“Now,” the captured Imperial grinned, “he’s crow shit.”
The knife lowered in a slackened grip. She didn’t try to hide the spilling tears. “Tell me what happened,” she said again. “Tell me how the Archon died.”
Their eyes met. His were human, with irises of rich hazel. Hers hadn’t been human in years: mutated, slitted the same way a snake’s eyes are split by black pupil slices—just as disgusting, and just as captivating.
Just one shot at this. One chance.
With his shins leashed together, there was a chance he could hammer a two-booted kick up into her throat, crushing her trachea and damaging her larynx. At the very least, she’d be stunned and muted, preventing an immediate call for aid. At best, she’d die from the trauma of impact, asphyxiating soon after.
One shot. One chance.
He could see it, hear it, feel it. Perhaps he’d miss. Perhaps his boots would smack into her chin, meeting her jawbone with a sick, sharp crack. Her lovely face would snap back on a bent neck, and instead of rising to flee, she’d fall like a puppet with cut strings. One chance.
Her guard was down, but… not enough. It wasn’t worth the risk. Not yet. Bide your time.
III
His rank was senior sergeant. His regiment was the Argentum: also known as the Silver Kindred, the Warmaster’s Own, and—on the Munitorum rosters—the Khulan 2nd Huscarls, assigned as bodyguards to Slaydo himself.
He wore the same silver shoulder guards and ornate vambraces that the Warmaster wore, for his uniform was a lesser reflection of Slaydo’s own finery. Carried in a scroll case strapped to his thigh was a parchment copy of the 755 Crusade Charter, issued by the High Lords of Terra, granting permission for Imperial forces to declare a crusade into retaking the Sabbat Worlds.
In his webbing, he carried a printed, leather-bound copy of A Treatise on the Nature of Warfare—required reading for command candidates, and the seminal work from the pen of Lord Militant Slaydo, written in the decades before his ascension to Warmaster.
Slaydo knew his first name, and addressed him by it. Familiarity had long begun to erode the boundary between the officer and the soldiers that served him.
“Commodus,” the Warmaster would always say in his gruff tones. “Still dogging my footsteps, boy? Still keeping up with this old war hound?”
Commodus Ryland, senior sergeant, was not with the Warmaster now, but he was still breathing. He intended to keep it that way.
Bide your time, he thought.
So he said: “I’ll tell you.”
And did just that.
IV
“I have dreamed of this many times, but in my worst nightmares, I did not witness this.”
—Slaydo, Warmaster of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade
History would say all of Balhaut burned that month. For once, these words could be spoken without a poetic simile or a mind to dramatise an event into the pages of Imperial archives. Day and night, earth and sky, Balhaut burned.
Bal Prime and Boruna Hive, Zaebes City and the Western Plains, the Tark Islands and Ascension Valley. Every critical site on Balhaut endured punishing orbital bombardment, the skies above them alight with the Warmaster’s anger.
Balopolis, the capital city, died in the heart of those flames.
Through sulphur skies, great whale ships breached the ashen cloud cover, gliding groundwards. Each one was fat with armour plating and swollen with legions of troops—Guard carriers, each eager to be the first on the surface and disgorge its soldiers into the Last Battle.
In the years to come, when Balopolis was a shrine-city—a monument to the trillions slain over the Crusade’s course—the memorials for this invasion would paint a glorious picture. Ten days of victory after victory; ten days of unstoppable Imperial advance into Archenemy territory. Wreckage from the Archon’s annihilated fleet rained onto the world below, each hunk of ship’s hull raising cheers in the Imperials that beheld it.
With no capacity to flee the planet’s surface, the enemy leaders barricaded themselves inside their strongholds, legions of loyal followers between them and Slaydo’s landing forces.
By nightfall on the ninth day, Slaydo had driven his bleeding forces into the heart of Balopolis with a crusader’s zeal. His army besieged the High Palace itself, regiment after regiment marching into the wasteland that Balopolis had become. Every record of the Great Victory would describe this in excruciating—and verbose—detail, for Slaydo’s death was only hours away.
