Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

by Warhammer 40K

  She sensed rather than heard something stealing up behind her. She whirled around, but stumbled in the process, her flailing elbow just missing the deadly energy.

  Tylar was there, horrified by what he had almost made her do. Recovering her balance and her composure, Arex suggested he free himself as she had done, but Tylar shook his head. ‘Either of those things could return at any moment,’ he whispered. He looked haggard, sickly, but Arex couldn’t tell if it just was the green light on his skin that made him appear that way.

  They abandoned the idea of stealth, to skirt the chamber at a half-run, their footsteps echoing around them. Arex’s eyes kept drifting upwards, searching for more spiders above her. At one point, she thought she detected a glimmer of compound eyes, but by the time she had pointed this out to Tylar, it had been extinguished.

  They emerged into another black-stone passage and saw the entranceway at last, grey daylight spilling in through it. Arex had expected night, and now she couldn’t tell if she had been in the pyramid for more hours or fewer than she had imagined. Its green glow had scrambled her sense of time.

  She could also hear gunfire, and she held Tylar back until he could hear it too. ‘The Imperium?’ he asked hopefully, but Arex shook her head. She could hear only one type of gun. Whatever was happening out there, she opined, the last thing they wanted to do was to step out into the middle of it.

  ‘I’ll take that chance,’ grunted Tylar, ‘to get out of this Emperor-forsaken crypt!’

  They waited, all the same, until the sounds from without had receded somewhat. Then Tylar insisted on approaching the entranceway first, signalling to Arex when it was safe for her to join him, and she didn’t argue with him.

  They slipped out of the pyramid, Arex’s heart pounding as they crossed a wide open space and dropped behind a mound of rubble. When last she had been here, when Amareth had brought her to his imagined masters and paid the price for it, this area had been teeming with activity. Now, the Iron Gods and their slaves were gone, shovels left abandoned and half-filled barrows upturned.

  They crept from one rubble heap to the next, and in so doing disturbed two filthy, hunched figures that may have been mutants. The pair bolted, and immediately an Iron God appeared from nowhere. Its weapon flared green and, like Amareth and his priests before them, the hapless figures were destroyed in an eye blink. Arex hoped they had been mutants, because no man deserved to die in such pain.

  She and Tylar watched in frozen horror, waiting for the Iron God to turn their way. It couldn’t have missed them if it had. Fortunately, it kept walking, as if the murders it had just committed had been no more than a passing distraction to it. A moment later, they heard the tearing-cloth sound of its gun again, and a similar retort from the opposite direction. ‘We’re surrounded,’ Arex whispered.

  Tylar shook his head. ‘I think they’re spreading outwards from the pyramid. If we stay behind them…’ He never got the chance to complete the thought.

  A small, wiry shape cannoned into Tylar from behind. A green-robed priest. Arex thought she recognised his protruding brow and misshapen nose; he had been one of Amareth’s ill-fated entourage, evidently one of the handful of survivors.

  Impeded by his cuffed wrists, Tylar was knocked down, and the priest leapt upon him. ‘You have caused this,’ he screeched. ‘You have brought the wrath of the Iron Gods down upon us. I have them, masters. Do you see? I have captured your enemies for you. I have served you well, have mercy upon me!’

  In panic, Arex looked for the quickest way to silence him. She found it: a hunk of plascrete, which she hefted to her shoulders and brought down two-handed, splitting the lunatic’s head wide open. He was bleeding, reeling, but not felled, and his screams had attracted more unwelcome attention. An Iron God appeared from between two rubble heaps, and its gun was trained upon Arex. The priest teetered towards it, one hand to his cut head, the other outstretched in imploration. ‘M-master…’ he moaned.

  The Iron God squeezed its trigger. At the same time, Tylar kicked out from the ground. His foot struck the priest behind his knees, and propelled him, flailing, into the path of the emerald discharge. His scream of agony was cut short as he was flayed to death. Arex hauled Tylar to his feet and they ran for their lives, even as a second shot crackled between them.

  They kept on running, until they came within sight of the nearest towers of the city. Then they faltered to a numbed halt, unable to believe what they were seeing.

