Every few minutes a burst of static followed by a verse of sombre chanting announces the Colonel checking our bearing towards the battle abbey. Each time we wince, knowing the sound is carrying far, wondering what it might attract.
And now there are howls ahead and to the right.
‘Everyone stick close together,’ I call out, sweeping my gaze over the group.
A fresh eruption of throaty howls sounds nearby, over to the left this time. I see my dwindling followers staring with fear into the night, trying to see past the ring of lantern bearers we have set as pickets on the edge of the group. Youngsters ride on the sleds with the baggage, cradling the few infants, leaving the adults to guard them. On one of the biers lies Karste, still unconscious. Some of the oldest wasters take turns to ride with her, to save their legs and to check her dressings. Every time one of them relinquishes the duty to the next their expressions are graver than before. Her future is measured in hours, and probably single figures at that.
‘There,’ whispers someone behind me. I turn just in time to see them pointing off to the right. Something large and canine slinks through the fog just on the edge of vision. Several more shapes follow it.
‘Nobody run,’ I warn, pulling out my pistol. ‘They won’t attack the group.’
‘More here,’ comes a gentle call from behind. I almost stumble over a rock as I look back, just glimpsing movement from right to left.
‘Circling us,’ I say quietly.
Everything falls silent but for the hiss of runners in ash and the pad of feet. I hear panting and growls, coming from both sides. Orskya must hear it too – everyone has their hoods pulled back despite the cold, straining for any warning – and darts me a worried look.
‘Getting closer.’ I almost mouth the words without sound.
Everybody has slowed, caution overtaking their thoughts. Both I and Orskya signal for them to keep going, though it seems obvious that the dunewolves are moving ahead of us. We can’t be more than a kilometre from the siege lines. If we can get there we can find a command bunker or maybe just a gunline to hole up in and wait out the night. Ahead is our best chance of surviving even if it is also the most dangerous route.
The growling intensifies, and then all of a sudden there’s a monstrous roar ahead. Something nearly the size of a horse dashes into view for a moment and then disappears. Answering snarls and bestial bellows sound from left and right, accompanied by the heavy drumming of footfalls and swirls of fog cut by immense four-legged beasts.
The howls become whines of terror swiftly followed by more snarling, the wet rasp of flesh being torn apart and the snap and crunch of bones. Agonised animal shrieks fill the air, dozens of them, punctuated by noises of rending jaws and guttural growls.
I’m trembling even as I walk, numb with shock and fear. A bellow and pointing cleaver from Nazrek has all eyes snapping to the left. A creature ploughs through the mists, passing through the circle of lamplight for several seconds. A face that’s part-canine, part-reptilian; lips drawn back from teeth like combat knives. Its horned head is bounded by a frilled crest, scaled skin a gleaming orange in the lantern’s glow. A tail like a scorpion’s sting whips behind it, before the massive beast is lost in the plume of ash kicked up by its charge.
I can just about make out the devil hound pouncing onto something smaller – something that would be easily twice as heavy as me, made to look like a house pet by the unnatural predator’s bulk. Jaws clamp around the dunewolf’s head, crushing it with one titanic bite while glinting claws rake out its gut, spraying ropes of steaming entrails.
Screams from children and adults alike pierce my sluggish thoughts. Some idiot fires a las-bolt into the gloom and within seconds a hail of blasts and bullets scream out into the darkness.
‘Stop! Stop!’ I shout, dashing to the sleds, shoving my laspistol into the waistband of my trousers. ‘Run! We need to run!’
I’ve never questioned my survival instinct and I’m not starting now. I grab a rope and start pulling, helping the waster already in front of the sled like a draught animal in the traces of a wagon. The ash shifts under my boots but I get enough grip to build up some momentum. Around me other wasters take up the call, bending their backs to the drag-ropes.
