Mersadie turned from Sindermann and pulled her hand from his, looking through the porthole at the void of space beyond. 'No. I can't. Not yet,’
A white streak shot across the porthole like a shooting star.
Another followed it, and then another.
'What's mat?' she asked.
Sindermann leaned over to get a better look through the porthole.
Even through his exhaustion, she could see the strength in him that she had previously taken for granted and she blink-clicked the image, capturВing the defiance and bravery she saw in his features.
'Drop-pods,’ he said, pointing at a static gleaming object stark against the blackness and closer to Isst-van III. Tiny sparks began raining from its underside towards the planet below.
'I think that's the Andronius, Fulgrim's flagship,’ said Sindermann. 'Looks like the attack we've been
hearing about has begun. Imagine how it would be if we could watch it unfolding,’
Euphrati groaned and the attack on Isstvan III was forgotten as they slid across to sit beside her. Mersadie saw Sindermann's love for her clearly as he mopped her brow, her skin so clean that it pracВtically shone.
For the briefest moment, Mersadie saw how peoВple could believe Euphrati was miraculous; her body so pale and fragile, yet untouched by the world around her. Mersadie had known Keeler as a gutsy woman, never afraid to speak her mind or bend the rules to get the magnificent picts for which she was rightly famed, but now she was something else entirely. 'Is she coming round?' asked Mersadie. 'No,’ said Sindermann sadly. 'She makes noises, but she never opens her eyes. It's such a waste. Sometimes I swear she's on the brink of waking, but then she sinks back down into whatever hell she's going through in her head,’ Mersadie sighed and looked back out into space. The pinpoints of light streaked in their hundreds towards Isstvan III.
As the speartip was driven home, she whispered, Token…'
The Choral City was magnificent.
Its design was a masterpiece of architecture, light and space so wondrous that Peeter Egon Momus had begged the Warmaster not to assault so
brutally. Older by millennia than the Imperium that had come to claim it in the name of the Emperor, its precincts and thoroughfares were soon to become blood-slick battlefields.
While the juggernaut of compliance had made the galaxy a sterile, secular place, the Choral City remained a city of the gods.
The Precentor's Palace, a dizzying creation of gleaming marble blades and arches that shone in the sun, opened like a vast stone orchid to the sky and the polished granite of the city's wealthiest disВtricts clustered around it like worshippers. Momus had described the palace as a hymn to power and glory, a symbol of the divine right by which Isstvan III would be ruled.
Further out from the palace and beyond the architectural perfection of the Choral City, vast multi-layered residential districts sprawled. ConВnected by countless walkways and bridges of glass and steel, the avenues between them were wide canyons of tree-lined boulevards in which the citiВzens of the Choral City lived.
The city's industrial heartland rose like climbing skeletons of steel against the eastern mountains, belching smoke as they churned out weapons to arm the planet's armies. War was coming and every Isstvanian had to be ready to fight.
But no sight in the Choral City compared to the Sirenhold.
Not even the magnificence of the palace outВshone the Sirenhold, its towering walls defining the
Choral City with their immensity. The brutal batВtlements diminished everything around them, and the sacred fortress of the Sirenhold humbled even the snow-capped peaks of the mountains. Within its walls, enormous tomb-spires reached for the skies, their walls encrusted with monumental sculptures that told the legends of Isstvan's mythiВcal past.
The legends told that Isstvan himself had sung the world into being with music that could still be heard by the blessed Warsingers, and that he had borne countless children with whom he populated the first ages of the world. They became night and day, ocean and mountain, a thousand legends whose breath could be felt in every moment of every day in the Choral City.
Darker carvings told of the Lost Children, the sons and daughters who had forsaken their father and been banished to the blasted wasteland of the fifth planet, where they became monsters that burned with jealousy and raised black fortresses from which to brood upon their expulsion from paradise.
War, treachery, revelation and death; all marched around the Sirenhold in endless cycles of myth, the weight of their meaning pinning the Choral City to the soil of Isstvan III and infusing its every inhabiВtant with their sacred purpose.
The gods of Isstvan III were said to sleep in the Sirenhold, whispering their murderous plots in the nightmares of children and ancients.
For a time, the myths and legends had remained as distant as they had always been, but now they walked among the people of the Choral City, and every breath of wind shrieked that the Lost ChilВdren had returned.
Without knowing why, the populace of Isstvan III had armed and unquestioningly followed the orders of Vardus Praal to defend their city. An army of well-equipped soldiers awaited the invasion they had long been promised was coming in the western marches of the city, where the Warsingers had sung a formidable web of trenches into being.
Artillery pieces parked in the gleaming canyons of the city pointed their barrels westwards, set to pound any invaders into the ground before they reached the trenches. The warriors of the Choral City would then slaughter any that survived in careВfully prepared crossfire.
The defences had been meticulously planned, protecting the city from attack from the west, the only direction in which an invasion could be launched.
Or so the soldiers manning the defences had been told.
The first omen was a fire in the sky that came with the dawn.
A scattering of falling stars streaked through the blood-red dawn, burning through the sky like fiery tears.
The sentries in the trenches saw them falling in bright spears of fire, the first burning object
smashing into the trenches amid a plume of mud and flame.
At the speed of thought, the word raced around the Choral City that the Lost Children had returned, that the prophecies of myth were coming true,
They were proven right when the drop-pods burst open and the Astartes of the Death Guard Legion emerged.
And the killing began.
PART TWO
THE CHORAL CITY
EIGHT
Soldiers from hell
Butchery
Betrayal
Thirty seconds!' yelled Vipus, his voice barely audible over the screaming jets as the drop-pod sliced through Isstvan Ill's atmosphere. The Astartes of Locasta were bathed in red light and for a moment Loken imagined what they would look like to the people of the Choral City when the assault began – warriors from another world, solВdiers from hell.
'What's our landing point looking like?' shouted Loken.
Vipus glanced at the readout on a pict-screen mounted above his head. 'Drifting! We'll hit the target, but off-centre. I hate these things. Give me a stormbird any day!'
Loken didn't bother replying, barely able to hear Nero as the atmosphere thickened beneath the
drop-pod and the jets on its underside kicked in. The drop-pod shuddered and began heating up as the enormous forces pushing against it turned to fire and noise.