‘What do we do about that?’
Gunnlaugur shrugged. ‘That’s up to the Sisters. If they’ve got any sense they’ll pull out while they still can, and I’d welcome having their flamers with us on the inner walls.’
‘And if they try to hold it?’
Gunnlaugur hefted skulbrotsjór once more, swinging it loosely around him. The noise of battle was already growing again.
‘Not my concern,’ he said, striding back towards the raging front line. ‘I have Traitors to hunt.’
Bajola crouched down beside the altar, her bolter ready. The six surviving Sisters of her detachment did similarly, cradling flamers. The roof shuddered as incoming fire speared into the cathedral defences. What remained of the Guard units assigned to the place had withdrawn inside the doors, taking up positions within the aisles and nave.
Bajola said nothing. She had given all but one of the orders she would give. Her troops had fought with commendable resolve, slaying far more of the enemy than she would have predicted possible, holding them back from the precincts even as the surrounding barricades had been destroyed or were abandoned. Her Sisters had been in the forefront of every bloody melee and firefight, remaining in position until the last of the regular troops around them had been slain and the enemy was swarming through the breaches.
Sister Jerila had been the first to die, surrounded by clouds of exploding toxin-grenades and assailed by arm-length blood leeches that cracked her armour open and slithered underneath. Sister Honorata had been next, charging headlong into a whispering knot of grotesque plague-bearers, giving time for the Guard units with her to retreat into the cathedral’s nave. Sisters Alicia and Violetta had both fallen during the final assault on the great gates, cut off at the last and swarmed over by hundreds of grasping, tearing claws.
Bajola had never truly been proud of being a member of the Wounded Heart. Her feelings about the militant order had always been complex, defined by the compromises she had made to leave her old life behind.
No longer. As she waited for the final assault every fibre of her body was proud. She saw the faces of the slain in her mind’s eye, their fierce beauty and their unbending will, and felt like one of them at last. At last she had no doubts, no regrets.
Well, one regret perhaps: that she had not broken her vows and told Ingvar the truth. The Space Wolf deserved to know, even if the know-ledge would only pain him and could not possibly do any good now. But that moment had passed; Ingvar was gone, no doubt fighting along with the rest of his malodorous brothers somewhere in the burning ruins of the lower city. She had made her choices, and had learned a long time ago not to give in to the corrosion of remorse.
In any case it was too late for remorse. The end was coming.
Grant that my station may serve.
Her lips moved slowly as she silently ran through the motions of the litany. At the end of the long nave, fifty metres away in the dark, she could see the gates still standing closed. The noise of the battering rams crashing against the barred metal tore at her heart. Every strike was like a body-blow, knocking the life out of the place she had never truly loved before that day.
It was ironic. Only on the verge of its destruction had she fully appreciated the austere majesty of the structure she had been charged with defending. There was a lesson in that, somewhere. Something for one of de Chatelaine’s homilies; a pity, then, that there would be no more of them.
Grant that my strength may suffice.
The doors shuddered again, cracking along their full height. Another strike hammered home, cobwebbing the struts and beams with spreading fractures.
Bajola crouched lower, shifting her gun’s muzzle a little, gauging where the first break would come. She could feel the sick tension in those clustered around her. They all knew this was last line of defence; no further fallback positions existed. Above them, hanging high in the shadows, the golden mask of the Emperor gazed serenely down on them, untroubled by the carnage unfolding under His spreading arms.
Grant that my life may give honour.
Another strike landed and the right-hand door was driven in, shattering and swinging back against the pillars. The jabber and hiss of mutant troops burst into the cold serenity of the interior. She heard the roar and crackle of flames, smelled the foetid reek of plague-riddled flesh under decaying armour plate.
Grant that my death may earn it.
As the horde spilled through the broken doorway at last, tumbling into the sanctified space of St Alexia’s holy precincts with the sick light of debauchery in their weeping eyes, Bajola spoke at last. She gave the final order, the one she had been saving for the final extremity, the one she had been preparing in her mind over the last hour of desperate fighting.
