Helsreach Read online

  I see Stormherald.

  Over my shoulder, Artarion sees the same. ‘Blood of Dorn,’ he says, his voice uncharacteristically soft.

  The entire scene is tainted by the grey dust clouds in the air from fallen buildings. In this cloud of grey, half-buried in the debris of the exploded buildings, the Titan kneels in the street.

  Sixty metres of walking lethality – an unstoppable weapons platform with the ornate cathedral adorning its shoulders – kneels in the street, defeated. Around it is the devastation of several fallen habitation towers. The invaders, curse their soulless lives, had set the surrounding hab-blocks to detonate and collapse on the Titan.

  ‘They have brought an Emperor-class Titan to its knees,’ Artarion says. ‘I never thought I would live to see such a thing.’

  Hundreds of them swarm the streets now, climbing onto the defeated god-machine’s back with grappling hooks and boosting up there on burning thruster packs. They crawl across its dust-coated armour like insectile vermin.

  ‘Grimaldus,’ the Titan hails me, and suddenly it is so obvious why the voice is pained. Not from agony. From shame. She has advanced ahead of her skitarii phalanxes, and is undefended against this massed infantry assault.

  ‘I am here, Zarha.’

  ‘I feel them, like a million spiders across my skin. I… cannot stand. I cannot rise.’

  ‘Make ready,’ I vox to my brothers. Then, to the humbled princeps, ‘We are about to engage the enemy.’

  ‘I feel them,’ she says again, and I cannot tell from her machine-voice if she is bitter, delirious, or both. ‘They are killing my people. My prayer-speakers… my faithful adepts…’

  I am not blind to the meaning in her words. To the Machine Cult, each death was more than a mortal tragedy – it was the loss of knowledge and perspective that might never be recovered.

  ‘They are inside me, Grimaldus. Like parasites. Violating the Cathedral of Sanctuary. Climbing inside my bones. Drilling toward my heart.’

  I do not reply to her as I watch the crumbled cityscape below. Instead, I tense myself for a moment’s sensory dislocation, and hurl myself out into the sky.

  Grimaldus was first to leap from the circling Thunderhawk.

  Artarion, ever his shadow and still bearing his banner, was only seconds behind. Priamus, his blade in hand, came next. Nerovar and Cador followed, the first of them leaping into a dive, the latter merely stepping out in an uncomplicated plummet. Last of all was Bastilan, the sergeant’s insignia on his helm catching the dull evening light. He voxed to the pilot, wishing him well, and drew his weapons before falling into air.

  Altitude gauges on retinal displays showed fast-falling numbers, the digital readouts a blur as the knights dropped from the sky. Beneath them, the kneeling god-machine presented a huge target. The multi-levelled cathedral on its shoulders was like a city in miniature – a city of spires – bristling with weapons batteries and crawling with alien vermin.

  The knights saw the aliens as they descended: the beasts clambering up on tethered lanyards, or flying up on primitive rocket packs, laying siege to the stricken Titan. Stormherald itself was a pathetic statue depicting its own failure. It was driven to one knee, buried to the waist in the debris of six or seven fallen hab-block towers. The avenue was in ruin around it, where the detonated buildings had collapsed and levelled the city flat. The Titan’s arm-guns, as large as some habitation towers themselves, were grey-white with dust and resting on the mounds of broken brick, twisted steel supports, and rockcrete stone.

  Grimaldus held off firing his boosters to slow his freefall.

  ‘Come down in the courtyard in the centre of the cathedral,’ he voxed to the others. Their acknowledgements came immediately. In turn, each of them engaged their jump packs, arresting their dives into more controlled descents.

  Grimaldus was the last to fire his boosters, and the first to hit the ground.

  His boots thudded onto the paved courtyard, smashing the precious mosaics into gravel beneath his feet. Immediately, he leaned to the side, compensating for the angle of the ground. Stormherald’s defeated posture was tilting the entire cathedral forward almost thirty degrees.

