by Andy Clark
‘Emperor forgive us, then, Master at Arms,’ said Reikard.
‘He will if we earn it,’ said Garath, then turned and ran for the distant stairway that led up to the battlement. As he went, the gate boomed again, and a metal claw the size of a Knight’s shin burst through it.
A scream filled the air, rising to deafening volume. Garath had a fleeting glimpse of huge rockets plunging down upon the battlements, then came an apocalyptic explosion. Garath was lifted and hurled through the air, lungs punched empty, mind screaming. Fire scoured everything, and the roar of the explosion was like a wrathful god.
He hit the ground and skidded, pain tearing through him before he hit the bottom step of the sector nineteen stairs with crunching force.
Groggily, Garath looked back the way he had come. Through a swimming haze, he realised that the entire Draconseye gate, and the section of battlement above it, was simply gone. Smoke and flame danced over a mountain of rubble and wreckage that spilled into the ravaged marshalling yard. Iron Drake was lost amidst that mountain of ruin, destroyed or buried. On the blast zone’s edge, Sacristan Nilsoch’s Crawler lay on its roof, ablaze from end to end.
Dull at first, but growing louder, Garath heard a rumble. His brain struggled to comprehend its importance, even as his instincts tugged at him, forcing him to his feet. Garath hissed in pain, feeling cracked bones grind together in his chest and neck. His flesh was scorched, agony gnawing at him from every angle.
Yet now his heart beat faster as sense returned.
‘Throne, the orks,’ he croaked. Casting about, he saw militiamen crawling from the debris, dazed and covered in dust. Some clutched the spurting stumps of severed limbs. Others had faces that were masked in blood.
Garath croaked, coughed, spat, tried again.
‘Men, draw your weapons,’ he rasped. ‘The orks are coming. Rally on me!’
Blank eyes stared at him. Gaping mouths worked over silent words. Garath felt anger surge, helping him to shake off his own torpor. He brandished his blade.
‘Are you men of House Draconis?’ he shouted hoarsely. ‘Or are you useless curs? Draw your damn blades, ready your damn bayonets, and bloody well rally on me or I swear by the High King’s crown I will shoot every last one of you.’
Now they stirred, all but the most broken motivated by duty or fear. Stumbling and shaking, the militiamen gathered to him. There were several dozen of them. Many were wounded. Some, for a blessing, still had blades.
The sound of the orks’ approach grew to a cacophonous bellow as the smoke from the blast cleared.
‘Any moment now, they’re going to charge through that gap,’ said Garath. ‘They’re going to spill through it. There’s thousands of them and a scant few of us, so I’m not going to waste all our lives trying to stop them. Fighting retreat, on me, back through the Blacksmith’s District to the second line bastions. We’ll rally there. Move.’
Garath turned and ran for the nearest street leading towards the inner walls. His men ran with him, as best they could. At their backs, the orks’ roar broke like a wave. A horde of monsters poured from the smoke. They looked a lot bigger when you fought them on foot, thought Garath.
The greenskins were hulking brutes, charging forward with their tusked mouths open wide in ferocious war cries. Some brandished crude chainswords that roared and belched smoke. Others cradled fat-barrelled autogun equivalents that sprayed bullets as they ran.
Shots whipped around Garath, striking sparks from the ground. A fat slug whined past his ear. To his right a running militiaman was thrown onto his face as shots struck him in the back.
‘Keep running!’ yelled Garath.
He dashed through the shadow of a blazing building and pelted down the street, his soldiers running with him. More shots whipped around them. More soldiers fell.
There came a roar of rockets, and dark shapes shot overhead. Garath swore as a handful of orks slammed down in the street ahead of them, their crude rocket packs flaring.
‘Charge!’ he cried. The orks turned with feral grins and ran to meet him.
The impact was bone-crunching. Soldiers fell, carved open or smashed flat. Garath swept his blade through the neck of the first ork he met, lopping its head from its shoulders. He barged the body aside and spun around it, whipping his sword in an arc that disembowelled a second.
