Yarrick: The Pyres of Armageddon

by David Annandale

The ork threw Stribolt before he could sink the blade in its skull. He flew through the air and came down on another ork that was spraying a cluster of prisoners with flaming promethium. The ork stumbled forward. Stribolt straightened from his landing and jabbed the blade into the fuel tanks. It stuck. Promethium jetted uncontrollably. He jumped to the side and pushed through the crush. Human and ork bodies shielded him from the worst of the explosion, but liquid fire splashed against his chest. He beat at the flames. They seared through his prison tunic. His flesh burned. The pain made him scream.

  It was an ecstasy.

  It was an absolution.

  Vision smeared by agony, he lunged at another wall of green flesh. He clawed and beat at the ork, half aware of the shapes of fellow prisoners hailing blows on the same target. His eyes were filled with tears of pain and tears of fervour. Did the saint see? Did she see the sacrifice? Did she grant him redemption?

  The ork went down beneath the fists and boots of a dozen humans. Stribolt kept hitting with all the fury of his torment. He looked about, blinking away the tears. Where was Setheno? He had to see her. He had to know if he had earned a new judgement.

  A huge shadow fell over him. He looked up. The claw of a battlewagon reached down to gather and crush. In the final moment before the iron fist closed on him, he shrieked his plea for redemption.

  ‘Do you see me?’

  His answer was the darkness and the shattering of bone.

  2. Yarrick

  We spoke to Mannheim once on the journey between Volcanus and Irkalla. We let him know we had left the hive and were making for the extraction point. That was an hour after we had left the hive, when we were still in the rolling terrain before Anthrand. We could still hear the war. We could still smell the smoke. We could even hear the greenskin army, but we could not see it. We had put a horizon between ourselves and the enemy. So we spoke to Mannheim.

  Once.

  After that, we dared not. The orks kept encroaching over the horizon. Spira detoured as best she could while keeping us on track. All day and into the evening, we caught sight of infantry and heavy armour movements. None of it was towards Volcanus. On several occasions, a deep insect snarl drew our eyes skyward. Squadrons of bombers flew just beneath the clouds. Some headed northeast, in the direction of Death Mire. Others went due east.

  ‘They’re heading for Armageddon Secundus,’ Brenken said.

  ‘Or preparing to, at the very least.’

  ‘How big was that space hulk?’

  ‘Too big.’ We were seeing more and more signs that Ghazghkull had committed only a portion of his forces against Volcanus. He had more, much more, at his disposal and was not being idle during the siege of the hive.

  We maintained vox silence. Colonel Helm’s pilot would know where to find us. We were a single vehicle travelling a landscape that had become occupied territory. If we were discovered, we were lost, and so, perhaps, was Armageddon.

  Night was falling when Irkalla appeared before us. We saw it first as clusters of huge, broken silhouettes. They gathered definition and mass as we closed in, but not life. They were the ghosts of buildings: collapsed façades, eroded towers, chapels sunken in on themselves. Violence, its nature obscure, had brought history in Irkalla to a stop. Wind, the driving dust of storms and acid downpours were eating at the ruins. The city was a cemetery now, interring its own memory. Its homes and manufactoria were its gravestones and monuments. They were all crumbling. Eventually, a night would fall over Irkalla, and no dawn would find it.

  Spira drove straight through. Even the echoes of the engine were muffled as if the walls they bounced off were soft, growing and insubstantial. The orks, as we had guessed, were not here. They were not as far away as we would like, though. We saw occasional flashes of light to the north and the east. We heard the distant growl of huge engines.

  ‘Still laughing at us,’ I muttered.

  ‘Commissar?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  The roads of Irkalla were broken. Many were stretches of clay between buildings, all traces of pavement long gone. Others had become deep, narrow canyons. They were traces of the convulsion that had been the city’s doom. We crossed Irkalla without incident, but it weighed on my spirit with the force of an omen. This was the future Ghazghkull sought to bring to all of Armageddon. I prayed Tempestora and Volcanus would rise again. If I kept my vow to let no other hive fall, perhaps they would.

