[Dawn of War 01] - Dawn of War Read online

  The message itself was straightforward enough, belied by the breathtaking beauty of its form. There was something about a curved blade—some sort of key. And there was a string of co-ordinates, coded in an elaborate manner than made Isador’s head spin; the figures spiralled and shifted until his mind discovered their secret, bringing them under control and settling them into a firm pattern.

  When the eldar hid their secrets, they placed them in full view of all, knowing that only the rarest of individuals would be able to see them, let alone decipher them. The problem was not a linguistic one—the runes were simple enough for an educated Blood Raven to understand—rather, the problem was psychic. Only the most gifted of human psykers would taste even a hint of the presence of the runic script in the first place.

  Stepping back from the menhir, Isador looked at it with fresh eyes. He could see now that it was a blaze of runes and twisting lines of script. The psychic etchings snaked and spiralled around the smooth form, flowing and coalescing like mountain streams, mixing their meanings together into transient poetry and garbled gibberish in equal measures. The tiny section on which his mind had focussed was merely the most miniscule fragment of a grand, sweeping narrative.

  The rock itself seemed to shimmer with release, as the texts that it contained were freed to swim and shift before the eyes of a reader once again. It was as though the menhir wanted to be read. For the first time, Isador realised that the menhir was not a rock at all—it was a giant tear-drop of wraithbone, the mysterious material employed by eldar artists and engineers to construct their unfathomable technologies.

  “What do you see, Isador?” asked Gabriel, approaching his friend from behind and placing a gentle hand on his shoulder.

  Isador started at the touch, and his head snapped round to stare at his captain, his eyes wide and wild. “Oh, Gabriel,” he managed, bringing his shock under control and turning back to the menhir. The lights and the script had vanished, leaving no sign of ever having been there at all. “It was so beautiful…”

  Gabriel looked at the rock for a moment, noting its graceful curves and its smooth lines. He shook his head vaguely. “Your eyes are different from mine, old friend. What did you learn?”

  “The menhir is a marker. It must have been left here by the eldar thousands of years ago. It speaks of a bladed-key, buried beneath the ground for all time,” said Isador, his mind drifting back to the images that he had seen in the wraithbone.

  “A key to what?” asked Gabriel.

  “I am not sure. It would take me months to decipher all of the text,” lamented Isador.

  Again, Gabriel looked up at the menhir and gazed at its perfectly smooth, flawless surface. He raised his eyebrows. “It is enough, I suppose, to know that the Alpha Legion and the eldar are both pursuing this key. Do you know where it is?”

  “Yes. The runes are very clear. They were clearly intended to guide an eldar force to it at an important moment,” replied Isador, deep in thought.

  Gabriel’s thoughts were catching up with those of his Librarian. “So, the eldar have been here before, and they anticipated the need for a return to Tartarus?”

  “So it seems, Gabriel.”

  “Did the historical records make any mention of an eldar invasion or presence on this planet in the past?” asked Gabriel, already sure that Isador would have mentioned such a thing.

  “No, Gabriel. I can only assume that the eldar were here before the colonisation of Tartarus—before the Imperium’s records began,” said Isador, his mind racing with the possible implications of this knowledge.

  “Can this all be coincidental?” asked Gabriel, giving voice to their joint concerns. “The return of the eldar, the presence of our old adversaries, the Alpha Legion, the invasion of the orks, and the imminent arrival of the warp storm?”

  Isador shook his head. “I do not believe in coincidences—they are the symptoms of ignorance. I fear that the Blood Ravens may be the only force on this planet who do not know what is going on.”

  The Striking Scorpion squad was first into the breach as the gate ground slowly open. Their new exarch—the eldar warrior that was once Jaerielle—was their spearhead, dancing and flipping through the hail of fire from the gunnery emplacements on the city wall. He was through the gate and into the courtyard on the other side before the mechanism had even wound open fully, flicking and darting between shots from the Imperial Guardsmen, as though they were moving too slowly to trouble him.

