He nodded grudgingly. ‘So now what?’ he asked.
De Chatelaine holstered her bolt pistol and put her hands on her hips. Her bearing was still regal, despite her exhaustion.
‘We have wounded them,’ she said, her voice giving away a fierce pride. ‘They will not breach the inner defences now, not without reinforcements. We should consolidate while we can.’
She gazed out to her left, over to where the dark profile of the cathedral still burned. Its triple spires sent twisting cords of inky smoke up into the foul sky.
‘Perhaps we should have done so earlier.’
Gunnlaugur grunted. That had always been his counsel.
‘What’s done is done,’ he said. ‘Every street was fought for. That satisfies honour.’ He looked over his shoulder, up the steep ranks of terraces leading to the upper city. ‘But you are right. They will not break the citadel now, not as they are. Give the order to your troops. My brothers and I will guard the retreat.’
De Chatelaine bowed. ‘This is your victory, Space Wolf,’ she said. ‘I should have trusted the hand of providence. You were our deliverance.’
Gunnlaugur shook his head. ‘You commanded this.’ He smiled under his belligerent helm. ‘You may yet get the crusade you dreamed of.’
De Chatelaine stood on the outcrop for a little longer, her cloak hanging limply in the thick, unmoving air.
‘They will come at us again,’ she said. ‘This is only one army. We know they have others. Plague Marines may yet live. What have we bought here? A few days?’
‘A few days are worth having,’ said Gunnlaugur. ‘The Imperium will answer your calls in time, and our task is to remain alive until then. We have made a start.’
De Chatelaine inclined her head in apology. ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘I learned to suppress my optimism. Perhaps I shall have to unlearn that again.’ She laughed. The sound was weary but clear. ‘Learning from a savage. That such things are possible.’
Then, ahead of them, out to the south over the wide dust-flats, the low covering of clouds broke open. The rift was fleeting, just a tattered break in the plague-pall that soon covered over again. But for a moment, sunlight shafted down on the battlefield, thick and golden, sweeping across the rusting, burning debris lining the road to Hjec Aleja.
Both Gunnlaugur and de Chatelaine watched it. Even after it had passed and the scene had resumed its preternatural gloom they said nothing.
It would not be the last such break, though. The clouds were thinning.
‘I had not realised dawn had come,’ de Chatelaine said.
‘Nor I,’ said Gunnlaugur. ‘But it has, and we are alive to see it.’
He looked across the devastation, thinking of Váltyr and Baldr, reflecting on what had been sacrificed.
‘Give the order to fall back,’ he said gruffly, avoiding such thoughts. Much work remained. ‘Let’s finish this.’
As Ras Shakeh’s natural daylight began to wane, the last of the toxin clouds thinned and drifted clear of the Halicon. In the deepening twilight, underlit by residual fires still growling away amid the wreckage of the lower city, the battlefield could at last be seen to its full extent. The outer walls had been half demolished, their smooth curve cracked open. The buildings closest to the perimeter had been hit hardest – huge areas had been reduced to black swathes of ash, gently smoking as the flesh, metal and stone all cooled.
The enemy withdrew beyond the walls, drawing up in sombre ranks out on the dust. Their numbers had been depleted by the assault but still remained formidable. The whispering stopped. They moved slowly, sullenly, like a vast beast withdrawing to lick its wounds. Their stench remained thick on the air, fuelled by the sweet tang of decaying offal left behind inside the walls.
The defenders pulled back to the inner walls, drawing closed the Ighala Gate doors and repopulating the long ramparts. The wall-gun magazines were reloaded, and materiel salvaged from the ruins of the perimeter defences was stowed, ready for use when needed. During the final withdrawal heavy lifting equipment was hauled down from the upper city to drag the wreckage of Vuokho back inside the walls. Hafloí’s haphazard flight had destroyed all of Jorundur’s repair work and caused fresh damage to the fragile hull, but what remained was judged worth retrieving by de Chatelaine’s surviving tech-adepts.