  I rejected the omen. Instead, I read Irkalla as a goad.

  On the other side of the city, the Valkyrie was waiting for us.

  ‘Helm is a good man,’ I said.

  Brenken nodded. ‘Mark him down as one to trust.’

  ‘I shall.’

  The pilot’s name was Wengraf. He marched forward from his craft to greet us as we pulled up. ‘Colonel Helm said I was to take you to Hive Infernus,’ he said.

  ‘To the staging ground of the Iron Skulls,’ Brenken said.

  ‘Yes, colonel.’

  ‘We should take advantage of being in the air,’ I said.

  ‘True.’ To Wengraf she said, ‘We’ll make this a reconnaissance flight. Take us as close to the enemy formations as possible. Carefully.’

  Neither of us wanted to be shot down a second time.

  Wengraf performed his mission well. The orks made it easier by being utterly unconcerned with concealment. Flames and bursts of energy lit up their encampments. The construction of their mad inventions continued without cease. Shields were piled upon shields on the vehicles. In the forges of the night, there were new weapons being born. Some would kill their creators. The ones that did not would bring grief to us. But on this night I was grateful for the greenskins’ mania. Looking through the Valkyrie’s viewing blocks, Brenken and I put together our most complete picture yet of the ork campaign.

  There were some regions Wengraf dared not approach. He had to be wary of aircraft. And he gave a wide berth to stable, unmoving lights suspended many metres above the ground. We didn’t need to get any closer to know those were the signs of immense war machines.

  The worst thing we saw was, far to the northeast, a fiery glow on the horizon. Death Mire was already burning. Brenken and I exchanged looks. We said nothing. What use were words? We saw what we had known was going to happen. It had come sooner than expected. That was all. That was bad enough.

  ‘There are several distinct armies,’ Brenken said a few hours into the flight.

  ‘Each strong enough to take a hive, or at least one without adequate defence.’

  She snorted. ‘And what is adequate?’

  ‘More than what we were permitted on this continent.’ I looked out the viewing block again. I saw a flash bright enough to be an ammunition dump blowing up. If it was an accident, it revealed an entire line of stompas. Whatever loss had just happened, the orks would regard it as nothing more than a stumble. ‘They’re much further towards Secundus than we had thought.’

  ‘How long until they reach the jungle, do you think?’

  I shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. None of these armies appear to be on the march.’

  ‘Camped for the night?’

  ‘Perhaps, but all of them?’

  ‘True, that doesn’t sound like orks.’

  ‘Nor does this level of coordination and discipline,’ I admitted. ‘But there it is.’

  ‘So they’re waiting,’ Brenken said.

  ‘For Volcanus to fall. Ghazghkull is going to take all of his armies through the Equatorial Jungle at once.’ Then the deluge would descend on Armageddon Secundus. Every sight before us on this night had underscored the importance of our mission. I saw also a minute glimmer of hope. ‘If they are waiting,’ I said, ‘the hours the canoness buys us will make a difference.’

  ‘A tactical mistake at last?’ Brenken said.

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps not.’ The strategic benef
it of hitting Secundus with everything was obvious. ‘It will be up to us to turn the decision against him.’

  3. Setheno

  Setheno’s crusade held the orks in the south-west quarter of Volcanus for hours. The greenskins sent infantry in greater and greater numbers to confront the prisoners. And meanwhile the lifter and the Iron Repentance continued to empty Nemesis Island of its charges. Inexhaustible numbers of animals tore each other to pieces. Justice was meted out in the midst of war, and minute after minute was gained for Armageddon’s counterattack. Individual units of battle-weary Steel Legion troopers joined the battle. Their platoons smashed, they were driven ahead of the orks. Here they fought back, and around them the mob gained direction and focus. Desperation for honour, for redemption and for life fuelled the struggle, and the legionnaires, prisoners and refugees hit the orks all the harder.

  And still: stalemate. Massive as the charge was, it could not drive the much greater force of the orks from the hive. But it drew the invaders’ focus. It tied up resources. The orks could not resist the kind of challenge presented by the damned. The savagery was too familiar.