  Inspired by their exarch, the emerald green figures of the rest of his squad stormed into the city behind him, flourishing their chainswords and dispatching sheets of shuriken fire from their pistols. Following in the wake of the Striking Scorpions came the reds and golds of the Fire Dragons, dousing the wall defences in chemical flames from their fire-lances and fusion guns. And then, bursting through the flames, hissed the Vypers and jetbikes, flashing through the open gate into the city streets under cover of heavy fire from the Falcon tanks outside.

  The Falcons had slid to a halt in front of the walls, and were battering the gun platforms with barrages of fire from their shuriken cannons and lance arrays. The impacts strafed across the wall, blasting great chunks of rockcrete out of their structure and shaking the weapons emplacements.

  The Imperial Guardsmen in the city defences found themselves in crumbling alcoves, with debris and rockcrete raining down onto them from great cracks in the superstructure. The fixings for their autocannons and multi-meltas were breaking free as the rockcrete splintered out from underneath them, denying them the stability needed for accurate fire.

  Guardsman Hredel threw his weight against his weapon, hoping that his mass would keep the autocannon rooted while it fired a constant stream of shells down towards the breach in the open gates.

  Down in the courtyard inside the gate, a smattering of Guardsmen, led by the hapless Bobryn, who had opened the gate and then regretted it instantly, staged a last ditch defence of the city. Eldar jetbikes zipped past them into the capital, not even bothering to engage the defenders. The Vypers slid to a halt in the courtyard, but did not open fire on the Guardsmen. Instead, their gun-turrets spun around and started to blast away at the rear of the wall, where the wall’s gun platforms were unshielded. Hredel turned to look into the courtyard just in time to see the withering hail of shuriken crash into his gunnery platform, killing him instantly. Meanwhile, Jaerielle sprang into the line of defenders in the courtyard, flourishing his toothed blade in a dizzying display of virtuosity.

  Bobryn’s mouth dropped open as the eldar warrior spun through the air in a graceful arc, vaulting the impromptu barricade in a single bound, its blade whipped into a blur by the speed of its motion. He just had time to marvel at the skill of the alien, before the blade passed straight through his neck.

  Jaerielle swooped and sliced with his chainsword, letting it dance all by itself, pulling him from one kill to the next in a frenzy of blood. The little stand of Guardsmen dwindled into nothing in a matter of seconds, and Jaerielle spun to a standstill in amongst the spread of dismembered corpses, striking the victory pose of the Striking Scorpions, with streams of mon-keigh blood coasting down his emerald armour.

  As he struck the pose, Farseer Macha walked calmly through the gates into Lloovre Marr, flanked on both sides by a retinue of warlocks, claiming the city for Biel-Tan. She stood for a moment, motionless in the entrance to the courtyard. The barricades of the defenders were still in place, and the Striking Scorpions and Fire Dragons had fanned out around the perimeters—they showed little sign of having seen combat today. But there, standing on the far side of the barricades, was Jaerielle, surrounded by a litter of corpses and running with blood. His blade was held dramatically above his head, and his pistol was pointing at the ground, as he stretched his legs into a long, low stance.

  The sound of a distant explosion made Macha turn and look back out of the open gates. In the distance, directly below the sun, was the imposing sight of Mount Korath. Its peak was a blaze of ligh
t, and a mushroom cloud of thick smoke and debris had plumed into the air above it, casting the valley into shadow as the cloud obstructed the sun for a moment. The Blood Ravens, thought Macha, hoping that her Warp Spiders had done their job.

  In the foreground, the rest of the Biel-Tan army remained positioned for battle before the walls. The wraithguard trained their wraithcannons on the defensive gunnery positions, although most had already fallen silent. The Storm and Defender squads were starting to file through the gate, keeping the farseer in sight in case they were needed, but the battle for Lloovre Marr was basically over. The Swordwind had swept the pathetic defence before it and, turning again to look at Jaerielle, Macha wondered whether he could have done it all by himself.