Comparatively few records would recall the Warmaster’s face on the morning he met his fate.
V
“You look tired, sir.”
In the wake of this observation, the old man scratched at his beard with soot-blackened fingers. His fingernails were darkened by dirt crescents beneath them, and his beard—once a feral red—was now stone grey, dashed with flecks of colour like fading fire.
The old man forced his scarred lips into what passed for a smile. It looked like a gash of mirth slitting his beard.
“I am tired, boy. It’s what happens when you get old.” He returned his gaze to the burning skyline, at the ruined cityscape of once-grand Balopolis. Through the devastation rolled a horde of iron beetles – Leman Russ tanks and Basilisk gun platforms of every class. The walls of the High Palace stood cracked and crumbling under the onslaught of entire siege tank companies. Even the air tasted of ash and engine fumes.
“Not long now,” he said, and closed his eyes, unsure if he was hearing his heartbeat or the pounding of distant guns.
“You should rest while you can, Warmaster.”
Slaydo snorted. “I’m not ready to call off the hunt yet. What about you, Commodus? Still keeping up with this old war hound?” The sergeant answered with a grin.
VI
When the palace walls came down, Imperial cheering shook the city.
From his vantage point at the western edge, the Warmaster exhaled a shivering breath. Around him, the Argentum stood proud, hellguns primed and officers exchanging last words with the men.
“Do you see that?” the old man asked. The question was to none of them and all of them, and it made the old man smile to say it. “Watch how the verminous tide claws its way through the breakages.”
Commodus looked on, squinting through his visor. Battered armoured personnel carriers, scorched tanks, broken squads of men in mismatching armour… all fled through the rents that Imperial guns had hammered through the palace walls. Those Archenemy troopers still outside were falling back for the last time, to stand and fight with their Archon.
“I’ve heard that rats always flee a sinking ship.” The old man’s smile was like a bad scar. “But these vermin flee into one.”
His hand rested on the pommel of his sheathed sword as he watched the cracked, burning palace ahead—its battlements of white stone tumbling, falling, breathing out clouds of dust as they died.
Around those immense walls, the dead slept in their thousands, a carpet of split flesh and stinking blood punctuated by the graveyards of slain tanks. Slaydo turned away at last, blinking eyes that suddenly stung.
“What is it, sir?” asked one of his men.
“Such bravery,” the old man almost laughed. “Such sacrifice. Hear me well and mark my words. No accounting, no retelling, will ever do these days justice. Balhaut will become a memorial after the victory we’ve bled for here.” Slaydo brought his gaze back to the razed city streets, and the bodies that blanketed them. There was nowhere else to look. The skies burned. The city was rubble. The dead were everywhere.
“And what else could it become? We’ve made a tomb of this world.” Every one of the Argentum that heard those words also heard the crack in their master’s voice, audible despite the mumble of distant artillery, and the rumbling of engines as the regiment’s silver-painted troop transports idled nearby.
Carron, the squad’s vox-officer, approached with the receiver in hand. The bulky vox-caster backpack strapped over his shoulders hummed in the light r
ain.
“Warmaster,” Carron offered the receiver to the old man. “It’s Colonel Helmud of the Pragar.”
Slaydo took the speech-horn. The men smiled at his terrible habit: he cleared his throat loudly while his mouth was next to the vox-mic.
“Slaydo,” he said, once he’d spat sooty phlegm onto the ground.
“It’s Helmud.” The voice was rasped by bad frequencies. “The walls are going down like pieces on a regicide board. We’re ready, Warmaster. This is it. We win Balhaut this day.”
Slaydo didn’t answer. His callused fingers stroked the grip of the blade still sheathed at his hip, and he stared at the urban ruin acting as a mass grave for the loyal dead.
“Warmaster?”
“I’m here, colonel.”
“The Palace will be ours, sir, but for a few thousand lives.”
