Yarrick: The Pyres of Armageddon

by David Annandale

  Grey afternoon had become grey evening when Nemesis Island came into view. It was a brutal uprising of rock, thrusting straight up from the sea. Its high basalt cliffs had been, through the industry of machines and serfs, rendered smooth as obsidian. They could not be climbed.

  At the top were jagged battlements of rockcrete and steel. On the south side of the island, a crooked inlet, no more than a crack in the forbidding mass of the cliffs, led to the tiny port. The pier had room for a single ship. The Iron Repentance was the only vessel that ever plied its dark waters.

  The boat docked. Setheno disembarked. The pier, wide enough for hundreds of souls, ended at a massively armoured guard house. Beyond that bunker, an iron door was set into the cliff wall. It was thicker than the gates of Volcanus.

  An enforcer emerged from the guard house to meet Setheno as she drew near. The woman’s lantern jaw tightened at the sight of the canoness. ‘Has the war come to Nemesis Island?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Setheno said. ‘Nemesis is going to the war.’

  3. Stribolt

  The Nemesis Island Penal Facility burrowed deep into the rock. In the centre was a huge circular space ringed by a hundred levels of cells. A warren of tunnels spread out from the central block. The prison was also a mining complex. The hard labour of the prisoners expanded the facility with every passing day. This was necessary, because even with the high mortality rate, the population kept growing. New inmates arrived on the Iron Repentence every week. The pits went deeper, the tunnels became darker, and in time there was no reason to go through the trouble of transporting the prisoners who worked the farthest ones all the way back to the overcrowded cells of the centre. The abandoned slept and ate where they worked. There was little food. Even less sleep. There was the back-breaking work using only the most primitive tools. There were the hours upon hours, sometimes multiple days, of digging ore from the walls and loading it into the carts. For those chained to the carts, there was the long journey hauling the loads to the vast bay where the ore would be transferred to containers awaiting transport by lifter to the mainland. For those left behind, during the brief periods when the guards did not use shock mauls to force them back to work, there was the brutal struggle for survival, the scrabble for food, for dominance, for the illusion of safety in the death of hated enemies.

  Sometimes, new arrivals would try to conceal themselves in the ore containers. If they weren’t crushed by rock, they were purged by the security procedures. On their way to the landing pad on the south end of the island, the containers passed through a great furnace. They and their contents were heated to a temperature just shy of molten. Nothing organic survived.

  In the exhausted seams, inmates remained. Food and water came more rarely. The struggle for survival became more savage, and then exhausted, and then silent. Mummified bodies, crusted in their dried blood, lay in heaps in the corners of endless darkness.

  Stribolt knew what happened in the dead seams. He knew to remain chained to the carts. As long as he was one of those who returned from the depths, he had his cell in the central block. It was a few metres on a side, and he shared it with ten other prisoners. They slept in shifts. They were among the fortunate of Nemesis Island.

  Keeping his privileged position meant killing. Stribolt had no objection. He was good at killing. It was murder that had brought him to the island. There was nothing unusual about murder in the underhive of Volcanus. Nothing unusual about running gangs, either. But he had run too close to the surface. He had harmed those who would be missed. He had warred against larger gangs, whose leaders had sympathetic ears just that little bit further up from the depths of the hive.

  He had been on Nemesis Island for years. He still had his cell and his limbs. By the standards of the facility, he was thriving. And he would strike down any challenger to his position. As he was doing now.

  He’d had his eye on Platen for several cycles. The new arrival was a head taller and very muscular. He had the loud voice and swagger of a man who intended to carve out his place as fast as possible, before the prison eroded his strength. Today, in the basin of the central block, where the prisoners assembled to drag the carts or follow them, Platen had stepped in front of Stribolt and picked up the bracket at the end of a chain.

  ‘Fits my chest better,’ he said to Stribolt.

  Stribolt punched him in the throat. Platen coughed and dropped the bracket. Stribolt picked up the chain, ducked around Platen and wrapped the chain around his neck. He hauled back. The big man bent backwards, choking. Stribolt pulled harder.