Orskya yells something and the children riding among the loads start pushing off boxes and bags, lightening the sleds. We surge forwards, starting to find a rhythm between us. Some of the older children take guns from their parents and loose off occasional shots into the night. I don’t doubt their aim, people like hivers and wasters learn to fight and shoot from the time they can pick up a gun – I’ve always preferred knives, but before I was ten years old I could reliably hit a sourfruit from thirty paces.
Ahead I see something large looming up through the gloom. It takes a moment for it to register as a gun bastion, the crenellated roof silhouetted against the haze of the sky. There are shouts from those in front, partly of joy, partly warning of trenches and gun pits.
I turn, checking on the others, and that’s when I see the daemon hound. It breaks a wall of fog about sixty metres behind me, tatters of dunewolf fur and flesh hanging from its iron-toothed jaw. I catch the glint of a bronze collar in the gleam of lamps on the back of the sled. The two small girls and boy riding among the baggage shriek, high-pitched squeals of pure terror as the hound bears down on us, covering half a dozen metres with each bounding stride.
My past flashes back to me, recollection ramming into my thoughts, taking me back to the trench lines outside Coritanorum. Bullets from a heavy stubber tracking towards me, sprinting like a fragging idiot across the open ground between two armies.
Ten strides from death.
That’s the difference between making it to the trench and getting caught by that abyssal monster.
Unless I let go of the rope…
Thoughts race through me and one hand releases its grip before I even know what I’m doing. It’s like something else is controlling me, a far greater power than my rational brain. The other hand lets go and I’m free of the burden.
But it’s not to run. I pluck the pistol from my belt again and vault the sled as the daemon hound reaches me, landing heavily in the churned ash behind it, the terrified faces of the children flashing past.
I take aim and shoot, the red bolt sizzling into the night to hit the ash beside the oncoming behemoth. I have no idea what a puny laspistol can do against the monster – it’s like throwing pebbles at a battle tank – but I’d rather die fighting than running, which is an odd sensation for me. I fire again, hitting the shoulder of the charging brute, and then again and again. No point saving a powercell, right? Can’t use it when I’m dead.
I sidestep as I fire, and the hound veers towards me, changing direction just enough that it isn’t heading straight after the sleds. It’s about forty metres away, white eyes reflecting the dwindling lantern light.
A deeper crack than the zip of my pistol startles me. Orskya, firing her heavy rifle, picking a shot for every three or four of mine.
Then the snap of the Colonel’s lasgun on my right. Blue beams cross the path of my shots, striking the head and crest of the monstrous dog.
Twenty metres.
The boom of Nazrek’s pistol is quickly drowned out by the ork’s throaty bellow as it pounds past us. We stop firing, unable to draw on our target without hitting Nazrek.
Xenos savage and abyssal predator meet about fifteen metres in front of me. Nazrek’s choppa hacks off a clawed foot sweeping towards its face, but dagger-fangs bury deep into the ork’s forearm. Borne backwards by the daemon hound’s momentum, Nazrek falls, choppa buried in the side of the hound’s head.
The abyssal monster has its jaws tight on Nazrek’s arm but the ork heaves to its feet, roaring as it rips away from the beast, tearing off its own arm at the elbow to be free. It punches its heavy pistol into the eye of the hound, firing as it
does so. Brutal high-calibre slugs rip through the skull of the hound, tearing it apart even as the ork’s fist continues its journey, plunging into the head of the daemon creature.
The hound thrashes into the ash dunes for seconds, rolling down a bank, and then starts to dissolve into a bloody pool. Nazrek stoops to retrieve its arm from disintegrating jaws, cleaver still in hand.
More shapes lope through the fog.
‘Not safe yet,’ snaps Orskya.
‘Run, boss!’ bellows Nazrek, before forging into the swirling fog, the small shape of Grot scuttling after.
Gunfire from the trench line behind us screams past, targeting daemon hounds still advancing after the hivers and wasters. Together, under the covering fire of the folks at the bunker, we reach the trenches and gratefully climb down into the protective shadows.