‘The altar will not be surrendered,’ she said calmly, fixing her aim on the first of the horrors to break the holiness of her domain. ‘Die well, Sisters. Our bodies may be broken, but our souls are secure.’
Scholiast-Majoris Iaen Rahmna hurried along the corridor between the Halicon’s prayer-scroll librarium and the incense stores. The canoness’s private chapel was running low on supplies, and with nine scheduled services on the slate there was a faint chance future ceremonies would have to be truncated.
For some people such an apparently trifling matter would not have seemed important, especially given what was happening in the city at large. Some people, not blessed with Iaen Rahmna’s meticulous attention to detail, would have long since ceased to care about the niceties of ritual. They might have seen the armies of darkness eating their way slowly through the lower urban zones and despaired of ceremonial propriety. They might even, in their weakness, have taken up a weapon and turned it on themselves, knowing that their life’s work was now useless and decades’ worth of careful prayers to the immortal Emperor of Mankind had been in vain.
Thankfully, no such people were in charge of the canoness’s ecclesiastical affairs. Under Rahmna’s management the thirteen chapels and sanctuaries dotted all across the citadel still worked faultlessly. The world might be ending around them, the Sisters might all have been called away to the battles outside, but the rituals would carry on. If the cardinal himself were to walk through Rahmna’s gilded doorways and into one of his thirteen chapels and sanctuaries, he would witness a perfectly orchestrated suite of devotional chambers, all perfectly stocked, all ready for the priests to undertake their solemn ministry.
And of course the familiarity of the routines was a distraction. It helped Rahmna to function. It helped to keep him from giving in to the fear that threatened to suffocate him every time he heard the echoing boom of the explosions getting nearer. It prevented him from remembering that he hadn’t slept properly for two weeks, or that three of his staff had succumbed to the plague and had been executed by Sisters Felicia and Calliope before his very eyes.
Keeping busy was important. It staved off the worst of the nightmares. It kept his hands occupied and gave him no time to think about retrieving the laspistol he’d stowed under his bunk for emergencies.
That was the coward’s way out. And for all that Iaen Rahmna was officious, prim and completely in thrall to routine, he was no coward.
The corridor was empty. His robes rustled softly as he walked. Aside from the diffuse hum of noise coming from outside the citadel, no other sounds disturbed his mechanical thought processes.
The only departure from orthodoxy was the route: he’d had to take a detour, heading deep into the lower levels to avoid Sergeant Ehre’s squads milling about in the assembly rooms. The Guardsmen were making a fearful mess there, overturning priceless cabinets and dragging their heavy equipment across polished marble towards the doorways. Rahmna didn’t really understand why they were bothering. If the enemy got as far as the Halicon citadel then surely it was all over. Better instead to remain faithful, to attend to the services, to pray.
He went as swiftly as he could.
The lower levels smelled bad and the lumens flickered every time a big explosion went off. Rahmna wasn’t even sure what the chambers down here were used for. Food storage, perhaps. Or maybe medical facilities for the Halicon staff. Yes, that was it – the chambers on his left were part of the medicae’s domain.
Ahead of him he saw a door hanging loosely on its hinges. He slowed down, unsure what to make of it. He could hear the dim humming of medicae cogitators from the other side of the wall.
He stopped walking. Something about the open doorway unnerved him. The metal panels bore long, raking marks, as if huge claws had been dragged along them.
He looked over his shoulder, his heart beating. Then he looked back. He wondered what to do. It would take him a long time to find another route.
He pressed on. His imagination had always been vivid; his superiors had castigated him for it many times in the past and he had laboured hard to curb the excesses of his mind’s eye.
He went as quickly as before, padding softly in sewn leather shoes. The open doorway approached, framed by the angled outline of the broken door.
