Medicae Rone had laid out his equipment and was sweeping the dirt from his new field hospital as Taavi entered. It looked as if the medic had aged ten years.
‘Sergeant,’ he said by way of greeting. ‘How do you like my new facility?’
Taavi took in the line of dirty mattresses, salvaged from the ruins, laid out on the grey marble floor. Rone gestured to a padded velvet armchair. Taavi sat. His hands cupped the polished ends of the chair’s arms.
‘So,’ Rone said, seeing the blood and the wound. ‘Your leg.’
‘Yeah. A wall fell on me. I didn’t realise that someone had shot me until I saw the hole.’ The las-round had burned a neat round hole, a generous thumb-size in diameter, into the fabric of his trousers. ‘No idea when,’ Taavi said.
He unbuckled his trousers and slid them down as far as his knees. His own skin looked pale against the dark of the crusted blood and scorched wound mark.
Rone sucked a breath in between his teeth. ‘Looks clean,’ he said at last. ‘Just missed the femoral artery.’
Taavi nodded. ‘Think I’ll live?’
Rone looked up and laughed. ‘Well, you won’t die from this.’
The medic didn’t have much to bind the wound up with, but he gave it a dusting with counterseptic powder and then bound it up with a strip of boiled cloth cut from a Cadian greatcoat. ‘There,’ Rone said as Taavi pulled his trousers back up. ‘Good as new. Now get back out there.’
Taavi picked his way out into the street. Exhausted survivors crept through the ruins as grey light spread over the city.
Rath’s company had made their new front line along the north side of the square, where a rockcrete revetment lifted the foundations of the fine hab-blocks twenty feet above the floor. The captain had made his command post in the cellar of a retired general’s oak-lined drawing room. The walls were hung with ancient portraits of military figures, a broken mirror hung over an ornate brass fireplace, and the leather sofa had been torn open, pale hair stuffing strewn across the floor.
Taavi found Rath on the front line, as the captain looked out across the square. The Volscani were now dug into the buildings that had been home twenty-four hours earlier. One half of the museum had collapsed. The Volscani had torn the aquila from the facade of the Veterans’ Hall and the marching figures on the museum pediment had been prised from the wall and lay smashed on the broad stairs.
Taavi could see the red figures. There were hundreds of them. ‘Why don’t they attack again?’
Rath didn’t know. ‘The forces of Chaos are easily distracted.’
There was a long pause. Taavi’s eyes were wide and staring. ‘How many did we lose?’
‘A hundred and forty-six.’
Taavi had feared they’d lost more.
Rath listed the missing squads. ‘Rendal and his men got crushed in the museum. Childe’s squad were trapped in the Veterans’ Hall. They came on us faster than I’d feared.’ He paused. ‘How’s the leg?’
‘I’ll live, apparently.’
Rath laughed. ‘Have you eaten?’
Taavi shook his head. He hadn’t even thought about it, but now his stomach rang empty.
Rath turned to him. ‘Go eat.’
Minka could smell the food as Gunnel and Malfred got a pot of slab-stew to the boil.
They had set up the canteen next door, in the panelled library, the tomes of military history making a ready supply of fuel. Gunnel had lost a hand. The stump ended halfway to his elbow. It had been bandaged, and he was clearly still getting used to the missing limb, swearing profusely as he tried to work one-handed.
Olivet was setting the vox up in Rath’s HQ. He was a young lad, and like her had started the war as a Whiteshield. Olivet looked up, saw Minka, and seemed at a loss as to what to say. ‘So,’ he started. ‘Yegor died?’
Minka nodded.
Olivet pulled a face. ‘I’m sorry.’
Minka looked down. Yegor’s death felt like an age ago. She couldn’t understand why he was still talking about it, then realised it was less than a day since she’d been picking her way through the ruined schola.
She shook herself. Olivet was tuning the vox into the Lord Castellan’s channel.
‘How long?’ she said.
Olivet checked his chronometer. ‘Five minutes.’
She nodded. ‘I’ll just sit down here.’ She crouched down and leaned against the wall.
A shadow passed over her. Rath tapped her on the helmet. ‘Cheer up,’ he said.
