Kingsblade Read online

  ‘They’re like rock-roaches,’ said Luk over the vox, his Errant moving up alongside Danial’s as they both lit their ion shields and searched for targets. The contempt in the young Knight’s voice was clear, and Danial found it hard to argue. The sense of power rushing through his body was immense. The foe seemed small and weak by comparison. Already their comrades were engaging, tilting their ion shields expertly to absorb the hail of small arms fire that stuttered from broken windows and vehicle wrecks.

  To Danial’s right, Sire Olric’s Crusader-pattern Draconsflame opened up with all guns. The scream of his avenger gatling cannon was deafening, its torrent of shells chewing along the front of a refectorum and leaving rubble and bloody corpses in its wake.

  To the left, Sire Daeved’s Knight Gallant, Pyrefang, advanced through hails of autogun fire. His reaper chainsword carved out the front of a building to send rubble thundering down on the screaming cultists below.

  ‘Why are they even trying to fight?’ Danial said aloud. ‘Guns like that can’t harm Knights.’

  ‘Hate? Panic? Desperation?’ came his sister’s voice in reply, Jennika’s Fire Defiant striding past Danial’s flank. ‘Don’t try to fathom the motives of heretics, little brother. Just kill them. And don’t underestimate them either.’ As if to underpin her words, a missile streaked out from a nearby rooftop and exploded against Jennika’s ion shield. The energy field flashed blue as the warhead’s force dissipated harmlessly, and a second later Fire Defiant’s battle cannon boomed twice. The rooftop erupted in flame and shrapnel, obliterating the luckless heretics and their tank-busting weapon.

  ‘Kingsward,’ said Sire Markos across the vox, ‘form lance on Lady Jennika. Take Tan Chimaeros with you. Both of you try to learn something, and keep your damned shields up. I’ll not be the one to explain to either of your fathers why a rabble like this managed to unseat their precious sons.’

  Danial obeyed swiftly, feeding power to his servomotors and feeling acceleration as his steed strode forward. The ground shook beneath his tread, and targeting data filled his thoughts as his thermal cannon powered up. Luk’s Knight followed, the green and grey of House Chimaeros incongruous amongst the crimson and black heraldry of his Draconis comrades.

  ‘You know you’re both Exalted Court, yes?’ said Luk resentfully over a private channel. ‘He’s no authority over you, Da.’

  ‘But he’s a veteran of a dozen wars and more,’ replied Danial, lengthening his stride to keep up with his sister. ‘This is our first. We don’t know what we’re doing yet, not really.’

  ‘Maybe you don’t,’ Luk answered, a moment before a massive heat bloom lit Danial’s auspex. For a second he panicked that his oldest friend had somehow been hit and killed, then he realised that the flare was Luk’s thermal cannon discharging. The searing blast of superheated energy bored through the façade of a nearby building, and a handful of traitor runes blinked out as the entire structure collapsed upon itself.

  ‘Good shot,’ said Jennika. ‘Now, form column. We’re pushing down the Tetrae Processional as far as mark seven-oh-seven-two, and there’s only room enough to go single file.’

  Danial moved up, manoeuvring his striding war suit in behind Jennika’s and matching her pace. Luk pressed close behind, his eagerness for battle clear in the swift, aggressive motions of his steed. As they advanced onto the processional, the enemy fire petered out for a moment. In place of its idiot din, the Knights heard the mournful crunch and grind of their ironshod footfalls crushing rubble barricades and wrecked vehicles. The towering buildings of Pentakhost closed in around them like mountains, muffling the sounds of their comrades’ continued battle on the plaza and making Danial feel suddenly isolated. The Knights were huge machines, but these buildings were bigger still, grim slabs of ferrocrete and iron that stood hundreds of feet high. The kingsward took in their grubby, soot-stained walls, their grimy windows and ash-blackened statuary. Tangles of razor-wire hung from looming gargoyles, strung with the macabre remains of those who had resisted the rebellion.

