Yarrick: The Pyres of Armageddon

by David Annandale

  ‘They are receiving precious little,’ I said.

  ‘You think me too quick to choose the monstrous act, don’t you?’

  ‘I think we will all be forced to make that choice soon enough.’

  As if in answer, the thunder in the east resolved itself into the enemy’s laughter.

  1. Yarrick

  By nightfall, the orks were at the gates.

  The companies under Stahl’s command stood guard on the east wall. After the crashes and the fight against the warbikes, we were fewer than five hundred strong. Over the length of the wall, we were stretched thin, and our numbers seemed even smaller.

  Stahl seemed very conscious of our weakness as he looked to his left and right. ‘What kind of defence is this?’ he asked me. ‘So much of the wall is undefended.’

  He was right. Our guns were trained only on a few hundred metres above the main gate. If the orks chose to breach or ascend the wall at another point, they would encounter no resistance. And perhaps they would. Their army was so vast its flanks were invisible in the darkness. Even so, their interest appeared to be the gate. ‘Our defence is exactly what it needs to be,’ I told Stahl. ‘We don’t intend to keep them out, do we?’

  ‘No,’ he admitted with effort. The nature of the operation offended the officer’s soul.

  ‘Remember what we’re doing, captain.’

  ‘I know.’

  His voice sounded faint, demoralised, even though he had to shout. The clamour of the orks on the verge of attack was tremendous, a constant roar forged from currents of savagery and excitement. It grew louder by the second. There was no room for more orks to arrive, but the ones before the wall were working themselves up to paroxysms of war frenzy.

  We held our fire. We would have precious little time to strike the enemy. We would make our opportunity count.

  I heard how battered Stahl’s morale was. I hoped he was, in the end, worthy of Brenken’s trust. The war was only beginning. There were many blows to come.

  Though none, I dared to hope, on the scale of the self-inflicted wound we were about to suffer.

  Some distance to my left, almost disappearing into the darkness, Setheno stood motionless, a forbidding grey statue. She had expressed no satisfaction as the preparations for sabotage had been completed. Neither did she show regret for the looming cost. We had known each other for over a century and a half, and I still found myself wondering about the nature of her faith. In her youth, it had always been stronger than adamantium. But since the destruction of the Order of the Piercing Thorn, and since she had blasted all colour from her armour, its strength had been so cold I had trouble distinguishing it from despair.

  Of us all, she was the one who had the most intimate acquaintance with sacrifice.

  The bellowing of the greenskins changed. It continued to grow louder, and now it took on a shape. It ceased to be the roar of thousands upon thousands of savage throats all trying to shout over each other. They found unison. They chanted. The word I had first heard on Basquit resounded once more. It beat against the walls of Tempestora as if those two syllables alone could smash the rockcrete.

  Ghazghkull Ghazghkull Ghazghkull.

  Louder, louder, a chant of praise, of war, of the victory of the green tide. It hammered at my mind. It dug claws into my soul. The ancient pain in my right arm, a legacy of Mistral, began to throb with renewed ferocity. I could not shake the irrational conviction that something prophesied to me long ago was coming to fruition.

  GHAZGHKULL GHAZGHKULL GHAZGHKULL.

  The word was a sound I had never heard from the orks in a lifetime spent fighting them. I recognised it all the same. It was a sound that should never be made by these xenos abominations. It was the sound of faith.

  And then it stopped. The quiet that descended was uncanny. A single ork that did not shout was far more disturbing than a thousand roaring brutes. And in this moment, all of them were quiet. I leaned forward, staring down into the night, fruitlessly attempting to see what had silenced the orks.

  Then I heard it. The voice rumbled over the plain. As it spoke, it rose from a deep, guttural snarl to bellowing exhortation. This, then, was their prophet. This was our enemy. I listened, conscious of the importance of the moment, and responding to a deeper intuition that the importance was even greater than I knew. The prophet called his forces to conquest, and promised endless spoils and endless battle. He paused, and the horde answered with ­terrifying unity, and in their violent joy gave me the full name of the prophet.

  Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka.

  I marked the name. This was our target. This is the ork we must kill, I thought.

  I peered into the dark. I caught a glimpse of a massive shadow moving through the ranks of the orks. I could make out no features, nothing but a vague, hulking shape that drew the eye with inexorable gravity.

  Ghazghkull spoke again, invoking the crude names of the gods the orks worshipped, and raging about a destiny of interstellar conquest. The words chilled my blood. They were not mere bluster. This ork had forged a fanatical unity in his kin. If he was not defeated here, on Armageddon, how far might his influence spread? I had a vision of a monstrous will uniting orks across the galaxy, launching a xenos crusade the likes of which the Imperium had never faced.

  Stop him, I thought. Stop him.

  I was the only soul on the walls of Tempestora who could understand what was being said. The only one who heard more than brute growls and roars. The only one who realised that I, too, had underestimated the threat that had come to Armageddon.

  And I would still make that mistake. I don’t think I truly understood just what Ghazghkull Thraka was until that day, years and billions of lives later, when he spoke to me in High Gothic.

  I looked at Stahl. Though he didn’t understand the full import of what was happening, what he grasped was bad enough. Even in the poor lighting on the wall, I could see how taut and brittle his expression was.

  ‘Let me speak to the companies,’ I told him.

  He nodded and summoned the vox operator, Lorenz, who took me to a node next to the nearest gun turret and plugged the unit in to the wall’s vox-casters.

  ‘Soldiers of the Steel Legion!’ I said. My voice bounced off the façades of Tempestora. It was loud enough to be heard over the ranting of Ghazghkull. ‘The enemy is below us, and his numbers are legion. Is this a revelation? It is not. His strength is not a surprise. The surprise will be ours. Can the greenskins possibly imagine what we are about to do to them? Do you not wish you could see their brutish faces when the trap falls on them?’ I paused so the troops could hear their own cheers. ‘We will not end the threat this night. But the orks will remember what happens at Tempestora. They shall behold the will of the Armageddon Steel Legion.’ More cheers. There was iron in them. ‘Remember what you fight for: you do not fight for a single hive. You fight for the entire world. You fight for the Imperium. So fight well!’

  The cheers were strong, and then kept going. I walked back to Stahl, and he gave me a grateful look. The shouts turned into jeers directed at the orks. We were mere hundreds taunting untold thousands, and that was a triumph in itself.

  With a roar so huge it hit us like a wind, the orks charged, stampeding over the narrow strip of plain that separated their front lines from the gate.

  ‘Fire!’ Stahl shouted. ‘All guns fire!’

  The turrets opened up. Autocannons rotated back and forth, strafing the ork lines as they approached. The larger, fixed mortars and modified siege cannons fired into the main body of the greenskin army. The great cannons all fired at once, and a wall of explosions lit the night. Chunks of ork bodies flew high, and a pall of smoke and dust spread over the field.

  The orks didn’t slow. The gaps in their ranks filled with even more eager brutes. By the time the next round of the barrage began, they slammed into the gates. Over the howling of t
he infantry, I heard the buzz of more warbikes somewhere off to the north, but almost nothing in the way of heavy armour. It was as if Ghazghkull thought so little of our defences that he didn’t care to commit anything more than footsoldiers to take the walls. What chilled me was that he was right.

  I didn’t know if the tactic was an act of contempt or a gift to the individual orks on the ground, a chance to strike the first great blow of the siege with their own muscle.

  Leading the charge was a huge, heavily armoured warboss. It trampled over any subordinate that made the mistake of rushing in front. When I saw its power claw, my right arm gave a momentary throb and I pushed away the distraction of the ache. Our second volley blasted craters in the horde, but the warboss ran through the explosions without slowing. If I didn’t know about the still greater monster in the darkness, I would have guessed this beast was leading the army.

