‘Sound the charge,’ Krezoc commanded the Pallidus Mor. ‘Let the traitors know we have come, and bring their reckoning.’
The war-horns of every god-machine howled, and the giants of cold, unwavering death thundered onto the battlefield.
Chapter 12
The Last City
Pheon Markos heard the war-horns in his bunker. The sound was too colossal. No being, above or below ground, could avoid hearing it. It carried down the grav lift shaft. Markos jerked away from the tacticarium table and looked up at the ceiling, as if he could see to the surface and know whether he could dare hope again.
There was nothing for him to see. There was plenty to hear, though. There were other sounds that made their way down through the earth to him. Those noises had been coming long before the war-horns. They were the thunder of the breaking of his city. The thunder ran deep. It was massive. It had begun with a few concussions, and very quickly had become almost continuous, a cracking rumble of explosions, impacts, energy discharges and building collapses. The walls and ceiling of the bunker vibrated from the force of the destruction.
Markos looked back at the tacticarium table. He had watched its display constantly since he had come to the bunker. His eyes ached from the strain. He had barely slept or eaten in the last few days. His obsession was futile. He knew it, but he could not fight it. He despised himself for his cowardice, but he could not fight that, either. His cousins were all dead. So were their cities. He did not have the courage to stand up to the end now it had come for him and Therimachus too.
He watched the war as he hid from it. He watched the clear icons of the Imperial Hunters fall one by one to the larger, less-detailed mass that was the Iron Skulls. He watched as the display on the table became more vague, more approximate, as the chaos of battle engulfed the land and the sensors feeding data to the bunker were overwhelmed or destroyed. Since the Iron Skulls had entered the city, the display had become a hololithic scream. The murder of Therimachus was a smear of overlapping glows. He couldn’t make out anything now except catastrophe.
The walls shook again. So did the floor. Markos gripped the table to keep from falling. He hissed through his teeth, clenching them with as much resentment as fear. It wasn’t fair. Therimachus was faithful to the Emperor. The heretics had not corrupted the city. Markos had searched for the cult, and he had uprooted it. Therimachus had done its part, and it counted for nothing. He had even warned Marshal Syagrius about the vulnerability of the city. None of his efforts mattered. The Imperial Hunters were defeated. The Iron Skulls were in the city, and the butchery had begun.
The vox-unit to the right of the table buzzed for his attention. It was Sorren, the captain of his honour guard, asking to be admitted to the vault. Markos tapped the control pad attached to the vox, and the massive door rolled back. Sorren entered. ‘Governor,’ he said, ‘I have concerns about the integrity of the refuge.’
Markos began to laugh. Events were reaching the stage where laughter was the only response left to their bitterness. ‘What, captain?’ he said. ‘You mean we won’t survive in the long run?’
Sorren grimaced. ‘I can’t speak to that long run, governor.’
‘I think you can. I think all of us can.’ Markos glanced upwards again in answer to a swell in the thunder. ‘We both know how this ends.’
‘We must fight until that end,’ said Sorren.
‘Or fight to hold it off,’ the governor muttered. He shook his head. ‘The game is rigged, captain. I’m not playing any longer. We did our part. The Collegia Titanica failed to do theirs. If the war wants me, it will have to come and get me here.’ The vault trembled again. Dust fell from the ceiling. ‘The bunker was built to withstand war in the city. This will be the safest place to be until the end.’
Sorren nodded, but hesitated before leaving. He looked like he had something else he wanted to say.
‘Speak freely, captain,’ Markos said. He wasn’t about to take offence at anything now. There was no point.
‘Governor,’ Sorren said, ‘is reaching the end what you really wish?’
The question stopped Markos cold. The answers he had thought he knew flew away from him. He thought about what the end would be. Everything he had sworn to serve on Katara destroyed. Dying like vermin in his place of concealment. Cowering in the dark that would surely come, hearing the final poundings of the city’s death.
