Small-arms fire spanged from the sides of the car and the railings, but as it rapidly picked up speed they were soon beyond the range of the soldiers' rifles.

Uriel glanced over at Pasanius before transferring his gaze to the mountain above. Black, smoky clouds wreathed the higher slopes, lightning and explosions flaring in the darkness from the battle above.

'Well, we're here,' said a breathless Vaanes.

Uriel turned to watch the swiftly diminishing ground as they rose into the clouds and darkness swallowed them.

'Getting here was the easy part,' said Uriel. 'Now we have to storm the fortress.'

CHAPTER TEN

'It would seem your attempt to antagonise Lord Berossus by shelling his pavilion was successful,' said Obax Zakayo needlessly, as another fluny of shells impacted against the walls. Plumes of flame and smoke soared skyward and Honsou laughed as he watched bodies rain down amid the rubble. Dust enveloped them, chunks of debris clattering down on the cobbled ramparts, and Honsou coughed as he swallowed a mouthful of ash. It was perhaps foolish to be this close to the front lines, but he was not so far removed from the sharp end of battle that he did not relish the cannon's roar in his ear.

'Yes, it does, doesn't it? He's so predictable it almost takes the fun out of crushing him.'

'But, my lord, he is within days of breaching the inner walls of Khalan-Ghol,' said Onyx, standing slightly behind Honsou. 'How can this be to our advantage?'

'Because he is dancing to my tone, Onyx, not his own. Get an enemy to react to your designs and he is as good as lost, I almost have him exactly where I want him. But Toramino… Toramino is not so easy. He is the one we need to be wary of. I don't know what he is doing.'

'Our scryers have seen nothing of note regarding Toramino,' said Obax Zakayo. 'It seems he waits, simply husbanding his warriors while Berossus grinds his men to dust against our walls.'

'I know, and that's what worries me,' snapped Honsou, waving his arms at the carnage taking place on the walls below him. 'Toramino is too clever to simply hurl his men at us like this. He knows that Berossus has no other stratagems and is waiting for his moment to strike. We must anticipate that and pre-empt him. Or else we are lost.'

Onyx leaned over the parapet and cast his gleaming silver eyes to either side of where he, Honsou and Obax Zakayo stood. Iron Warriors were ready to defend the ramparts should the bastions below fall, which if the projected strength of the assault below was correct, was entirely likely.

'We are too close to the battle,' he said.

Honsou shook his head. 'No, I need to be here.'

'I can protect you from an assassin's blade or a killer's bullet,' said Onyx, 'but I cannot say the same for an artillery shell. An eternity of torment awaits my essence should I allow you to die while under my protection.'

'Why should I care about your eternal torment?'

'You wouldn't, you'd be dead.'

Honsou considered this for a second and said, 'You may have a point there, Onyx.'

The daemonic symbiote nodded respectfully as more screaming shells exploded against the walls below. Honsou turned, content that the bastion here was as secure as he could want. The warriors he had chosen to accompany him into the camp of Berossus commanded this section of the walls, and there were no better warriors in his grand company.

He had taken one step when a flash of dark prescience made him look up and he yelled, 'Down!'

Whether it was by sheer luck or great artifice, Honsou would never know, but a salvo of shells from the guns below impacted on the edge of the ramparts upon which he and his warriors stood, shearing the rock clean from its supports in a cataclysmic ham-merblow. Honsou picked himself up and desperately scrambled for the safety of the esplanade behind the ramparts, but it was already too late.

With a grinding crack of splintered stone, he and hundreds of his finest warriors were swept down the mountainside in a raining avalanche of rubble and blocks of sundered stone.

Emerging from the smoke was like being born into hell, thought Uriel. At first he had been frustrated not being able to see their ultimate destination, but upon passing through the dark clouds of the mountain and seeing it up close for the first time, he soon wished for the sight of it to be snatched away from him.

Stretching up to pierce the dead sky, the fortress of Honsou was a madman's conceit made real, stone laid upon stone so that each angle was subtly wrong and violated the senses on a deep, instinctual level. Its dark veined walls reared up in defiance of the laws of perspective, looming and huge with pierced garrets leaning from the wallhead and spiralling, lightning-sheathed spires. Blades and spikes stabbed from its glistening fabric, and black rain, like the very lifeblood of the fortress, spilled from where artillery shells had struck. Fast-flowing rivers of molten metal poured from glowing culverts and ran down the mountainside like streams of lava from an erupting volcano.

Guns fired from daemon-visaged portals and burning, daemonic blood spilled from vast iron cauldrons onto the screaming soldiers below. Flames danced on the ramparts and in the mass of struggling soldiers. Death and destruction stalked the battlefield this day, and they hunted well.

Tens of thousands of soldiers thronged the rubble-strewn reaches of the fortress, fighting their way up a rained screed slope that had once been a bastion. Explosions tossed corpses through the air as buried mines swept hundreds to their deaths and the monstrous forms of a pair of Titans straggled in the rubble, crushing men and machines beneath their great footsteps as they fought amid the flames.

Uriel and the Space Marines watched the terrifying battle rage above them, the car grinding as it approached the upper platform where it would deposit them and begin the journey back down the mountain.

'Emperor protect us,' breathed Vaanes. 'It's like nothing I've ever seen before.'

'I know…' agreed Uriel, drawing his sword as the car clanged home against the platform and the bronze gate in the railings squealed open.

'How can we hope to survive this?'

Uriel turned to Vaanes and said, 'Remember what I told you: death and honour. If one brings the other then it is a good death.'

'No…' hissed Vaanes. 'No death is a good one. Not like this.'

None of the Space Marines moved, too in awe at the terrible and magnificent spectacle of war on a scale few had ever experienced. Uriel realised he had to get them moving before the vastness of this battle and their impulse for survival overcame the newly-rekindled sense of honour and duty he had instilled in them.

He was saved when Pasanius shouted, 'Come on, get moving! Everybody off!'

Ingrained reflexes took over and the Space Marines swiftly debarked from the funicular car, chivvied all the way by a bellowing Pasanius. Only Uriel and Ardaric Vaanes remained on board.

'Come on,' said Uriel. 'We have work to do.'

Vaanes said nothing, but nodded and followed Uriel from the car, climbing up past the platform and unsheathing the crackling claws from his gauntlet.

'What are you doing?' called Uriel.

'Funicular cars work on the principle of counterbalancing one another,' explained Vaanes, slicing his claws clean through the thick cables that held the car.

The platform groaned and the cable snapped with a metallic twang, whipping around and sending the car plummeting back downhill through the smoke. The sound of screeching metal and showers of fat orange sparks followed it down.

'No one will be coming up here in a while,' said Vaanes, climbing back to join Uriel.

'Clever,' said Uriel.