Helsreach (warhammer 40000)

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  'He is shaken by Mordred's death,' Jurisian had pressed. 'He seeks his place in the Eternal Crusade.'

  Helbrecht had sat musing on his throne, his cold eyes lowering the temperature of the room.

  'In the coming war, I will give him the chance to find that place.'

  Jurisian had spoken no more, and inclined his head in a bow. The Emperor's Champion was not so subdued, and had put forward his recommendations for warriors other than Grimaldus to succeed Mordred.

  The High Marshal had kept his own counsel, but the voices of the Sword Brethren around Helbrecht's dais sounded out in jeers as fists crashed against shields. Grimaldus was the chosen of Mordred the Avenger, and skilled in personal combat beyond question. Two centuries of valour and glory; two hundred years of unrelenting courage and a host of enemy dead across a horde of worlds; his short years as the youngest Sword Brother in the history of the Chapter - there was no arguing with such truths.

  Jurisian and Bayard had relented. The following night, they watched Grimaldus accept Mordred's mantle.

  Oberon tilted as it rose over an ash dune, the anti-grav field changing its tone to a more strained whine.

  On the horizon, a blanket of blackness rose from a burning city.

  'Reclusiarch,' he voxed, trying once more to speak with the warrior that did not deserve the title he now carried.

  Leaving the Titan had proved less of a trial than Asavan had feared.

  He'd managed it two days ago, and had been on the streets of the city ever since. All it had taken was a slow descent through the decks, and what felt like about eight million spiral staircases, each one shaped from dense bronze and riveted heavily to the walls.

  Well. Perhaps closer to four staircases. But by the time Asavan was approaching ground level, he was blinking sweat from his eyes and cursing his lack of fitness. On the Titan's lower levels, all was emergency red lighting, narrow corridors, and stuffy air filled with the smell of sacred incense holy to the Machine-God, as well as His disciples chanting blessings in His name. Through their devotion was Stormherald empowered. Praise be.

  'Halt,' a machine-voice barked, and Asavan did exactly as he was told. He even raised his hands in the air, mimicking some unnecessary surrender.

  'What are you doing here?' the voice demanded.

  Here was at the base of the Titan's pelvis, in one of the lowest accessible chambers, lit by a flickering yellow siren light. Six augmented skitarii stood stationed around a bulkhead in the floor. The room itself rocked back and forth, tilting with the Titan's tread.

  'I'm leaving the Titan,' the priest said.

  The skitarii glanced at each other with focus lenses instead of eyes. The air buzzed with inter-vox communication. They were confused. This… this made no sense.

  'You are leaving the Titan,' one of them, apparently their leader, said. His eye lenses revolved, scanning the unaugmented human.

  'Yes.'

  More vox-chatter. The leader, his face noticeably more bionic than the others', emitted a blurt of machine code. Asavan knew an error/abort complaint when he heard one.

  'Stormherald is engaged in locomotive activity.'

  Asavan was aware of this. The entire room was, after all, moving. 'The Titan is walking. I know. I still wish to leave. This service maintenance ladder will take me down the left leg struts to the shin-fortress, will it not?'

  'It would,' the skitarii leader allowed.

  'Then please excuse me. I must be going.'

  'Halt.' Asavan did, again, but he was growing tired of this. 'You wish to leave the Titan,' the skitarii repeated. 'But… why?'

  This was hardly the ideal setting for a debate on crises of faith and the sudden revelatory desire to walk among the city's people and help them with one's own hands.

  Asavan reached for the medallion around his neck, marking him as an honoured member of the Ecclesiarchy of Terra and a minister ordained to preach the word of the Emperor in His aspect as the Machine-God of Mars.

  The skitarii stared at the icon for several moments - the double-headed eagle and the divided skull backing it - and lowered their weapons.

  'My thanks,' the sweating priest said. 'Now if it's not too much trouble, could you open that bulkhead for me?'

  His stomach lurched at the sight beyond the opened trapdoor. Beneath, the broken rockcrete of Hel's Highway passed by, a good twenty-five metres down. Pudgy hands gripped the black iron service ladder as he descended, rung by rung, through the wind, hanging on to the Titan's thigh. Above him, the bulkhead slammed with a chime of finality.

