‘Back away,’ I breathed, my arms trembling. ‘It’s not your fight.’
The general obeyed, thank the Emperor.
The next strike smashed me from my feet, for the beast launched himself at me a second time. Again, I was up first, casting about in the slime for my fallen crozius. Sure enough, when the overlord rose, he held my mentor’s war maul in his grip. It was a cudgel to him, a pathetic club with its length of severed chain. I backed away, shame burning with every retreating step.
Las-fire lanced into the creature, going ignored against its armour, and equally ignored as the volleys scored fingertip holes in its flesh. One of the Lions threw himself at the ork, only to be caught in his leap and compacted in the monster’s mangling claw. The warping of ceramite was the same plaintive abuse of metal that sounds out as tanks melt in chemical fire.
The corpse was hurled aside. I had my pistol, drained of all power an hour before, and a metre of severed chain forming a useless whip. The thing, in its hulking iron plate armour, stalked forward through the marsh made by the blood of our companions.
Steel Legionaries were charging in, shouting wild cries, firing uselessly at close range. I ordered them back, both because they could do nothing to this beast, and because it would be disaster if, somehow, they did.
Cyneric threw himself onto the ork’s back, slapping down with his fangless chainblade. Each blow shed sparks, but no blood. The warlord gave a carnosaur’s bellow and threw my brother away into yet another mound of the sodden dead. I heard something give with a wet crunch over the vox, and I prayed – out loud and with no shame – it was not Cyneric’s spine.
‘Emperor’s ghost.’
Throne of Mankind’s Master, the thing spoke Gothic. Not well, not with any grace, but enough to convey meaning. Because of their mangled jaws, I understood precious few of the greenskin breed. This one was levelling my own mace at me, aiming at my face, and speaking my lord’s name.
No, not at my face. At my faceplate. The Emperor’s skullish, eternal visage. ‘Emperor’s ghost,’ it said. ‘Emperor’s ghost.’ It had the tones of a Dreadnought, freshly woken from stasis frost. I had no conception, then or now, of how a living thing could speak with a volcano’s voice.
‘I am the living will of the Immortal Emperor,’ I spoke through teeth as clenched as those of my avataric face mask. ‘And you will pay for your transgressions against the armies of humanity.’
It came for me in a lumbering run. I moved aside, ducking and weaving, giving up yet more shameful ground. Lashing back with my chain-whip was loud but fruitless, as was the gunfire poured on in spurts by the Steel Legion. The las-fire became more sporadic; this close, they risked hitting me.
‘Ekene…’ I voxed, but managed nothing more. I caught the maul on the ninth swing, clutching its haft with every iota of energy I could burn from my aching flesh. The alien drove me to the ground, down to my knees, but to release my grip was to die by my own weapon.
The beast swung its other hand with a driving whine of overworked servos. No dodging the claw – it crashed into the side of my armour, breeding the same wet crunches I’d heard from Cyneric – and hurling me aside into the muck. My retinal display told me the same as the pulses of pain dancing along my left side. Broken bones. Pain nullifying adrenaline injections. Warning runes chiming of biological trauma and armour damage. I ignored all of it. Ekene’s kill or not, I would not tolerate this vile slug to wield my crozius.
Ekene came between us with a leap and a roar, neither of which would have shamed the great cat his bloodline was named for. He held a hand back, bidding me remain away, and forcing myself to obey was a yield I could never countenance in any other circumstance. But we had fought this battle for a bloodline’s pride, and here was the moment of reckoning.
Ekene beat his blade against his chestplate, staring at the greenskin lord in its powered suit of tank armour scrap. Despite the sound of the battle above and around us, I heard his words as clearly as if they left my mouth instead of his.
‘In whatever underworld your foul breed believes, you shall tell your pig-blooded ancestors that you died to the blade of Ekene of Elysium, Lion of the Emperor.’
I did not know, not then, that Ekene was the last Lion still standing.
Would it have changed anything, had I known? I cannot say.
