Helsreach (36 page)

The
Godbreaker
stood over the crater of broken road, as if staring down at the body of its latest kill.

Fourteen seconds after the Warlord’s shattered remains came to a rest, a flare of sun-bright and fusion-hot energy screamed across the Hel’s Highway. It was the shape of a newborn star, flaring with arcing coils of plasma light and surrounded by a blinding corona.

The
Godbreaker’s
shields disintegrated at the sunfire’s touch. Its armour disintegrated mere seconds later, as did its crew, skeletal structure, and all evidence that it had ever existed.

Jurisian drooled through clenched teeth, feeling the untamed machine-spirit’s quivering rage at being used without being ritually blessed and activated via the correct rituals. As the knifing pain in his skull faded to tolerable levels, he opened a vox-link to Grimaldus, and breathed two words.

They were laden with both agony and meaning – symbolising the completion of his duty, and a final farewell.

‘Engine kill,’ he said.

‘The Godbreaker is dead,’ Grimaldus voxed to anyone still listening to the comms channels. The news brought no relief to him, and no joy, even for thought of Jurisian’s glory. There was nothing now beyond the next second of battle. Step by step, the Reclusiarch and his last brothers were pushed backwards through the basilica, room by room, hall by hall.

The air reeked of alien breath, spilled innards and the sharp overcooked ozone sent of las-fire.

The walls still shook as xenos tanks shelled the holy temple even while their own forces stormed through it.

A young girl in Argent Shroud battle armour was cut down, wailing as she was disembowelled by the horde. Artarion’s two blades, both inactive from meat-clogging and no more use than jagged clubs, ripped across the face and throat of the girl’s killer. Then he too was beaten back by the four beasts that took the dead brute’s place.

A voice rose above the carnage – harsh and enraged.

‘Kill them all! Let none survive! Never has an alien defiled this holiest of places!’

Grimaldus dragged the closest ork against him, gripping its throat and thudding his skulled helm against its face to shatter its hideous bone structure. The voice was the prioress’s, and he realised now where he was.

No.

No, how could it all be over already?

We have been beaten back to the inner sanctum in mere hours. Sindal’s cries of defiance have the worst effect: they awaken everyone from the mindless heat of battle and bloodshed, dragging us back to face the truth.

The inner sanctum is a gore-slick mess of heaving, slashing, shooting humans and orks. We are beaten. No one in this room is going to survive more than a few more minutes. Already, others have sensed this and I see them through the crowd, trying to run from the room, seeking a way past the orks rather than lay down their lives at the last stand.

Militia. Civilians. Guard. Even several storm-troopers. Half of our pathetic remaining force is breaking from the battle and trying to run.

With my hand still at the ork’s throat, I drag the kicking beast up with me, standing atop the Major Altar. The beast struggles, but its clawing is weak with its skull broken and its senses disoriented by pain.

My plasma pistol is long gone, torn from me at some point in the last two days of battle. The chain remains. I wrap it around the beast’s throat, and roar my words to the painted ceiling as I strangle the creature in full view of everyone in the room.

‘Take heart, brothers! Fight in the Emperor’s name!’ The beast thrashes as it dies, claws scraping in futility at my ruined armour. I tense my grip, feeling the creature’s thick spinal bones begin to click and break. Its piggish eyes are wide with terror, and this… this makes me laugh.

‘I have dug my grave in this place…’ An explosive round detonates on my shoulder, blasting shards of armour free. I see Priamus kill the shooter with the Black Sword in a one-handed grip.

‘I have dug my grave in this place, and I will either triumph or I will die!’

Five knights still live, and they roar as I roar.

‘No pity! No remorse! No fear!’

The walls shudder as if kicked by a Titan. For a moment, still laughing, I wonder if the
Godbreaker
has returned.

‘Until the end, brothers!’

The cry is taken up by those of us that yet draw breath, and we fight on.

‘They’re bringing the temple down!’ Priamus calls, and there is something wrong with his voice. I realise what it is when I see my brother is missing an arm and his leg armour is pierced in three places.

I have never heard him in pain before.

‘Nero!’ he screams. ‘Nerovar!’

The beasts are primitive, but they are not devoid of intelligence and cunning. Nero’s white markings signal him as an Apothecary, and they know of his value to humanity. Priamus sees him first, two dozen metres away through the melee. An alien spear has punched its way through his stomach, and several of the beasts are lifting him from the ground, raising him like a war banner above the carnage.

