[center][h2][b][u]The Scourging of Midafrik[/u][/b][/h2]

[quote=Excerpt from the Rolandine Fragments, M2]Religion non giova al sacerdote,
né la innocenzia al pargoletto giova:
per sereni occhi o per vermiglie gote
mercé né donna né donzella truova:
la vecchiezza si caccia e si percuote;
né quivi il Saracin fa maggior pruova
di gran valor, che di gran crudeltade;
che non discerne sesso, ordine, etade.
Non pur nel sangue uman l'ira si stende
de l'empio re, capo e signor degli empi,
ma contra i tetti ancor, sì che n'incende
le belle case e i profanati tempî.[/quote][/center]


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  Religion cannot for the priest bespeak
  Mercy, nor innocence avail the child:
  Nor gently beaming eyes, nor vermeil cheek,
  Protect the blooming dame or damsel mild.
  Age smites its breast and flies: while bent to wreak
  Vengeance, the Saracen, with gore defiled,
  Shows not his valour more than cruel rage,
  Heedless alike of order, sex, and age.
  Nor the impious king alone with human blood,
  — Lord of the impious he — his hand distains,
  But even on walls so sorely vents his mood,
  He fires fair houses, and polluted fanes.

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The breath of flame across his face was his greeting, and the taste of ash on his tongue his welcoming feast. Dust and fracturing stone cracked under his feet as his soaring leap reached his mark. A chorus of panicked cries and frantic calls to order rose around him, and that was the one fitting exultation for his arrival. His blade whirled, and they shattered into agonizing gurgling. No honour ought to overstay its welcome, after all, especially not those borne of battle, where a long procession of new glories waited in every stroke of the sword, and every charging step was a new hymn to the warrior’s grandeur.

With an arcing sweep of his sword, the bodies who still crowded the ramp were swept back, scrambling over each other to avoid the murdering steel. The few seconds they gained were however nothing more than that, for a hurtling mass of metal hurtled over them as a crushing avalanche. Crimson blood stained red armour, washing away ashen grime. A bellowing war-cry silenced fading screams even as carmine-shod boots stamped on the throats they issued from.

Rodhamon, Red Knight of Thunder, raised his dripping blade to the dust-clouded heavens, and plunged into the doomed city.

Like many of its neighbours, Kinchizere greatly differed from the towering hives of Meric or the blocky behemoths of the Yndonesic basins. Far from being encased in its own walls from every side, faceless and impregnable, its was akin to a titanic forest of pillars standing tightly together like a stony oasis in the Afrik desert, each a lesser spire in its own right. Tiers of balconies spread from their stems in circles and spirals, lofty streets and avenues extending not in length but climbing upward. Some of the lower rings were so massive that they supported quarters of their own, cone-roofed houses not fashioned into the hive-pillars but standing loosely as they might have on the ground. Such private dwellings were a luxury in the hive, and its wealthier families had vied for the right to live between their own four walls. Their exterior betrayed this opulence: more than any other district they were adorned with fluttering curtains and bloodline-flags of bright cloth, set with doors of precious wood and hung with carved icons and ritual masks.

Now, these very privileges made them the first to fall as the Thunder Warriors tore through the lower levels of the hive.

The hand-flamer in Rodhamon’s left fist vomited fiery death as he charged through the streets, scourging walls and doors like a sweeping lash. Cloth and wood blazed, choking the small buildings with searing black smoke. Blinded and gasping, their inhabitants stumbled out through collapsing doors, heedless of danger in their frenzied scramble, crowding disorderly in the now all too narrow passages and jostling each other for a mouthful of air. There the fell knight’s blade scythed them down like stalks of wheat at harvest-time, its wielder as indifferent as the steel in his hand to what lives were severed by his mighty swipes. The soldiers of Kichinzere had abandoned these outer quarters to their fate, seeing the hopelessness of facing the juggernauts in these cramped streets, and thus it was the unbridled slaughter of old and young that spelled the first true letters of this battle.

They staggered out into the inner ring, red anew with gore from head to foot, glutted on carnage but yet insatiable. Rodhamon surveyed his brothers, those hundred who had followed him in the mortal leap over Kichinzere’s flaming moat and reached the other side. Their armour, like his, was scorched, but still undented, and their movements sweeping and fluid with awakened bloodlust. He roared a wordless cry and motioned ahead, past the circular plaza that ran in a band around the lowest terrace and to the entrance into the hive proper.

