More jarring impacts. Near to Dalin, a man was struck so hard that his helmet flew into the air. Sprays of arterial blood feathered across their faces. Dalin was shoved face to face with some feral thing with augmetics plugging its eyes and mouth. Yelling, he lunged with his blade, and fired for good measure. The thing fell backwards and then was knocked limply forwards into Dalin again by the swell of the mob. The Krassian beside him cried out as a bayonet slashed his arm guard. The man’s own bayonet was lodged in the chest armour of the enemy soldier facing him, a diseased wretch in decaying black wargear. Dalin desperately hooked round with his own weapon, tearing out the enemy soldier’s throat with the tip of his bayonet. The Krassian grinned at Dalin in gratitude. Ten seconds later, a bullet from somewhere had felled the Krassian with a solid www-spakk!
Dalin felt adrift in the stormy sea of bodies. Above -their heads, out over the seething mass, banners and flags swayed and flourished. Las rounds zipped. Half a kilometre away, one of the other huge gateways on the bulwark trembled and blew out in a gargantuan sheet of flame. From the raging fire, through the breach, a titan strode forwards, its armour scorched black by the fireball. A vast cheer went up from the men.
The tide moved forwards with renewed vigour. The resistance ahead gave way, and they advanced with greater speed, free to move apart and spread out, free to find breathing space. The flagstones underfoot were cracked by weight and impact, and stained brown with blood. Bodies lay everywhere, amongst a litter of debris and pieces of equipment.
Dalin ran. He found an enemy trooper in his path, a man with copper armour plates on his green cloth battledress. Dalin charged into him, and they grappled. Dalin swung the butt of his rifle up, brought the man to his knees, and delivered the death stroke with his bayonet.
Raising his weapon, he saw another man running at him with a sword. He fired two shots from the hip, and the man turned around as he fell, spun by torque. Small explosions blew stones and grit into the air nearby. He met another warrior face to face, and they locked bayonets. The enemy, a grotesque mutant beast with sunken features, screeched at him as it struggled. Dalin couldn’t wrest his blade free. A passing bolter round blew out the warrior’s midriff, and Dalin tore clear.
As far as he could see, the Guard was engaging hand-to-hand in furious skirmish fights right across the city square. The enemy warriors they were fighting were things he would spend the rest of his life trying to forget: bizarre things, some armoured and ugly and brutal, some strange and almost beautiful in their weird forms. Some seemed diseased, and so dependent upon their armour and augmetics that they were fused, flesh and metal, into one whole. Others were resplendent in bright wargear, flying banners from long spears on which the ignominy of Chaos was spelled out.
An entire catalogue of corruption, decay, mortification, mutation, mutilation and decoration was on display. The Archenemy faced mankind’s assault armed with lasweapons, cleavers, autoguns, swords, talons and teeth. Dalin saw a man with a festoon of thin, barbed tentacles billowing from his open mouth. He saw a cyclops woman with a single jagged tooth curving down over her deformed lip. He saw bat-faced things, wailing and chirruping as they hacked with chain blades. He saw horned ogres, and men with the backwards legs of giant birds. He saw gleaming black flesh like sharkskin; bone fingernails worn on engraved metal hands; slit-ted eyes the colour of embers; grossly distended, encephalitic heads supported on sagging shoulders; cloaks of beaded, winking eyes; secondary faces blinking and mewling through gaps in garments and cloaks.
Shells landed with a woosh of fractured air and Dalin ducked instinctively. Heavy rounds fell across the square, hurling bodies off the ground in explosive swirls.
“Holy!”
Fourbox appeared. He had been drenched in blood and then dusted with fine stone powder.
“You’re alive!” Fourbox cried, as if telling Dalin something he didn’t know. We’ve got to move!” he cried, over the din. The armour’s coming!”
The wide body of Guardsmen pouring into the square was parting and separating. Snorting plumes of smoke, Imperial tanks clattered forward from the sundered gates, firing their raised main weapons up into the towers and spires of the malevolent city. The first tanks were Leman Russes of the Rothberg division, puzzle-painted in beige and brown scales. Soot and dust jumped off their hulls every time they fired their main guns. Guardsmen ran along beside them, cheering and whooping at every tank round shot off.
