ornate, and his movements were a fraction slower, though every part of him was suffused with the arcane potency of the warp.
‘Not yet,’ he said, keeping the shimmering psy-field activated over his great hammerhead. ‘Attend, Custodian – now the storm breaks.’
Even before he had finished speaking, the walls began to shake. The heavy chains swung, first gently, then ever more violently. With a squeal and a whine, the conveyers began to move, their skins drumming. A rumble broke out below us, a grind of earth against earth, almost too low to be heard, but then the reverberations thrummed into our bones.
Urbo’s men kept fighting. The mob kept coming at them. The mortals seemed insensible to this, and yet I could feel it – the build up, the swell and the bulge of something uncurling and extending and thrusting into reality.
This was something cumulative. This was something exponential.
‘You sensed this,’ I said, sounding more accusatory than I had intended.
‘We must leave,’ was all the Grey Knight said.
The walls were cracking. The foundations were shifting. I looked out at the assembly hall, and saw its floor begin to shudder, vibrating like kicked sand.
‘Withdraw,’ I ordered Urbo over the vox. ‘Get out now. Get to your ships.’
His forces instantly complied, disengaging, pulling back the way they had come. I looked up. There were stairs leading up the far wall, hugging the adamantium panels and running sheer to the distant roof. The Grey Knight saw what I proposed, and nodded.
‘That is acceptable,’ he said.
Then we were moving again, leaping from the pulpit and running across a heavy landscape of breaking metal. I felt the decks shatter under my tread. Wherever my boots landed, a red glow was revealed, as if we trod across magma-skin. I could unleash my full power now, and sprinted at full tilt. The Space Marines kept pace, and the six of us swept across the disintegrating hall. As we went, huge chunks of iron fell around us, smashing apart and driving deep into the vaults below. One of the tank husks was struck and tilted straight over into widening chasms beneath.
I reached the stairway and ascended, leaping four steps at a time. We rose swiftly, even as the walls buckled. Blood-red light flooded the chamber now, shafts of it angling from every rent in the toppling edifice around us. I had a vision of the entire structure collapsing as we raced through it, the tonnes and tonnes above us sloughing into a landslip of ruin.
I leapt to one side, my movements governed by intuition, narrowly evading a column that crashed into dust. We ducked and swayed through the disintegrating galleries, showered with clouds of bouncing rubble. The noise became incredible, a roar like the forgotten oceans. I had a final glimpse of the vaults over the assembly chamber – imploding entirely, folding in on the halls below – before we reached the portal to the outside. I raced through it, followed by the others, even as the decking beneath us fell away and plunged into the gathering vortex of collapse.
We emerged onto a high, narrow bridge into the spire levels and kept running. Behind us, the immense Munitorum facility broke open with blazing shafts of red light, thrust out from its slumping profile of darkness. Slowly, agonisingly, like a mountain being consumed from within, the great buttresses folded in on themselves and the towers crumpled. I heard explosions from a long way down, booms of tortured stone giving into tectonic pressures, and plumes of smoke reared high into the sky.
The bridge began to sway, its moorings pulled from their armatures. Ahead of us was another portal set into the face of a rearing hive-spire with a forked crown. We made for that, swerving and ducking even as molten clumps of metal rained down around us. I had a blurred impression of everything – the towers, the domes, the great defence stations – falling apart, as if all creation were splitting into pieces around us. I fixed on the goal – a wide platform of heavy iron and adamantium lodged high up on the westward face of the forked spire – and shut all else out of my mind. As the bridge finally broke free of its fastenings, we threw ourselves into the air, sailing through fire-flecked winds before crunching hard to the solid deck ahead.
Behind us, the bridge twisted away like a headless snake. Its spine broken, it seesawed as gravity sucked it down into the hungry maw of cataclysm.