  The courtyard was modest, ringed by nine plain marble statues that each stood four metres tall. In each of the cardinal directions, a set of open doors led into the cathedral itself. The mosaic tiles on the floor depicted the black and white bisected, cyborged skull of the Machine Cult of Mars. Grimaldus had come down onto the dark eye socket of the skull’s human side, crushing the black tiles to powder underfoot.

  Nothing moved nearby. The sounds of battle, of looting, of desecration – these all came from within the surrounding building.

  Priamus landed with a skid, his armoured boots tearing at the mosaics and shearing them off in a wave of broken pebbles. His blade, chained to his wrist, crackled into life.

  Nerovar, Cador and Bastilan were altogether more graceful in their landings. The sergeant came down in the shadow of one of the tilted statues. Its stern face eclipsed the setting sun.

  ‘These are the primarchs,’ he said to the others as they readied their weapons.

  All heads turned towards Bastilan. He was right.

  As representations of the primarchs went, they were plain to the point of almost being crude. The sons of the Emperor were usually depicted in grandeur and glory, rather than by sculptures so subtle and austere.

  There was Sanguinius, Lord of the Blood Angels, prominently unwinged, with a childlike face lowered in repose. And there, Guilliman of the Ultramarines, his robed form so much slenderer than any other depiction of him that the knights had seen before. In one hand, he clutched an open tome. The other was raised to the sky, as if he was caught and forever frozen in a moment of great oratory.

  Jaghatai Khan was bare-chested, bearing a curved blade in his hands and looking to the left, as if staring at the distant horizon. His hair was shaggy and long, whereas in so many masterpieces it was shaven but for a topknot. Next to him, Corax, the Prince of Ravens, wore a plain mask that was utterly featureless but for the eyes. It was as if he was unwilling to show his face in the company of his brothers, hiding his visage behind an actor’s mask.

  Ferrus Manus and Vulkan shared a plinth. The brothers were bareheaded, and the only two primarchs sculpted here in armour. Both wore vests of mail, the fine links of chain on Manus’s breast a counterpoint to the larger scales adorning Vulkan’s. They stood back to back, facing in opposite directions, both carved to bear hammers in each hand.

  Leman Russ of the Wolves stood with legs apart, head cast back, facing the sky. Whereas the other sons of the Emperor wore robes or armour, Russ was clad in rags sculpted over his chiselled musculature. He was also the only primarch with tensed fists, as if he stared into the heavens, awaiting some grim arrival.

  A robed figure, hooded yet visibly slender to the point of emaciation, clutched the hilt of a winged blade, its tip between the statue’s bare feet. Here was the Lion, depicted as a warrior-monk, eyes closed in silent contemplation.

  And, last of all, rising above Bastilan, was Rogal Dorn.

  Dorn stood apart from his brothers, neither facing his kin, nor looking into the skies above. His regal visage was aimed at the ground to his left, as if the primarch stared at something vital only he could see. The robe he wore was plainer that those adorning his brothers’ icons, though it showed a cross on its breast, sculpted with care. Although he had been the Golden Lord, the commander of the Imperial Fists, his personal heraldry had inspired that of his Templar sons who followed.

  His hands were what drew the knights’ eyes more than any other aspect in this gathering of demigods. One was held to his chest, the fingertips joined to the cross there, frozen in mid-stroke. The other was held out in the direction Dorn stared, palm up and kindly, as if offering aid to one who would rise from the floor.

  It was quite the most humble and exquisite rendition of their gene-father Grimaldus had ever laid eyes on. He fought the sudden burn
ing urge to fall to his knees in reverent prayer.

  ‘This is an omen,’ Bastilan continued. Grimaldus could barely believe only a handful of seconds had passed since the sergeant last spoke.

  ‘It is,’ the Reclusiarch replied. ‘We will purify this temple under the gaze of our forefather. Dorn watches us, brothers. Let us make him proud of the day he sired the first Templar.’

  We move without hesitation, and without caution, through the cathedral.

  The angled floor is an irritation that I’ve managed to blank from my mind by the time the third alien is dead. Room by room, we move in unison. The cathedral is a divided into a series of chambers ringing the courtyard, each one with its own stained glass windows now shattered and gaping like missing teeth, each room reaching high up with a pointed ceiling ending in the spire above.