Nerovar dies like no warrior I have ever seen before. Even as I try to kill my way closer to him, I see him gripping the spear in his fists, hauling himself down the weapon, impaling himself deeper on it in an attempt to reach the aliens below.

He has no bolter, no chainblade. His last act in life is to draw his gladius from its sheath at his thigh and hurl it down with a Templar’s vengeance at the ork with the best grip on the spear. He’d dragged himself down to get close enough to ensure he wouldn’t miss. The short sword bit true, sinking into the beast’s gaping maw and rewarding the xenos with an agonising death, choking on a sword blade that had ravaged its throat, tongue and lungs. With the beast unable to keep hold, the spear falls and Nero plunges into a seething mass of greenskins.

I never see him again.

Priamus, one-armed and faltering now, staggers ahead of me. A detonating round crashes against his helm, spinning him back to face me.

‘Grimaldus,’ he says, before falling to his knees. ‘Brother…’

Flames engulf him from the side – clinging chemical fire that washes over his armour, eating into the soft joints and dissolving the flesh beneath. The ork with the flamer pans the weapon left and right, dousing Priamus in corrosive fire.

I am hammering my way with painful slowness to avenge him when Artarion’s blade bursts from the ork’s chest. He kicks the dying ork from his broken chainsword. With vengeance taken, my standard bearer turns with as much grace as can be salvaged in this butchery, and his back slams against mine.

‘Goodbye, brother.’ He’s laughing as he says the words, and I do not know why, but it brings out my own laughter.

Blocks of the ceiling are falling now, crushing those beneath. The orks in here with us, paying for every human life with five of their own, pay no heed to their kin outside damning them by destroying the temple with them still inside.

Not far from the altar, I catch a final glimpse of the storm-trooper and the dockmaster. The former stands above the dying latter, Andrej defending the gut-shot Maghernus while he tries to comprehend what to do with his bowels looping across his lap and the floor nearby.

‘Artarion,’ I call to him, to return the farewell, but there is no answer. The presence against my back is not my brother.

I turn, laughing at the madness before me. Artarion is dead at my feet, headless, defiled. The enemy drive me to my knees, but even this is no more than a bad joke. They are doomed as surely as I am.

I am still laughing when the temple finally falls.

Epilogue

Ashes

They call it the Season of Fire.

The Ash Wastes are choking with dust from roaring volcanoes. Planet-wide, the picts show the same images, over and over. Our vessels in orbit watch Armageddon breathe fire, and send the images back to the surface, so that those there might witness the world’s anger in its entirety.

Fighting across most of the world is ceasing, not because of victory or defeat, but because there can be no arguing with Armageddon itself. The ash deserts are already turning dark. In a handful of days, no man or xenos beast will be able to breathe in the wastelands. Their lungs would fill with ashes and embers; their war machines would grind to a halt, fouled beyond use.

So the war ceases for now. It does not end. There is no tale of triumph and victory to tell.

The beasts stagger and crawl back to cities they have managed to hold, there to hide away from the Season of Fire. Imperial forces consolidate the territories to which they still lay claim, and drive the invaders out from those where the orks have managed to grasp no more than a weak hold.

Helsreach is one of these places. That necropolis, in which one hundred of my brothers lie dead alongside hundreds of thousands of loyal souls…

That tomb-city, so much of which is flattened by the devastation of two months’ road-by-road warfare, with no industrial output left at all…

Imperial tacticians are hailing it as a
victory.

I will never again understand the humanity I left behind when I ascended to the ranks of the Templars. The perceptions of humans remain alien to me since the moment I swore my first oaths to Dorn.

But I will let the people of this blighted world claim their triumph. I will let the survivors of Helsreach cheer and celebrate a drawn-out defeat that masquerades as victory.

And, as they have requested, I will return to the surface once more.

I have something of theirs in my possession.

They cheer in the streets, and line Hel’s Highway as if in anticipation of a parade. Several hundred civilians, and an equal number of off-duty Guard. They stand in crowds, clustered either side of the
Grey Warrior.

My helm’s aural receptors filter the noise of their cheering to less irritating levels, the way it would do if an artillery battery was shelling the ground around me.