  So be it. Down, he went.

  Behind the god-machine's knee, another bulkhead blocked his descent into the bulky lower leg section. Below, Asavan heard the servos of turrets mounted on the shin-walls panning back and forth, seeking targets.

  It took almost a full minute to work the bulkhead's wheel lock, but he was energised now, drawing close to his objective. Once more, he descended into red-lit, downward spiralling corridors, avoiding the troop chambers where ranks of skitarii stood in tomb-like silence.

  The Titan's movement now was almost unbearable, slamming him to the wall and rocking him from his feet on several occasions. This low, the gravitic stabilisers were little use against the sheer degree of movement necessary for each leg to make. His surroundings rumbled with sickening violence every eleven seconds, as the foot came down on the road below. Asavan vomited against a wall, and tried not to laugh. He was trying to keep his balance while walking through the steel bones in the ankle of a striding machine giant. Perhaps this wasn't such a wonderful idea, after all.

  And now came the hardest part.

  This last bulkhead opened onto the Titan's tiered claw-toes, which formed steps by which the skitarii battalions in the leg-fortresses could ascend and descend, when Stormherald was at rest.

  Disembarking with the Titan in motion was going to be… exciting.

  Asavan pulled the door open on squealing hinges, gripping a nearby handrail and watching the ground in bug-eyed horror, waiting for it to level out with the foot touching down. It did, with a bone-jarring rumble of thunder, and the fat priest ran, huffing and puffing, down the tiered stairs.

  The other foot came down, shaking the ground and sending Asavan tumbling down the last steps to land in a heap of overweight flesh and filthy robes on the dirty surface of the highway.

  A metre away, the stairs rose again as the great war machine lifted its foot to take another step. Squealing without even realising he was doing so, Asavan Tortellius sprinted, with his additional chins shaking, away from the leg's ascent and inevitable descent. He hurled himself the last few metres, landing hard.

  As the Titan walked on, monstrous feet still pounding into the ground, the priest lay on his back, breathing in ragged gasps.

  And thus was completed the least dignified disembarkation from an Imperator Titan in the history of the Imperium.

  That had been two days ago.

  Since then, Asavan had not improved his situation by a great deal, but by the Throne, he was doing the Emperor's work. And that was a start.

  His journey along the Hel's Highway (which he was resolutely calling his ''pilgrimage'') had begun on an uninspiring note. Hauling himself to his unsteady feet and recovering the shoe he had lost in his fall, he began to make his way down the wide road, clutching his bag of dehydrated foodstuffs and electrolyte fluid packs.

  Away from the Titan, with Stormherald thumping away in the far distance now, he realised how utterly silent a dead city could be. The crashing of weapons and war machines was a muted murmur, seeming a world away. His immediate surroundings were quiet almost to the point of eeriness.

  He left the highway to trudge through an abandoned commercia district that had been punished heavily weeks before. Slain tanks littered the central market zone, both Imperial and alien, and each one commanding its own mound of nearby bodies. Red flies - the bloated and oversized tropical vermin that bred like a plague in the jungles to the west - were here in s
warms, blanketing the dead and feeding from them.

  He'd not been prepared for the smell of a city at war. On the back of a Titan, one strode the battlefield like a colossus, far from what the princeps, blessings upon her, referred to as the ''distasteful biological carnage''.

  The smell was somewhere between untreated sewage and spoiled food. He vomited again halfway across the plaza, releasing a stringy ooze that stuck to his teeth. Fluid packs and dehydrated foodstuffs were not wonderful for the digestion.

  That night, he'd camped in the broken shell of a Leman Russ. The tank was half-buried in a fallen wall, which evidently it had rammed. Whatever had become of its crew was a mystery Asavan didn't feel like looking into. He was glad enough that they weren't there, slouched and rotting in their seats like so many others had been.

  When he finally slept, he dreamed of everything he'd seen that day. After three hours of dreaming that every corpse he'd passed was staring at him, he gave up the attempt to find rest and instead pushed on deeper into the city.