  No one intervened. Nearby guards and inmates watched the fight with mild interest.

  Platen reached back and clawed at Stribolt’s face. Filth-encrusted nails gouged the flesh from his cheeks. Stribolt jerked his face away. Platen’s gagging was sounding liquid.

  And then the voice came.

  It spoke from the vox-casters spread around the entire block. The effect was not unusual. This was how the many announcements, pronouncements and sermons of the warden, Mierendorff, reached the ears of the inmates. The difference was the voice. It spoke with a chilling authority far beyond Mierendorff’s fondest hopes. The first words froze Stribolt.

  ‘You are the damned,’ the voice said, and the truth hammered his chest with a spike of bone.

  Stribolt staggered back from Platen. The other man fell to his knees, gagging, but he stared in the same direction as Stribolt. So did all the inmates in the central block. Midway up the height of the huge space, a platform projected into the air. It was attached to the warden’s offices. Instead of Mierendorff, a warrior of the Adepta Sororitas stood at the platform’s edge. She paused before speaking again. She turned her head slowly. Her gaze swept all the rings of cells, and all the prisoners on the floor. She was too far for Stribolt to see her features clearly, yet he knew when her eyes fell on him, and he felt her judgement. For the first time in his life, he felt shame.

  ‘You are the damned,’ she repeated, and despair drove Stribolt to his knees. ‘But even the damned have their use. The Emperor calls, and you will answer. The orks walk upon Armageddon with impunity. You will rise against them. You will take up arms, and you will follow me into battle. You will seek redemption in the faithful death, and this is already more than you deserve.’

  The Sister of Battle’s words scoured Stribolt’s soul. She was a figure of grey terror. He would do anything. To mitigate the judgement of ice, he would seek the absolution of fire.

  4. Yarrick

  The refugees streamed through the south gates of Volcanus. We were among them. Defeat, rage, impotence – they were a single mass, a weight of molten lead on my shoulders. Breathing was difficult.

  Brenken sat in the top hatch of Sword of the Wastes. I crouched beside her on the roof, holding the heavy bolter turret for stability. I had to see everything. I had to see the full extent of the loss. I had failed, and I would not allow myself any grace. I would not turn away.

  The Chimera moved slowly through the countless thousands of civilians as we passed through the gates. We were concerned with stealth more than speed at this stage. We did not want to attract the attention of the orks. For the time being, they were ignoring the refugee columns. There was still enough resistance in the city to keep them interested. When the last of the combatants fell, the orks might well make sport in slaughtering these masses.

  Not yet, though. The tattered remains of the 252nd and the Volcanus Hive Militia fought on. As did any citizen who wasn’t fleeing. I looked at the refugees with pity rather than hate. They weren’t cowards. There hadn’t been time to arm every inhabitant of the hive. Millions fought. Millions more had a choice of deaths. Some had hidden, paralyzed with terror, in their homes. I couldn’t guess how many were still alive, and how many had been crushed as the orks toppled the city. If they survived, they would become slaves. I knew what that meant. It was survival only in the most perverse sense o
f the word.

  The masses that fled were looking at a future that was no ­better. They had no destination. There were no settlements within a few days’ walking distance. The closest were too small to provide for such numbers. And there would be little desire to make themselves obvious so close to the ork army. Perhaps the refugees had the vague hope of reaching Armageddon Secundus. It was the land over the horizon, as yet untouched by the orks. It was where protection could be found.

  Illusions. Delusions. The people would die of hunger, thirst and exposure before they had traversed the Plain of Anthrand. They would never even reach the Equatorial Jungle. If chance and cruel fate took any that far, their journey would end in its dense, verdant, predatory dark. Von Strab was wrong about the jungle holding back the orks. Desperate, weakened humans were another matter. It would strip the flesh from their skeletons.