There, the garrison had regrouped after being cast from the outer defenses. Soldiers cloaked in vivid orange hurried under a high arch, setting down heavy repeating guns they had clearly not been counting on to use. Just yesterday, the self-proclaimed Emperor had still been but another warlord of the wastelands, one of the many scavengers who circled the hives but never could hope to breach their safety. In less than an hour, the defenders had been disabused of their safety, and the ruthless grip of the assailants strengthened by the minute.

The first guns scarcely had time to fire a volley before the Red Knights were on them. One or two warriors fell in the corner of Rodhamon’s eye, but he paid them no mind as he overturned a fuming lascannon on its tripod in the same stroke that reduced its crew to mangled ruin. The defensive line crumpled before it truly had time to form, those soldiers not caught behind their guns casting them away in dismay and rushing back into the interior of the spire. Their effort was futile - the pursuers had not even slowed, and overtook them in a few strides, scattering them with a few careless blows.

The interior of the spire was a great hollow chamber, rising far along its height. Less spacious than one could have surmised from outside, for the walls were dense enough to accommodate several hab-blocks united by galleries, it was nevertheless monumental, being largely unbroken in its expanse unlike the layered floors of individually greater hives. Its size was matched by the ingenuity of its design, built to accommodate for the passage of men and goods in bulk at all levels of the vast tower. Circling spiral walkways ran abreast of the walls, winding upwards to the summit in webs held together by oblong platforms. Those were in turn connected by elevators and wire-running cabins whose dazzling yet orderly tangle bore witness the the ingenuity of their ancient engineers, though a number of them hung limply, damaged beyond the skill of their inheritors to restore. The same air of decay shone through the very stark artificial light that stood in lieu of the sun for the enclosed city, awning in the hopeless darkness of hundreds among the vast numbers of fluorescent slabs casting their glow.

All throughout the immense structure, the mass of humanity was teeming. The Imperials’ bombardment had struck Kinchizere’s power lines, and most of the wire-platform conveyors were stilled; the flicker of ailing lights drove the people to maddened fright. Crowding the walkways in the tens of thousands, an amorphous tide clad in varicoloured weaves like the scales of a leviathan serpent, they pushed up in blind, futile flight. It did not matter to them in that moment that at the top of the spire they would find safety no surer than in their doomed homes, the bridges between the segments of the hive insufficient for their multitude and likely beset by more prongs of the attackers. In the throes of panic, each thought only to prolong their life by the next instant, and now it meant flight, escape from the advancing danger below. Vainly did those soldiers who kept to their ranks try to keep a semblance of order; before the onrush, all they could do was stand aside and prepare to meet the Red Knights with their fire.

“Death to them!” Rodhamon brandished his sword and hurled himself at the straggling rear of the human wyrm, where the infirm and abandoned had been left to claw their way through the trampled bodies crushed in the stampede. Under the pitiless blades of the Thunder Warriors, their end was as gruesome as their last minutes had been. Rodhamon did not even deign to stain his blade upon the wretches, stamping them underfoot as he raced to the bulk of his prey. Hideous was his onslaught then! Heedless in his sanguinary exhilaration of the las-bolts that rained down around him, he clove into the files of shrinking and scampering backs. Wailing in mortal terror, the unfortunates tried to leap over the shoulders of their fellows to escape. Some outright cast themselves into the yawning abyss beyond the guardrails, whether to at least meet their fate on their own terms or to in any way escape the rampant giants. None tried to fight; even the soldiers who found themselves caught in close quarters threw away their guns and madly reached for any escape. None even dared hope for mercy from these steel-shod nightmares of war.

One platform went by in a red haze, then another. Rodhamon’s arm never tired, never grew heavy. He was about to let loose another swing when something crackled through the air, and a voice too deep to be human groaned behind him. Stirring himself from his fugue, he glanced back to see one of his warriors, Marbalus, topple over, a smoking crater burned into his gut. His superhuman eyes traced the trajectory of the shot to an extended branch of the walkway overhead. There, immobile and unflinching amid the swirling chaos of the massacre, stood a troop of striking figures. Tall, uniform in their carapace of bright emerald-green and peaked helmets, they were far unlike the defenders he had faced until that point. The long maws of their hellguns took aim with cold-blooded deliberation. He leapt to the side as two more Knights collapsed, their corpses pitted with scorched wounds despite their powered armour.

Beams of infernal heat trailed them now, their butchery now even more vicious in the frenzied effort to hack their way to the sharpshooters. The hellguns were no more discerning than the Knights’ blades, nor were their wielders: crackling energy sliced impiteously through the terror-mad throngs of Kinchizere to strike at their pursuers. More and more red-armoured warriors fell.