Slaydo drew his sword for the first time in four hours. Gold flashed as it caught what little light broke through the smoke-choked sky.
“Start with mine,” the Warmaster said, and hung up the receiver without waiting for a reply.
His blade fell in a chop, the order to advance. After a brief respite, the Argentum went back to war.
VII
Commodus wasn’t a bad driver, but nor was he a particularly good one.
Vellici, the squad’s previous driver, had got it in the neck the day before—a sniper with a truly evil aim had tagged him through the Chimera’s front vision slit. Commodus and three of the others had buried the body, while the rest of the squad did what they could to clean up the tank’s interior. Vellici seemed to have a lot of blood, not uncommon in a man as big as he was. Sadly, at the end, it had all been on the wrong side of his skin.
Behind the driver’s seat, a ladder let up to the gun turret. The old man stood up there, peering from the open hatch with tired eyes. The men had commented on this many times before, citing that he was making himself an easy target.
The old man always replied the same way. This tank is festooned with flags, beribboned with honour markings, and as silver as Luna’s smiling face. If the enemy want me dead, they already know where to shoot. Hard to argue with that.
Commodus drove the Chimera up an incline of rubble. Something—metal on metal—passed under the tank’s hull with a sickening grind.
“Don’t ask,” Commodus called back to the others, “because I don’t know.”
The old man leaned back down into the dim, sweat-smelling interior. “It was wreckage,” he said. “Leman Russ. One of theirs.”
Commodus trundled on through the palace grounds, tank treads crunching over rubble. What was once an immense botanical garden stretched out in all directions, blackened and starved. The palace’s cracked battlements rose ahead, while around them was nothing but a sea of advancing Imperial troop carriers.
A shot clanked against the hull, making every man tense.
“We’re in range,” said Yael, in the back.
“Thanks, genius,” said one of the others.
The shot was the first of many. Hailstone-loud, the others started arriving moments later.
The turret hatch slammed closed, and the old man descended the ladder with a cackle.
“First in, my boys,” he grinned as he primed his laspistol. “And last out. Let’s win this war.” Commodus laughed, even under fire. “Good to see you back, sir.” The old man’s eyes gleamed. “He’s close now, my boy. I can smell him.”
VIII
The Chimeras skidded to halts, churning the garden’s soil beneath their tracks.
Ramps crashed down. Men ran from the scorched and battered hulls of their transports, seeking cover in the statuary and rockeries of the botanical garden. Getting through the outer walls had been simple enough. Now came the true test: fighting chamber to chamber, hallway to hallway, into the palace’s heart.
Time to abandon the tanks, then.
Commodus hunched into cover behind the statue of an angel with its face shot off. Thirty metres away, his Chimera leapt into the air, performing a tortured half-spin, before its left track exploded along with half the hull. Steel rained down around him, clanging off already-broken angels and breaking several more.
More rockets streaked down from balconies and windows above, inflicting similar punishment on the Imperial Guard tanks clustered in the garden. One of the Warmaster’s flags, emblazoned with the laurel-wreathed skull he wore as a personal emblem, fluttered down to drape itself over the head of a nearby angel, hiding its face like a funeral shroud.
Commodus didn’t exactly find the comparison touching. Next to him, breathing in something between a laugh and a wheeze, Yael clutched his hellgun tight to his chest. “I’ll miss our tank,” he said.
Commodus ignored the weak attempt at humour. “I counted seven emplacements on balconies. The Emperor only knows how many of the bastards are squatted at windows up there. I got to twenty before it was too dangerous to keep looking.”
“Should’ve counted faster, sarge.”
“Funny.” Commodus tightened his vambrace. “Voxing for Vulture support is going to be like pissing into the wind, isn’t it?”
“Into a storm, more like.” Yael raised his head, and his rifle, between the angel’s stone wings. “No saviours from the sky are coming to blast us out of this one for a while yet.”
Commodus hunched lower as a solid shot cracked off the angel’s shoulder. He blinked stone dust from his eyes. This was going nowhere.