  Setheno concentrated on the battlewagons. She moved from tank to tank, ducking under fire and then climbing aboard to strike down the vulnerable crews. She turned the heavy armour into flaming pyres. From their roofs, she praised the Emperor’s name, amplifying her prayers through her helmet’s vox-caster. She held Skarprattar high before each strike, so the prisoners who could not hear her would see her, see the light of holiness, and be called upon to renew the fury of redemption.

  The battlewagons were inviting targets. The more the ork footsoldiers rushed to the fight, the more they hampered the tanks. The vehicles laid waste to all within the reach of their articulated arms. But barely able to move, they became fixed gun emplacements. They fell to her attacks. The streets roared with their flames.

  The western sector of Volcanus was a tight, expanding, burning knot of war. Its density achieved a purity of murder. No step could be taken except through the flesh of an enemy. The grey of her armour was slicked with a wash of crimson. She waded through blood, she cut through bone, and she left a wake of fire and faith.

  Where she walked, the prisoners howled prayers as they fought. They were deathbed conversions, but they had seen the truth she had brought to them. They felt the touch of her clarity. They embraced their sacrifice.

  Perhaps they purchased some benefit for their souls. On that count, she had no insight. Nor did she care. All that mattered was the tactical value of their martyrdom. All that mattered was the hours they bought.

  Time blurred. The battle was a storm of blood. Setheno’s awareness of location faded. Her focus was on the next step, the next blow, the next kill. An ork came at her with a chainaxe. She shot out its throat. On her right, she sliced the fingers off another’s hand before it could fire a rocket at point-blank range, and then she drove the power sword’s point up through its chin and out the top of its skull.

  But when the pounding of great footsteps began, the new necessity drew her attention to the wider view of the street. The stompas were coming. The stalemate was drawing to an end.

  But not yet, she thought. Not just yet.

  Two stompas appeared, one at either end of the avenue. They were as tall as the lower hab blocks, and so wide they blocked the streets completely. They were the walls of a vice, coming together with a steady, inexorable pace. Combatants fled from their heavy steps, but even the time between each slow stride was not enough. Running was impossible. Orks and humans were crushed beneath the massive feet. The stompas fired, but only with the shoulder turrets. The gunners were attempting some degree of discrimination in their targets. More evidence of the unusual discipline imposed on the greenskins by their prophet.

  The discipline worked against the orks. Setheno was hurling an army against them that was destined from the first to be sacrificed. On these streets, the tactics of orks and humans were reversed. The greenskins had more interest in preserving the lives of their kin than did the humans.

  The situation would not last. The orks’ bloodlust would dominate, and their restraint would vanish.

  A few more minutes. A few more small victories.

  ‘We force the xenos to extremes,’ Setheno announced. ‘Strike now. Strike hard. Find redemption now or be lost to the Emperor’s sight forever.’

  Around her, the frenzy intensified. She saw the spiritual desperation in the eyes, and in the faces, and in the gestures of every human within the reach of her voice. They attacked the orks with the full fury that came of the fusion of spiritual terror and spiritual hope.

  And they pushed the orks back. To Setheno’s surprise, there was movement. It was possible to move forward, to pick up speed, to run. The orks were falling…

  No. They were pulling back.

  Even as she riddled more greenskins with bolter shells, Setheno looked up and down the street. She saw organised movement, not a rout. The stompas had reversed course. Even more slowly than they had advanced, they walked backwards. They left open space. The remaining battlewagons drove through the infantry battles towards the gaps. They mowed down many of their own troops, but the more valuable resource was preserved. The heavy armour disappeared, pulled away down the sidestreets. The footsoldiers followed. Orks in power armour, who had just arrived on the scene, disappeared next. Setheno had the impression of the sudden withdrawing of a tide. The withdrawal that precedes the arrival of a great wave.

  Two more stompas appeared at the far ends of the street, and then two more. They went to work with cannons and wrecking balls. They resumed their strategy of the night before. They blasted at the base of towers. Tall ones. Spires that stretched for thousands of metres.

  The work of destruction took seconds.