Ekene attacked. His chainsword was worthless against the beast’s claw; he had just as little hope of parrying my war maul with his combat knife. So what he lacked in strength, he poured into speed – never blocking, always dodging.
The battle did not pause around us. General Kurov, half of his face missing from the descent of some nameless, artless junkyard blade, blinked away blood as he sought to reload his pistol. His bodyguard of storm troopers fought around him, spearing out with bayonets and firing in closed ranks.
I saw no other Lions nearby. I heard none on the vox. None responded to my hails.
Cyneric, with bloody slime running in rivulets from his war-plate, tore his stained tabard free with his remaining hand, moving to my side. Together we slammed through the greenskins threatening to overwhelm Andrej and Kurov. I beat one to death with my fists, and strangled a second, feeling sick, primal joy at the life dying in its porcine eyes. Gasping, scrabbling with its weakening talons against my faceplate, it died in my grip.
A hole flash-burned in the thing’s forehead after I dropped it into the slime. Andrej, who had no hope of seeing my instinctive snarl behind my faceplate, raised his rifle in salute from a few metres away.
‘Just in case,’ he said.
‘Do not do that again,’ I growled.
Cyneric lifted his boot from the throat of another greenskin, a final stamp enough to crush whatever alien equivalent of a trachea it had possessed.
He chuckled as he watched it die. I have recorded elsewhere that what earned Cyneric his commendations to the Chaplaincy were his other numerous virtues and fervent insights, but in this personal accounting I can confess it was then, in that moment, as he laughed at the asphyxiating alien’s pain, that I made my decision.
His hatred was pure – what lesser warriors might call cruel or gratuitous, a Chaplain considers holy. Cyneric belonged behind a skull helm.
‘Where is the Grey Warrior?’ I called to the general. He was up to his thighs in filth.
‘Dead.’ He turned his ruined face to me. I could see bone beneath the flesh wreckage, yet he was still grinning. ‘We’ll mourn her later, Reclusiarch. Captain! How long now?’
Andrej wrestled with an incendiary control pack over a comrade’s shoulder, thumping it with a fist to straighten its readings.
‘One minute. One hour. This is broken, okay, general? That is the truth, I–’
A Vulture gunship laboured above us, its central turbine coughing as it chewed ork bullets instead of breathing air. The thing fell, flames already breaking out across its steel skin, and I pulled the closest two soldiers with me as I threw myself to the side.
As they picked themselves up, one thanked me profusely. The other was Andrej, who did no such thing.
‘That was a dramatic reaction, I am thinking. Yes. Yes, indeed.’ He shook blood from his hellgun, and prayed to its machine-spirit that it would still fire after being submerged in the muck. The scattered squad came together again, around the gunship’s wreckage.
More greenskins were barrelling their way closer. ‘Kill them,’ I ordered the Guardsmen, and turned to run back towards Ekene.
A burning Gargant close to the canyon’s entrance broke from its gantries, setting the ravine quaking as it crashed earthward. I felt the same bitter amusement that had gripped me as the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant came down in a hailstorm of marble and stained glass, but no laughter followed this time. The shaking earth bubbled the blood at our boots, and threw hundreds of soldiers from their feet. I kept running, Cyneric at my side.
Ekene and the warlord were still engaged, both bleeding from scores of wounds. The chainsword had licked out at armo
ur joints and plunged into soft tissue; the power claw had mangled my cousin’s armour each time it fell. He was backing away now, just as I had. Fighting such a beast was no task for one warrior alone, no matter the pleasure of pride.
Then came the electrical burst – a thunderclap like nothing else – turning the air to charged static. Orks and men in their droves cried out in pain at the sonic boom.
My helm protected me, though it chimed with alert runes at the sudden atmospheric instability. Serpents of lightning danced between my fingertips. The parchments on my shoulderguards caught fire. The air itself was alive with dispersing force. It felt as though I was inhaling the breath of another living being.
‘The shield,’ Cyneric cried, gripping my pauldron with his remaining hand. ‘The orbital shield!’