He passed by hastily, not daring to look inside. He could smell a thick aroma of something like human sweat, though it was rancid and laced with other more musky elements.
Rahmna almost reached the far side before his eyes flickered involuntarily to the left. It was just the merest glance, a fleeting vision of what lay within.
He didn’t scream. The shock was too great for that. A knot of panic twisted in his stomach and burst up his throat, choking off the cry of surprise that he wanted to make.
‘L-lord,’ he managed to blurt, wondering, despite it all, if the etiquette was to bow. ‘I did not–’
They were the last words Iaen Rahmna ever spoke. A flailing storm of green-tinged lightning forked out at him, catching him in the face and bursting his skull apart. His headless body slammed into the far wall of the corridor. For a moment the corpse hung there, impaled on sparking fronds of ether-energy, twitching and kicking, before the lines of force finally snapped out. Rahmna’s corpse slid to the floor, crumpling into a heap of smoking robes.
A little later, Baldr emerged through the doorway, breathing heavily. His eyes were glassy, his skin pallid and greasy. Thin lines of drool ran down from the corners of his mouth, viscous with clotted mucus. His gauntlets glowed with a pale witchlight, dancing across the armour-plate like a will-’o-the-wisp. His battle-plate had darkened, crusting with scab-like patches that throbbed and pulsed. His head drooped low, his jaw hung loosely, his arms were limp.
His feet dragged along the ground as he moved; his breath vaporised in foul trails of mist as he breathed. He seemed unaware of where he was or what he was doing. He looked up and down the corridor, halting before moving off again.
Only when he limped back in the direction Rahmna had come from, stepping carelessly on the dead man’s legs and crushing the bones, did his sallow-eyed stare pick up something a little like resolve. A lime-green lustre kindled under his heavy lids. Strands of phlegmy saliva trembled on his lips.
‘Terminus,’ he breathed, his voice as dry and whisper-quiet as corpse candles gusting out. ‘Terminus Est.’
When Váltyr reached the Ighala Gate it was lit red by fire. The bulwarks and gothic fortifications danced with the flickering light of flames, turning the stone into a seething patchwork of shadow and reflection. The twin banners on either side of the main archway leading into the upper city were torn and punched with holes from long-range ordnance. Guns arranged along the embattled parapets drummed a heavy return rhythm of fire, throwing round after round back into the contested suburbs below.
Váltyr paused at the head of the bridge, watching the last of the retreating columns of soldiers hurry across the span and into the shadow of the gates. They looked exhausted, their feet dragging and their shoulders hunched. Five hours had passed since the outbreak of hostilities and there had been no let up since; just a grinding, hammering, relentless assault that had kept on coming no matter what resistance had been put in its way.
He turned away from the bridge and looked back the way he’d come. The land immediately in front of him had been cleared to give targets for the wall gunners. It ran gently downhill without obstruction, a bleak, open plain of rubble, dust and blast craters.
Half a kilometre further down, the surviving buildings of the lower city started to cluster tightly together. They fell away from Váltyr’s vantage in ranks of terraces that ran over the uneven slopes of the mountain. Olgeir’s concentric rings of trenches were all lit far below, throwing their fuel-laced blaze into the mix of raging fires from incendiaries and las-blasts. The lower circles had already been breached, in some places by plague-bearers throwing themselves into the fire in such numbers as to create bridges from their smouldering carcasses. Those barriers that remained would not buy the defenders much more time; the enemy was advancing on every front, creeping up through the ruins like a cancer penetrating a body. Only in a few isolated places, where squads of Battle Sisters or individual Wolves had taken them on in counter-attacks, did the advance halt for more than a few moments.
As Váltyr watched the encroaching devastation, Hafloí strode up out of the flame-licked darkness, limping across the broken landscape. He looked weary, and his bleached armour bore signs of recent damage.
‘Hjá, whelp,’ said Váltyr. ‘You gained a skull for your weapon belt.’