Minka pulled her helmet down low over her face. Flower of Cadia began to play over the vox.
‘Turn it up,’ Rath said as the notes of Flower of Cadia fell away and Creed’s voice filled the silence.
‘People of Cadia. Brothers in arms, warriors all of you. You ask me what I want from you. I shall tell you. But first, good news. Our forces are moving across many fronts. We are driving the enemy back…’ Creed listed units and battles and little victories, reports of enemy retreats, brigades destroyed, objectives reached. ‘But brothers and sisters, I need your help.
‘We face a monstrous evil with resolve, with courage, with the faith of the unconquerable Imperium of Mankind! We have trapped the enemy upon our barbs – let us hold him here, while the Imperium prepares the counter-strike that will destroy him utterly!’
At the end of the broadcast, Creed spoke with rousing defiance. ‘I ask of you this. I ask you to defy the enemy with all your might. Fight them to the last. Do not give ground, unless you can inflict more pain upon our foes. Do not hope, for in hope lies despair!’
At the end his gravelly voice ground out two words: ‘Cadia stands!’
Minka mouthed with him. But if the forces of Cadia were driving the enemy back, why, then, were the defenders of Kasr Myrak fighting without support?
It didn’t make sense. To Minka, it felt like they were losing. Badly.
She looked up to see Rath staring at her. His augmetic eye glowed with a dull red light, as baleful as the Eye of Terror.
The Elysion Fields
Zufur the Hermetic did not care that the rest of his warband were fighting about the walls of Kasr Kraf. Their anger and fury washed off him, like oil, or another man’s blood. At least that was what he told himself, but through his helmet he heard their shouts and curses, their blood-curdling oaths, the bark of their bolt shells, and he felt his hearts quicken, his pulse begin to pound, the bestial anger rising within him like a flooding well.
‘Where are you, Zufur?’ Sikai the Thriceborn hailed him over the vox.
It had taken Sikai six hours to realise that Zufur’s warriors were not there, on the battlefield.
Zufur could have taken offence at the length of time it took the Black Legion captain to notice Zufur’s warband were not slaughtering their way through the ruins of Kasr Kraf’s third ramparts. He heard the moan and throb of Sikai’s chainaxe, the momentary slowing of the blade as it snagged on bone.
‘Am I needed?’ Zufur responded.
‘We never need you, Hermetic!’ Sikai laughed, and there was the sound of his blade chopping again and again into dead or dying meat.
Zufur ignored the insult. ‘I will leave the killing to you.’
Sikai laughed once more. ‘You always do.’
In his mind’s eye, Zufur could see Sikai’s fanged mouth open in a smile. Fighting on Cadia was pleasurable in a way that none of them had appreciated beforehand. It was joyful. Exultant. Victorious. Zufur felt his fist clench. Killing was an itch that had been growing in intensity. He swatted the thought away. Zufur the Hermetic had deeper desires he had come to Cadia to fulfil. The culmination of a lifetime’s study. ‘I have more important business.’
‘What can be more important than killing?’ Sikai demanded. Through the vox, Zufur heard the other warrior’s chainblade roar its approval.
‘You kill
with an axe, I work with subtler weapons. I think, if you counted, I have murdered millions more than you.’
‘You are always talking, Zufur. Put an axe in your hand. Wade through the blood of your foes.’
Zufur was irritated with himself. ‘You wade. I will swim through their blood.’
As he spoke he saw the forest appear. ‘There,’ he said.
The thing that piloted his craft had been human once. Zufur had forgotten the man’s name, but he had been perfect for Zufur’s needs. All he’d needed were a few modifications. Silence was one of them.
The pilot had not willingly consented to the alterations. But that did not matter. Zufur did not like his slaves to speak. Now ribbed pink tubes ran from the pilot’s mouth and eyes, his legs had been removed, his hands ended in fleshy tendrils that disappeared into the flight deck consoles.
‘Bring us down.’
The lander shuddered as it made its descent. ‘There,’ Zufur pointed.
The pilot’s tendrils tensed. There was a wet slosh of fluids moving through his body and the tubes of his mouth rattled. Sometimes Zufur imagined that there were words in the wet sounds. He should have had the man’s larynx removed too, he thought.