A huge green fist caught him in the stomach and doubled him over, driving the air from his lungs. A leering ork raised its axe over him, only for a howling militiaman to drive his bayonet into the greenskin’s chest. The ork staggered, the blade embedded to the hilt in its chest. It snarled, and Garath saw the moment of horrified realisation on the militiaman’s face before the greenskin slammed its axe into his chest.
‘No!’ gasped Garath, sweeping his sword up and hacking off the ork’s axe arm at the elbow. The militiaman fell away, dead, and the ork spun towards him with a roar. Garath swung low and cut off one of its legs, spilling it to the street in a spray of blood.
‘Come on,’ he yelled. ‘Through them. If we halt here, they’ll overwhelm us!’
He ducked the swing of a chain-choppa and drove his blade point-first through its wielder’s jaw. Ripping his weapon free, Garath started running again and those that could followed. A glance told him that he had maybe half of his force still with him, all running for their lives.
They dashed down a long concourse and across a junction where a Knight loomed dead and dark. Its hatch hung open, and blood painted its carapace. The sight of it filled Garath with despairing anger.
Shells fell around them, blasting open buildings and bringing rains of masonry down upon the unprotected streets.
Turning a corner, Garath almost ran headlong into a band of militia coming the other way with a small group of Sacristans in tow.
‘With me,’ yelled Garath. ‘They’re right behind us! Beaconfort, postern gate. Come on!’
The men and women of the militia responded with admirable speed, chivvying their Sacristan charges into an ungainly run. Garath could hear the roar of the orks as they poured through the streets. Up a short, steep climb rose the dark bulk of the second wall, and the battlements of the Beaconfort.
He could see pale, wide-eyed faces staring out from the fort’s embrasures.
‘Open the gate,’ he yelled, arms and legs pumping as he dashed up the steep roadway. ‘Open the damn gate in the name of the Master of Arms!’
‘Sire Garath,’ shouted a man from above. ‘The High King has ordered us to seal the gates.’
‘You do that, you’ll watch us die down here,’ yelled Garath. ‘There’s time if you act right now, and as a Knight of the Exalted Court, I order you to do so! Stop wringing your hands and open the damned gate!’
Handles cranked and cables groaned as militiamen manually winched the Beaconfort gate ajar.
They were a hundred metres away, then eighty, then fifty. Shots whined around him, striking the Beaconfort’s walls.
Closer, closer, and then Garath finally reached the gate. He stopped, bellowing encouragement to the soldiers and Sacristans charging up the hill behind him. The orks had appeared, a wall of green brutes racing uphill at their heels.
Men and women dashed past him, lunging through the cracked-open gate. The last of them, a limping militiaman, was ten yards from the gate, his eyes locked on Garath’s when ork fire raked him. Garath felt the man’s blood spray his face, and then he was ducking through the gate, bellowing at the garrison to close it.
The metal gateway slammed shut, and Garath pressed his back to it, sliding slowly down into a sitting position. He glanced up, seeing the grateful, frightened faces of the men and women he had saved. In every face, he saw the last man to die staring back at him. Then their image swam, and his pain caught up to him, and his blade clattered from his hand.
The last thing Garath saw was militia medicaes hurrying to his
side.
Deep beneath the Draconspire, Danial advanced by torchlight. Bannoch and his men carried burning brands, lighting their High King’s way. They had progressed ever downward, through arming chambers and mausoleums, victuallaries and dungeons, past barricades under hasty construction. Finally, they had come to the very lowest levels, where only the most august personages were permitted to tread, where the secrets of House Draconis brooded in darkness. Now they progressed slowly, and Danial’s frustration grew at each wrong turn and dead end.
In his youth, Danial had descended into the tunnels only rarely, and always with his father. Once the tunnels were this deep, they had a strange metallic cast to them, and were lit intermittently by sleek-looking lumen that had not been affected by the orks’ weapon. Danial led the way, following the instructions he had memorised from the scrolls of the Elderknight and watching for sigils of ancient script emblazoned at junctions and portals. He sought the fabled Ancestral Armoury of House Draconis, the secret that had been passed from one regent of the Noble House to another until its very existence had become little more than a fable.