The Wounded Heart standards still hung on either side of the Ighala Gate. Many other battle-flags remained in place, albeit with rents and burns marring the holy icons. The Halicon had escaped largely undamaged, and still reared its baroque profile up against the far horizon. Though marked by missile-fire and stained from airborne filth, much of the upper city was intact, a final island of defiance amid a world of ruins.
Between the defenders’ redoubt and the enemy encampment on the plains stretched a wide swathe of no-man’s-land – a waste-zone of contagion studded with the remains of empty hab-shells and hazy with smoke. That was the buffer between the two forces over which artillery pieces gazed and troopers watched. Like a huge circular scar, it ran down from the gorge and out to the shattered perimeter wall, slowly greying and festering, devoid of all sounds but the hissing breeze.
Gunnlaugur and Olgeir stood on the Ighala ramparts watching over those wastes, their helms removed and their weapons sheathed.
Olgeir’s mood had improved after he’d managed to recover sigrún from a retreating warband of mutants. As they’d died under his fists he’d broken into laughing and hadn’t stopped until he’d withdrawn back to the bridge. Even now his ugly face was twisted by a half-smile.
Gunnlaugur, on the other hand, had fallen into brooding. The withdrawal from combat always turned his mood dark.
‘Any news from Old Dog?’ he asked, his eyes fixed on the ruins below.
Olgeir snorted. ‘Not since he dragged the whelp back to the hangars to put right what he did. For a while I thought he’d kill him.’
Gunnlaugur smiled. ‘Hafloí can look after himself.’
‘He can.’ Olgeir looked satisfied. ‘He’s a good fighter. You know who he reminds me of?’
‘I was never so foolish.’
Olgeir chuckled. ‘You were. And as arrogant. When his hair starts to grey he’ll be a formidable Hunter.’
‘If he lives long enough.’
Olgeir’s smile faded. He looked down at his burly hands where they grasped the parapet edge.
‘And Ingvar?’
Gunnlaugur’s chin slumped against his gorget.
‘He lives,’ he said quietly. ‘He says he found Baldr’s body, and will return it.’
Olgeir looked up at Gunnlaugur. His face betrayed his disquiet. ‘Fjolnir was destroyed?’
‘I do not know. Ingvar would not tell me. He told me he’d explain when he was back.’
‘So you two are speaking again.’
‘We will speak,’ said Gunnlaugur, his voice heavy with weariness. ‘I cannot feel anger with him, not now.’
‘He disobeyed you.’
‘He did. But was the order just?’ Gunnlaugur turned to Olgeir. ‘Have I persecuted him, Heavy-hand?’
Olgeir shrugged. ‘I’m no vaerangi. But the bad blood between you: it cannot continue.’
Gunnlaugur nodded, then lowered his head again.
‘I hoped he would be how he used to be, but I see the change in his eyes. I see that damned Onyx skull around his neck and I know he carries his past with him like a ghost at his back. At times I wonder if something’s possessed him.’
Olgeir made the ritual gesture against maleficarum.
‘Do not jest.’
‘Even so.’
Silence fell between them. The first stars appeared above, pricking silver into the veil of dark blue. The smells of cooking fires wafted up from the buildings behind them, the first wholesome aromas that had been detectable since the enemy had arrived. Although battered and surrounded,
Hjec Aleja still clung to life.
‘Baldr cannot be suffered to endure,’ said Olgeir at last, his deep voice sombre. ‘You saw what he’d become. He is as much a brother to me as he is to you, but we should have ended him when we had the chance. You know this.’
Gunnlaugur didn’t look at him.
‘If we had done so, then we would all be dead and the Halicon would now be the throne room for that monster,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it was his wyrd to be there. Perhaps he can still be saved.’
As he spoke, a figure emerged from the ruins below and moved across the wasteland. It went haltingly, dragging something along. Only slowly could its shape be made out – a warrior in pearl-grey armour hauling another behind it. The two of them stumbled up out of the desolation and towards the bridge.
Gunnlaugur watched their progress bleakly.
‘You will let him pass?’ asked Olgeir.
