by Nick Kyme
The Techmarine considered these factors as he hunched over a bench in the gunship’s hold, the low light picking out the edges of tools and mechanical components. There were small chain-cutters, drills, a hand flamer. Unlike the power armour, his tools at least were functional and he had managed to repair the damage sustained during the crash. The gunship would fly, though fuel reserves were near redline, but it was grounded on Sicarius’ orders. Out here, they were isolated, and hopefully unnoticed. Farther inland… well, they did not want to terrify the natives with a steel dragon descending from the skies.
In the hold, which now served as a workshop, Haephestus engaged in the other task Sicarius had given him before the party had set off in search of civilisation. After almost three days, he had considered venturing out into the wild himself, but someone needed to remain with the ship.
Using parts from the gunship’s vox and antenna array, and boosted by what little dregs of power remained in his battle-brothers’ disengaged armour generators, he had rigged up a transmitter beacon. It broadcast codes in Ultramarian battle-cant to the Emperor’s Will requesting reinforcement and warning of the dampening field. With the gunship lacking enough fuel to reach high orbit, they would need additional means of egress.
As of yet, no signal had been received, and Haephestus was attempting different vox frequencies and readjusting the circuitry to improve the gain in order to override the field, but generating sufficient amplification was proving difficult.
‘Omnissiah…’ he began, uttering a few canticles of function in the hope of appeasing whatever malady was afflicting the transmitter’s machine-spirit. It was to no avail, and he had been about to strip the device back to its components, engaging his still-functioning mechadendrites to try a different configuration, when he heard the intruders.
Haukberd knew he was the strongest warrior in all of Farrodum. At least, he had been until the strangers had arrived. He had not met knights before, not like these, and he wondered briefly as his party stalked through the wild lands whether he might have some southern blood in his veins.
A shrill whistle from up ahead caught his attention. One of the rangers had found something. His hand was raised, just visible through the thick mist. Haukberd grunted at the footmen with him, urging them to follow as he slogged through the rough hills to where the ranger waited.
It had taken a little time to find their trail – the lands around Farrodum were vast and largely looked the same – but once the rangers had it the rest was easy enough. They trod heavily, these knights, and their boot impressions were not only distinctive but also left a deep crater that rain or churned earth could not hide. The closer they came to whatever lay at the end of the trail, the more eager Haukberd found he was to meet it. He wanted to match his strength against one of these southern knights. It chafed that he had never fought in the war against the bone-swine. Always at the baron’s side, his dutiful henchman, just as Athelnar’s father had decreed on his deathbed. Thinking back now, he became momentarily frustrated. His memories of those earlier days felt vague and gossamer thin. He remembered them only in pieces, and incomplete ones at that. He had begun to wonder why that was when a slab-sided wall emerged through the mist.
‘Is it a keep of some sort?’ asked one of the rangers.
Haukberd shook his head, not knowing. He decided to draw his sword regardless and the massive blade slid from its scabbard with a whisper of metal against leather.
It was colossal, the keep, and wrought impossibly from iron or some metal. Painted blue, though chipped to grey in places, it matched the knights’ armour. The shape of it confounded him, squat and angular as it was. Two flat pieces extruded from a long, rectangular middle and reminded Haukberd of avian wings. And there were other protrusions, cast in a darker metal, obscured by mist. These he could not fathom, but he thought they had the look of weapons and this stirred a measure of greed within him.
‘Whatever it is,’ he said, his voice deep and gravel-coarse, ‘I want to find out what’s inside and kill it if we have to.’
A few of the other soldiers turned to him at that remark, their faces pale.
‘Make ready…’ he growled, uncaring of their fear as he hefted his blade in a two-handed grip.
A profusion of spears and swords were raised and pointed at the keep. The rangers drew bows, hastily nocking arrows.
Haukberd gestured to three swordsmen closest to the front.
‘Scare up the quarry,’ he said.