  There were creatures in the air, skeletal and metallic like the Iron Gods but of different shapes and sizes, a menagerie of horrors. They were circling, swooping onto skyways and through windows, lighting the sky with the green of their weapons, and, although Arex and Tylar couldn’t see the monsters’ victims from this distance, they could certainly hear their screams.

  ‘They’re hunting people down,’ stammered Arex. ‘They’re… What if he was right? That priest, I mean, when he said… They were leaving us alone, Tylar. They were leaving us alone, until we… What if this is all our fault? What if we–?’

  Tylar shook his head firmly. ‘It was always going to end this way,’ he said. ‘Amareth and his followers were mad to believe otherwise. The Iron Gods aren’t interested in us, they don’t care what we do, and they never said otherwise. They were never going to share their world with us.’

  ‘But why now? Why choose now to… to slaughter their own followers?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tylar, ‘and as far as the cultists and the mutants are concerned, I don’t much care. Better them than us, that’s all I can say.’

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Arex. ‘We can’t go forward into… that.’

  ‘We can’t go back either,’ said Tylar.

  He caught Arex’s gaze, and she saw something in his eyes that she hadn’t seen before. She had been relying on him to keep her going, to give her hope – but now, for the first time, she saw that his own hope had gone. Tylar was as terrified as she was.

  There were creatures circling overhead. Shrinking into a doorway, huddling on its step, Arex and Tylar watched their emaciated shadows flitting across the ground, as Arex struggled to break Tylar’s cuffs open with a jagged rock.

  They had agreed to get as far away from the pyramid as they could. That was their goal. So far, this had meant remaining at ground level rather than climbing the towers, but that was okay with Arex because, frankly, one floor felt as safe as any other to her now. They had encountered no more mutants anyway, hearing only the occasional wail from a nearby hab-block as one was hunted down and slain.

  They had stuck with Tylar’s plan, advancing slowly behind the Iron Gods’ line as this expanded outwards across the city. Arex was trying not to think about what would happen once the creatures had done their worst and decided to turn back.

  ‘This must be my uncle’s doing,’ said Arex. ‘He has triggered this.’

  Tylar looked at her quizzically.

  ‘What else could it be?’ she said. ‘He must have… When the Iron Gods gave him their ultimatum, our lives for the city, he must have–’

  ‘They gave him no ultimatum,’ said Tylar. ‘Amareth, perhaps, may have played those games, thought to take hostages, but these creatures–’

  ‘All the same,’ said Arex, ‘Uncle Hanrik knew I was here, trapped in here, and yet still… But he did the right thing. I know he did the right thing, and… and what if he’s winning, Tylar? What if that’s why...? I asked why the Iron Gods are doing this now, killing people now when they have been content to ignore us before, and perhaps… perhaps it is because they are losing the war. Perhaps they–’

  ‘It could mean the reverse,’ said Tylar. ‘It could mean they have defeated the Imperial forces, and are scouring Hieronymous Theta of its final remnants of human life. We keep on running, Arex. For weeks, we have been running – but what if there is nowhere left to run to? What if it would be better fo
r us to accept our fates?’

  ‘What did you see?’ asked Arex quietly.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Tylar. ‘I don’t know what you–’

  ‘There was something,’ said Arex. ‘You were always so… You’ve been different, Tylar, since I lost you in the Iron Gods’ temple, in that room of machines.’

  ‘I think those flying things have gone now,’ said Tylar leadenly. ‘We should move on. And we should start climbing soon. We’ve gained enough distance on the pyramid. We’d be safer, less likely to be seen, indoors now. With the Emperor’s grace, it just might be enough to save us. It just might.’

  Arex agreed, and they went on their way, but Tylar’s optimistic words had been a lie and they both knew it.

  They had been walking for hours, but had made little progress. They had spent too much time hiding from shadows, had climbed only thirty or forty floors. Arex was exhausted, more with the tension of her plight than with the physical strain of it.

  Then they heard unholy screaming from above them, abruptly curtailed, and they cowered in the dreadful silence that followed, until Tylar plucked up the courage to climb to the next floor, to emerge into a hab-block hallway, Arex at his shoulder.