  On the second day, he had found his first survivors. In the ground floor of a collapsed habitation block, movement drew his eye.

  He'd voiced a tremulous ''Hello?'' before he'd even realised he might be calling out to one of the invaders. The sound of scampering footsteps emboldened him. Alien beasts would not run from a lone human's cry. 'I've come to help,' he called.

  Silence was the only answer.

  'I have food,' he tried.

  A filthy face rose from behind a pile of rubble. Narrowed eyes never left him - bright and quick like a scavenger's gaze.

  'I have food,' Asavan said again, lowering his voice this time. With no sudden movement, he unslung the satchel from his back and held up a dehydrated food pouch in its silver packaging. 'It's dehydrated. Rations. But it's food.'

  The face became a person, a middle-aged woman, as she left her hiding place and drew closer. Gaunt and wild-eyed, she moved with the caution of the forever fearful. It took three attempts for her to speak. Before the words left her mouth in a scratchy whisper, she had to clear her throat repeatedly.

  'You're a priest?' she asked, still not coming within arm's reach. She pointed at his white and violet robes, her gesture weak and dismissive.

  'I am. The God-Emperor sent me to you.'

  She had wept in that moment, and soon after, they shared a small meal in the ruins of her hab-chamber. He asked questions of her life, and the losses she'd suffered. Before he left an hour later, he made sure she had several days' worth of food and fluid, and blessed her in the name of the God-Emperor. It was strange to be ministering to the genuinely needy, and the fully-fleshed. So many of his sermons had been to fellow clerics and machine-altered skitarii that a weeping woman praising the Emperor was quite beyond his experience.

  It was strange, but it was good. It was worthy.

  Asavan Tortellius's first meeting with a survivor had gone well. He walked on, similar encounters repeating themselves over the next day and night. It was only on the third day that he ran into trouble.

  A small group of ragged survivors huddled around a trash-fire, warming their hands as night fell over another tank graveyard along the Hel's Highway. Asavan cleared his throat as he approached, raising a hand in greeting.

  The survivors whirled, bringing lasguns to bear. Several of the group were in workers' overalls, blood-spattered and dark with grime. One of them was clad in a Guard uniform, a bulky power pack on his back and a cabled lasrifle aimed at Asavan's face.

  'No more surprises, please, yes?' The soldier spat onto the ground, his thin face marked with suspicion. 'I am tired and I am cold and I am sick to my core of shooting looters in the skull.'

  'I'm not a looter.'

  'That is not a surprise to me, given what I have just said I do to looters.'

  'I'm a priest.'

  'Explains the robes,' one of the workers chuckled. 'I think he's telling the truth, Andrej.'

  'A priest,' the storm-trooper repeated.

  'A priest,' Asavan nodded.

  The storm-trooper lowered his rifle. 'That is most definitely a surprise. I am Andrej of the Legion. These are my friends, who were unlucky enough to be born in Helsreach instead of a city worth defending.'

  The workers snickered.

  'I am Asavan Tortellius, of Stormherald.'

  'The god-machine?' Andrej barked a laugh. 'You are far from your walking throne, fat priest. Did you fall off and fail to catch up?'

  Asavan drew nearer to the fire, and the workers made room for him.

  'Tomaz Maghernus.' One of them offered his hand for the priest to shake. 'Don't mind Andrej, sir. He's not all there.'

  'All of me is exactly where it needs to be.' The storm-trooper shook his head, his dark, weasel eyes glinting with the fire's reflection. 'Throne, I have never been so cold. We are all lucky that our balls have not frozen and cracked by now.'

  'Good to see you,' one of the other men muttered to the priest.

  'Yeah,' another nodded, his voice sincere despite not meeting the newcomer's eyes. Asavan was touched by their almost-shy gratitude to see a priest amongst all this.

  'Looters?' Asavan asked. 'Did I hear that correctly?'

  'You did,' Maghernus breathed into his hands, before holding them out to the flames. 'Dockworkers. Militia and Guard deserters. It's ugly out here. They're going through the habs, stealing credits and whatever else they can find.'