  The autocannons, now aiming straight down, hammered at the orks closest to the gates. The entire line of the Steel Legion fired at the besiegers. We managed a solid rain of las and bolt shells for several seconds before the orks showed interest in us and responded. A storm of bullets and rockets hit our position. We took shelter behind the battlements. Not everyone was fast enough, and a few of the more powerful rockets disintegrated rockcrete crenellations. One of the siege cannons exploded. An autocannon turret was blown off its base and fell down the outside of the wall. I hoped its gunner would be dead before he landed.

  The orks concentrated rocket fire against the gates. A massive drum began to beat as explosive after explosive battered the metal. The wall shook.

  We fired a third volley, and sent clusters of frag grenades sailing over the parapet. We were buying seconds. The length of time was irrelevant. What mattered was the show of force and the deaths. We needed the orks driven to paroxysms of violence, uncaring of anything except the rampage and the pursuit of their opponents into the hive. They were an incautious race, but not without ­cunning. Even they would be suspicious if they entered Tempestora unopposed.

  So we fought as if there were a real chance of defending the hive. We drew the orks’ attention to the main gate. We kept the huge mass of their infantry concentrated. That was an accomplishment.

  At least it felt like one.

  Streaks of fire lit the night from dozens of positions. The orks unleashed a barrage of rocket attacks. Deep booms followed. Metal screamed. The thousand-year-old gates, as thick as the body of a Leman Russ tank, fell.

  The orks laughed, and though I had expected this moment, though I had counted on it, I grimaced in pain and hate as the fall of a great Imperial city began.

  All the while, the streets of Tempestora ran deeper with promethium.

  2. Thulin

  The rebreather was old, and not up to the task. It was clogged with ash. Thulin gasped, his lungs clawing for oxygen. He yanked the rebreather off his head, stumbling forwards as he gagged, coughing up a soggy cud of cinder and dust.

  ‘Count Thulin?’ Countess Zelenko asked.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Keep going.’

  He was trudging across the dunes with the rest of Tempestora’s nobility. The rich and the powerful looked like neither. Their robes were ragged, soiled and grey. So were their faces. Their eyes were hollows of fear. They had stuck together throughout the evacuation, bunching close during the horrific passage through the north gate. There had been no option but to use the same egress as the lower classes, and Thulin had seen many acquaintances and relatives fall during the stampede and be trampled into the mire of other victims. He didn’t think any of his friends had died, but that was because he regarded so few of his peers as his friends.

  There was little room for trust under the reign of Herman von Strab.

  Thulin had never thought of himself as an idealist. His existence had been an exercise in pragmatism, of establishing himself as useful but unthreatening to those more powerful than he. But without his conscious knowledge, he had acquired a sense of duty. When the threat to Tempestora had become clear, his chest had constricted, pained by the danger to something he loved.

  Now he had abandoned the city. He still had a duty to the millions of refugees staggering through the Ash Wastelands. But there was no way to perform it. There was no mechanism of government now. Most of the forces of the Adeptus Arbites had remained to fight alongside the Steel Legion, and those who accompanied the exodus could do little in a movement so gigantic. There was no order. There was only flight. And suffering.

  The winds here desiccated and choked. They blew cinders into his eyes, his nose and mouth. Breathing hurt, and his eyes watered constantly. The land swallowed the humidity of Armageddon and radiated heat. Thulin’s exposed skin was baking. His face felt as if it would curl off his skull. Every breath damaged his lungs further. He couldn’t see more than a few steps ahead. The torches he and thousands of others carried struggled to pierce more than a few metres of night in any direction. They were dying embers of Tempestora’s hope, smothered by the dead land.

  Thulin crested a dune. He followed the slope down because the people in front of him were doing the same. He climbed the next dune for no better reason. There was no destination. The population of Tempestora travelled north, inching towards the Boiling Sea. There would be nowhere to go from there, but Thulin found it easy not to worry about the decision to be faced then. Making it that far was unlikely. What mattered was to keep going north. He and millions more were alive for now. Far behind, the evacuation continued. He did not expect it to be complete before doom struck the hive. He found that thought harder to suppress.