  ‘This place is nothing like home,’ he murmured. For a moment, the whispers of his throne surged, the words hovering tantalisingly close to the edge of audibility. Images flashed unbidden across Danial’s mind’s eye; a wind-whipped tundra dominated by looming spires of ice; a sucking quagmire of mud and tangled razor-wire where warriors brawled like animals amidst the filth; a bone-hued desert, the sun beating down upon glittering silver cities. He understood in that moment that his ancestors were showing him places where they had fought, perhaps even died, and that the galaxy was a far vaster and stranger place than Danial Tan Draconis yet knew.

  He was brought back to the present by a collision alarm, and he swore as he felt Oath’s left shoulder guard clip a towering hab-block.

  ‘Watch where you’re walking, Da,’ cried Luk as falling rubble fizzed against his ion shield.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Danial, correcting course. He made obeisance to his Knight’s machine-spirit, and felt a surge of reassurance in response. His steed was undamaged.

  ‘Your throne?’ Jennika’s tone implied she already knew the answer to her question.

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Danial, swivelling his Knight at the hip as they crossed an intersection littered with corpses. No life signs showed on his auspex. This part of Pentakhost seemed already dead.

  ‘Stay focused,’ his sister told him, her tone sharp but not unkind. ‘Our thrones are a great source of strength and wisdom, but it takes time to master them. The Becoming is only the start, and while your link to your ancestors is still incoherent any mental slip you make is dangerous. And this plan was never the safest to begin with.’

  Danial nodded, his interface translating the gesture into a pip of acknowledgement across the vox.

  The processional gently sloped downhill between the towering buildings. A flight of Imperial Navy Thunderbolts swept low overhead, the roar of their ramjets echoing down the canyon-like street. Their weapons flashed, spitting las-fire at some distant target, and Luk growled in frustration.

  ‘Seems safe enough to me, Jen. Where are all the traitors? Wasn’t the fire supposed to herd them onto our guns?’

  ‘We’re out near the flank of the advance, Luk. Widen your auspex for a moment and look. Danial, you too.’

  Danial willed his perception to broaden, his subconscious directing his steed while he took a moment to inspect the broader strategic situation. As the highest ranking noble of the invasion force, it had fallen to High King Tolwyn to martial not only the strengths of the Knightly Houses, but also those of the Astra Militarum and space-faring Imperial Navy that accompanied them. His plan had been typically audacious. The naval lance strikes had set a wildfire that drove the dug-in traitors out of their nests and into the Knights’ guns. Yet to sit back and wait for the enemy would be ignoble, not to mention time-consuming. The High King had decreed that, with a world to win back, the Imperial forces could ill afford to dither in securing their beachhead. Instead, he had ordered his attendant regiments of Imperial Guard to land their forces in reserve and hold the line around the drop keeps, ensuring that no traitors slipped through. The Knights would then advance into the burning city and shatter the largest concentrations of resistance. In this way the enemy could be quickly exterminated, while at the same time any danger of a concerted heretic breakout was neutralised. Taking in the strategic overlay and runic force dispositions that hovered on his retinas, Danial could see that it was working.

  ‘You see there?’ asked Jennika, highlighting several key runes so that they flashed upon her comrades’ retinal displays. ‘Markos has relieved the besiegement of the Arbites Precinct. And there, the greatest concentration of the foe is pushing straight up the centre.’

  ‘And they’re dying in droves,’ said Luk with relish.

  ‘There, Jen, converging on our target coordinates,’ said Danial, fingers twitching unconsciously as he highlighted runes of his own. His cockpit shook and swayed with every great stride his steed to
ok, but the information stood out clear as day to him. ‘We’ve enemies ahead.’

  ‘Well spotted, brother,’ said Jennika. ‘You’ll get your fight, Luk. But be careful, both of you. I read armour amongst that rabble. Shields fore, weapons ready, lengthen stride. Let’s get to the next intersection before they do.’

  Danial followed his sister’s commands instantly, seeing the wisdom in her words. The foe was moving up the Tetrae Processional from the south with their armour at the fore, and whoever reached the intersection first would be able to bottleneck their enemies between the Pentakhostan hab-blocks. The kingsward returned his attention to the immediate combat, but left the wider strategic map underlying his perceptions. It intrigued him to see where their fight slotted into the broader tapestry of the battle, and even as he focused his mind upon the task at hand he continued to watch the swarming runes flow across the wider stage.