I looked up, no longer seeing the mother-of-pearl distortion of the kinetic barrier energised in place above the canyon. At some point in the hours of melee, while I fought with the Lions, the Steel Legion had laid explosives at the void shield reactor. The Emperor alone knew when, where, and how. I had abandoned my delusions – and desires – of general command upon leaving the Helsreach in the hands of its Guard leaders.
No sooner had the shield imploded, spitting its static charges in all directions, than a powerful and priority channel vox-rune chimed loud on my retinal display.
I activated it, watching Ekene and the ork lord stagger around each other, wounded animals too proud to die.
‘Brother,’ came the voice, lifting my heart.
‘You are still there.’
‘For now. Not for much longer. Give the word if you require it, Merek. Just give the word.’
Helbrecht’s name-rune pulsed, red, gold, fierce. I broke into a run towards Ekene, replying as I moved.
‘Do it,’ I ordered my liege lord. ‘Blacken the sky.’
Ekene was down before I reached him. The beast clutched his arm in its mangling claw, crushing it at the bicep before ripping it free. He retaliated by ramming his chainsword in an awkward thrust into the creature’s throat. Deflected by armour, it barely bit. His assault came at the cost of his left leg, as the iron claw scissored through the limb at the knee, dropping him on his back into the slime.
I was on the beast’s back a heartbeat later, secure where one-armed Cyneric had been easily thrown, digging into the creature’s armour with my boots as I wrapped my weapon chain around its bleeding, sweating throat. The chain garrotted taut, and my broken bones throbbed in narcotic-dulled sympathy with the creaking, cracking sinew in the beast’s throat. The iron claw battered at me, shearing chunks of ceramite away. It staggered without toppling, gasped without truly suffocating. Even this – even strangling it with my last remaining weapon – could not kill it. All I could do was buy Ekene the moments he needed to crawl free.
He did. And Cyneric was waiting, a bolter in his remaining hand. The mutilated Lion reached up for it, clutching it one-handed in a pistol grip, and aimed it up as he lay back in the sludge.
I dropped back. Not completely, but enough to pull the chain tighter, adding my weight to my strength, and wrenching the beast’s head back to bare its throat.
I heard the bolter sing once, and the kick of something heavy striking near the chain. With a muffled burst, the head came free, tumbling back over its shoulders and landing with me in the filth. The armoured body stood there without anything existing above its neck – still too stubborn, too strong, to fall.
First I reclaimed my maul from its fingers. Then I tossed the thing’s slack-jawed head to Ekene where he lay.
The battle continued to rage, as the men and women I had led here fought their way further down the canyon.
With ideal atmospheric conditions, it takes less than two minutes between a drop pod’s launch and the impact of planetfall. Ekene was looking up at the darkening sky. I did not need to, nor did Cyneric. The Lion’s only reaction was to rise as best he could, and pull his helmet clear.
‘Help me stand. I cannot meet the High Marshal on my back.’
Cyneric and I hauled Ekene up between us. While we did so, the vox link I shared with the Imperial Guard erupted in cheers, as Lord Helbrecht blackened the sky with Templar drop pods.
Epilogue
Farewells
Three events remain to account in this personal chronicle, away from the battlefield. These were my last acts before leaving Armageddon.
The first, such as it was, took three entire days and nights. I memorised the names and regiments of every Steel Legion soldier lost at the Mannheim Gap, and etched them myself onto a pillar of black marble, erected in the courtyard of the foundations that would become – in the years after we departed – a new Temple of the Emperor Ascendant.
I wrote each of the six thousand, eight hundred and eleven names myself, etching them in gold leaf script onto the black stone.
The inscription above the names read, in simple Low Gothic:
‘Their names and deeds will be remembered, always, by the Emperor’s own sons,
And by the city they saved.
Honoured for their sacrifice,
And respected for their courage.
These words are carved by Merek Grimaldus,
Reclusiarch of the Eternal Crusade, Son of Dorn, Hero of Helsreach.’
Among the inscribed names of the fallen were General Arvaley Kurov and Captain Andrej Valatok.