  The Wastelands devoured the refugees. People dropped, overcome by heat and dehydration in a matter of hours. The dunes swallowed others. The ash heaps shifted according to the whim of chance and wind, and rolled over their victims, smothering them with silence. An hour after leaving Tempestora, a man five paces ahead of Thulin disappeared into a crevasse hidden by a thin crust of cinders. Thulin walked more slowly after that. He shuffled, kicking up puffs of ash. He let himself believe he would feel the void beneath his feet in time to leap backwards.

  Cannons boomed. Thulin looked back. To the east, white flashes lit the wall of Tempestora. The barrier seemed very small from this distance. Yet the city was a mountain, looming so close it was as if he had been standing still all these hours. The windows of the spires were still illuminated, the lights of the hive another lure for the enemy. Thulin’s eye traced the shape of the buildings behind the artificial constellations. He saw the silhouette of the charge he had abandoned.

  He turned his back on Tempestora and walked on.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Zelenko. She was still looking south and east.

  Thulin listened. Guns in the distance, hammering the night again and again. The rumour of a multitude of savage throats. And there, coming closer: engines, high-pitched and hungry.

  ‘Run,’ Thulin said. He tried to do as he said. His legs were exhausted from hours of walking over the soft terrain of the dunes. He could manage no more. ‘Run!’ he pleaded with his body. No more thoughts of duty. No empathy for the millions with him. Only the desperation to break through the sluggishness of nightmare.

  His fellow evacuees also tried to move faster. Most fared no better than he did. A few found the energy to lunge forward a few metres. Then the cries began. Of terror, of despair and, further away, towards the sound of the engines, of pain and death.

  The ork vehicles closed in. Thulin refused to look, but he couldn’t block out the sounds of massacre. At the top of the dune, he tripped over his feet and fell to his knees. He whimpered and looked back.

  Vehicle headlamps and spotlights illuminated the landscape. Thulin gaped in incomprehension. He could not process the scale of the atrocity.

  There were too many vehicles to count. They were battle­wagons, bristling with jagged armour. Lethal metal plates sliced apart anyone who came
into contact with their flanks. Mounted on the fronts were bladed siege shields and spiked cylinders. They slammed through the refugees, crushing and gutting, raising a wake of blood and ash.

  And that was not the worst. In twos and threes, and even a few groups of four, the battlewagons were linked together at the level of the chassis by tangled nets of barbed and razor wire. As the vehicles advanced, they created a line a thousand metres wide of mutilation and death. There was no escape from the absolute slaughter. The ash turned to mud, soaked by the murder of thousands.

  Thulin pushed on, found his footing and stumbled down the dune. The massacre was out of sight now, but he could hear it. He could hear it approaching. He could hear his end close in.

  He could run now, finally, when nothing mattered any more. The guns fell silent, and he wondered, bitterly, why he had chosen to die in the wastes. What use was the Steel Legion?

  Why had the Emperor abandoned them?

  A great light answered.

  3. Yarrick

  The time for retreat had come. The orks were through the gates, into the staging grounds beyond, and pouring through the streets. They were looking for a fight. Against all the urging of our training, we would not give it to them.

  We retreated. We ran. That this was the plan did nothing to quell the stab of shame. Never again, I thought as I pounded along the battlements, heading south. We had several kilometres to cover until we reached the Morpheus manufactorum. To reach it, we had to rely far too much on luck. We needed the orks to be more interested in the city itself than their defeated opponents on the wall. We needed the right collision of violent elements, one that would give us time rather than cut it short.

  Too much left to chance.

  Too much shame.

  Never again. Never again.

  To my right, the orks rioted through the streets. They roared their challenge, and when it was not answered, they laughed at our cowardice. Glass shattered and stone shattered as the plundering began.