After that would come the punishment. After that, the populace of Shardenus Prime would be held in judgement for their sins, for allowing malice to root itself amongst them and for failing to resist when the time of testing came. Judgement would come to them; when it did, it would be swift, austere and complete.
‘Shardenus has been saved for the Imperium,’ announced Rauth, looking out beyond the steaming outline of the daemon-corpse and across the burning wasteland. The Melamar spires to the south smouldered amid the boiling mists of toxic fug. Above them dark clouds raced still, underlit with sporadic bursts of lightning. ‘When our remaining work is done, its loyalty will be unmatched. We will remake it. We will refashion it as an exemplar.’
‘I relish it, lord,’ said Imanol.
Rauth could tell that he did. Imanol had good instincts – a firm grasp of the sacrifices that needed to be made in order to do what was necessary. When the time came, he would make a suitable successor as clan commander.
‘Then we have labour ahead of us,’ said Rauth, turning away from the vista of devastation. ‘Prepare your weapons and follow me down.’
Rauth strode back towards the shaft leading into the spire’s interior, preparing once again for the fighting to come.
‘Leave no mutant alive,’ he ordered, activating the disruptor on his force-blade. ‘Preserve any mortal loyalists still living – we still have need of them.’
As he neared the edge of the steep way down, a dark expression kindled on his helm-guarded features.
‘Except for Nethata,’ he growled, starting the long climb down into darkness. ‘Should you find him, bring him to me.’
Nethata adjusted his his chem-suit a final time before climbing out of the Leman Russ. He clambered down the ladder from the open hatchway, feeling the toxin-laced air pull at him.
He walked out across the ash, his boots crunching through the thin layers of drifting embers. Behind him, a kilometre to the north, the Capitolis burned. Huge explosions continued to surge through the enormous superstructure, making the earth beneath him tremble.
Ahead of him stood the two Warlord Titans. They had come to a full stop, and towered over everything within fire-range. Seeing them up close was awe-inspiring – he had to crick his neck just to make out anything above their massive knee-joints. Their cockpit lights glowed dimly amid the shrouds of ash, and their gigantic weapon-arms hung, de-powered, from their mighty shoulder housings.
Between the Warlords stood a tracked vehicle – a steep-sided armoured crawler with the emblem of the Mechanicus emblazoned on its flanks. Columns of dirty smoke poured from vents along its sides, making the dark metal even darker.
As Nethata approached it, a ramp lowered slowly from the crawler’s blunt forequarters, touching heavily onto the earth with a low hiss of pistons releasing.
Nethata halted, waiting for Ys to emerge. He knew it had to be her, even though he’d had no confirmation of her arrival. Though unexpected, the development gave him hope – Lopi must have been in touch with her. The princeps, seeing the way things were going, must have passed on the reports of the Warhounds’ destruction, triggering her descent from orbit.
As Nethata waited, he marvelled at the twists of fate. He knew Rauth was furious with him, and that the fury of the Iron Hands was only ever satisfied by a single result. The Mechanicus, though, was a different matter. Nethata was fully aware of the links between them, and the knowledge Ys had of Rauth’s protocols and machine workings. If anyone could stand against Rauth, if anyone could hope to act as a bulwark against the Iron Hands, then it was her.
A squad of skitarii lumbered down the ramp, spilling out into the wasteland with their bizarre array of inbuilt weapon systems and external bionics. Behind them came Ys, striding out with human-like fluidity. Her cowl had been pushed back to reveal the strangely organic curves of her metal face.
‘Magos,’ said Nethata, bowing. ‘I am glad to see you again.’
Ys stood before him. Her expression, as always, was impossible to read.
‘I don’t know why that should be so, Lord General,’ she said, and her voice was cold.
It was then that Nethata knew that he’d miscalculated.
‘Has Princeps Lopi not informed you?’ he asked. ‘We had an agreement – an arrangement. He promised me that–’
‘Princeps Lopi has been relieved of his command,’ said Ys.
As she spoke, a team of skitarii dragged a body down the ramp and hurled it onto the ground. The flesh on it was milk-pale and covered in metal-rimmed input nodes. As it hit the ground, its head fell back.
Nethata recognised Lopi’s face despite what had been done to it.
‘He acted outside the boundaries of his jurisdiction,’ said Ys. ‘The penalty for that is the same for us as it is for you.’
Nethata looked up at her severe face, and knew then that it was over. The Warlords stood impassively above him, gazing northwards with their vast machine eyes. They looked like vengeful giants. For a few moments, Nethata had dared to believe he could use them to shield himself; that the Mechanicus would honour its compact.
‘I do not understand,’ said Nethata, knowing that protestation was useless but finding himself unable to avoid the attempt. ‘He told me that Rauth had betrayed him, that if we stood together then we could force him to come to terms. You yourself, you told me that. You told me that they only respect strength.’
Ys’s expression didn’t change. There was no sympathy there, no compassion, nothing but a steady, machine-cold glare.
