'You are really going to turn your back on us? After all that has happened, all the blood spilt, the death and the pain? Can you really do that?'

'I can and I will,' snarled Vaanes. 'And who would blame me? Look around you, look at these monsters. They are all going to be dead soon, and their blood will be on your hands. Think about it, you're going to try and storm a besieged fortress with a tribe of cannibalistic mutants, a dying Guard colonel and a sergeant with one arm. I am a warrior, Ventris, plain and simple, and there is nothing left to me except survival. To go back to Khalan-Ghol is madness, and attacking that fortress isn't my idea of courage, it's more like suicide.'

Vaanes gripped Uriel's shoulder and said, 'You don't have to die here. Why don't you and Pasanius come with me. You're pretty handy in a fight and I could use a warrior like you.'

Uriel shrugged off the renegade's arm and said, 'You are a fine warrior, Ardaric Vaanes, but I was wrong to have thought you might regain your honour. You have courage, but I am glad that I do not go into battle with you again.'

Hatred flared in the renegade's eyes and his expression became hard as stone.

Without another word, Vaanes stalked away.

Uriel put the renegade from his mind as he saw a patch of bright light coming from ahead and realised that the noise of battle was swelling in volume as well. With renewed vigour, he climbed after the Lord of the Unfleshed and emerged, blinking into the harsh while light of Medrengard.

The noise of the battles raging around Honsou's fortress was tremendous, and Uriel saw that the secret paths of the Unfleshed had brought them out into the rocky uplands near the base of Khalan-Ghol itself, the plains before the fortress hundreds of metres below them.

High above, the ramparts of the fortress were wreathed in the fires of battle, and Uriel saw that they were going to have to ascend into the very heart of the maelstrom raging above them.

Many kilometres away, the clang of picks and shovels echoed in the hot, lamp-lit confines of the mineworks beneath the great ramp. A wide gallery had been excavated, some nine hundred metres wide and with a gently sloping floor. A warrior in stained iron armour watched as hundreds of slaves and overseers hauled vast flatbed wagons bearing drums of explosives and fuel to be packed into the length of the excavations.

The long gallery was almost full, packed with enough explosives to level the mountain itself, knew Corias Keagh, Master of Ordnance to Lord Berossus himself. The tunnels to reach the underside of Khalan-Ghol would be his masterwork. It had been hard, slow work and cost the lives of thousands, but he had succeeded in getting the complex web of tunnels to exactly the right spot. It was almost a shame to blow such a perfect example of siege mining apart.

Thirty metres above him - if his calculations were correct, and he had no reason to doubt them, for Obax Zakayo had been very precise in his treachery - were the catacombs of the fortress, where the revenants of previous masters of Khalan-Ghol were said to haunt its depths. Keagh knew that such tales were probably nonsense, but in the Eye of Terror it never paid to scoff at such things too openly.

But word of these tales had filtered back to the thousands of human soldiers who had spent the last few months billeted in the garrison tunnels he had constructed within the body of the great ramp, and he had heard ill-favoured mutterings concerning this attack. He had ritually flayed these doomsayers, but a pervasive sense of dread had already taken hold.

Despite this, all the soldiers were armed and ready to begin the assault upon the opening of Khalan-Ghol's belly, and Keagh was eager to finally get to grips with the foe.

His armour thrummed in the heat, its internal systems struggling to keep his body temperature even.

The heat in the tunnels was fearsome - more than Keagh would have expected at such a depth - but he paid it no mind, too intent on the spectacle of destruction he was about to unleash.

The battlements were aflame, gunfire and steel scything through men and stone in devastating fusillades of heavy calibre shells. Mobile howitzers moving in the midst of the armoured column approaching the top of the ramp rained high explosive shells within the last line of bastions, filling the air with spinning fragments of red-hot metal.

Men died in their hundreds, ripped apart in the devastating volleys or flamed from the wall by incendiary shells fired from the upper bastions of the approaching Titans.

But Berossus was not going to take Khalan-Ghol without a fight and Honsou's Titans and revetted artillery positions had laid-in targeting information and punished the approaching column terribly. Tanks exploded as armour-penetrating shells slashed down from above and tore through their lighter upper armour. Such casualties were bulldozed aside without mercy, tumbling down the steep sides of the ramp to smash to pieces on the rocks below. But no matter how many Honsou's gunners killed, the column continued its relentless advance.

Honsou gripped onto a splintered corbel of rock and watched the approaching army with a mixture of exhilaration and dread.

Logistically Berossus had the upper hand, and he was using it to strangle the life from the defenders of his fortress - or what was left of them. Onyx was right, they could not defeat this army conventionally.

But Honsou did not intend to fight conventionally.

'Come on, damn you!' he shouted into the deafening crescendo of noise. He straggled to penetrate the gunsmoke, but could see nothing through the acrid fog.

Onyx looked at Honsou in confusion, but said nothing as more shells landed nearby. Whizzing shrapnel ricocheted from the walls and Onyx leapt before Honsou, allowing several plate-sized blades of metal to hammer into his daemonic flesh rather than shred his master.

'Onyx!' called Honsou, dragging the daemonic symbiote to its feet. 'Look towards Berossus's army and tell me what you see!'

Onyx staggered over to the edge of the wall and shifted his vision patterns until he could see clearly across the entirety of the battle. Streamers of fire and starbursts of explosions flickered like distant galaxies, but his eyes pierced the chaos and confusion of the battle with ease.

The lead elements of Berossus's army had smashed their way onto the spire's plateau and were less than a hundred metres from the last wall that stood between them and final victory. Dreadnoughts howled in battle fury and the Titans strode behind them like avatars of the gods of battle, weapons roaring with prayers to their dark masters.

'Berossus is at the wall!' shouted Onyx. 'He will be upon us in moments!'

'No! The ramp!' returned Honsou. 'What's happening at the end of the ramp!'

'I see tanks, hundreds of tanks,' yelled the daemonic symbiote, barely audible over the concussive booms of artillery fire. 'They are gathered beside the entrance to the mineworkings at the base of the ramp and are simply awaiting their turn to begin the climb.'

'Excellent,' laughed Honsou. 'Oh, Berossus, you are even more of a fool than I took you for!'

Satisfied that there was just the right amount of explosives, shaped and arranged to explode upwards into the fortress, Corias Keagh retreated swiftly from the gallery beneath Khalan-Ghol, unwinding a long length of insulated cable from the servo-rig on his back. Darting pincer arms mounted on the rig kept the cable from fouling and ensured that it remained straight and level.

'Here should do it,' he said to no one in particular as he turned into the armoured bunker he had constructed for just this moment.

The pincer arms cut the cable and craned over his shoulder to hand him the brushed copper end of its length. Synchronous timers had been calibrated from his armour's own power unit and he hooked the end of the cable into a power port on the chest of his breastplate. A winking red light on his helmet's visor turned to gold and he felt a physical stirring as the charges he had set armed.