The lander settled. The wet gurgles from the pilot went on, even though there was no one to hear them.
Zufur’s warband was already securing the area. He climbed down the cockpit ladders. He had waited ten thousand years for this.
Zufur the Hermetic jumped the last ten feet and landed with a thud on the thin grass. He had lost count of the number of planets he had set boot upon. Each world had its own texture underfoot, but none was quite as satisfying as Cadia. It was hard, but not brittle. Soft enough to allow humans to live.
He strode forward. The soil seemed to shrink at his touch. Its horror was as satisfying as the struggles of his pilot. Zufur paused for a moment and looked up. There, above him, amid the purple-and-green stain of the Eye of Terror, was his home. Standing in this place was a delicious transgression. He felt like an imprisoned slave who finds the door of his cell left open, walks out and looks back on the hole where he has been shut up for so long.
And it was not just being on Cadia that counted. He was here, in this particular place. The very keyhole, as it were, for it was not the planet of Cadia that had held the warp back, but these stones.
He turned to gaze on them. The structures rose before him like a forest: each one unique, sublime, perfect. Things of beauty, yes, but torment also, for these were Abaddon’s shackles.
Zufur of the Black Legion had studied the pylons for ten thousand years, but he had never had the chance to touch one – until now. He strode down the ramp of his lander, the tubes in his nose filling his lungs with a sweet and sickly stimulant.
The pylon was pale grey, like marble. It stretched up before him, a four-sided spike, a hundred yards tall. Just one of thousands that filled the vast plains about him. But this one was cracked, and a piece had sheared away from the spire.
Zufur strode forward, looking for the one.
At last, he found it: untouched, unscarred, perfect.
Zufur removed the gauntlet of his suit of power armour. These pylons had held the warp back since long before the Heresy of Horus. Fools like Sikai tried to win the war against the Imperium of Man by killing Guardsmen one by one. It was as hopeless as trying to hold the sea back with your open hands.
Humanity bred as quickly as men like Sikai could kill them. Zufur was not so foolish. He had been one of the first to throw in his lot with Abaddon, one of the first to join the Black Legion. Abaddon had seen what needed to be done. He had an understanding – a vision – that none of the others possessed. Zufur flattered himself that he had a vague sense of what Abaddon saw clearly. When they aimed it was not at the throat of a human, or a Space Marine. It was at a city, a world, an empire.
Zufur had no doubt about the success of Abaddon’s Thirteenth Black Crusade. But the Chaos gods were fickle. Just in case, he would bring a pylon back to his archo-smithy and learn the secrets of the pylons of Cadia.
He looked up at the perfect pylon and pressed his hand against it. Through his bare skin, a thrill of warmth and energy rushed into him. The pylon throbbed with life, like a slow, persistent heartbeat. It was strong, healthy, vibrant; a fine specimen. He felt relief, hatred and the sweet taste of vengeance. It was the one he wanted.
Behind him, from the landing ramps, his slave gang was descending.
He turned to the gang leader, an augmented tech-priest that Zufur had taken from Agripinaa, the priest’s hood thrown back off his tattooed scalp. He bowed and spoke through sharp steel teeth. ‘This one, master?’
‘Yes,’ Zufur exhaled. He watched as the excavators began to reverse off the lander. Teams of mind-slaved ogryn stumped down after it and stood in an uncertain pack, their arms slack at their sides, waiting for orders.
‘Careful,’ Zufur told the priest. ‘I do not want a scratch upon it.’
It took a day for the excavator teams to locate the roots of the pylon. Spider-leg cranes unfolded. Cables were secured about it. Black gantries rose, and a pair of crane heads, like the legs of a praying mantis, slowly unfolded and lifted the pylon straight from the ground.
The next step was critical. It was now, as the weight was taken along the length of the pylon, that any hidden fractures or imperfections could shatter Zufur’s prize.
He stood to watch as the lifter slowly lowered the vast pylon onto the back of the tracked carrier.
Gang leaders hurried back and forth, shouting, pointing, as the mind-slaved ogryn moved slowly and stiffly to tighten or loosen the cables or adjust the padding.