Snarling, Rodhamon raised his left hand, which held the flamer, and cast forth an arc of fire. The cacophony of screams around him became fevered, the smells of blood and ordure fast overwhelmed by the choking stench of burning bodies. Flaming, flailing bundles hurtled into the pit. The hammering of the hellguns paused, the shooters straining to pick out their targets, however massive, in the newly risen cloud of fire and smoke. It was not a subterfuge that would last for long, but Rodhamon knew his Knights were not just the murderers everyone held them for - true warriors were prompt of mind as well as of hand. Taking advantage of the moment of reprieve, some Thunder Warriors in the back halted for a moment and took aim with their bolters across the gulf, before answering the hell-blasts with a roaring volley of their own.

Raucous cheers rose as a dozen of the green-clad soldiers burst into gory eruptions like ripe fruit under a hammer, smearing the others with mangled viscera. It was to their credit that they did not break then, like so many lesser foes had before the voice of thunder. The hellgunners wavered, but held firm, crouching in haste as more bolts tore gaps into the parapet before them. They were about to reopen their own fire when several things at once tore through the discordant arras of the battle.

First came a unified scream of many throats from far above, not merely the din of fright that had saturated the tower with its innumerable echoes, but a chorus of dismay so intense and unified that it almost seemed deliberately coordinated. The reason was one easily guessed by those whose thoughts were still lucid. In a bid to delay the fall of his seat atop the central tower of the hive, the despot of Kinchizere had sealed the upper exits of the other spires and thus their access to the connecting bridges. The vanguard of the desperate had at that moment found their last irrational hope dashed against fortified gates.

The second shock struck closer to the focus of the firefight. What appeared to be a hangar gate in the tower’s wall overlooking a crowded mustering platform ground open with a sinister rumble. The thronging fugitives paid it little mind at first, stubbornly pressing ahead still, but even ragged and exhausted throats found fuel for new horror when a nightmare crawled out from the shadows beyond.

Squamous, slavering and immense, the creature crept onto the spiral road, snapping up unlucky stragglers between its jaws. It was a reptilian beast as large as two battle tanks, reconstructed from some ancient genetic template and reshaped into a weapon of final resort. Its long, squat body dragged forward on six clawed legs, the oscillating serpentine neck ending in an arrow-shaped head that was almost wholly one wide mouth. Where spines did not protrude from its spine and joints, heavy plates of armour had been bolted to its skin. Its dull, flinty eyes were mere slits above its forest of interlocking fangs, from between which a thin lashing tongue tasted the air. Its head darted to one side with incredible speed, jaws closing around a hapless victim, before it ponderously began to crawl down towards the Knights. Even the hellgunners, still distant on their perch, had scattered into the darkened web of wires at the sight of the monster.

“Not a step back!” Rodhamon growled, kicking aside the burned husks piled before him and tensing his preterhuman muscles as the beast neared. But the Thunder Warriors needed no encouragement. As they formed into a wedge bristling with blood-slick blades, five came forward, levelling their bolters, and let loose a round of fire at the gaps in the creature’s armour. Its dirty-green scales sloughed away under the precise shots, but it did not so much as slow; indeed, as it loomed from the nearest platform overhead, it sprang with unexpected agility and crushed two of the warriors in its grotesquely distending maw. Rodhamon cursed, and lunged forward.

They circled the gargantuan brute like a pack of snow-lions around a mammoth, probing its defenses and drawing back before its clattering teeth as it clumsily but unstoppably maneuvered its bulk on the walkway. The armour that had been fastened to its hide was of the sort used for land-ships and fortresses, and even Rodhamon’s powered sword could only dent it. The gaps between the plates were more vulnerable, but the monster seemed to know no pain, and its reptilian flesh barely even bled when it was cut. Like a living bastion, it blocked the way above, and its own jaws moved with frightening speed. Time and again a Knight would be too slow in drawing back, and with a sickening crunch the adamant-sharp teeth would tear through steel and bone alike.

“Mark me now!” Rodhamon looked aside to see one of his warriors, Mandrekar, raise his spear with both hands as the monster prepared to rear up its head. He understood in an instant. As the bristling fangs came down again, Mandrekar angled the haft of his weapon, and his spear pierced into the underside of the creature’s jaw, driven deep by its own momentum. The distended beastly throat rattled drily as the steel haft bent and snapped in its wielder’s hands, and this time it was ever so slightly slower in drawing back. Rodhamon was ready to drive his own weapon forward, and his blade slid into a cold unblinking eye. The beast hissed then, and thrashed, but he held his grip firmly. Its maw stretched wide, almost tearing the sword from his hands, and in that moment another Knight, Rugier, hurled a krak grenade down its gullet. The sibilations became a liquid gurgle as half its legs went limp, blood pooling between them from under its belly.