The skirts of the city ahead were burning. Incendiary shells had created blistering firestorms that wrapped up the nearest towers and gutted their structures. The assaulting tanks moved out ahead of the expanding infantry line.
One tank rolled right past Fourbox and Dalin. They cheered as if it was a passing carnival float.
“Come on,” Dalin said, and they ran along behind it, joining others following the armour in. When its main gun fired, the sound was so loud and close that it made them all jump and then laugh. Dalin saw the mangled corpse of a commissar laying on the rubble. He wondered if it was Sobile. He hoped it was.
“Look!” he said to Fourbox. Nearby, the bodies of several Krassians lay around their fallen banner, a tattered aquila on a cross-spar square.
“Help me!” Dalin said, running towards it. Fourbox followed, along with two Krassian privates from the mob following the tank.
Together, they gathered the banner up and raised it. It took a moment to straighten the main flag and make it hang properly. Then they hustled it back to the file of men jogging after the tank. More cheers went up. The tank up ahead sounded its horn.
The smoke wafting in from the towers was getting thicker, draping across the square like a fog. Dalin suddenly spotted Merrt amongst the advancing lines.
“You made it!”
Merrt nodded and moved in to join them. His fight up from the gatehouse had been tough. The lasrifle he had ended up with, having swapped with Dalin, was poor: an unreliable old unit marked with a half-faded yellow Munitorum stencil on the butt. It had misfired twice, and each time that had almost got him killed. It was in poor condition, mechanically, and Merrt had a nasty feeling it was an old weapon recaptured from the enemy.
With Merrt were Amasec, Spader, Effort and Wash, four other members of AT 137. All of them were in a dirty, dishevelled state. Then Pinzer, the company pardoner, appeared. Dalin had assumed he’d been killed hours before. Pinzer held a laspistol in one hand and an open prayer book in the other, reading aloud as he walked along. The members of AT 137 cheered him as if he was a long lost relative. Pinzer looked up vaguely, but didn’t seem to recognise them.
Wash spat on the ground and made the sign of the aquila. He’d seen something else. He nodded across the square.
Amid the advancing Guard ranks, Dalin could see gnarled dark figures coming forwards. Some were clad in stormcoats, and walked with the aid of long staffs. Others were bent, hunched forms in shackles who waddled along, linked to pairs of Commissariat guards by chain leads.
High Command had sent the sanctioned psykers forwards.
“Filthy bloody things,” Wash said, and spat again.
Dalin peered at the distant figures curiously. The daylight, admittedly sheened with smoke and dust, seemed especially murky around them, as if the air had been stained brown like the fingers of an old lho smoker. There was a slight flicker to the walking figures too, so they looked like an old pict recording, running slightly fast, with jerks and jumps on the file.
He felt his skin crawl, and imagined powerful, inhuman minds glaring at him, glaring at them all, and seeing inside them. He wondered how the psykers perceived the world. Were they looking into his mind? Where they seeing through his flesh to his weary bones? Did they even notice him?
Could they see into his head and read how scared he was of them?
He felt a touch, like light fingertips on his skin, and he jumped, and then reassured himself that it was his own imagination.
The sound of a fierce blow came out of the smoke ahead of them. The so
und had been very loud, and expressed some considerable collision, like a wrecking ball striking a blast hatch. It was followed immediately by an impact that quaked the ground, and then by a long, drawn-out shrieking, scraping sound of metal on stone that grew louder.
A Leman Russ tank appeared out of the smoke. It was one of the Rothberg units, in beige and brown, part of the vanguard that had plunged ahead into the burning city.
It was half overturned, turret towards them and tracks away from them. The uppermost track section had been broken, and the loose tread segments trailed down like a lizard’s loose scales. The hull armour on the raised flank was deeply dented, by some colossal force.
Sparks and scraping squeals came out from under it. On its side, the tank was sliding across the flagstones towards them.