The second was the farewell offered to Chapter Master Ekene Dubaku of the Celestial Lions, escorted with his surviving few warriors onto the Black Templars strike cruiser Blade of the Seventh Son, with its course plotted for the distant world Elysium.
His bionic leg clanked on the deck, and he still bore a limp, his physiology not entirely adjusted to the augmetic replacement yet. His armour was the gold war-plate of an ancient Imperial Fists champion, granted as a gift from the Eternal Crusader’s halls of memory. His cloak was that of Helbrecht’s own Sword Brethren, red on black, elegantly cast over one shoulder. I had worn one of those cloaks once, in a luckier life. For all I knew, it had been the very one Helbrecht had granted to Ekene when he forced him to take the oath of lordship over his depleted Chapter.
The honour guard ready to bid him good journey consisted of myself, Cyneric, and the High Marshal’s household knights, clad in ceremonial colours.
‘Chapter Master.’ I inclined my head in farewell. Cyneric did the same.
At Ekene’s hip, bound by a chain of black iron, was the flayed, polished skull of the greenskin warlord we had killed together. My name rune was etched into the bone, as was Cyneric’s, alongside Ekene’s own mark. An honour indeed, to be named on a Chapter Master’s prime trophy.
‘It should feel petty,’ he remarked, his dark face showing a smile, ‘to take such overwhelming vengeance on the site that killed my brothers. But it does not. Thank you, both of you.’
Cyneric’s skull helm dipped in further acknowledgement, but he said nothing. I could not resist a last lecture.
‘Vengeance is never petty, Chapter Master. It does, however, sometimes serve better to strike with the aid of trusted brothers.’
He made the crusader’s cross. ‘I will remember that.’
I hope most fervently, as time passes, that his efforts in reconstructing the Celestial Lions and training the generation to follow him are going well.
We will never meet again. Ekene is sworn to a life of defending what he can hold, and the Black Templars always sail forth to attack.
The third and final event worthy of chronicling came in the very last hour before the Eternal Crusader departed Armageddon’s orbit. I was alone in the Chamber of the First Proclamation, leaning on the guardrail before the great window overlooking the burning, wretched, priceless world beneath.
Bootsteps from behind did not draw my attention. Not until I realised there were two sets of them, and only one was twinned with the whirr of active battle armour.
I turned, to see Cyneric escorting a human, who walked with his hands in his pockets. Huma
ns did not come here. I could not recall the last time one had walked this hall. This one, however, seemed absolutely unimpressed, staring not at the relics, but only at me.
‘Hey. Yes, you. I am not dead, eh? You can see this, so very plainly. Go back down there and scratch out my name, yes? I demand satisfaction in this.’
Cyneric turned to leave, abandoning me to this moment of acute discomfort now his escorting duties were done. Because of his helm, I could not tell his humour in this matter, but I suspected he was enjoying it.
I was not.
‘You were listed in the rolls of the dead,’ I said, which was perfectly true.
The slender Steel Legionary raked his fingers back through his hair, one eye narrowed in… I could not tell exactly what emotion or expression it was meant to convey. He seemed angry, or distressed, or perhaps amazed.
‘Must I sing a song or perform a dance in this museum here to convince you I am not dead?’
‘Please do not do either of those things.’
‘No? Very well. I shall scratch out my name myself. Then perhaps I can collect my pay again, eh? They cease monthly credit wages once you are registered deceased, you know? Now I have a heroic name and no money. Your brother Cyneric brought me to you. He tells me you will fix this.’
The ship shivered underneath us.
Andrej’s eyes went wide.
‘No,’ he said, as if one man could simply speak a single word and shift the tide of inevitability. ‘No, no, no. The ship moves. This is unacceptable. If I fly away from the war, I will be shot as a deserter, and then I shall truly be dead. And,’ he added, looking past me at the globe below, ‘continue going unpaid.’
How could he be shot as a deserter if he was nowhere near his regiment? I did not understand the workings of his mind, and I was not sure what to say. So I said nothing.
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