Gunnlaugur remained still for a long time. All along the parapets, defence towers locked on to the moving figures, primed to fire on his order.
He remembered Baldr’s own words to the canoness, back when the first of the infected had been discovered.
Do you not understand? They allow them to survive. There are carriers among them. You cannot let them in.
His amber eyes held steady in the failing light as he watched Ingvar struggle under the dead weight of his unconscious brother.
Allow none to pass in or out. Everything contaminated must be destroyed.
‘He is one of us,’ Gunnlaugur murmured. His voice betrayed his doubt, but it brooked no argument. ‘The Gyrfalkon would not have brought him back if he thought Baldr had gone beyond redemption.’
Gunnlaugur took in a deep breath. The air was still foul in his nostrils.
‘I must learn,’ he said. ‘I must change. I must find him a place, now that Váltyr is gone.’
He leaned forwards on the parapet, his brows furrowed.
‘I must learn to trust his judgement, Heavy-hand,’ he said. ‘Open the gates.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Canoness de Chatelaine knelt before the altar and watched the memorial fires burn in their brazier pans. Dozens had been lit, each one marking the soul of a fallen Sister. The smoke, pungent with incense, twisted up into the chapel’s vaults.
As the thin columns rose the choir sang a low, cadenced dirge. The music was a blend of traditional Shakeh death-chants and sanctioned Ministorum melodies. The words had been written by Sister Renata of her Celestian bodyguard. Like so many others, Renata was dead now, her body lying somewhere unmarked in the smouldering ruins of the lower city.
De Chatelaine bowed her head. The rites of remembrance gave her a little comfort. So many of those she had lived with for years were gone, their lives ended in cruel and ignominious ways, but as long as the rites endured some measure of dignity could be restored to their legacies.
As each brazier was lit, a chime sounded and a priest declaimed the name of the fallen. As the list neared its end, ordered by rank in the Imperial way, only a single brass pan remained empty.
An iron-masked acolyte walked up the remaining station with a flame cradled in his metal-gloved hands. As he reached up to the pan and the coals kindled, the chime sounded a final time.
‘Sister Palatine Uwe Bajola, of the world Memnon Primus, of the Orders Famulous, afterwards of the Order of the Wounded Heart. Confirmed slain in the conduct of righteous duty. Gathered into the bosom of the Emperor of Mankind. Blessed are the martyrs. Their souls remain inviolate.’
The canoness listened sadly. Bajola had always been a mystery to her. De Chatelaine had never understood why someone with the Palatine’s gifts had wanted to take up a station in such a remote world. The pleasures and rewards of ministering to a devoted populace were not something Bajola had ever seemed to feel deeply. De Chatelaine had always felt that her restless spirit would have been better employed elsewhere; perhaps in one of the bigger Orders, or perhaps in the Famulous chambers where she had come from, with all the glamorous system-spanning work that entailed.
She remembered how Bajola had been on the day she’d arrived on Ras Shakeh. De Chatelaine had admired the younger woman’s poise, her calm manner, her quiet application. Only later had she been troubled by the amount of time Bajola had spent in the bowels of the cathedral, how disconnected she had been with the work of the other Sisters. When Bajola had so vociferously opposed the decision to seek protection from the Wolves of Fenris, for reasons de Chatelaine had never fully understood, a rift had threatened to open between them.
That had never happened. Now, after so much bloodshed, it seemed pointless to even think of such things. She was gone, and any secrets she had were gone too.
It would have been good to talk before the end. If the Palatine had not been so obsessed with that damn cathedral, perhaps they would have done. But that was in the past now. Perhaps one day it would be rebuilt and a shrine dedicated to her heroic defence of it. It was always comforting to think of the future.
With the last of the pans lit, de Chatelaine got to her feet, bowed a final time towards the altar, and turned back down the chapel’s central aisle. As she walked towards the doorway she heard the scurrying footsteps of aides. They kept to the shadows of the aisles, cloaked and hooded. Some were flesh and blood like her; others were at least part mechanical.
As she pushed the heavy gahlwood doors open and stepped into the cool of the night, one of them came up to her, bowing and genuflecting.