I try not to stare at them, at their flushed faces, at their bright and joyous eyes. The war is over to them. They care nothing for the orbital images that show entire ork armies taking root in other hives. For the people of Helsreach, the war is over. They are alive, so they have won.

It is hard not to admire such simple purity. Blessed is the mind too small for doubt. And in truth, I have never seen a city resist invasion so fiercely. The people here have earned the lives they still have.

This part of the city, not far from the accursed docks, is relatively unscathed. It remained a stronghold firmly in Imperial control. I am given to understand that Sarren and his 101
st
fought here to the last day.

A gathering of figures clusters by the
Grey Warrior.
Most wear the ochre uniforms of the Steel Legion. One of them, a man known to me, beckons me over.

I walk to him, and the crowd erupts into more cheers. It is the first time I have moved in almost an hour.

An hour of listening to tedious speeches transmitted from the gathered group, over to a vox-tower nearby that blares the words across the sector.

‘Grimaldus, Reclusiarch of the Black Templars,’ the vox-voice booms. More cheers as I draw close. The soldier that beckoned to me offers quiet greetings.

Major, or rather,
Colonel
Ryken has regained much of his face since I last saw him. Burn scars spread across much of the remaining skin, but over half of his features are dull-metalled augmetics, including significant reconstruction to his skull. He makes the sign of the aquila, and only one of his hands is his own. The other is a skeletal bionic, not yet sheathed in synthetic skin.

I return the salute. The vox-speech – the speaker is a member of General Kurov’s staff I have never met before – drones on about my own heroism alongside the Steel Legion. As my name is shouted by thousands of humans, I raise my fist in salute to them all.

And all the while, I am thinking how my brothers died here.

Died for them.

‘Did Adjutant Quintus Tyro survive?’ I ask.

He nods, his ruined face trying to make a smile. ‘Cyria made it.’

Good. I am pleased for him, and for her.

‘Hello, sir,’ another of the Legionnaires says. I glance behind Ryken, to a man several places down the line. My targeting reticule locks on him – onto his grinning face. He is unscarred, and despite his youth, has laugh lines at the corner of his eyes.

So. He’s not dead, either.

This does not surprise me. Some men are born with luck in their blood.

I nod to him, and he walks over, seemingly as bored with proceedings as I am. The orator is declaring how I ‘smote the blaspheming aliens as they dared defile the Temple’s inner sanctum’. His words border on a sermon. He would have made a fine ecclesiarch, or a preacher in the Imperial Guard.

The ochre-clad soldier offers his hand for me to shake. I humour him by doing the same.

‘Hello, hero,’ he grins up at me.

‘Greetings, Andrej.’

‘I like your armour. It is much nicer now. Did you repaint it yourself, or is that the duty of slaves?’

I cannot tell if this is a joke or not.

‘Myself.’

‘Good! Good. Perhaps you should salute me now, though, yes?’ He taps his epaulettes, where a captain’s badges now show, freshly issued and polished silver.

‘I am not beholden to a Guard captain,’ I tell him. ‘But congratulations.’

‘Yes, I know, I know. But I must be offering many thanks for you keeping your word and telling my captain of my deeds.’

‘An oath is an oath.’ I have no idea what to say to the little man. ‘Your friend. Your love. Did you find her?’

I am no judge of human emotion, but I see his smile turn fragile and false. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I did find her.’

I think of the last time I saw the little storm-trooper, standing over the dockmaster’s bloody corpse, bayoneting an alien in the throat, only moments before the basilica fell.

I find myself curiously glad that he is alive, but expressing that notion is not something I can easily forge into words. He has no such difficulty.

‘I am glad you made it,’ he uses my own unspoken words. ‘I heard you were very injured, yes?’

‘Not enough to kill me.’

But so close. I quickly grew bored of the Apothecaries on board the
Crusader
telling me that it was a miracle I clawed my way from the rubble.

He laughs, but there is little joy in it. His eyes are like glass since he mentioned finding his friend.

‘You are a very literal man, Reclusiarch. Some of us were in lazy moods that day. I waited for the digging crews, yes, I admit it. I did not have Astartes armour to push the rocks off myself and get back to fighting the very next day.’

‘The reports I have heard indicated no one else survived the fall of the basilica,’ I tell him.