  A line of ranger jetbikes hissed through the gates, and Flaetriu vaulted off the leading machine before it slid to a halt. He swept into a bow before the farseer.

  “Farseer, the Chaos Marines are regrouping in a cave in the valley wall. They are several hours’ march from here. We have time to refortify the city before they arrive,” reported the ranger, his concentration suddenly broken by the sight of Jaerielle further inside the courtyard.

  “Thank you, Flaetriu. In the meantime, take your rangers through the city, and find those cowardly mon-keigh that fled their positions at the wall. We want no surprises today,” said Macha gravely. Even as she spoke, she could feel that surprises were on their way.

  As the column of Blood Ravens thundered down the north side of Mount Korath, Gabriel clicked the detonator-trigger that Matiel had given to him. Behind them, the summit of the mountain erupted like a volcano as the eldar charges exploded. The mountain top was vaporised and a huge cloud of debris and smoke blasted into the air, obscuring the sun. The rocks around the summit were instantly rendered into flows of molten lava that sprayed outwards from the mountain in a superheated fountain. Great sheets of molten rock started to ooze down the mountain side, chasing the heels of the Blood Ravens as they roared down into the valley towards Lloovre Marr.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The grand streets of Lloovre Marr were quiet and deserted. Vehicles and market stalls had been abandoned by the sides of the roads, and the doors to buildings had been left swinging in the breeze. The population had left in a hurry, and it looked as though they had not anticipated returning. Lights still burned behind some of the windows, but Macha was certain that these had simply been left burning when the occupants left—there were few signs that anyone remained in the capital.

  The eldar convoy moved along the central boulevard with swift urgency, heading for the very heart of the city. Jetbikes flashed through the adjoining streets, running parallel to the convoy to ensure that it was left unchallenged. The boulevard itself was lined with tall, white statues. Each depicted a human figure, usually a warrior, presumably from the history of the city. Their heads were all turned towards the centre of the city, as though gazing up towards the great palace of the governor that dominated the administrative core of the capital.

  To Macha’s eldar eyes, the statues looked clumsy and ugly—not merely because they depicted the disproportionate features of the mon-keigh, but also because the artisans had been poor. In general, reflected the farseer, this was true of all human art—it all seemed so rushed and underdeveloped. It was almost as though art were a hobby, rather than the highest expression of the soul. It would be inconceivable that the Biel-Tan would grant a commission of the magnitude of a public statue to an artisan who had not been walking the Path of the Artist for many centuries, perhaps even millennia. The commission itself might take decades to fulfil. But these pathetic lumps of stone looked as though they had been turned out in a matter of months, by artisans barely old enough to hold the tools.

  Shaking her head in disbelief and pity, Macha took a moment to consider what these statues said about the soul of the mon-keigh. Each of them represented a warrior, and each was gazing on the buildings of the Administratum, fierce with pride. It is not the art itself that these humans exalt, realised Macha, but power and war. Art is merely a means to praise the warriors—and combat is the highest expression of their souls. She nodded to herself in satisfaction, as she thought about the dedication of the mon-keigh’s Space Marines, and compared their abilities to wreak destruction with the mon-keigh’s pathetic attempts at the construction of art. For the eldar, war was embraced as a artistic path—the most feared of many equal paths to truth and glory. For the humans, it seemed, the whole society was subordinated to war—only in war did the human soul find itself. They were only slightly more civilised than orks.

  Behind the statues, running along both sides of the boulevard, were grand stone buildings, each rendered in the same white stone. The structures grew larger and more imposing as the eldar moved further and further into the city—as though the heart of the city warranted the most glorious architecture. All of the structures showed signs of age and decay, giving the street the aura of an ancient capital of culture, resting on the strong arms of thousands of warriors that had died for its glory.