  The first enemy fire whipped in at them just as Fire Defiant surged from between the towering hab-blocks and out into the open space of the crossroads. Shells and las-fire splashed from Jennika’s ion shield as she trampled over heaps of wrecked administratum groundcars. As his sister slowed to a stop at the centre of the intersection, Danial guided his steed onto her right flank and registered Luk doing the same to her left. With booming footfalls, the three Knights came to a halt, drawn up in a shield wall to meet the onrushing foe.

  Planetary militia tanks were roaring as fast as they could up the processional – mostly infantry transports, with a few battle-tanks churning along in their midst. Crude slogans had been daubed across the defiled machines, while ragged banners flapped above. They bore twisted symbols, icons whose precise meaning Danial did not need to know to recognise them as evil. From a few dangled the wire-wrapped corpses of those who had presumably refused to turn traitor along with their comrades. Behind this armoured fist, the auspex read the runes of an infantry rabble, a couple of hundred foes at least. Danial felt his throne’s ghosts stir, and with an effort he pushed them back.

  ‘Not. Now,’ he hissed, focusing on targeting solutions and the firepower hammering against his shield.

  ‘Knights Draconis and Chimaeros,’ intoned Jennika solemnly. ‘Fire at will.’

  The power in Danial’s thermal cannon surged as his will became fire. Clenching one haptic gauntlet, he punched it forward to loose his first shot. The killing heat leapt outward, spearing from Danial’s fist to tear through the enemy tanks. A traitor Leman Russ took the main brunt of the blast, its armour flashing from grey to red to white hot in an instant before vaporising into scalding, super-heated mist. Other renegade tanks around it caught the edge of the blast, their tracks melting as they slewed out of control. Armour plates buckled and ran like wax. Engines and ammunition stores exploded, while exposed crewmen didn’t even have time to scream before they burst like blisters. So great was the thermal cannon’s fury that it gouged a great crater into the road, leaving a vitrified ditch into which two more traitor tanks skidded. They crunched to a stop, smoke rising from their engines. Between vehicle wreckage and the still-glowing crater left by Danial’s shot, the processional was as good as blocked.

  Danial’s ears rang and his mind was numbed with shock. He had done that. He had killed, for the first time, extinguishing the lives of a slew of heretics as easily as he might crush worms beneath his boot. The surge of exhilaration was overwhelming. The kingsward was jolted back to reality as a cannon-round punched through his shield and exploded against his Knight’s chest, staggering it. Sparks drizzled from several cockpit systems, and Oath of Flame gave a rumble of mechanical protest.

  ‘Shield, brother!’ barked Jennika, hammering battle cannon rounds into the stalled enemy tanks with precision. Danial hurriedly adjusted his ion shield to protect his steed. Despite the jarring impact, he was grinning like a lunatic. He could hear Luk laughing.

  ‘What a shot,’ crowed his friend as he let fly with his own thermal cannon into the remaining enemy tanks, ‘Danial Tan Draconis, master marksman and slayer of heretics.’

  More traitor vehicles exploded, trapping the enemy infantry between the flaming wrecks to their fore and the hungry wildfires now sweeping up the street behind them. Enemy runes scattered on Danial’s auspex as traitors smashed through shop fronts and hab windows in their desperation to find safety.

  ‘Don’t let them disperse,’ said Jennika.

  ‘Understood,’ responded Danial, striding forward to get a view over the top of the blazing traitor tanks. His heavy stubber kicked to life, hosing high calibre bullets into the ragged traitors still caught in the street. At the same time his thermal cannon flashed again, burning through the front of the nearest building and annihilating the infantry trying to escape through its corridors and chambers. Rebar supports melted, masonry evaporated, and a great slab of the hab-block’s frontage sheared away to crash down upon the processional like an avalanche. Danial’s auspex showed Jennika and Luk wreaking equal havoc, as enemy runes snuffed out like candles in a high wind.

