear, but the Preceptor Line had been on a war footing ever since a company of Belgar had been found slaughtered in the jungle.

Dying in the jungle was easy, it had a hundred ways to see a man dead, but something unutterably savage had killed these men. Any number of the jungle beasts might have attacked the men, but what manner of beast would take ident-tags as a trophy?

Just one of many mysteries of the Kushite jungle.

‘Walk tall,’ ordered Balmorn. ‘Don’t let these Army dregs see you limping. You’re a Donar, for Throne’s sake. Act like one.’

Balmorn marched his Knight up a long sloping roadway of scaffolding that led to the widened ramparts. The few functional turrets scanned the jungle. Thermal auspex hunted for targets. Robard followed his father, slower as he compensated for the buckled joints of his leg.

‘Foolish of you to get caught out like that,’ said Balmorn, as his son finally reached the ramparts and braced his Knight’s piston-driven leg against an adjacent blockhouse with no roof.

‘How could I have known the azhdarchid were going to stampede?’ snapped Robard, tired of his father’s baiting. ‘We were lucky to get away at all.’

A gaggle of Sacristans scurried towards the damaged Knight, but Robard warned them off with a bark of his hunting horn.

‘Luck’s got nothing to do with it, lad,’ said Balmorn, rotating his upper body to take in a full panorama from their elevated perch.

It wasn’t pretty.

The sky painted a gloomy picture for Molech. Furnace orange and coal black burned in every direction. The wind carried the stench of burned stone, heated steel and fyceline. Electromagnetic storms raged over the fertile landscape and flashes of orbital weapon detonations mushroomed on every horizon. Balmorn didn’t like to think how big explosions had to be for him to see them all the way out on the Preceptor Line.

As he looked over the jungle canopy, a growing illumination bathed the clouds pressing down on the jungle canopy.

‘What’s that?’ asked Robard. ‘Another bombardment?’

Lord Donar didn’t answer, watching as thousands of black objects streaked from the clouds and arced over the eastern horizon.

‘Too slow to be orbital munitions,’ he said. ‘And too regimented to be wreckage.’

‘They’re too fast and steeply angled for assault carriers,’ said Robard. ‘What are they?’

‘They’re drop pods,’ said Lord Donar.

5

Three of Ophir’s fuel silos were ablaze.

A lake of flaming promethium engulfed the city’s southern outskirts and was slowly spreading north. The city’s Mechanicum adepts had locked the pumping stations into emergency shutdown. No flames jetted from the vent towers and the ever-present heartbeat of drilling rigs had stilled.

A coaling station at the eastern tip of the continent on the far side of the Kushite jungle, Ophir lay nine thousand kilometres east of the Preceptor Line. Cargo tankers from across the ocean paused here to gorge on the promethium wells before continuing around the northern coastline to the commercia distribution hub of Hvitha or the starports at Loqash and Larsa.

No one called Ophir by its given name. Once it had been called the City of Gold, but centuries of exhaust gases, promethium discharge and oily runoff that stained every structure with a persistent black residue had earned it another name. The soldiers of the Karnatic Lancers knew it as ‘the city without shadows’.