  We left the wall behind. I turned around to look at it, as I had during the retreat from Tempestora. Smoke rose from a hundred positions, forming dark columns rising to the low clouds. The echoes of combat followed me, accusing, drawing blood from my spirit.

  Brenken stared straight ahead. Neither of us had spoken since we had boarded Sword of the Wastes. ‘Will we find forgiveness?’ she asked.

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘From our comrades. From the Emperor.’

  ‘We are doing what we must to save Armageddon,’ I told her. ‘Von Strab is the one who should seek forgiveness. He won’t find it.’

  She nodded. She looked as unsatisfied with my answer as I felt. She had left a question unspoken, and I had left it unanswered.

  Would we find forgiveness from ourselves?

  I didn’t know.

  Away from the gates, Spira manoeuvred the Chimera out from the edges of the crowd. We picked up speed.

  The molten lead pressed harder on my back and on my mind. I spoke in answer to its constricting weight. ‘No more,’ I said. ‘Not one more.’

  ‘Commissar?’ Brenken asked.

  ‘No other hive that I defend will fall. By the Throne, this I vow.’

  I might not find forgiveness, but I would bring an end to shame.

  1. Stribolt

  There was a lifter on the landing pad. This time, the containers it carried were full of live prisoners. It transported them to the docks of Volcanus. Stribolt was among them. His forehead still burned. A guard had branded him with the sign of the aquila as he had entered the container. The same mark was on all the other prisoners travelling with him. It was the sign of allegiance to the crusade, and of their fallen state. All who saw them would know them to be the damned on the final march to redemption.

  Stribolt arrived at the docks ahead of the first load brought back by the Iron Repentance. The lifter came down vertically, turbo engines blasting at the ground. The massive clamps that ran the length of its fuselage released the tanks two metres above a wide expanse of rockcrete before the dockside warehouses. The containers dropped with a crash. The jolt of the landing would have knocked Stribolt off his feet if there had been room to fall. The prisoners were standing, packed so tightly he could barely breathe. Front and rear hatches popped open. Stribolt shoved his way out of the stifling darkness of the tank and in to the waiting grey of the Volcanus day. It was the first time he had been in the open air in five years.

  The lifter was already flying back to Nemesis Island for the next cargo. Over the course of the next few hours, it would make multiple trips for each one the ship managed. The docks filled with thousands of inmates. They crowded the refugees off the docks. They were herded by enforcers. We’re an army, Stribolt thought. Male and female, they were shorn of hair and wore the same ragged grey tunics. Stribolt saw the terror in the faces of the refugees as they beheld this army, and he grinned.

  Setheno was visible, marching back and forth on the roofs of the warehouses. Word filtered through from the prisoners closest to the civilians: Setheno had ordered the refugees to fight or drown.

  One, weeping, had begged the canoness to tell them how they should fight without weapons. Stribolt laughed when he heard that. No inmate would have asked such a stupid question. Hands, nails, teeth, feet – he had killed with them and nothing else on plenty of occasions over the years.

  But Setheno signalled to an enforcer, who rolled up the door to the warehouse on which the Sister of Battle stood. The building had become an armoury. Stribolt guessed it had been stocked with whatever caches were nearby and still outside the zones of combat. He ran forward with the rush. There were thousands more prisoners than weapons, and they pushed and kicked their way ahead of the refugees. The lasrifles were gone before Stribolt could get through the doorways, but he grabbed a bayonet. He savoured the weight of a real weapon as he shoved against the flow of the mob and back outside.

  Setheno made them wait until the docks could hold no more. ‘We advance in a single mass,’ she announced, her vox-caster reaching out from the roofs, the command picked up and repeated until it had spread across the docks.

  Stribolt waited, impatient, desperate for the fight, desperate to prove himself before the unbending, merciless saint that had come among them. Then the order came. Setheno leapt from the roof to the ground and led the charge into the streets of Volcanus. Stribolt lost sight of her. He ran to see her again. He feared to fall under her gaze, yet he was desperate for a blessing, however painful, however fatal.

