The Iron Warriors were here; every Guardsman knew that the fight for life had begun. Overnight the heretic Space Marines raised great earthworks and began to push towards the outer walls, keeping up their momentum despite the approaching barrage. Tech-priests detected the tremor of mole-mines excavating ponderously towards them, while a storm of lance strikes rained down on the void shields, making the air fizz with ozone. For a week the fighting was ferocious and bloody. During the day flocks of arrow-shaped black bombers rained vast spiked frag charges and incendiary canisters down on the city streets. At night, the skies were barred with the beams of streaming search lights and the red tracer fire of Hydra defence platforms; each dawn brought the sight of the Iron Warriors’ earthworks creeping gradually closer to the outer walls. Demolition squads rushed out of armoured sally ports in up-armoured Chimeras, their multi-lasers spewing out searing bolts. The Cadians threw themselves at the Iron Warriors but had to fight their way through cultist slaves, who blunted their advance with melta bombs and demolition charges. Few Cadians returned from these missions, but each attack slowed the relentless assault for precious hours. On the fifth day, troops on the West Gate felt the tremor of mole-mines approaching the walls and teams of Cadian civilians dug counter-mines. The Cadians sent in demolition squads of their own, then flooded the Iron Warriors’ tunnels with toxic slime and radioactive coolants.

It was on the afternoon of the fifth day that the first Iron Warriors mole-mine exploded under the North-East Bastion. The blast was immense. A whole section of wall lifted into the air and then crashed down in ruins. With a howl, tens of thousands of cultists charged. The number and fury of their charge rocked the defenders back and brought them right up to the cliffs of rubble. A few cultists started to clamber up the sacred walls of the kasr before the blizzard of las and autocannon rounds cut them down in heaps. On the sixth day, two more mole-mines exploded near the south gate, and there was ferocious fighting, this time hand to hand, as the heretics crested the rubble walls and had to be driven back with flamer and bayonet. The battle went on into the night, with repeated assaults of daemon tanks, heretics and kill-teams of Black Legion Adeptus Astartes that swooped in, bolt pistols barking with each shot, chainswords spraying blood and gore across the walls. On the seventh day, whole sections of the outer walls were reduced to ash and rockcrete rubble.

Rath’s 94th kasrkin had held the line that night and the enemy’s grand assault began after dawn – a frenzied, howling charge of mutants and heretics and those driven insane by the violence and the darkness. Ten thousand Unnamed made the first charge. They died to a man, cut down by scathing salvos of disciplined lasrifle fire, withering support from heavy bolter and autocannon squads, and precise shots from the surviving gun turrets and bastions. The heretics lay in heaps ten-deep, when at last they fell back, mewling and howling curses at the defenders. That evening a mole-mine penetrated the magazine, deep in the bowels of the rockcrete bastion. The armoured walls acted like a seal on the explosion, which vented out through the doors and loop-holes before it tore the ancient rockcrete fortress apart. The void shields flickered and fell. Under a barrage of orbital bombardments and massed assaults, the walls had been attacked at all points at once, hemmed in to the south banks of the Myrak River.

On the morning of the eighth day, the warband of the Black Legion champion Druxus Bale battered the defenders with close-range Vindicator shells. Once the Cadians had been driven back, Druxus’ warbands charged across the open ground in Land Raiders that mounted the rubble cliffs, shrugging off a blizzard of las-fire. Flamers gouted out under the smoke-filled sky. Assault ramps slammed down as bolters killed the last Guardsmen, then power armour-clad Black Legion warriors stormed out, the mass-reactive shells of their bolters hitting the defenders with unerring aim, punching through carapace and flak armour and exploding the Cadians from within. The sudden, precise and overwhelming assault swept the defenders away from the Southern Gates and down into the city. The hand-to-hand fighting was fierce and brutal, as tens of thousands of heretics swarmed up behind them and drove the Cadians back. General Stahl led the defence in person, a bodyguard of elite carapace-armoured kasrkin about him. For a moment they had thrown Druxus back, knocking Black Legion Terminators off the walls, but then the Chaos Warlord had shoved his way to the fore.

He was a giant warrior in baroque warplate, bald head covered with obscene tattoos. In the hands of the Chaos champion was a crackling sword of blue fire. He singled Stahl out. ‘For Cadia!’ the general shouted, and threw himself at the enemy. He had fenced with the finest in the Cadian Shock Troop, and with an heirloom power sword and faith in the Emperor, he felt sure of victory. His first blow scored a deep groove in the Terminator’s pauldron, the second drove through the layers of ablative armour – a fine blow that drove Druxus back for a moment. But Druxus was ancient long before Stahl was born, and it took more than a power sword to lay him low. He caught the blade in his open hand and broke it in half with a crackle of energy. Stahl refused to give way. He drew his hot-shot laspistol and stood his ground. ‘In the name of the God Emperor of Mankind,’ he shouted, as Druxus laughed.

‘The False Emperor,’ the Chaos champion snarled as he tossed away the shards of the power sword. He caught Stahl by the chest and threw him to the ground. Stahl staggered back to his feet as his kasrkin ran to his side. Druxus killed them all with a sweep of his axe that cut Stahl in half.
\