When he raised his bald head, displaying an age-lined face and blank white eyes, de Chatelaine recognised her Master of Astropaths, Ermili Repoda.
‘Could it not wait, master?’ she asked.
Repoda bowed again in apology. ‘You commanded me to inform you if the Choir received anything.’
Despite herself, de Chatelaine felt a twinge in the pit of her stomach. It was dangerous to hope.
‘And?’
Repoda swallowed drily.
‘I do not wish to give you grounds for false optimism,’ he said. ‘But since that… thing was killed, we have been getting intermittent scraps. Nothing as solid as I would like, and mostly from the acolytes who are not yet trained to interpret soundly.’
De Chatelaine drew in an impatient breath.
‘I think we were heard,’ he said, his face oscillating between doubt and expectation. ‘I do not have a reliable name, nor a time, but someone has been trying to reach us.’
‘No more detail?’
Repoda looked uncertain. ‘Perhaps. A title, maybe. The Wolves may be able to tell you more. My people interpreted it differently: one of them came up with gibberish, another the title Storm-caller. I do not know what to make of it.’
De Chatelaine pursed her lips thoughtfully.
‘Storm-caller,’ she said slowly. ‘I will speak to Gunnlaugur of this. It sounds like something he would recognise.’
Repoda bowed again. His hands twitched nervously. He looked on edge. Everyone around her was on edge, driven into a state of fragility by what they had seen and lived through.
De Chatelaine gave him a kind look, not that he would have seen it.
‘Do not despair, master,’ she said. ‘I had almost given up, and then our prayers were answered. The Wolves will not leave their own kind: more will come, and when they do our survival here will count for something. They will find this city still defended, ready to receive their warriors for the crusade we hoped for.’
Repoda tried to smile, but his old face produced little more than a grimace. ‘I hope you are right, canoness,’ he said.
De Chatelaine drew in a deep breath. The airs around the Halicon were purer than they had been.
‘If I had learned to doubt, master,’ she said, ‘then I have unlearned it again. The Master of Mankind does not desert souls who remain true to Him. That is what we need to remember, is it not? To believ
e.’
She smiled at him again, more for her own benefit than for his.
‘After what we have seen,’ she said, ‘surely even the most lost of us has remembered that.’
In a forgotten corner of the upper city, cloistered away from the overcrowded chapels, converted hab-units and medicae stations, shaded by spear-leaved trees and open to the deep night air, a fire burned.
It was larger than most, a heaped pile of wooden slats stuffed with torn fabric and doused in oils. Váltyr’s body lay amid the roaring flames, lying on his back with his open eyes gazing up into the sea of stars. About the pyre were set his warrior’s artefacts: his armour pieces, what remained of his pelts and trophies. Set at his feet, hanging from an iron frame and sheathed, was holdbítr. The blade looked mournful. It would no longer draw; the pieces had been retrieved but only a smith with the skill of Arjac would be able to reforge the blade.
Gunnlaugur watched the flames consume the corpse of his battle-brother and friend. He knew what Váltyr would have wanted: the sword to be destroyed with him, to perish completely so that none but he would ever wield it.
That would happen in time, but the pyre would not be sufficient to harm it. A greater furnace would be needed to melt the imperishable metal and break the wards of the runes along the blade.
His eyes moved away from the flames and scanned across the pyre’s watchers. Four others had gathered before it, each standing silently, each lost in their own thoughts.
Olgeir was closest. He stood proudly, his huge shoulders pushed back, his snub nose and gnarled beard silhouetted against the pyre’s glow. His deep-set eyes stared into the heart of the fire. He had not been close to Váltyr, but Gunnlaugur knew they had respected one another. Baldr’s affliction had hit him harder. Though Olgeir had argued for giving Fjolnir the Emperor’s Mercy, he had done so with pain in his eyes. Since Baldr’s entry into the pack they had fought together like kin-brothers, their bolters ringing in unison. If Baldr died, Olgeir would mourn long. If he lived but did not recover, he would mourn longer.
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