  Danial’s strategic overlay showed that the story was the same all along the battlefront. The renegade rabble of Pentakhost were no match for the Knights of Adrastapol, and were dying by the thousand. A handful of Knights showed minor battle damage on their manifolds, but it was nothing that the Sacristans would not soon fix. Tertiary vox data flashed back and forth amongst the Astra Militarum as they prepared to deploy their artillery batteries and blast a firebreak through the middle of the city. The wildfires had done their job, and now the Imperial forces would preserve what they could of Pentakhost for their own use.

  As the last localised enemy runes blinked out, Danial slowly backed Oath of Flame into the intersection to survey the annihilation that he and his comrades had wrought.

  ‘Is this what it means to be a Knight?’ he breathed in awe.

  ‘It means victory,’ replied Luk, burning with pride and excitement. ‘It means death to our enemies.’

  ‘It means duty,’ said Jennika, though Danial could hear the exhilaration in his sister’s voice also. No one could wield power like this and not feel something. His heart was hammering in his chest. The whispers of his ancestors had grown to a clamour, still indistinct but surely congratulatory and full of bloodthirsty excitement. Danial wanted to fight again, to feel the godlike power at his fingertips. But the battle was won and the flames closing in.

  ‘We should return to the keep,’ said Jennika, her voice steady again. Danial pipped his vox in acknowledgement and turned his steed. They had claimed victory here, but as his natural pragmatism beat out the newfound flames of battle-lust Danial remembered that this was just the beginning. They had their beachhead, but there was a world out there yet to be re-conquered.

  High King Tolwyn Tan Draconis strode along the colonnade with purpose, his booted footfalls echoing from the vaulted ceiling. The High King of Adrastapol was tall and rangy, his wiry strength and irrepressible energy belying his advanced years. His neatly trimmed beard and moustache were both silver-hued and waxed to fine points. Tolwyn’s long hair was a similar shade, his golden circlet standing out proud against it. Five elaborately worked servo-skulls hovered along above his head, each hand-crafted to resemble the heads of mythic beasts – the pegassus, the chimaer, the minot, the wyvornne and, of course, the dracon. The High King had remained in the armoured bodysuit of a Knight at war, his only concession to tradition being the rich crimson-and-black quartered tabard his servants had draped over his shoulders and belted at his waist. Tolwyn had not even taken the time to wipe the sweat from his brow, nor the dust from his boots, and for good reason. He marched to a council of war. This would be a gathering of martial men and seasoned warriors. He must establish himself as one of their number, rather than appearing to set himself above them. The High King knew his own worth as a warrior and tactician, but as with any courtly matter, appearances were important. He might not have a taste for politicking, but one did not reach the station that Tolwyn Tan Draconis had without knowing the steps of
the courtly dance.

  Though he was about to tend to matters of state, the High King was in fine spirits. His bold opening strategy for the war had run like clockwork.

  ‘And the casualty reports?’ he asked the burly warrior who kept pace at his side.

  Markos Dar Draconis glanced at his ornate data-slate. Everything about the herald, from his scarred, bald head to his pugnacious manner spoke of a lifelong warrior. The data-slate seemed gaudy in his hands, thought Tolwyn with amusement.

  ‘None, my liege,’ grunted Markos, ‘unless you count the Guard, I suppose.’

  Tolwyn frowned.

  ‘I do, old friend. I must. And so should you. These are our valued allies, soldiers of the Imperium every one. They might not have our grandeur, or nobility…’

  ‘…but their purpose is every bit as just,’ finished Markos grudgingly. ‘So you always say, my liege.’

  ‘And so I always shall. Until we’re so old and shrivelled that the closest we come to war is hunching over the regicide table and squinting at the pieces,’ chuckled the king.

  Markos laughed.

  ‘Hah, let us both die bloody in battle before we suffer such ignominy.’

  ‘Indeed, old friend,’ nodded the High King, ‘but come now, what of our allies’ casualties?’

  ‘Blessedly light,’ said Markos after glancing at his slate. ‘Two platoons of Tanhollis Highlanders took a mauling when the traitors tried to push up the western flank, but they held. Lost four Cadian tanks to lucky shots. Nothing in orbit, the enemy’s star ships have stayed well clear of ours and vice versa. Seems a pissing contest’s likely to leave both sides with wet shins.’