IV
Sedately, its hull still grinding on the ground, the tank slid past them and the Leman Russ they were following, and slowed to a halt. As it stopped, two heavy tread sections fell lumpenly onto the ground. There was almost a moment of silence.
“What in the name of hell could—” Fourbox started to say.
There was something in the smoke, something that had met the tank and struck it such a blow that it had knocked it over and sent it sliding across the square. The something was tall, the height of a two-storey hab, and it was barely moving. They could see it in the smoke, a grey shadow in the paler cloud. They saw it take a single, slow step. They heard a long, wet, rasping purr.
The advancing infantry lines had stopped. Banners flapping in the wind, they were staring at the bank of smoke and shadow inside it. The tanks had stopped too.
Another deep, wet purr came out of the smoke.
Along the line, officers and commissars were shouting orders and encouragement.
“Present your weapons! Firing ranks!”
“Hold order, hold order!
An officer that Dalin didn’t know ran past them down the line. “Steady guns! Two files!”
“What is it?” Wash murmured. “What is it?”
The shadow moved again. It began to have a form. Dalin almost swallowed his tongue in terror as he gazed up at the two giant horns that topped the wedge-shaped skull. A vast cloven hoof clopped the flagstones as it took a step. There was a stench of burned sugar and volcanic gas, thunderstorms and shit.
“Daemon…” said the pardoner, looking up. “D-daemon…”
Several men fainted. The Guard line broke and fled like a stampede of timid veldt grazers. Voices suddenly rose in a hubbub as men turned and scrambled for their lives. Banners fell, forgotten. Commissars yelled and threatened, and were knocked down. Hatches clanged open and tank crews leapt out, abandoning their vehicles in an effort to flee with the rest.
The daemon came for them. Though he stared, and was one of the last to run, Dalin didn’t really see it. He glimpsed the tusk-like horns, the massive, quasi-humanoid shape, the back-jointed legs, and a mouth full of ragged teeth inside a mouth full of ragged teeth inside a gaping, fang-fringed maw. He glimpsed the round, black, glossy eyes.
He wanted to see the daemon. He wanted to steel himself and witness his greatest fear made flesh, and bear the sight and be stronger for it, or die. But the daemon possessed a quality beyond all those enumerated in the Ecclesiarchy’s texts and warning sermons.
It was fast.
Its speed was as unnatural as all of its other ghastly aspects. It was not fast like a man or animal might be fast. When it moved, reality folded around it and allowed it to pass from place to place in an eye-blink. There was a sound like screaming, gale-force winds. Dozens of fleeing Guardsmen were suddenly hurled upwards into the air, as if thrown aside by a violent wake. The crew had only just abandoned the tank in front of Dalin when it flipped up sharply into the sky like a toy, turned over, and came crashing down thirty metres away with an impact that jarred Dalin off his feet.
He struggled onto his hands and knees. Dismembered dead lay everywhere. Bodies, stripped and flayed in a second of fury, sprawled in lakes of blood. Dalin screamed in helpless rage and terror. Wash sat on the ground near to him, hands in his lap, weeping and sobbing. Fourbox was still standing behind them, staring at the place where the tank had been. Pinzer wandered past. Dalin looked up at the pardoner. The man was gazing at the crumbling Imperial lines around them, at the great, horned blur of smoke and stinking air that ripped through them, casting bodies into the sky.
Pinzer looked away. He turned his back on the slaughter and sat down on the ground beside Dalin. His prayer book fell from his hand and landed on the gritty flagstones.
“There’s no ham here,” he said quickly, his voice thin and perplexed. “None at all. I checked. Bad eggs. You ran too fast for me to count. Preposition.”
“What?” asked Dalin.
Pinzer put his pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. His body flopped back from the waist onto the ground.
“Get up!”
Dalin turned. “Get up!” Merrt told him. He looked at Wash. “Get him on his feet.”
“We’re all dead!” Wash moaned through his sobs.
A flicker of light caught the corner of Dalin’s vision. It made his teeth itch, and he felt a nasty liquid pulse in his gut. He thought he was going to lose control of his bowels. Fourbox felt it too, and Merrt. The sensation made Wash, hard man Wash, squeal like a girl.