  He ran towards the absolution of fire.

  Consumed by the terror of faith, the mob moved up the widest avenues towards the maelstrom of war. To the rear, the lifter and the Iron Repentance continued in their tasks. The charge picked up momentum, and Stribolt had a sense of the limitless force of the crusade. He raced past the dark windows of the hab towers. On another day, the inhabitants of those blocks would have hidden, driven mad with fear at the sight of tens of thousands of Armageddon’s damned loose and rampaging. On another day, Stribolt would have shown them how justified their fears were.

  But not today.

  Today the only target was the orks. Today there was only the sacred fire.

  Setheno took the crusade right at a major intersection. Stribolt heard the shriek of voices human and xenos, the chatter of guns, the rumble of engines. He took the turn without slowing. He ran straight into the full battle. Setheno had brought them against a large contingent of orks. There must have been thousands of ork footsoldiers. Stribolt saw only a solid mass of the enemy filling the street, and moving through them the ugly, savage bulk of battle­wagons. The greenskin infantry greeted the swarm of humans with snarls of delighted rage.

  Some of the prisoners broke and tried to run. So did a larger number of refugees. The grey saint had foreseen the cowardice, and placed enforcers at the rear of the column. They turned their shotguns on the deserters. They blew the heads off the first to run. The others, wailing, turned back to the fight.

  The orks waded in with crude, heavy blades longer than Stribolt’s arm. The tanks opened up with their turret guns and cannons. Their huge, articulated claws swung through the mass of combatants. Orks and humans both fell. The greenskins with armour heavy enough to save them laughed at the enormous massacre.

  Stribolt howled to drown out the mockery. The bullets were thudding into the bodies ahead of him. He found himself in the midst of a confusion of orks and humans. There was no order, only the cauldron of struggle. He stabbed and slashed with his bayonet. He opened one ork’s throat, then jammed the blade through another’s rib cage. It stuck in the bones. The brute wailed but did not fall. It raised its own weapon. Stribolt leaped at the ork, sailing over the brute’s cleaver swing. It snapped at him with its jaws, tearing a chunk of flesh from his right calf. He swung himself around its neck and jabbed his thumbs into its eyes. The ork shrieked. It waved the cleaver blindly, trying to slice him from his perch. He dropped down and rammed his shoulder into the orks’ legs. It fell and was trampled.

 
A stream of blood splashed against the side of Stribolt’s face as he snatched the ork’s cleaver from its broken fingers. He turned. An ork with arms like tree branches had ripped the head off an inmate with its bare hands. It grinned through the fountain of vitae. It brought its huge shotgun to bear. Stribolt dropped low. The shot blew apart two inmates.

  Stribolt lunged through their falling bodies. It took all his strength to wield the cleaver and he brought it down on the ork’s wrist. He cut most of the way through the limb. The hand dangled. Startled, the greenskin dropped the shotgun. It stared at the wound, offended. It bent down to retrieve the weapon. Platen grabbed it instead. He shoved the muzzle in the ork’s face and pulled the trigger. The shotgun exploded, shredding Platen’s torso and face. The ork stumbled back a step, laughing at the mishap, and Stribolt slammed the cleaver through its throat. He sawed until the greenskin fell. Then the press of more and more and more bodies carried him forward.

  Stribolt was part of a wave. The prisoners pressed against the orks and held them. The tanks were immobilised by the crush. They had no room to turn. Their cannon fire stopped as ork footsoldiers jumped aboard to beat down gunners with too indiscriminate an aim. Stribolt had a glimpse of Setheno atop one of the tanks. She cut a gunner down with her power sword and threw a grenade inside the turret. The melee obscured her from his sight in the next second, but he heard the explosion. He jumped onto the shoulders of another ork and brought the cleaver down on its head, bashing at the beast’s helmet. On both sides, for thousands of metres in either direction, the street convulsed with struggling bodies. More orks were arriving to combat still more prisoners.

  In this corner of Volcanus, the orks had ceased to advance.