  The slaughter is easy, almost mindless. Priamus is like a wolf on the leash, eager to run ahead on his own.

  My patience is wearing thin with him.

  Each chamber also shows its own unique desecration. Tech-adepts and Ecclesiarchy priests lie dead and butchered, their bodies in pieces across the mosaic floors. Unarmed as they were, they offered little resistance to the rampaging invaders. Bookshelves are overturned, ceramic ornaments shattered… I would never put feral destruction past this xenos-breed, but it almost seems as if the greenskins sought something specific in their rabid assault.

  ‘The articulation structures are sealed. My bones are defended by internal forces. My heart-core is cut off from the parasites.’

  Ambush or not, it is disgusting that it took them even this long to achieve such basic necessities.

  ‘We are retaking the Cathedral of Sanctuary,’ I tell her. ‘Resistance is minimal, Zarha. But you must stand. They are still coming. Bring the cathedral out of range of boarders, or we will be overwhelmed.’

  ‘I cannot stand,’ she says.

  What a sin it is, for such a majestic warrior to speak with such shameful defeat tainting her words. Were she one of my men, I would kill her for such dishonour. Slowly. By strangulation. Cowardice does not deserve the rush of a blade.

  ‘I have tried,’ she intones.

  The emotion colouring her machine-voice brings my bile rising. For all I know, she could be weeping. My disgust is so powerful I must fight the need to vomit.

  ‘Try harder,’ I breathe into the vox, and sever the link.

  We fight our way to the outer battlements at Stormherald’s front, where the incline allows for easy boarding. An ork’s fat hand slaps on the red metal of the battlement’s edge, and the brute hauls itself up. My pistol meets its face, the heat exchanger vanes hissing against its skin. It has a moment to bawl its hatred at me before I pull the trigger. What remains of the alien falls from its handholds, tumbling to the ground, burning briefly on its way down as a living torch of white-hot fire.

  The battlements resemble a true siege in all respects. The last remaining tech-adepts and priests defend the cathedral against boarding aliens, though no more than a small cluster remain. Few humans, augmented or otherwise, are a match for one of these beasts.

  Priamus slips the leash of discipline. His charge carries him ahead, his sword flaring with light each time its power field saws into alien flesh. My brothers lay into the enemy along the besieged wall with bolter and blade. The few servitor-manned spire turrets that had been spitting solid shots into the mass of orks fall silent, not willing to risk striking any of us.

  ‘You will do penance for this, Priamus.’

  He doesn’t answer. ‘For the Emperor!’ he cries into the vox. ‘For Dorn!’

  In the pockets of battle where none of us stand, the turrets open fire once again. At least their servitors are worth something, then. The orks turn from butchering the few priests still standing. Their bestial faces are afire with brutish, eager emotion as they come for us.

  One of them… Throne of the Emperor… One of them dwarfs his piggish brethren. His armour makes him twice the size of us, looking like scrap metal and primitive, chugging power generators bolted onto an exoskeletal frame. His hands are industrial claws that look as if they could peel a tank apart without effort. He even kills his own kin as he strides towards us on the inclined floor. His claws swing, battering his lesser allies aside, hurling them against the cathedral wall or over the battlement’s edge.

  I raise my crozius in a two-handed grip.

  ‘That one is mine,’ I tell my brothers.

  Dorn is watching this.

  ‘You asked to see me, sir?’

  Tomaz didn’t bother to straighten his crumpled work overalls as he stood at what could loosely be called attention. Around him, the command chamber was its usual bustling hive of activity. A junior staff officer bumped him as she passed.

  Tomaz said nothing. He’d worked fifteen hours straight today, on a dock backed up with dozens and dozens of ships, with almost no room to unload. Fifteen hours of shouting, of broken vox-casters and no techs spare to fix them, of cargo being dumped wherever it could be dumped – which was inevitably the wrong place (and the most inconvenient one for someone else) – necessitating its removal minutes later when another worker’s already fouled-up work was fouled-up even further.

  Frankly, he didn’t much care if he got shoved over onto the ground. Maybe he could curl up and get some damn sleep.

  ‘Sir,’ he prompted.