“What was that?” Fourbox complained, apparently unaware or unwilling to acknowledge the full extent of what was happening.
“The psyks,” growled Merrt. They’ve engaged the gn… gn… that fething thing.”
They could all feel it, like someone was squeezing their internal organs. Wash dry-heaved. Tears streamed down all their cheeks, unbidden. Dalin felt the mother of all headaches gnawing at him, and tasted the iron tang of blood in his mouth. All the cuts and gashes he had taken since landing spontaneously reopened.
Filthy yellow light spread out across the vast, disputed city square. The haze was like a rainstorm vapour, and obscured the bulwark and the distant skyline. Forking traceries of energy lit up the frothing darkness like veins. Some of the larger flagstones under their feet spontaneously cracked, as if exposed to cosmically low temperatures.
Merrt put a hand to the side of his head. “Let’s move,” he said. “Let’s move before it kills us.”
V
For two hours, some form of combat rolled around the darkened square. A foul mist, busy with flies, breathed into the side streets, and screams echoed from the noisome dark. There were strange, inexplicable crashes and thumps.
The streets nearby were burning. Some Guardsmen from the advancing line had fled forward into the ruins, and this had probably saved them, from the daemon and the telepathic conflict at least.
Dalin, Merrt, Fourbox and Wash fled that way. Two Krassians, one called Firik, the other Bonbort, ran with them. Firik had lost his left hand. He either didn’t know how he’d lost it, or was too traumatised to remember. Merrt bound up the stump, and Firik sat alone, making little gagging sobs of pain every now and then.
They had taken shelter in the bombed-out shell of a building. Nearby, one of the grotesque city towers, a monstrous thing of spiked architecture and insectile buttresses, burned, long into the night.
They sat in silence in the flickering shadows, flinching at every howl or crash. They were too tired and numb to speak. Fourbox took out a ration pack, but his fingers were too stiff and trembling to tear it open. Merrt seemed content to sit and check his weapon, examining it carefully as if trying to correct some fault with the foresight.
Dalin sat still for as long as he could, knowing he needed the rest, but there was a ticking impatience inside him. They weren’t out of this, and every step seemed, triumphantly and incredibly, to be worse than the last. He got up and paced the ruin, peering out of the broken windows. The street to one side was full of dead enemy vehicles that looked as if they had been burned out in one flash firestorm while in procession. White ash covered their hulls like snow.
“Eat something.”
He glanced around and saw Merrt. He shook his head.
“You need food,” Merrt said. “It’s a miracle any of us are still functioning after the last few hours. Lack of food’s the last thing you’re noticing right now, but you’re gn… gn… gonna know it when the crash comes. Eat something and you might stay useful for a little while longer.”
Dalin took a ration pack out and picked at it. Merrt helped Fourbox to tear open his pack, and then gave the others the same advice.
Sucking reconstituted broth through a straw, Merrt rejoined Dalin.
“Worst thing you’ve ever seen, right?”
Dalin wondered which particular aspect of the last day Merrt was referring to. He simply nodded.
“Actually, there was a chair once,” Dalin said.
“What?”
“I had a nightmare when I was a kid,” Dalin said. “Me and my sister were being chased by a chair that was going to eat us. Aleksa from the strength was there, with a chicken under her arm, asking me if I’d tied my bootlaces.”
Merrt raised his eyebrows. “Why’d you tell me that?”
Dalin shrugged. “Because I honestly can’t think of a single fething subject for sane conversation just at the moment.”
“That’s the truth,” Merrt agreed, and turned to look out at the ash-covered street. “Probably symbolic,” he said.
“What?”
“Your dream.”
“How so?”
Merrt glanced back at Dalin. “A chair? That’s gn… gn… got to be a symbol, right? Of the Imperium. The Throne. No matter how hard you try to prolong it, sooner or later the Imperium’s going to eat you and your sister up, like it eats everyone up. The Imperium gn… gn… gets us all in the end. It consumes us all.”