He laughs. ‘Yes, that would make for a wonderful story, no? The last black knight, the only survivor of the greatest battle in Helsreach. I apologise for surviving and breaking the flow of your legend, Reclusiarch. I promise most faithfully that I and the six or seven others will be very quiet and let you have all the thunder.’

He has made a joke. I recognise it, and try to think of something humorous with which to reply. Nothing surfaces in my mind.

‘Were you not injured at all?’

He shrugs. ‘I had a headache. But then it went away.’

This makes me smile.

‘Did you meet the fat priest?’ he asks. ‘Did you know him?’

‘I confess, I do not recall anyone by that name or description.’

‘He was a good man. You would have liked him. Very brave. He did not die in the battle. He was with the civilians. But he died two weeks after, from a problem with his heart. Ayah, that is unfair, I think. To live through the end and die at the new beginning? Not so fair, I am thinking.’

There is a twisted poetry to that.

I would like to speak words that comfort him. I would like to tell him I admire his courage, and that his world will survive this war. I want to speak with the ease Artarion would have done, and thank this soldier for standing with us when so many others ran. He honoured us all in that moment, as did the dying dockmaster, the prioress, and every other soul that faded from life on the night only I survived.

But I say nothing. Further conversation is broken by people chanting my name. How alien it sounds, voiced by human throats.

The orator whips the crowd up, speaking – of course – of the relics. They want to see them, and that is why I am here. To display them.

I signal the cenobyte servitors forward. Augmetic servants, vat-grown by the Chapter’s Apothecaries and augmented by Jurisian to haul the Temple’s artefacts. None of the mindless wretches bear a name; just a relic that represents all I could do to ease my guilt at such a shameful defeat.

The crowd cheers again as the servitors move from the vulture shadow of my Thunderhawk, each of the three carrying one of the artefacts. The ragged scraps of the banner. The cracked stone pillar, topped by the shattered aquila. The sacred bronze globe, sloshing with its precious holy water.

My voice carries with ease, amplified by my helm. The crowd quietens, and Hel’s Highway falls silent. I am reminded, against my will, of the impenetrable silence beneath the mountain of marble and rockcrete when the Temple came down upon us all.

‘We are judged in life,’ I tell them, ‘for the evil we destroy’.

Never my words. Always Mordred’s.

For the first time, I have an answer to them. A greater understanding. And my mentor… You were wrong. Forgive me, that it took so long to leave your shadow and realise it. Forgive me, that it took the deaths of my brothers to learn the lesson they each tried to teach me while they yet drew breath.

Artarion. Priamus. Bastilan. Cador. Nero.

Forgive me for living, while you all lie cold and still.

‘We are judged in life for the evil we destroy. It is a bleak truth, that there is nothing but blood awaiting us in the spaces between the stars. But the Emperor sees all that transpires in His domain. And we are judged equally for the illumination we bring to the blackest nights. We are judged in life for those moments we spill light into the darkest reaches of His Imperium.

‘Your world taught me this. Your world, and the war that brought me here.

‘These are your relics. The last treasures of the first men and women ever to set foot upon your world. They are the most precious treasures of your ancestors, and they are yours by right of legacy and blood.

‘I return them to you from the edge of destruction. And I thank you not only for the honour of standing by the people of this city, but for the lessons I have learned. My brothers in orbit have asked me why I dragged these relics from beneath the fallen Temple. But you have no need to ask, for you each already know the answer. They are
yours,
and no alien beast will deny the people of this world the inheritance they deserve.

‘I dragged these relics back into the sunlight for you – to honour you, and to thank you all. And in humility now, I return them to you.’

This time, when the cheers come, they are shaped by the orator. He uses the title I swore to High Marshal Helbrecht, standing before Mordred’s statue, that I would not refuse when it was formally awarded to me.

‘I am told,’ the High Marshal had said afterwards, ‘that Yarrick and Kurov have spoken with the Ecclesiarchy. You are being given the relics, to carry Helsreach’s memory and honour with you, in the Eternal Crusade.’

‘When I return to the surface, I will offer the icons back to the people.’

‘Mordred would not have done so,’ Helbrecht said, masking any emotion, any judgement, from me.

‘I am not Mordred,’ I told my liege. ‘And the people deserve the choice. It is for them that we waged that war, for them and their world. Not purely for the holy reaping of inhuman life.’