  Instead of a warning, Setheno shouted a promise. ‘Your reward comes now!’ she pronounced, and pointed at the swaying tower before her.

  The base disintegrated. The stompas disappeared behind the sudden billow of dust and rockcrete powder. Bracketed by other structures almost as tall, the tower began its fall. Its shadow fell over the avenue. The network of walkways shattered like icicles. Their fragments fell before the huge monolith. To Setheno’s rear, the other tower began to fall towards its brother.

  The prisoners and the orks still in the street froze before the vastness that came for them.

  Setheno ran for the side of the street. She knew how long she had. She would not reach an intersection. She smashed through the nearest door without stopping.

  Seconds slipping away. The shadow followed by the mass. A cracking thunder announced the end of the crusade.

  She was in a hab. She turned left and banged open the door to the stairwell. She heard voices above and below. There were still people here, citizens crying out in terror.

  She had used up her allotment of regret decades ago.

  Final seconds. In her mind’s eye, she saw the great eclipse of the joined shadows. She jumped over the railing. She dropped straight down the shaft formed by the spiral of the staircase. She fell towards darkness. She grabbed a landing three floors down, arrested her fall with a jerk, let go to plummet a few more, stopped herself again, dropped again, and then darkness swallowed the whole of the staircase. Millions of tonnes of rockcrete hit the street, and took everything with it.

  The impact of her landing and the blows of the collapse knocked her unconscious. When she woke, Setheno was surrounded by the deep silence of vast death. The hab’s roots went as far as the upper reaches of the underhive. She sat up. Her armour’s servo-motors caught and whined. Waves of pain collided across her frame. But she could move.

  She turned on her helmet’s light. Where there had been a shaft, there was now a solid mass of rubble. The vault of the sublevel buckled. The groan of settling rubble disrupted the silence. Dust fell in steady streams on all sides.

  The crusade was fini
shed. She had done what she could. She had held the orks in Volcanus past its fall, keeping them anchored to the hive into another night. Whether that would suffice was up to Yarrick now.

  She stood. She turned around until she spotted a grating in the floor. She tore it up. The drain went deeper into the underhive. Her path was clear: through the underhive to the docks once more, then commandeer the lifter back to Hive Infernus.

  Above, the men and women who had followed her into combat had found their annihilation. Did they find redemption in the end?

  That was not her concern. Her duty had been to push the condemned to seek absolution. She had done so, and they had met their final judgement.

  The damned had their uses, and she had used them.

  She made her way deeper into the darkness.

  1. Yarrick

  We reached Hive Infernus in a dim, crimson dawn. The Season of Shadows had begun. The winds of the Season of Fire had dropped, but now a deeper flame had kindled. In the Fire Wastes, the volcanic chains were in full cry. Their ash clouds joined the dust already blanketing Armageddon. The distinction between day and night was fading. We had entered a time of perpetual lightning, of a roiling sky glowing like a furnace, lit by the rage of the mountains. Our days and nights would now be shadows of red and black. We would be fighting beneath an endless fury.

  Mannheim met us at the landing pad in the Legio Metalica’s staging ground. ‘We won’t have much time,’ he said as we walked towards the command block. ‘If von Strab doesn’t already know you’re here, it won’t be long before he does.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘So we won’t try to hide.’

  Von Strab’s blind spot concerning the orks was immense. It was also one of his rare ones. His eyes were everywhere. Whether his tools were human, servitor, pict-feed, one way or another, there were few corners of Armageddon into which he could not see, if he felt the need. Even in the underhives, he had his spies. But he couldn’t look everywhere at once. The intensity of his surveillance increased in direct proportion to his presence. His physical safety was his paramount concern. This was followed by the need to know of anything that might conceivably offer a threat to that safety. Around his quarters, nothing moved without his knowledge. That was not my destination. The astropathic choir of Hive Infernus, housed in the control tower of the spaceport, was kilometres away from the administrative centre. But it was an important lever of power. I had no hope of reaching Genest, the master of the astropathic choir, without being seen by one of von Strab’s creatures, organic or bionic.