  The walls were wet with blood. Lumps of bloody red meat were strewn across the hallway’s floor. Arex’s hand flew to her mouth in revulsion, as she realised that these were human corpses. Before them lay the remains of two women and three children. They had been skinned, dismembered, in one case decapitated.

  She turned away from them and, as she did so, she caught a flicker of movement on the edge of her vision and she shrieked. ‘There was something there in that corner,’ she insisted to the concerned Tylar, pointing unsteadily. ‘Something that just… It passed through that wall like a spirit!’ He calmed her down, pointing out that if indeed there had been something, evidently it hadn’t noticed them, and anyway, wasn’t it more likely that Arex’s weariness and hunger had induced a fleeting hallucination?

  They agreed, in any case, that they didn’t want to stay here, this in spite of the logical but unvoiced argument that the Iron Gods had searched this place and were unlikely to return to it. They resumed their climb, but even more slowly now as they stopped on every floor to search the nearby rooms for food and drink.

  Unfortunately, most of the habs in this tower had been picked clean. Most of them had also been turned over, and some of them bombed or burnt out. Arex grew tired of picking her way through dust, ash and soot, and in the end her only reward for it was a near-empty tube of food paste from which she and Tylar were able to squeeze out a few tasteless globs. Arex felt sick anyway, and so couldn’t have eaten much.

  A few rooms over from there, they found a serviceable bed, the only off-putting detail being that its former owners, a young couple, were hanging by their necks from a pair of ropes alongside it. In contrast to the mutilated corpses a few floors below, they looked peaceful, almost content. They hadn’t been dead long, because their flesh hadn’t had time to rot yet. Tylar cut them down and rolled them out into the hallway, while Arex kicked off her shoes and snuggled down beneath a filthy blanket.

  Tylar sat on the bed beside her, but he was shivering, so she folded the blanket around him too. It was quiet in here, and although they both felt they had further to go, neither of them was in any hurry to resume their fraught journey.

  Arex longed for sleep, but her brain was too full, so she lay and stared sightlessly at the ceiling as the silence between them lengthened and deepened.

  Then Tylar took a deep breath to steel himself and, avoiding her eyes, he finally answered her question.

  ‘You saved my life,’ he said. ‘In the machine room. When you shouted that warning. I saw the creature going after you, and I tried to follow. I listened out for your footsteps. They sounded different from the creature’s. Iron Gods don’t run. They have no need to. I lost you near the wall. I guessed, I prayed, you had hidden, but I couldn’t call out to you without them hearing. I followed the wall around, praying you would see me. And I came to a doorway.’

  He faltered then, swallowed, and continued in a somewhat smaller voice. ‘There was another chamber through there, even larger than the machine room. They were in there, Arex, scores of creatures, Iron Gods. They had their backs to me, watching some manner of construct: pylons, curved pylons, like claws, holding… I don’t know how to describe it. Like a ball of flame, green flame. No, not a ball, a disc, an upright disc, perfectly flat, and then… Stepping out of the flame, they came, marching in four by four, until they almost filled that great chamber.’

  ‘More of them?’ Arex breathed. ‘But where could they have–?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tylar. ‘I don’t know where they came from. I only know that… Do you see now? Do you understand why I–?’

  ‘They don’t know what they’re facing, the Imperial forces. If the Iron Gods have the power to… If they can bring in reinforcements like that–’

  ‘An infinite number of them,’ said Tylar.

  ‘If we could only send my uncle a warning...’

  ‘But we can’t leave the city, we know that, and every day more mortars fall. Every day, the city will shrink further, driving us back, back towards the horrors at its heart. You were right, Arex, in the pyramid. We should have stayed put. All that effort, the risks we took, and we’re no safer out here than we were in there.’

  She could bear to hear no more, so she hugged him tightly. He surrendered to her arms, and for the first time Arex felt that, instead of her drawing from his strength, they were drawing on each other’s, sharing all they had. She pulled him gently down until his head rested on the pillow beside hers, and for a moment everything was all right, she was warm and protected.