Is this how you want to die? That was what Sorren was truly asking.
I don’t want to die at all, Markos thought. He had done his best for the city. It wasn’t fair that he should have to die for the mistakes of others. He had tried to look his death in the face. He found he was afraid. Sealed in the vault, he could pretend, just for a little while longer, that the end, his end, was not imminent.
Sorren had broken his illusion.
You don’t want to die, but you will. And soon. So choose your end.
He thought for a few moments longer. At last, he reached the truth about himself. He was simply too frightened. ‘We will remain here,’ he said. He was forcing Sorren and the rest of the detachment of the guard to meet the same end with him. Markos knew what he was doing to the man’s sense of honour. He hated himself for it. He hated the thought of dying alone even more.
He decided he would leave the door open between the vault and the guard chamber. At least for now.
‘I understand,’ Sorren said.
If he did, Markos thought, then he was doing a commendable job of keeping the contempt from his voice. Markos doubted he would have been able to do the same, had their positions been reversed.
Sorren walked out of the vault. Markos started to return to the tacticarium table. He took only three steps before the punishment for his cowardice came.
The vault was directly under the governor’s palace. A massive barrage hit the building. The thunder above was no longer distant. Markos froze as the roar of explosions went from muffled to acute. The shells seemed to be hitting just above his head. He crouched instinctively. The sound of stone and rockcrete cracking raced towards his heart. He gasped in terror. The impacts kept coming. The thunder and the shattering drew nearer. Markos dropped to his knees. Judgement was descending through the earth to find him.
It arrived. He stared up at the ceiling, and this time there was something to see. The ceiling split in two. Rubble crashed through it. Half the vault collapsed, burying the tacticarium table and the sleeping quarters beneath the weight of the destroyed foundations.
Sorren grabbed Markos under the arm, lifted him to his feet and dragged him from the vault. ‘We have to leave, governor!’ he shouted.
Markos found his footing again as they crossed the guard chamber. ‘How can we get out?’ It was his sole thought, sole hope, sole desire. And he didn’t believe it was possible. Trapped, trapped, trapped, trapped, went the idiot chorus in his head. He was on the knife edge of hysteria.
Sorren didn’t answer. He released Markos’ arm as the other guards formed up behind them, and ran forwards to the grav lift. The power to the bunker was still on for the moment, but flickering. Sorren opened the door beside the lift. An iron staircase spiralled up a second shaft. ‘Quickly,’ the captain said, and started up.
Markos hesitated at the doorway. The lumen strips on the sides of the shaft were frequent enough to light the stairs, but the five-hundred-foot ascent was dark with shadows. ‘Is this safe?’ he asked. The question was stupid, but he had to ask it. He could not contain his fear.
‘There is no choice,’ Sorren said. His last words were drowned out by the roar of more of the palace foundations being blown apart by explosives and compacting down on themselves. Vibrations rang through the stairs.
Sorren climbed, and Markos followed.
The spiral was endless. After the first few twists, Markos lost all sense of distance. He was in a limb of dark iron. The bombardments continued, shaking the wa
lls. Cracks webbed their way down the shaft. Markos expected the stairs to tear away from the walls at any moment, throwing him down into the black. His instinct at each tremor was to curl into a ball, close his eyes and wish the world away. But Sorren was moving fast, and so were the guards behind. The pressure kept him moving. So did the terror of being alone.
The higher up the stairs they went, the closer they came to the thunder. It grew sharper and louder. There were no pauses, merely shifts where it seemed to vent its fury at a distance before returning with a vengeance. Markos felt as if he were rising into the centre of a final storm, the one that was unmaking Katara, and he would emerge to a shattered world, its fragments spinning off to the night of the void.
The tremors were violent by the end. A rain of rockcrete chips fell in the shaft, pattering on Markos’ hair and shoulders. Dust crusted his eyes. A large chunk bounced back and forth down the stairs and cut his cheek as it passed. His lungs protested. He could barely lift his legs. He would have fallen, but the adrenaline in his veins pushed him on.