Hafloí snorted disgustedly. ‘Wouldn’t touch it,’ he said. ‘Smelled worse than the Old Dog’s breath.’
Hafloí drew alongside Váltyr, turned and looked out over the same vista. His breathing was heavy, his movements stiff. For all the Blood Claw would never admit it, he was at the limit of his strength and still affected by the wounds he had taken in the ravine.
‘You know what the vaerangi wants of you now?’ asked Váltyr.
Hafloí nodded. ‘For me to take my turn by Baldr’s side. To free up another rune-sword for the final fight and sit the rest of this out.’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t worry, blademaster. I know it must be done.’
Váltyr looked at him quizzically. ‘You’re not going to fight it?’
‘Would it do any good?’
‘No.’
‘There you are, then.’
Váltyr laughed. ‘You’re growing fast, whelp,’ he said. ‘You surprise me. Soon your hair will be as grey as ours.’
‘When Hel melts,’ muttered Hafloí, turning away and stomping up the slope towards the bridge.
He was one of the last to cross it, still limping slightly but with his shoulders back and his spine erect. He was even learning to walk like a Grey Hunter.
Váltyr smiled to himself. The new blood was welcome. Of all of them, only Hafloí still had the unconscious, arrogant assurance that a Sky Warrior ought to have. Olgeir retained much of his old bravado, and Gunnlaugur in the right mood was still an unstoppable kill-engine, but even they had learned to temper their fury as the centuries had played out. Baldr had never lost his aura of self-command, not until this mission, but that was moot now.
Váltyr himself had never possessed that innate confidence. Despite all the psycho-conditioning, all the training, all the long decades of success, he had never quite been able to convince himself that he deserved his place among the honoured of the Rout. His matchless prowess with the blade didn’t mask that. He knew he pushed his reputation too far, testing it too often, forcing others to take him on. He was aware that they resented it, thinking that he delighted in humiliating them and proving his superiority.
They were wrong about that. The duels, the tests – they were a compulsion rather than a desire. He had even begun to wonder whether he wanted to be beaten, just once, just so he could look himself in the eye in the mirror and know truly that his limits had been reached.
That was the strange thing about success. It was useless in disproving the nagging, whispering no
tion he’d been unable to shake ever since ascending into the Blood Claws: that he was a fraud, that he wasn’t quite as good as his results indicated, and that one day he’d be found out; that one day, when it really mattered, he’d let the pack down.
Váltyr, like all his brothers, was immune from fear in battle, but he’d never been immune from that anxiety. No matter how hard he trained, no matter how deadly he became in the practice cages, the quiet voice in his mind would never quite go away.
It is good that we are always forced to fight, he thought grimly to himself, watching the city burn below him. It prevents us spending any time with ourselves.
The last of the mortal troops, some dragging their wounded behind them, crossed the bridge. The enormous doors under the central arch slowly ground together, leaving only a narrow gap for the Wolves to slip through. After that, when they were all in, the breach would be sealed.
Váltyr walked down the shallow slope, away from where the bridge met the cleared land. Ahead of him, still a long way off and half shrouded by smoke and night shadow, lay the jagged, toothless line of buildings. Many were little more than skeletal ruins, bombed empty and glowing like angry coals. The rest were deserted, dark and hollowed out, their old inhabitants slain or cowering behind the inner walls. From beyond their see-saw profile came the dull roar of battle, a distant sighing like the surge of the ocean.
He sniffed. Something unusual laced the air, mingled amid the melange of foul smells rising from the lower city as if purposively concealed there. The hairs on his forearms rose.
He walked further down, his boots crunching through the rubble, drawing steadily closer to the line of ruins. Visibility was poor, even with his superb eyesight: the air had been turned into a miasma of spores and smoke.
‘Whelp?’ he voxed into the comm, wondering how far Hafloí had moved away.
No answer came. The Blood Claw’s channel was unobtainable. That was strange; perhaps interference from the electrostatic in the air.
Blood of Asaheim Page 30