At last, as Danial was beginning to lose hope, he found himself before a huge door melded somehow from stone and metal. It bore writings so archaic that he could not read them, and sigils whose warning or welcome he did not understand, but it matched the stylised illuminations in the Elderknight’s works. Set into its frame was a socket lined with glowing filaments, and this, at least, he understood. Danial pressed his grandfather’s amulet into the socket, where it fitted with a click.
Light flared as hidden beacons strobed the chamber, and ancient airs washed over them as the heavy doors rumbled apart. A mechanical voice droned words in a language that sounded familiar, yet illusively incomprehensible. He caught something that sounded like ‘long march’, something that might have been ‘emergency’.
Beyond, in a chamber of cold metal and glowing archeotech, lights flickered on. They illuminated metal racking, row upon row of it within which objects sat in shimmering stasis fields.
Danial looked upon them, and smiled a hard smile.
‘By the grace of our ancestors,’ he said. ‘House Draconis is not defeated yet.’
Jennika opened her eyes onto absolute darkness. The pain in her chest, her head and her left wrist told her she still lived. She felt cold. Her skin was unpleasantly wet with some tacky substance. In the dark, she struggled to tell what she lay on, or which way up she was.
Panic threatened, and she crushed it down viciously.
‘Not here,’ she whispered. ‘Not now. That would be death.’
The sound of her own voice brought some measure of comfort, allowing her to rationally assess her situation.
‘I fell,’ she said quietly. ‘From the bridge. We were at the… shrine. The inquisitor wanted whatever was in there. There’s more to his mission than there seems.’
She felt the truth of it as she said it. The glances at Venquist, the insistent search; the inquisitor had come to do more than just scour the taint from her world. He was using the Knights of Adrastapol for some hidden end. But why hide his purpose?
‘This cannot be good,’ she muttered. ‘I need to find them. Confront him.’
Jennika felt the steely determination that had carried her through her father’s death and the terrible events that followed. With it came clarity. She needed, first, to see. Feeling about, and wincing at the stab of pain from her left wrist, Jennika determined that she was wedged between spurs of rock, laid on top of something soft and yielding… Fleshy. The mutant that had knocked her from the bridge had also broken her fall.
Struggling in her constricted position, Jennika groped around until she found what she sought. The hilt of her draconblade, still jutting from the thing’s chest. If she hadn’t been wearing her bodyglove, she realised, its pommel would have shattered her sternum upon landing.
Painstakingly, she dragged the weapon free and managed to squirm away from it somewhat, turning herself onto her side with a hiss of pain.
‘Dracon, be with me now,’ she prayed, then thumbed her blade’s igniter rune.
Fire leapt in the darkness, and Jennika breathed a sigh of relief. Squinting against the sudden glare, she took in her surroundings.
She was near the bottom of a deep ravine whose walls were jagged stone. They stretched above until they left the light of her draconblade. She had come down between two spurs of stone, fall cushioned by the mangled carcass of the monster that had tried to kill her. Its tacky blood was still drying on her skin.
‘Emperor be praised, thank you for this miraculous intervention,’ Jennika whispered fervently. ‘I will not waste this chance that you have given me.’
After a few moments of wriggling and straining, she could see where to move, and worked herself free of the cleft. She skidded to the floor of the chasm, splashing down in a foot of brackish water, hissing in pain as her ankle ground beneath her.
Jennika took a moment to run a diagnostic through her bodyglove’s systems. Broken left wrist. Two broken ribs. Possible fracture of her collar bone. Badly sprained ankle. Cuts, abrasions and bruising all over.
‘Lucky,’ she said. ‘Still lucky.’
At its base, the ravine was no more than a few feet wide, its floor an uneven mass of jagged rock, gnarled clefts and dark water. It stretched away in either direction, neither way looking more appealing than the other, and for a moment Jennika felt panic again. The thought of being trapped down here, no way out, devoured by its stony maw…
‘No,’ she told herself sternly. ‘No. Not while they need you.’