At last, the pylon lay supine and Zufur felt the pulses of his hearts slow once more.
He had supervised the entire process, not needing to sleep. All the time the angry noise of battle had been fed through his helmet vox. It was only now that he noticed it, like a vaguely buzzing insect veering towards the ear.
The shouts, the screams, bolters, chainswords, the thunder of ordnance blasting through armour.
‘Sikai. How many have you killed?’ Zufur asked.
‘Eight thousand, seven hundred and forty-six,’ Sikai voxed.
‘Have you taken the city yet?’
There was a moment’s pause, during which Zufur could hear the faint sound of slaughter over the vox. ‘It cannot be long,’ Sikai eventually replied.
Zufur laughed to himself. Hand-to-hand combat was such a slow way of winning a war. Sikai and his ilk were nothing more than distractions to keep the attention of the defenders away from the real danger.
Ahead, the land was pocked and broken by the passage of war, and all along the edge of the pylon fields the vast stone structures were cracked and broken.
It was over the ruins that the grey Land Raider ploughed. Wolf heads were emblazoned on both sides, and on the assault ramps the craft bore crossed axes: the personal badge of the White Wolves.
The Land Raider led the hunt. It turned into the pylon forest, and the rest of the pack followed: bounding shapes of great Fenrisian wolves, and behind them the Wulfen, some running, others loping along like half-apes, with their hands on the ground like paws.
The company of the White Wolves was dwarfed by the vast pylon forest. They plunged down into a deep crater, a hundred yards wide, over the shattered rocks from a broken pylon, and then they saw the foe.
Mounted on a snarling thunderwolf, Ottar the White was chief. He led the pack, his great axe, Lightbringer, shining with its own inner white light. Before him, between the avenues of pylons, he could see the brass and black of the enemy lander.
The heretics had pulled a pylon from the ground. It lay like a fang wrenched from its socket. Ottar sneered at the enemy. ‘Look at them! They want to remove the pylons one by one! Fools! That will not help them! Forward, brothers. Forward!’
&n
bsp; Behind him, his company howled with battle-joy.
The black power-armoured heretics reacted quickly. Precise bolter fire flared towards him. Bolt-rounds ricocheted off the pylon edges. Ottar felt them impact against his chest-plate, but the Black Legion fell back as the ogryn guards stumped forward.
The first to meet him had a crude gun in one hand, buzz-sword in the other. The solid shells punched against Ottar’s grey chest-plate. Warning runes lit within Ottar’s helmet, but he was wild with the joy of the hunt, and he bared his fangs, letting out a wordless snarl of anger and fury.
If the ogryn thought to slow the Space Wolf’s charge, he had not met the Sons of Fenris before. Ottar’s wolf closed its giant maw on the massively muscled forearm of the ogryn guard, snapping through arm and fist and firearm, ripping them clean off.
The ogryn’s moment of horror was cut short as Lightbringer came down on his thick-skulled head. There was an ice-flash of white energy, the crude rivets of his helm bursting open as the axe crashed through steel, skull and brain matter.
The ogryn guards came forward. A wall of bodies and ripper guns and buzz-saws.
Ottar led the charge, limbs and heads and grisly lumps of torso flying off to either side as he cut his way through them, his wolf riders close behind him, their chainswords buzzing furiously as they protected his back. The charge punched deep into the guts of the enemy.
Even as Ottar’s thunderwolf was killed beneath him, the assault ramp of the Land Raider Ghost of Fenris slammed down and Terminator-armoured figures charged out, war cries ringing out under the hellish sky. Moments after they hit, the Wulfen caught up and drove all before them, howling and tearing ogryn, heretics and Chaos Space Marines apart.
Ottar leaped free of his slain wolf, the joints of his power armour grating as he accelerated to a sprint. Lightbringer flashed over and over as he drove through the enemy. Mind-slaved labourers flung themselves at him in an insane wave. He killed them just as quickly. They fell one on top of the other, the bodies mounding about him as he slowed almost to a halt.
The Black Legionnaires of Zufur’s warband had waited for this moment. Now the Space Wolf leader had been brought to a halt, they charged, cutting him off from the warriors behind him.
Cadia Stands Page 7