‘Yes, I told you that, Lord General,’ she said. ‘I told you that to warn you, and you should have heeded it. The strength of the Iron Hands is far beyond your strength; you could never have stood against them, and you were foolish to attempt it. Lopi was also a fool, and he has paid the price. The Warlords will walk on the Capitolis, and I will aid Commander Rauth in his cleansing of it. Perhaps, in that small way, we will recover a portion of honour. For you, for Lopi, there is nothing.’
Nethata watched the magos’s lips move, and it felt like watching his own death sentence being read out. The ceaseless wind blew ash across her cloak, dragging on the fine fabric and staining it black.
‘Then you are here to kill me,’ he said. He wondered briefly whether he could reach his bolt pistol in time, and quickly discarded the notion.
Ys shook her head. The gesture was so impeccable, so graceful.
‘I have taken care of my own,’ she said, gathering up her robes and preparing to return to the crawler. ‘Your fate is not in my hands.’
Then she turned, and walked back to the ramp. Nethata watched her skitarii follow her. When they were inside, the crawler was resealed and began its steady movement again.
Nethata watched it go. Then he watched the Warlords grind into movement. He watched them stride out north, stalking across the shattered terrain with their massive, earth-crushing treads.
Then he was alone again, save for the lone Leman Russ tank he’d withdrawn from the front line. As he pondered what kind of protection that offered him, he almost laughed.
He looked north, following the route of the Titans towards the Capitolis spires. The whole structure raged with flame and smoke. Clouds raced across the distant summit, swirling and breaking open. Lightning still flickered down the smouldering flanks, though it had lost the lilac hue it had had before.
Something had changed. The spire still loomed up massively, a monument of decaying grandeur riddled with blast-gouges and semi-ruined gothic ornamentation, but it no longer carried the spectre of abject horror that it had done. A pall of fear had lifted from it, replaced by the grimy tang of spilled promethium, molten metal and soot.
Nethata knew then that Rauth had been right. Something had been waiting for them in the Capitolis. The Iron Hands had been prepared to sacrifice everything they had to destroy it, and they had succeeded. They had been
prepared to make the calculations he hadn’t.
He felt sick.
‘Lord?’
The tank commander’s querulous voice was another irritation. Even at the end, even with the ruin of all his hopes, still the reminders of his failure intruded.
‘What is it?’ he replied absently, staring up at the Capitolis.
‘What are your orders? Where are we going?’
Nethata didn’t reply immediately. He afforded himself the luxury of thinking back over his lifetime’s many glorious conquests. Jeriul XI, the Refaloa Stars, the Adjmena agri-belt. None of those would now be remembered – scholiasts would painstakingly amend the records, substituting the names of more suitable commanders. The only world left next to his name would be this one: Shardenus.
He wondered how long it would take Rauth to find him. Despite everything, the thought of dying at the hands of the clan commander rankled.
Nethata began to unhook the catches at his neck, unfastening the seals that kept him isolated from the lethal air of the wasteland. He felt the links unclip with tiny snaps.
There was still one thing he could do; one aspect of his fate that remained within his hands.
‘We are going nowhere, commander,’ he said absently, disconnecting his rebreather and wondering how long it would take him to die.
Chapter Twenty-Three
How long, Khadi wondered, did it take to punish a world?
Perhaps they would only stop when every last mortal life was extinguished. Perhaps that had always been their goal. For a long time Khadi had thought that was what they were planning. In the weeks after her escape, as she’d made her way back to Melamar Secundus and headed down into the hidden catacombs in search of safety, it had seemed that they would stop at nothing less than that.
After leaving Marivo in the tunnels, she’d gone as quickly as she could through the ruined chambers of the war-torn hive. It hadn’t been easy, even during the chaos of the residual fighting and resupplying. Troops had been moving up to the front all the time, though none of them looked to have enough spirit to report a deserter.
She hadn’t been alone, either. The terrible carnage in the tunnels had broken the spirit of many others, and some of them had formed into ramshackle bands as they’d slunk back into the shadows and slipped down hidden tunnels.
Khadi hadn’t liked to look at the others, though she’d thought of Marivo often during the long flight home. It sometimes felt like his spirit was mocking her, or chiding her, or somehow informing on her to what authorities now remained.
Khadi knew he wouldn’t have done that, not even if his sense of duty had tempted him to. Right at the end, she’d learned to appreciate his character a little more. Perhaps she would never have truly liked him; they were too different, too far sundered along the long line of Imperial hierarchy.
For all that, though, moments of their association still came back to her. She remembered how it had been to drive the mutants back in disarray, shouting out her allegiance to the Emperor and watching them fall, one by one, under a hail of las-beams. She remembered how she’d felt when the Iron Hand, the one with flame-wreathed fists, had spoken to them before the gates to the tunnels.
Whenever she thought about those things for too long, though, it made her feel sick, and she forced herself to concentrate on the present.
The present was squalid enough. She was hunched in the corner of a tiny, metal-lined room. It was perfectly dark save for a sliver of light at the base of the door. The floor swam with filth that seeped through her worn-out boots as she squatted.
She was cold. She’d long since got used to the perpetual shakes and the blurred vision. Melamar’s ruined infrastructure was still mostly offline, which meant that the air was almost unbreathable and drinking water was scarce. She hadn’t eaten properly for days, and the chances of finding more food where she was were slim.