Jennika extinguished her blade for a moment, closed her eyes and held her breath. Her mind reached out for anything that might give her a clue. The slightest sound, or a breath of air would be enough. She frowned as she felt instead a faint warmth upon her right cheek. The sensation was akin to standing before a guttering hearth, and she opened her eyes and reignited her blade but saw nothing there.
‘Touched by the draconsfire, perhaps,’ she murmured. ‘It’s as good a sign as any.’
Turning right, Jennika began to pick her way along the defile.
Hours passed. Her armour’s inbuilt chronolog helped her keep track. But hours was still time she could not afford, and Jennika knew it. Limping through the gloom, her draconblade’s fuel runes turning amber and winking out one by one, Jennika struggled with the worst nightmares her mind could conjure.
Her. Dead. Turning to mouldering bones, lost forever. The Knight who never returned.
The orks victorious, howling their hate from atop the fallen steeds of Adrastapol.
The inquisitor revealing himself to be a traitor as foul as Alicia Kar Manticos.
The Draconspire in flames.
Jennika pushed the images away, snarling angrily at her mind’s attempt to turn upon itself. Yet she couldn’t deny that her wounds hurt, and her body was growing weaker. She was painfully thirsty, and her limbs ached with tiredness.
‘They need you,’ she told herself after a moment of groggy weakness. ‘No, Throne take them, they’ve always needed you. You need you. You are the First Knight of House Draconis and you deserve better than this.’
Again, Jennika felt that promise of warmth upon her skin, and thought for a second that she heard the crackle of distant flames.
‘Delirious,’ she muttered. But all the same, she followed the sensation, forcing her tired limbs to keep moving, limping along the slippery floor in the guttering light of her blade.
Rounding a jagged bend, Jennika frowned as she realised that her sword was not the only source of illumination. A faint shimmer came from ahead, the suggestion of light as faint as the pre-dawn glow.
Hope drove her forwards with renewed vigour.
The pale light swelled, and after a while Jennika extinguished her blade. It was pale, diaphanous. Not daylight, she thought with a
pang of disappointment, but something at least.
Overhead, the ravine’s walls met and melded like lips pressing shut, leaving her in a glowing, water-logged tunnel. A hundred yards further and Jennika limped from its end into a cavern that took her breath away.
The cave was huge, its roof like the domed ceiling of a cathedrum. Stalactites and stalagmites had melded into towering pillars as thick as a Knight’s leg, encrusted with crystalline deposits like jewelled waterfalls. It was from these crystals that the light shone, a kaleidoscope of blues and yellows and pinks.
Jennika realised that, beneath the dust and grit, the floor bore a stone fresco. Many of its tiles were shattered or missing, but it depicted an image she recognised only too well. A Knight, tall and powerful. Its hull was less ornate than the steeds she knew, its lines curving and strangely industrial, but it was a Knight nonetheless. At its feet were fallen trees and the bodies of slain beasts. Above it was a darkened sky full of stars, in which one blue-and-green orb glinted larger than the rest.
Jennika’s attention was drawn to the chamber’s centre, and her breath caught. There stood an altar whose design was clearly anything but Imperial. Eight pointed stars and flowing, serpentine symbols decorated it. Avian statues overlooked it, foul things graven from the same crystals that clad the pillars. Banners fell from their taloned hands, things of blue silk bearing ancient designs that were hard to look upon.
Jutting from the top of the altar, Jennika saw an object wrapped in chains. She felt that phantom fire again, warmer now upon her face. Something compelled her to approach.
Jennika limped towards the altar clutching her blade in her right hand, while her useless left arm hung by her side. Her eyes darted, alert for any threat. Nothing moved but her. Amidst the still air and silent, dancing light, it felt as though nothing ever had.
‘It’s a draconblade,’ she said wonderingly.
The ornate weapon rose from the surface of the altar. Though most of its length was driven into the stone, Jennika could tell that it was the most beautiful weapon she had ever seen. Heavy chains stretched from the altar’s flanks to wrap around the sword’s hilt and crossguard, but between their links Jennika could see fiery opals and rubies glowing, set into masterfully worked adamantium.