  'May I ask, why are you out here?'

  Andrej shook his head as he joined the group. 'Do not sound so suspicious, holy man. We are not hiding from duty. We are merely the Forgotten, lost in the dead city, making our way back to… wherever the closest front line might be.'

  'You have no contact with the rest of the Guard?'

  'Ha! I like this. I like the way you think. You fell off your Titan, fat man. Do you have a vox-link back to ask your Mechanicus masters for advice? No. Exactly. You were not at the docks, priest. Half the city died last week. The Guard is broken, and the vox is no more than a hundred frequencies of hissing noise. If I am right, and I hope to be wrong, then no Imperial force is able to contact any other in perhaps half of the city.'

  'What do you intend to do?'

  'We are moving west. The Templars went to the west, and so shall we. Why are you here?'

  Asavan shrugged. It wasn't something he could explain with any conviction. 'I wanted to walk the streets and help where I could. I was serving no one on the back of a Titan.'

  A few of the group made the sign of the aquila and murmured their admiration.

  'You wish to come with us, fat priest? You will like what is in the west, I am thinking.'

  'What's in the west?' Asavan asked.

  'A great number of burning industrial sectors, too many looters for my innocent heart to consider at this moment in time, and of course, the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant.'

  'What is this temple you speak of? A monastery? A cathedral?'

  Maghernus shook his head. 'Both. Neither. It's a shrine - built by the original colonists who came to Armageddon.'

  In his surprise, Asavan almost ordered a servo-skull to take a dictation. 'You are telling me that the first church ever built in Helsreach still stands? It endured the First War against the daemon armies? It remained unbroken through the Second War, when the Great Enemy first came to this world?'

  'Well… yeah,' Maghernus replied.

  This was providence. This was why he had left the Titan, and this was why the God-Emperor had guided him through the city to these men.

  Andrej snorted at his questions. 'It is not simply the first church built in Helsreach, my fat friend. It is the first church ever raised in the whole world. When the first settlers prayed to the Emperor, they prayed in the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant.'

  Asavan felt his hands trembling. 'How do we reach it?'

  Andrej gestured to the expansive, raised road in the distance. 'We walk the Hel's Highway. How else?'

  Artarion stood away from the others.
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  The building they occupied had once been a small temple, serving as the spiritual heart of this industrial sector. Now it was a tumbledown ruin, no longer fit to house dawn and dusk prayers for the local workers. In the altar room, Artarion had paused his bored exploration, finding bloodstains on some of the fallen rubble that had buried the floor in broken architecture.

  The blood-scent was old, the stains themselves flaking. Whoever was entombed beneath had been dead for days. Artarion breathed in through his helm's filters. Female. Had not bled much after being crushed. Dead for perhaps three days; the delicate scent of decomposition was little more than spice on the air.

  He'd removed himself to perform the rites of maintenance on his weapons, as well as to get away from Priamus muttering about the Salamanders.

  As he lowered himself to sit on the dead woman's cairn, the knee joint of his armour locked for several seconds. Runic warnings flickered across his visor display. Instead of blanking them, he disengaged his helm's seals, removed it, and breathed in the smell of the fire, ash and brick dust that was all Helsreach had become. The faulty joint crunched back into motion, eliciting a grunt from the knight as he sat.

  His bolter, chained to his thigh and mag-locked in place, was starved of ammunition. He had not spoken of this to the others yet, but knew they must surely be approaching similar difficulties. Before the week of bloodshed at the docks, the supplies brought down by the Helsreach Crusade from the Eternal Crusader so long ago had been reduced to a Thunderhawk cargo bay half-full of bolts and an almost-empty crate of replacement tooth-tracks for chainswords.

  The gunship itself sat cold and silent in the courtyard of a factory complex, almost two kilometres to the west, in a sector of the city still securely in Imperial control.

  Artarion examined the bolter's fire-blackened muzzle, turning the weapon over in his hands as he followed the path of winding, once-gold inlaid scriptures etched along the gun's sides. A list of enemies slain, battles won, worlds defended…