Alone for so long out in the wilds, he had slipped into a partial catalepsean meditation to rest his body and clarify his thought process. His reactions were slower than optimal. That fact, married to the loss of power in his war-plate, meant he was at something of a disadvantage when the warriors came across the threshold of the ship.
Three scruffy men in padded jerkins and rough leather armour confronted him. His bionic eye, though slower than usual, caught the slight trembling of their drawn swords. It whirred noisily as the focusing rings shifted, accumulating data.
‘What is it?’ breathed one of the men.
‘A golem of iron and flesh…’ rasped another.
‘He has the evil eye,’ uttered the third.
Haephestus raised his arms in a surrendering gesture and started to move towards the men.
‘It’s attacking!’ shouted the first man, prompting another to leap forwards and lash out with his sword.
The blade broke against the Techmarine’s vambrace, shattering into pieces that rattled loudly as they hit the deck of the hold.
‘Impervious…’ the ignorant man uttered, glaring disbelievingly at the ragged hilt of his weapon.
‘Stop this,’ said Haephestus, his voice cold and metallic. He did not want to hurt these men but he would if they gave him no other choice. ‘What is your name? I am Haephestus and I mean you no–’ He was advancing slowly towards the man with the broken sword when the second man lunged in with his own weapon.
The blade skidded off the edge of Haephestus’ breastplate, stripping back a line of red paint before it slid a few inches into the softseal of his armpit and bit. He growled, shocked at the pain, though it was minor. His distress encouraged a renewed attack from all three at once, the first having drawn a long dagger from his belt. Blades rang against his armour, repelled by ceramite and adamantium, fury and fear driving every blow.
‘You were warned…’ said Haephestus, hearts thumping as his body switched into a battle-heightened state, and went on the offensive.
He backhanded the second man, the one who had cut him through the softseal, and the warrior flew back against the wall, struck his head and lay still. The one with the dagger Haephestus pushed hard, the flat of his hand against the man’s solar plexus, and sent him sprawling down the hold’s open ramp and back outside. He parried a desperate swipe from the last assailant and smashed his shoulder with a counterblow to disable him. The man screamed, sword falling through his nerveless fingers, and scurried back outside.
Haephestus followed him into the mist-shrouded light and found a host of warriors waiting.
Haukberd’s eyes widened as he saw the beast. Half-metal, half-man, it was unlike anything he had ever before encountered.
It stood as tall as the other knights, but was clad with intricate red metal plates covered in strange toothed sigils. Metal ropes of intestine or something even fouler hung from its belt and though its knife-like talons slid back into its gauntleted hands, Haukberd immediately recognised it as a threat.
‘What are you?’ he growled, nodding to his remaining men to surround it. The red paladin, for this is how Haukberd thought of it, let them do it, edging forwards into their killing circle.
‘I am a man like you.’
Its voice did not sound like a man’s. It was hollow, cold. Haukberd had dreamed of such voices, of the dead things that haunted the wilds. He had never spoken of it to anyone, but the memory of it chilled him now.
‘You may have met my brothers,’ the red paladin
tapped his armour with a dull resonant tunk. ‘They wear blue livery and with this same icon.’ He pointed at the inverse horseshoe Haukberd had seen on the southerners’ armour.
‘From the land of Macragge,’ he thought aloud.
The red paladin mistook it for a question.
‘They are my lands too. I mean you no harm,’ it said.
As he met its pupilless red gaze, Haukberd knew what he had to do.
‘Loose…’ he commanded.
The whip and snap of sinew presaged a volley of iron-tipped arrows as the four archers let fly, only to see their missiles snap against the red paladin’s armour.
‘Its face and eye!’ snapped Haukberd, urging the sword and spearmen to close the circle so the beast could not escape.
A second arrow volley followed smartly on the heels of the first. One quarrel smacked against an armoured gorget, a second and third hit the metal side of the beast’s face and bounced away but the fourth cut the red paladin’s cheek and managed to draw a line of crimson.
‘It bleeds!’ gasped a spearman.