“Hurl!” Tearing his sword out, Rodhamon slammed shoulder-first into the creature’s steely side, and with a crash of metal the others followed suit. Muscle strained, boots scraped the paved rockcrete, slipping in the admixture of human and beastly blood, but the tremendous strength of the Thunder Legions told true. The dying monster scratched the ground, vainly struggling to keep its hold, and then the ruined guardrails gave way, and the carcass tumbled into the abyss.

“To the end now!” Nothing more stood between the Red Knights and the top of the spire. Unseeing bloodlust carried them again, and Rodhamon scarce knew how many more fell under his blade, for how long he swung and hacked unthinkingly, with what violence he battered the fortified door at the very apex, the last barrier that separated him from the court of the hive’s craven satrap and the glory of their blood. Only when the heavy steel gate collapsed with a tearing groan did the first breath of clear though smoke-tainted air pass through his lips, and as he stepped once more into the light of day the haze cleared from his eyes.

He did not like what they saw.

The central tower of Kinchizere, tallest and most ornate of all, lay across an arched bridge over a vertiginous fall to the dusty ground of Midafrik far below. By all tokens, it had already been sacked. Its horseshoe-arched windows belched oily smoke into the troubled sky. The once-white facade was scored with bolts and lasfire, the turquoise mosaics once marking its grandeur in places smashed with particular relish. The culprits of this devastation were plain to see: a score of inhumanly large armoured figures were marching over the bridge towards them, their backs to the ruin. Though battle-marked, their liveries were plainly a blend of lightning yellow and black-red. The Annihilators had beaten them to the ultimate prize.

“Waste jackals!” His vision began to cloud again as he stepped forward, pointing his sword at the rival warriors, who hesitated the slightest fraction of an instant. He heard the other Knights at his back step forward behind him. “We ripped out the hive’s teeth, and we carved out its heart! The court was ours!”

“You? Ha!” The lead Annihilator’s face was an ungainly mess of scars and swollen features, beyond a doubt one of the ugliest works to issue from the Emperor’s hands. He laboured every word as if surfacing from the ocean of simmering rage behind his uneven eyes to speak were a contemptuous annoyance. “Slow. Weak. We are first! Lick the dust.”

“You will be first to taste it indeed!” Mandrekar’s fury was the first to reignite, and he sprang upon the leader, still unarmed and begrimed in gore to his shoulders. The Annihilator had been no less eager to let loose his violence, but the strangeness of this charge surprised him. His sneer turned to a grimace as the chainaxe he had been raising to strike the assailant was simply pried from his grip with a dexterous wrench, and then to a frustrated roar as its spinning blade hewed his own throat. Mandrekar tore the weapon from the stumbling corpse of its wielder and hurled it, still shrieking, at another opponent, sending him stumbling back between curses and blood. Rodhamon did not let the momentum slip away, and whirling his own sword he was soon in the thick of the fight.

It was a brutal, disorderly brawl. Both sides were tired, insofar as Thunder Warriors could be, but they were equally skilled and ferocious. Rodhamon clove through an Annihilator’s helmet, splitting his skull, even as he saw in the corner of his eye as Mandrekar was cut down by another. Step by step, blow by blow, the match grew more uneven. The Red Knights had been depleted by the battle, while another squad of Annihilators came charging down the bridge. The crimson was whittled down, hemmed in and pressed together by the black and yellow. Soon Rodhamon found himself on the defensive, inching back before the vicious swings of a fresh enemy. Another Knight fell near him; only six remained now, shoulder to shoulder, encircled by roaring blades. He snarled, tired and bleeding yet no less defiant, sword held up in a posture of challenge.

“Enough!” A harsh command pulled the Annihilators back. Their ranks loosened and withdrew, and between them there appeared the hide cloak and crested helmet of their Primarch. “Go back to your master, dogs of Charmagnol. This day is ours. Let this be a lesson to you.”

“Watch yourself, Jotharion,” Rodhamon growled, but he lowered his blade and motioned for his warriors to do the same. With rancorous glares, they stepped back, their rage undimmed but in no condition to contest such an adversary. Dusk crept into the soot-streaked sky.

All around them, for hundreds of miles, Midafrik burned.