At the top of the stairs, a tunnel ran left and right. The left headed towards the heart of the palace. A fall of rubble blocked it barely twenty feet from where Markos stood. Sorren turned right, pounding down the passage towards the outer wall of the palace. The lumen strips were out here, but there was light ahead. It was irregular, dark red, shifting and flickering. The tunnel was filling with smoke.
Markos followed Sorren closely. Everyone was moving more slowly now, coughing from dust, smoke and exhaustion. The light became more intense. They ran through a red glow, but there was no sign of the exit. The smoke was so thick, Markos could see virtually nothing past the figure of the captain.
Sorren stopped suddenly. Markos almost ran into him. They had arrived at the base of another collapse. Above them was the source of the red light. The roof of the tunnel had been torn open by the cave-in. The flames of Therimachus roared outside and sent their angry light into the shadows.
Sorren signalled for Markos to wait. He climbed the heap of rubble cautiously and scanned the world outside. His shoulders sagged. He looked down, and Markos saw something of his own despair now mirrored in the captain’s face. Markos worked his way up. His terror, sustained so long, was giving way to a numbness that spread out to his limbs from his soul. The blunting sensation was a relief. So was the prospect of the open air after the vertical tomb of the shaft.
He reached the top just ahead of the other guards. They sheltered beside a vertical fragment of wall a few paces to the right and downhill from the tunnel roof. The palace had been built upon the highest of many hills of Therimachus, in the western sector of the city. Markos looked down to the south and east, at Katara’s last, fatal wound. Huge monsters walked the streets, unleashing madness and flame with weapons that seemed to be the products of sorcery more than technology. They were vast nightmares. Horned, tailed and spined, their eyes burning with hate, they were something other than machines. They were distortions, horrors that should not exist but which imposed their reality upon the world through their very mass and violence. They had spread their force widely through the city. They were everywhere, and where they walked, they spread ruin.
Buildings fell. The wide avenues became seas of flame. Wherever he looked, Markos saw Therimachus savaged, and there was no hope at all. In the distance, near the outskirts, battles seared the night. There were still some Imperial Hunters fighting the traitors, but they were very few. Their efforts meant nothing now.
Markos watched, and his numbness grew thicker, filling his skull. There was nothing he could do. There was nowhere to go. Even Sorren looked slumped, deprived of purpose. They could watch the end take Therimachus. When it came for them, they could run, grasping for those last few pointless seconds of life. As he watched, a new pain cut through the numbness. The Iron Skulls laid waste to the city along definite lines. Something was being enacted. Something was being shaped. About a mile down the slope, where a chapel had once stood, there was now a vast wasteland. It was not empty. It was full of people, a huge crowd of refugees milling there, running from the fires. More and more citizens were pouring into the streets nearby. Already, Markos thought he was looking at a hundred thousand packed into a relatively small area.
Animals herded into a pen, in preparation for the slaughter.
Or perhaps the sacrifice.
And the movements of the Titans cut even more deeply into Markos’ spirit. An act more terrible than simple destruction was taking form.
Then a furious roar sounded over the city. It was the cry of many war-horns sounding at once. Markos grabbed the wall to keep from falling. The destroyers of Therimachus ceased their march. Their guns fell silent as they turned, all of them, to face the south east. The blast of the horns went on and on. It was a challenge, and it was the sound of pure, holy, incandescent fury. It served notice to the traitors of punishment. It was as if a scythe blade of unforgiving, skeletal purity swept over the entire city. It burned with unforgiving cold and scoured the numbness from Marcos, cutting him down to the marrow. He saw the night with a new clarity. His unworthiness pierced him to the core. He saw that the Iron Skulls were not the only ones who must be judged.
‘The Pallidus Mor has come,’ Markos said. It was not hope he and Sorren exchanged in their looks. It was more like the exchange of one fate for another, perhaps a more fitting one. He and the guards watched for the sight of the legio’s coming, beyond the city, beyond the suddenly intensifying skirmishes with the Imperial Hunters.