‘Kill it, kill it!’ said another.
Haukberd roared and they rushed the red paladin together.
The first row of spears broke against his armour, like twigs hitting a metal shield. He dashed the men wielding the spears too, using his bulk and mass to overwhelm them. Disarmed, terrified, the men scattered into the mist as he looked on.
A sword screeched against his back, hacked down two-handed. Haephestus turned, about to smash the warrior aside when an arrow struck his neck. He wrenched it out, releasing a thin gout of blood, but it was enough of a distraction for the larger warrior with the sword to strike a second blow. Pain flared around his knee joint, the sword blade finding the softseal at the back of his leg. A flung spear ricocheted off his plastron, its tip dangerously close to his eye as it skidded off the metal. The large warrior had retreated, sending three sword-armed lackeys in his stead. He was large for a baseline human, heavily armoured in lacquered black war-plate and evidently the leader.
Another slew of arrows crashed and broke against his armour. He was practically invulnerable to their primitive weapons, except for his face and the softseals between the joints in his armour.
He counted nine men left, four of those fighting at range with crude but effective bows. He had to resort to his cog-axe, which, although no longer powered, was still a formidable weapon.
‘I have no desire to kill you,’ he said, seizing and hurling a spearman into two of the archers. The leg wound was bleeding through where the meshweave had broken. He felt it welling up around his greave.
The last two archers fled as he charged at them, the pounding of his heavy footfalls enough to finally break their fragile courage. As he turned to engage the last of them, he felt something crash into him from behind. The swordsman he had poleaxed in the hold clung to his back with a fearsome strength, heaving at the gorget around Haephestus’ neck.
He half turned, reaching behind his back to grasp the man’s scruff when sharp, agonising pain exploded down his left side.
‘You are no man…’
The leader had rammed his sword into the softseal between the upper arm greave and breastplate.
‘…abomination!’
Haephestus swept down with his arm, snapping off the blade before it could be pushed any deeper. Then he smacked the flat of his gauntleted hand against the warrior’s breastplate, denting it and sending him sprawling backwards. He rolled three or four times, end over end, until he stopped and did not rise.
Haephestus clawed for the figure on his back, surprised at the man’s strength. He got a grip of his shoulder and tore the wretch loose, hurling him off, but like an arachnid the man jumped to his feet and threw himself at the Techmarine.
The cog-axe extended in Haephestus’ grip, its killing arc cutting the manic swordsman in half across the midriff and halting his bizarre rampage. The two severed halves collapsed in a tangle of limbs and spilled innards. It was too much for the three ragged spearmen who were left. They threw down their weapons and ran, heaving the black-armoured leader to his feet. He fled too when he saw the steaming remains. Haephestus didn’t pursue and let his assailants vanish like apparitions into the mist. A grimace seized his face. He needed to extract the sword blade still lodged in his body and stitch the wound. The gunship carried a rudimentary medi-kit. Either it would suffice or he’d use the acetylene torch from his tool array to cauterise.
He briefly regarded the upper and lower parts of the corpse lying on the ground.
He needed to get word to Sicarius. He needed to breach the dampening field. But this had to come first. The enhanced strength, the apparent resurrection. They were gaps in his understanding. Such things were dangerous. He considered they may have underestimated the threat presented by this world and its primitive inhabitants.
‘More questions…’ Haephestus muttered, taking the upper half of the body by the arms, dragging it back up the ramp and into the ship. The ramp slammed shut behind him.
WE MARCH
They returned a few hours before dawn.
Vedaeh was standing in an empty watchtower that overlooked the recently repaired northern wall. Hands clasped in front of her, she gazed out into the darkness of the wild. Three figures approached the town in the distance, visible for a fleeting few seconds as they crested a high ridge before becoming lost in the mist-flooded valleys. A white veil lay heavy across the land, like a belt of low cloud refusing to rise or dissipate. The rugged geography of Agun undulated beneath. The low hills drowned in the mist, grey islands mostly subsumed by a white ocean, but the larger tors protruded, their lower flanks clung to by ghostly tendrils as if something were trying to drag itself up from the abyss below.