‘That was–’ begins Orskya but I cut her off with a raised hand.
I turn away, stumble a few steps and then throw up, vomiting nothing but stomach acid and bitter waster tea. My legs finally give up holding me upright and I collapse against the trench wall, heaving breaths into my punished lungs.
‘Emperor be praised!’ says someone close by. I look up and find one of the underhivers, Nemoa, looking down at me, a canteen of water held out. ‘Once more He delivers you from the very teeth of death, Burned Man.’
I take the canteen from him and swig metallic-tasting water, swilling it around my mouth before spitting out the remnants of vomit. Handing back the water bottle I pull myself up to the firing step and look out of the trench. In the flash of las-bolts and muzzle flare of autoguns I see more hounds, maybe half a dozen.
No sign of Nazrek.
‘Just delaying the end, that’s all,’ I tell Nemoa, dropping back down into the trench. ‘Less praying, more shooting.’
I’ve had many sleepless nights in my life, waiting for some miserable demise or other. The night in the trench is no different, but for the fact that the thought of dying doesn’t feel like a failure any more.
Sporadic bursts of terror and gunfire intersperse the old familiar sensations of numb fatigue and boredom. The sentries call out the alarm and I rouse myself, but each time feels a little less real. Death hounds and blood-warriors, tentacled pox-beasts born of slug and nightmare, cackling flame-sprites and screeching fanged skysharks.
The coldness bites in the early hours of the morning, turning breath to fog and fingers to ice. Senses dulled by exhaustion and fear start to wane. I can’t feel the ferrocrete and flakboard beneath my boots or taste the air any more. Reality becomes a small patch of lantern-lit trench and a bunker, no more than fifty metres of defiance against the ruddy gloom of the abyss that tries to swallow us. Nobody talks. The moans of the wounded break the still between violence-filled moments of brightness and cacophony.
I think about Geller fields, those unreal slivers of reality that keep ships protected in warp space. Madness and death, that’s what we were told they hold back. That’s true, to a point. They never said that madness and death clothed themselves in makeshift bodies and could cut you open with their blades. They forgot to mention that the warp could become walking disease, corrupting lungs with a breath, its unnatural touch turning flesh to poisoned slurry.
Perhaps I’m sleeping. It certainly seems the stuff of warp dreams. I’m still on the ship, transitioning to Armageddon. Everything here is a product of warpfluence and bad memories. The abyssal messenger and the heinous things it did with my body, the Burned Man, the impossible creatures in the mists.
Maybe none of it has actually happened.
The Geller field, straining at the pressures of the warp, while a lone Navigator peers into insanity made form, picking our way through eternal darkness with only the light of the Emperor to guide us.
That makes more sense. All a dream, a manufactured reality to make sense of a Geller field collapse.
If this was real, I’d have to be crazy, right? The last bits of sanity that I was clinging to after the Brightsword mission have finally given way, a frayed rope of sense parting under the constant strain.
Especially the part where blood-warriors mounted on grox-sized steeds of scarlet flesh and brass advance amongst packs of slavering daemon beasts and sword-bearing warpborn. I laugh as I see chariots pulled by more of the metal behemoths. From a ferrocrete bunker roof, the lasgun I took from a waster corpse in hand, it seems like an army of the most ancient myth arrays itself against us, complete with the sound of braying horns and flapping banners.
It’s as divorced from t’au battlesuits and ork hordes as the blue sky is from the underhive. Two things that don’t share the same universe.
A fresh blare of horns announces the advance and I laugh, ignoring the looks of shock from my companions. Orskya frowns and mouths something but I don’t really hear the words. I can feel the war-heat prickling my skin again, touching along nerves I thought dead, bringing power and energy to limbs that should be lifeless.
For a fleeting moment I wonder if maybe I’m not even sleeping, but dead. I’ve met a lot of people from different worlds – different species even – and some of them have very odd ideas about what happens when we die. I’ve never seen it as anything other than the end, but I’ve billeted with troopers that think that the Emperor takes you to a paradise of peace and plenty. Others say our souls join the great God-Emperor after death, sustaining His immortal presence.