  The last time Macha had been on Tartarus, Lloovre Marr did not even exist. This end of the valley had been nothing but thick forest, huddled in the basin of the valley’s flood plain, where the soil was richest and most fertile. She had known, of course, even then, that the mon-keigh would recover their strength and rebuild their cities on Tartarus. She had even seen that they would build here—away from the sites of the destruction of their other cities, starting afresh, carving their new capital into the cliffs with their very hands.

  That had been why she had picked this site, where her secrets would be buried beneath the cheap grandeur of the Imperium of Man. The mon-keigh would never think to look right under their noses. And, sure enough, the whole population had left at the first rumblings of a problem, never even pausing to see what they were leaving behind.

  As the eldar convoy neared the end of the boulevard, Macha let a faint smile float across her lips: this grand capital city was nothing more than a tiny blip in a war that had begun countless millennia before mankind had even made its first leap into space; for the sake of Khaine, she had been a farseer for longer than these buildings had stood against the elements of Tartarus. And now she was being chased across the planet by two bumbling platoons of children—one carried with them the doom of Tartarus and its surrounding systems, and the other brought hope with them, like a delicate, flickering candle. She had never thought that the once mighty eldar would be reduced to playing nanny for the younger races of the galaxy—but here she was.

  The end of the boulevard opened up into a wide plaza, in the centre of which was the focus of the gazes of the all the statues along the way. A huge figure rose out of the pristine white flagstones—a statue taller and more magnificent than any of the others. It was the figure of Lloovre Marr himself, the founder of the city, acclaimed as the first governor general to rule Tartarus in the Emperor’s name. The official historical record recounted stories of his valour and strategic genius, organising the planet’s defences against the incursions of ork raiders and the uprisings of cultists.

  In one hand, Lloovre Marr was holding his sword, pointing up into the heavens, as though redirecting the admiration of his people towards the Emperor himself. In the other, a great slab of white stone represented a scroll, on which Lloovre Marr was reputed to have written the constitution of Tartarus, pledging its future to the cult of the undying God-Emperor, and vowing never to permit the seeds of heresy to take hold in this fertile soil.

  Macha smiled to herself at the constellation of ironies as she realised that the monument had been constructed directly upon the site that she was looking for.

  Just before they broke the tree-line, the Blood Ravens’ convoy drew to a halt. The co-ordinates that Isador had deciphered from the eldar menhir on Mount Korath, before they had blown it up, seemed to refer to a point in the middle of Tartarus’ capital city. On their way down into the valley, the Blood Ravens had seen hints of an eldar trail, as well as tra
cks of Chaos assault bikes, so Gabriel was certain that they were on the right track. All sign of the Alpha Legion had vanished half way through the valley, but Gabriel had pressed on after the eldar, fearing what might happen if they reached their goal. He disliked such games of cat and mouse, but he took some solace in the fact that he was the cat. At least, he hoped that he was the cat.

  The convoy stopped in the fringe of the forest and Gabriel jumped down from his temporary vantage point on the roof of his stationary Rhino, making his way to the very last line of trees before the ground fell away into the plain in front of Lloovre Marr. With Isador at his shoulder, Gabriel dropped to the ground as the foliage thinned, and he crept further forward.

  Lying flat against the earth, Gabriel took out his binocs, letting them whir and blip until they clicked into focus against the great wall of the city before him. The once shimmering rockcrete was now a pitted and stained mess where ordnance and flamer gouts had smashed into the formerly smooth surface. The wall’s gun emplacements had been shattered and cracked with precision fire, but the great gates showed no sign of damage at all.

  “Do you think the defenders repelled the attack?” asked Isador, trying to make sense of the unexpected scene.

  “No. There was only a minimal force left to defend the city, thanks to Toth’s alarmist pronouncements. There is no way that they could have confronted the eldar,” replied Gabriel, half-whispering.