It was the same for all the others. She’d been surprised how many there were, lurking in the underworld of the hive; thousands of them, their faces drawn with hunger, their eyes hollow with despair. Somehow they’d managed to escape the worst of the fighting, neither succumbing to the mutants nor the loyalists.
She’d pushed her way through them, not wanting to get too close and hoping she saw no face she recognised. They had been heavy with disease, most of them, and if they hadn’t been so weak and terrified then she might have been scared of them. It was only later that she realised how she must have appeared to them – still in armour, holding a well-used lasgun and with blood all over her.
Eventually she’d managed to get away, finding ways down into levels where even they didn’t go. She’d found a home in the dark, a place to gather her shattered spirits, to wait for her energy and resolve to return.
They never did. The days passed. She got hungrier and weaker, and her scavenging trips to the old refectoria turned up less and less of use. She saw bodies everywhere, slumped face down in the flickering gloom, wasted away from plague or exhaustion.
If Marivo had still been with her, she would have shown him those bodies, and the masses of refugees who still huddled in the depths of the spires. She would have explained to him that these people were the backbone of the Imperium, the ones who kept it functioning during the long centuries of toil and privation. They understood nothing of the certainties he’d cherished. Even right at the end, most of them would have had no idea why war had come to Shardenus, nor have been able to tell the traitor forces apart from those who had come to liberate them. Each army would have been equally horrifying to them – just two sets of monsters, each one intent on killing as much as possible, destroying as much as possible, punishing as much as possible.
In those circumstances, she would have argued, who could blame them for hiding away, for turning a blind eye to the growing tide of corruption, for keeping their heads down?
Khadi liked to imagine what Marivo would have said in reply. She liked to imagine him tongue-tied, finally aware of the harsh reality of the underworld, unable to respond with some glib piety or other. Most of all, she liked to picture him admitting to her that she’d been right, and that they had never stood a chance right from the beginning.
They won’t even know it was us that took down the tower, she’d told him. They’ll do to us what they’re doing to everything they come across. They’ll kill us, Marivo. It doesn’t matter which side does it; we are all going to die.
Her thoughts came to an abrupt halt then. Something heavy boomed out above her. She shrank back, pressing her body up against the metal wall. The boom was followed by a series of heavy crashes, each one echoing down long tunnels before dying away.
She felt her heart beat faster. She hugged her knees, and resisted the urge to rock on her haunches.
She knew what was coming. She’d gleaned enough information from the others to know that the Angels of Death had finally turned their attention to those who had been too slow, too scared or too confused to make the appropriate level of sacrifice for Shardenus. She knew that they’d spent two whole weeks scouring the Capitolis, cleansing it with fire. Then they’d moved on to the outer spires, sweeping through them one at a time, delivering their justice, executing those who hadn’t resisted the traitor with enough fervour.
Khadi wondered how they knew who had been a hero and who had been a coward. Surely it was almost impossible to tell, except for the fact that most of those who’d joined them, like Marivo, were dead.
So it was that she’d speculated that they were killing everyone, perhaps in some petulant rage against the perceived weaknesses of mortal men. She’d heard other figures bandied around, too – one old man who’d escaped from the Axis hive across the wasteland and had nearly gone blind from the poisons reckoned they were killing one out of every three survivors they found.
‘One out of three,’ he’d rasped, struggling to breathe from his bleeding mouth. ‘They’re maki
ng an example, to stiffen the resolve of other systems.’
He’d laughed then, coughing up blood in the process.
‘We will be famous,’ he’d said, and Khadi had seen the tears in his eyes. ‘They will whisper our name on a thousand worlds.’
More booms rang out from above her, followed by a long, resounding series of dull thuds. For a moment, Khadi thought they were mortars going off. Then she realised they were boot-treads, clanging against the hollow metal. They got closer.
She tried to get to her feet, but her legs were too shaky. She stumbled, and fell to her knees into the slime. When the door slammed open, flooding the chamber with light, that was how she appeared – on all fours, wrist-deep in filth, her greasy hair hanging lankly down over her face.
Khadi looked up, squinting against a strong lumen beam. The Iron Hand towered over her. For a moment, she thought she recognised him. He looked exactly the same as the one that had rescued her and Marivo, the one who had demanded that they follow him to the tunnels.
Then again, they all looked more or less the same.
‘I fought for you,’ she said, getting to her knees. Her eyes began to adjust to the light, and she blinked heavily, sending tears down her cheeks.
The Iron Hand lowered his boltgun. He hesitated for a moment, holding the weapon steady. It looked to Khadi like he might have been running some kind of ident-check through his internal systems.
‘I was with Alend Marivo, of the Guard. We both fought for you.’
The Iron Hand remained unmoving. His helm lenses glowed blood-red in the shadows. He looked more like an daemon than an angel.
Perhaps, thought Khadi, that was what was required. Perhaps the galaxy had become so mired in horror that only such warriors as these could stand up for humanity.
She resolved to say nothing further then. She fixed her gaze on the monster’s trigger finger.
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