The Iron Skulls began to move again. Half of their number converged as they lumbered towards the edge of the city. The others turned once more to the murder of Therimachus.
Sorren took a pair of magnoculars from one of the guards. ‘How did they get here?’ he said.
Markos shook his head. They were coming from the direction of the Klivanos Plain, but he had seen its conflagration in hololithic form. They could not have crossed that inferno.
‘I see them,’ said Sorren. He moved the lenses down slightly. ‘There are tanks with them. The Spears are here too.’
They left the ruined wall. They did so with no thought or discussion. Something more profound than instinct pushed them to head down the slope. Markos barely realised what he was doing, at first. The fear had not left him. Nor had the despair. His city was dying, and soon he would be too. But those truths were background. All he thought of now was to reach the 66th. He did not think about how he and the guards could hope to cross that distance. He did not think about getting past the Iron Skulls. There was only the goal, to fly to Katara’s warriors, and not to the shadow of the uncaring gods that marched with them.
There were two wars for Therimachus. The only path left for Markos was to become part of the one that was still human. The one where Katara was a name to defend.
He wasn’t running towards hope. He was running towards what remained of his home.
On the plateau of rubble at the edge of Deicoon, the righteous and the heretic clashed. For the first time in the war, in a city that was already destroyed, the struggle was an equal contest. The heretics did not have the advantage of surprise, numbers or weaponry. Thousands of cultists fought with the thousands of the Company of the Bridge. Both forces attacked with a mixture of improvised hand weapons and lasrifles. On the uneven, jumbled surface of the rubble, they tore into each other. The heretics attacked with a hunger for naked violence. The company fought with the anger of a people whose world had been betrayed and with the strength that came with their unwavering faith in the God-Emperor.
Ornastas kept his eye on the leader of the cultists as he led the charge from the company’s reclaimed portion of the wall. He sensed the other man’s focus on him. The heretics fired down on the company, but they did not have the guns to hold Ornastas’ followers off the rubble. The company roared up the hill, shouting praise to the Emperor, and slammed into the cultists. The righteous were
a great wave, and they forced the heretics back. Ornastas swung his staff like a scythe. Snarling wretches fell before him. His breath came in wrenching, ragged gulps, but purpose kept him moving hard and fast. He was clearing his path to reach the leader.
His nemesis had the same idea. His need to confront Ornastas seemed to be as strong as the confessor’s. The tumbled base of a tower rose in the midst of the rubble, and both men made for its prominence, fighting their way through the close-quarter battles and the storm of ash. As they drew nearer to their goal, Ornastas started to make out some details of the man’s face. The darkness and the debris-filled air made identification difficult, but Ornastas realised he had seen him before, at a distance. He had been on the Cathedral of Saint Chirosius.
The man shouted orders, and the last dozen yards between Ornastas and the tower were clear. The heretics got out of his way. He grunted. Their leader wanted the duel. Ornastas took what amounted to an invitation. He covered the ground at a run, risking a broken ankle on the shattered surface. He vaulted over a chunk of rockcrete like a man half his age. Destiny gave him strength and speed. He scrambled up the ruined tower as easily as if it were a flight of stairs.
The peak was rounded, with jagged fragments of stone jutting out across its twenty-foot span. He strode onto it at the same time as his opponent. They advanced towards each other. Ornastas held his staff with both hands, ready to swing. The other carried the symbol of his imagined office. It must have been fashioned before the uprising had begun, because it had been constructed with some care. It was a brass spear topped with the skull rune.
They did not rush to attack one another. Ornastas stared at the man, feeling recognition forming at the back of his mind. The heretic was studying him just as fixedly.
They stopped a few paces from each other. They were both coughing from the exertion and the ash. The heretic spoke first. ‘Lehrn Ornastas,’ he said.
Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine Page 22