“Where’s Carron?” he asked.
Yael snapped off a shot. His hellgun whined for the half-second it took to power up, and spat a spear of hissing energy skywards. Both men heard the scream as one of the red-clad enemy soldiers toppled from the window above. The panicked shout ended with a wet smack. Something that had once been human was smeared across the stone tiles.
Yael sniggered. “He won’t be going home to his mother’s farm.”
Commodus was still scanning the view from ground-level, “I said where’s Carron?”
“Not a clue, sarge. No, wait—there he is. Pinned down behind the primarch.”
The “primarch” was a statue of a robed figure, towering above all others around it, depicting one of the Emperor’s blessed sons. In better days, it had doubtless been a beautiful piece. The weeks it had suffered under the tender mercies of the Archenemy invaders had not been kind. It now stood deprived of one arm, its face annihilated by hammers, and fresh bullet-scars appearing on its stone flesh with each moment.
With several of the Argentum using it as cover, it was drawing a withering hail of fire from above.
Carron crouched beneath the statue’s plinth, firing up at the walls with his pistol. “I see him,” said Commodus. “Not a good place to hide.”
“Not at all,” Yael agreed.
Carron rose up to take another shot. He was immediately lanced by three separate snipers. The first shot was enough to kill him outright, blowing mess from the back of his head before it even snapped his neck back. Carron collapsed in a heap that didn’t even twitch.
“Dead at Rogal Dorn’s feet,” Yael remarked. “Now there’s an honour not many can claim.”
Commodus added his fire to Yael’s, shooting up at the windows. “That’s Guilliman,” he said. Another body turned end-over-end as it fell from above.
“How do you know it’s Guilliman?”
Apparently, their return fire was drawing notice. A spray of solid slugs cracked around them, defacing their angelic protector all the more. Both Yael and Commodus ducked, using the respite to recharge their weapons.
“Are you blind? It’s holding a book in its hand.”
Yael recharged first. He cracked off a shot in the direction their most recent attackers were firing from. “So? I’m sure Rogal Dorn could read, sarge.”
“It’s the Astartes holy book.” Throne, what an idiot. “The one with all their laws.”
“If you say so.” Yael didn’t stop firing. “Always hated mythology classes.”
Another of the
ir squad hunkered down into hiding with them, breathless from the sprint into cover.
“Grunner,” both of them greeted him. He looked as tired as Commodus felt, all sickly and hollow-eyed. When he reloaded, it was with clumsy hands.
“Shit, why are you two so happy?”
“Born this way,” Yael replied, still shooting up at the balconies. Commodus answered with a question of his own. “You tired, Grunner?”
“Been a long week, sarge.” Grunner forced a smile onto a face lined by middle-age, too many close calls, and one hell of a sleep debt. “All over soon, though. Even the old man says so.”
Commodus nodded. The old man knew best.
Vulture air support arrived almost two hours later, and annihilated the western face of the Golcir Battlement with strafing runs and rocket barrages. The Argentum had been pinned the entire time, taking casualties from the Archenemy’s last-ditch efforts—with no way to advance, and suicide to retreat. Such was the price paid by the Slaydo’s Own for “first in, last out”.
Each man and woman in the uniform was a veteran storm-trooper, hand-chosen by the Warmaster himself. With grenade and hellgun, every soldier accounted for themselves, raking the windows and walls with unrelenting firepower. Bodies tumbled and toppled from their gun-nests, though more of the ragged enemy took the places of the fallen. Resistance was forever fed from the garrison within.
On beast-loud engines with turbines sucking in air, the Vulture gun-ships banked over the battlements to unleash their payloads. The horrendous fire being spat down at the Argentum ceased, hurling itself into the skies to repel this newest threat. Seven gunships died, hulls burning and spinning, only to hammer into the same walls and rooftops they were already attacking. Even in death, they still served.
When the wall came down in an avalanche of dead soldiers, gunship wreckage and powdered rubble, Yael was one of the first to make a break for the opening.