  Sarren finally looked up from the hololithic table. The colonel had aged in the last week, Maghernus could see it clearly. He looked as tired and bone-achingly sick of it all as Tomaz felt.

  ‘What?’ Sarren asked, narrowing his bloodshot eyes. ‘Oh. Yes. Dockmaster.’ Sarren looked back down at the hololithic display. ‘I need your crews to speed up. Is that understood?’

  Maghernus blinked. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t quite hear you.’

  ‘I need,’ Sarren didn’t look up, ‘your crews to speed up their work. The reports I’m getting from the docks show they are at a standstill. We are talking about significant portions of the north and east perimeters of the city, dockmaster. I need to move troops. I need to store materiel. I need you to do your job.’

  Maghernus looked around the room in disbelief, unsure how to respond.

  ‘What would you have me do, colonel? What is there that I can possibly do?’

  ‘Your job, Maghernus.’

  ‘Have you even seen the docks recently, colonel?’

  Sarren looked up again, laughing without even a shred of humour. ‘Do I look like I have seen anything except casualty reports recently?’

  ‘I can’t do anything about the docks,’ Maghernus shook his head, a sense of unreality settling over him. ‘I’m not a miracle worker.’

  ‘I appreciate you have an… intense… workload.’

  ‘That’s not the half of it. We’re dealing with a backlog of weeks, months even, and no room to handle anything.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I need more from you and your crews.’

  ‘Of course, sir. I’ll be back in a moment, I feel the sudden need to piss expensive white wine and turn everything I touch into gold.’

  ‘This is no laughing matter.’

  ‘And I’m not laughing, you pompous son of a bitch. “Work harder”? “Do more”? Are you insane? There’s nothing I can do!’

  Nearby officers glanced his way. Sarren sighed and rubbed his closed eyes with the tips of his fingers.

  ‘I respect the difficulties of your position, dockmaster, but this is the first week of the siege. This is only going to get worse. We are all going to sleep much less, and we are all going to work much harder.

  ‘Furthermore, I understand that you are sweating blood in an underappreciated duty, but you are not the only one suffering. You, at least, are guaranteed to live longer than many of us. I have men and women in the streets, fighting and dying for your home, so that you may continue to complain at how I crack the whip over you. I have hundreds of thousands of citizens under arms, facing the greatest alien invasion force the world
has ever seen.

  ‘Sir,’ Maghernus took a breath. ‘I will–’

  ‘You will shut up and let me finish, dockmaster. I have platoons of men and women lost behind the advancing enemy line, no doubt hacked to pieces by the axes of barbarous xenos monsters. I have armour divisions running out of fuel because of resupply difficulties in the embattled sectors. I have an Emperor-class Titan on its knees, because its commander was too angry to think clearly. I have a city with its edges on fire, and its population in rout with nowhere to run to. I have tens of thousands of soldiers dying to prevent the enemy from reaching the Hel’s Highway – people dying for a road, dockmaster – because once the beasts reach the city’s spine, we are all going to die a great deal faster.

  ‘Now, am I making myself perfectly clear when I tell you that while I have sympathy for your difficulties, I also expect you to work through them? We are, just to be sure, no longer speaking past one another? We are, for the record, now on the same page?’

  Maghernus swallowed and nodded.

  ‘Good,’ Sarren smiled. ‘That’s good. What can you do for me, dockmaster?’

  ‘I’ll… speak to my crews, colonel.’

  ‘My thanks for understanding the situation we are in, Tomaz. You are dismissed. Now, someone raise a reliable vox-signal to the Reclusiarch. I need to know how close he is to getting that Titan walking.’

  In the cognition chamber, Grimaldus stood before the crippled Zarha.

  His armour’s calm, measured hum was marred by a mechanical ticking sound at random intervals. Something, some internal system linking the power pack to the suit of armour was malfunctioning. His skull helm with its silver faceplate was painted with alien blood. His armour’s left knee joint clicked as he moved, the servos inside damaged and in need of reverent maintenance by Chapter artificers. Where scrolls of written oaths had hung from his pauldrons, the armour was burned, the ceramite cracked.

  But he was alive.