Maybe this is what happens. Maybe when you die your soul just goes to this place of insanity where nothing is real and you keep fighting. Keep fighting for the Emperor.
What if all of those times I thought I’d cheated death, I actually hadn’t? Maybe I’ve died again and again.
We’re called the Last Chancers – why would I keep coming back to this place unless it was because I’m not really alive but battling for the God-Emperor in the darkness of the abyss itself?
I’m still laughing as I watch the army of blood-warriors closing. I wish we had artillery and lascannons and heavy bolters, but we face the oncoming tide of unnatural beasts and soldiers with nothing but las-bolts and bullets.
And faith?
Even as I think this, I can hear the clarion of the Emperor’s eternal voice on the wind.
Is He with me? Is that why He has brought me to His afterlife of war, to keep fighting? The preachers tell us that the Emperor protects. Again and again, every prayer and hymn and exhortation tells us that we must die for His service so that He may protect humanity.
I did that once already. I gave my life, threw myself into the flames.
Still here though. Do we need to fight on the other side? Maybe it isn’t the Emperor that protects, but the souls of dead soldiers fighting on in the darkness of the everlasting war?
And if that’s true, then I can’t die and maybe accepting that is why I can look at the wall of nightmare and death coming upon us and not feel afraid. That moment of pure grace I felt as I was falling into the flames comes upon me again.
The breath of the Emperor.
And the singing swells, lifting my soul, cutting through the madness of laughter, filling me with the strength of His sacrifice. I can hear the words clearly, the rolling High Gothic that I can’t understand but which brings back my earliest memories of tales of the Emperor’s righteous anger smiting the enemies of mankind. No preachers in the underhive of Olympus, but we carried with us the Pure Word of the Emperor all the same. Imperius Dominus Eternus.
And like a dawn breaking, light shines upon us from above, a yellow glow of the Emperor’s blessed illumination, the song of praise reaching its crescendo. I stand up, lifting my arms to the blessing, allowing it to pour into me.
I hear the roaring of His anger. The ground shakes with it, causing the bunker to tremble.
His wrath breaks upon the warpborn like a storm. Bolts of righteous light burn through the air, searing wounds through the oncoming horde. Like
the flicker of bolter trails, His ire carries destruction to His foes, a withering storm of vengeance that fells all that it touches.
The light is blinding, yet in its passing I see clearly, as if the fog that has dogged us since leaving the underhive has been a blindness of spirit rather than the eyes. I look upon the deceit of the enemy laid bare, nothing but rage given form, robbed of its power by the divine spirit of the Lord of Terra.
The anger of the abyss is nothing to the pure hatred of He who guards humanity. That hate takes form, solidifying upon the battle-churned ash before us. Warriors in plate of silver, their own banners of red and white flying above them. With them come beasts to match the bronze giants, spitting white fire, hurling salvos of holy missiles into the monstrous ranks of the abyssal host.
My madness is cleansed by their arrival, even as the dunes are cleansed by unceasing fusillades of bolt-rounds and burning promethium. From transports and tanks, from the address systems of battleplate, female voices sing the battle hymns of the Emperor. As their weapons purge the enemy, their righteous songs purge fear.
I look upon our saviours and know that the Emperor indeed protects.
For they are the Battle Sisters of the Adepta Sororitas.
How swiftly salvation turns to peril.
While squads of Battle Sisters secure the area, others turn upon the miscellany of humans in their midst. It’s impossible to know their intent, expressions hidden inside their full helms, weapons trained on us as they advance upon the siege line. They wear metal-enamelled armour, ornate and burnished to a gleam, beneath white robes lined with scarlet. One bears a banner with a stylised skeleton depicted on it and all are marked with the Skull Imperator crowned with a spiked halo.
Armageddon Saint - Gav Thorpe Page 13