  Then an image of Gunthar came into her mind, unbidden, and she pulled away from Tylar, feeling guilty. ‘It’s okay,’ he said softly. ‘Really, it’s okay.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to…’ she said. ‘I hadn’t thought about him in so long. I hadn’t dared to, because I knew… I know I shan’t ever see Gunthar – his name was Gunthar – again. I wish I knew if he had escaped from the city, or if… That’s the worst part of it, I believe, the not knowing.’

  ‘He was a lucky man,’ said Tylar, and Arex allowed herself to relax into their embrace again. It wasn’t that she loved him, at least she didn’t think she did. Right now, however, she needed someone, needed him, and he needed her too, and what, she thought, could be wrong with that? What was wrong with their finding, in the midst of all this madness, a crumb of simple human comfort, and in taking it?

  What was wrong in her holding him and being held by him, in their bodies melting into each other for this one lonely night?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The orders had come down that morning.

  The bombardment of Hieronymous City was to cease forthwith. Not that there was much left to bombard. The city was a fraction of its former size, reduced to fewer than four hundred forlorn towers standing in an expansive field of debris. Gunthar Soreson had long since stopped thinking of it as his former home. It was hard to believe that once the city had been alive, vital, a proud symbol of everything good about the Imperium. It was an empty shell now. Worse, it was rotten, decayed from within, a cancer upon this world that needed to be excised.

  It would be, soon.

  It had been almost three weeks since Gunthar had seen combat. He remembered the moment, almost unreal, when the necron force had vanished before his eyes. It had taken him a minute to adjust, to understand what had happened; to be sure the monsters weren’t coming back. It had taken him longer to accept that a victory had been won, and he had lived to see it. He had felt oddly bereft, lacking in purpose. But, of course, one battle, no matter how grand, did not a war make, and there was much more yet to be done.

  Ten days ago, a band of mutants had tried to blast their way out of the city, having somehow mana
ged to lay their hands on a pile of demolition charges. A handful of them had had lasguns, and these were the first shot down by the waiting PDF troopers and Guardsmen. Gunthar had killed one himself, almost surprised when the vile creature had succumbed to a single hellgun beam.

  The remaining mutants, unarmed, were considered a waste of las-power, and a Death Korps platoon had all but finished them off with a bayonet charge. One had come screeching, wailing, towards Gunthar, to be met by his gun butt. Its yellow parchment skin and startling pink eyes had reminded him of something he had seen a long time ago. The creature was so warped and twisted that he couldn’t tell if he had struck it in the chin or the elbow, but either way it fell, with a satisfying crunch of bone, and Gunthar drove his bayonet through what he judged to be its throat.

  After necrons, mere mutants were hardly a threat to him.

  They had dumped the bodies in a mine tunnel, to be buried under tonnes of debris. They had been filling in the tunnels ever since Commissar Costellin had used them to infiltrate the city. They didn’t want the necrons using the same trick in reverse. A few bodies, however, had borne no visible signs of mutation, and had been clad in dark green cloaks to boot. A Guardsman had pointed to necron sigils scrawled in ash across one dead man’s face, and had commented on the depravities to which some people could sink, especially those who had been brought up no better.

  Gunthar had agreed with him, and felt shame for the life he had once lived.

  Officially, he still served with the Planetary Defence Force. His commanding officer was Colonel Braun. He had nine squad-mates, none of whose names he knew, none of whom had fought the necrons at his side. Increasingly, however, his orders came from a Krieg watchmaster or lieutenant. Gunthar worked alongside the Krieg Guardsmen, ate and drank alongside them. More often than not, he also slept alongside them, eschewing his space port bunk for a bedroll in an abandoned siege emplacement.

  He spoke few words to them, nor they to him, which suited him well. Most of the time, he had nothing to say. He had been interrogated once, by a group of Krieg men who had heard about his dealings with the disgraced Hanrik. He believed he had convinced them that he didn’t share the late Governor-General’s heretical views. Moreover, they had seemed impressed by the part Gunthar had played in Costellin’s triumphant sabotage mission. Certainly, since then, they had treated him as a comrade, nothing more or less.