It was peaceful, she reflected. The Imperium had so little natural wilderness left and that which did still exist was either toxic wasteland, rad-desert or the blighted plains of an overtaxed agri world. Mankind had left its mark on every scrap of earth and had saturated it with industry or left it desolated by war. The only lands and worlds that remained untamed now were, of course, inimicable to human life. Which made Agun only more anomalous.
‘A miracle that we ever lasted this long…’ she said to herself.
‘Who’s lasted?’ asked Reda, blowing on her cupped hands to warm them.
She’d joined Vedaeh half an hour ago and the two of them had shared a companionable silence. She was worried about Gerrant, Vedaeh could tell from the tight set of her lips and the faraway look in her eyes. That drive, that certainty Vedaeh had seen on the Emperor’s Will, it wavered in the face of Reda’s new reality.
Labourers toiled below, making good the stone they had laid and the reinforcing braces they had placed according to Sergeant Fennion’s instructions. A guard patrolled the rampart, though it was threadbare on account of the fact that Farrodum had few soldiers left who could still carry a spear or sword.
The war against the orks had bled them almost dry.
‘Mankind,’ Vedaeh answered at length. She pulled the furs around her shoulders tighter. A harsh wind was blowing, and it wailed and whipped around the tower’s summit. It was cold up here, but it had a stunning view of most of the city and the surrounding lands.
‘Something ails this place,’ said Reda, pulling her cloak around her body so it didn’t blow open again.
Vedaeh framed a sad smile. ‘I was only just thinking how beautiful it was. Stark, but beautiful.’
‘It’s in the air, Vedaeh,’ Reda replied. She sniffed, taking in a long draught. ‘Can’t you smell that?’
The stench had begun to emanate in the wake of the battle against the greenskins, possibly a pungent reminder of their spore. All the corpses, both human and ork, had been taken from the city and burned, but the evidence of the dead had a tendency to linger.
‘I would say it’s death, but that would be overly poetic. And, yes, the city reeks, and not just literally. But out there is beautiful. So rare and untouched.�
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‘I had never seen sky before I came to this place. Not really, not without a thick layer of pollutants hiding the sun.’
‘And what do you make of it?’
‘It’s wide, grey and cold. But at least it’s clean.’
‘You should bring Vanko up here. The air, stench notwithstanding, might do him some good.’
‘Perhaps,’ replied Reda, and let the word hang for a while. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with him,’ she admitted at last.
‘I had heard there was an explosion,’ said Vedaeh, though she suspected much more than that.
‘A scratch, nothing more, especially to a man like Vanko. He is… troubled. Ever since Barthus’ sanctum, something’s been off about him.’
‘Off?’
Reda met her questioning gaze. ‘Like he’s a different person.’
Vedaeh became very serious very quickly. ‘What are you saying to me, Arna? Do I need to fetch Captain Sicarius?’
‘Throne, no,’ Reda answered quickly. ‘I just… I just need time with him, that’s all.’
Vedaeh’s mood softened again. ‘This journey has put a great strain upon all of us.’
Something had broken in Gerrant, and it had left its mark on Reda too.
‘I think he saw something.’
‘Saw?’
‘In the eye, Barthus’ eye. Everyone else who looked in that eye is either dead, or went insane and then died.’
‘I can see why you’d be concerned,’ said Vedaeh. ‘What was he doing with the grenade?’
‘You know about that?’
‘I know explosions don’t manifest out of thin air. It was either that or the medicus needs to exercise better discipline with how she stores her combustible elements.’
‘I don’t know why he had it, or when he took it, but he used it trying to kill the ork battering its way in.’
Vedaeh nodded. Mentally troubled or not, Vanko Gerrant was a military man with a military heritage. She couldn’t quite believe he would have been so careless with handheld munitions as to injure himself and almost kill the other two people in the room with him.