Blood of Asaheim

by Chris Wraight

  At the mention of plague-cults, a low murmur of recognition passed among the Wolves.

  ‘The heretics,’ Gunnlaugur said. ‘They brought the war.’

  ‘No, not them. They kept us occupied, but we never let them flourish for long. Do not think that my sisters are afraid to use their flamers, Wolf Guard, for they are not.’

  Gunnlaugur smiled again. Against all expectation, he and the canoness seemed to be finding each other’s company agreeable.

  ‘The enemy came from outside the subsector,’ said de Chatelaine. ‘The cults here did nothing more than prepare the ground for them. The ships must have arrived in-system before we sent our request for aid to you, but back then we had no inkling of their presence. It was a large fleet, and our defences were so paltry and undermanned that we stood no chance. We quickly lost what orbital grids we possessed. We prepared our cities for bombardment, assuming that destruction was what they wished for. It was not so. They landed forces – we do not know how many – and the majority of the fleet moved on. The ship you encountered was the only one they left behind. As we speak, dozens more are no doubt ravaging the rest of the subsector.’

  Bajola watched de Chatelaine’s expression grow tighter, more self-conscious. The canoness had taken the blame for the war on her own shoulders, and the ruin of her world pressed heavily on her. The fact that she had acted with the utmost propriety at every stage made no difference. De Chatelaine had exacting standards, and did not exempt herself from them.

  ‘It happened so quickly,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘Too quickly. They have already overrun our industrial heartland. We have lost our population centres, our manufactories. A few hold-outs remain, but we receive word of capitulations every day. This planet is going dark. Two weeks ago I ordered the withdrawal of all remaining forces to this zone. We have succeeded in holding the city since then, but we know they are coming for us. Everyone here knows it.’

  She smiled dryly.

  ‘This is the planet you have landed on. I had hoped to show you an exemplary shrineworld, one from which the legions of the Emperor would march out to fresh conquest. Believe me, I am sorry that I cannot do that.’

  Gunnlaugur leaned back in his seat, and the wooden chair creaked alarmingly under him. He hacked up a gobbet of phlegm, leaned over and spat on the floor.

  ‘War has a way of following us,’ he said. ‘Truth be told, we like it that way. We get bored without it.’

  De Chatelaine’s advisers looked disapproving. Bajola could understand why – they had all suffered enormously; the savage in front of them was making light of it.

  She stole a glance at the grey-eyed figure sitting at the far end of the pack. As her eyes lighted on him she caught him looking directly at her. She averted her gaze quickly, half embarrassed, half irritated.

  He is studying me, just as I am studying him. Do I seem as outlandish to him as he does to me?

  ‘If war is what you wish for, you will have no shortage of it on Ras Shakeh,’ said de Chatelaine. Her expression had become severe again. The canoness disliked flippancy in most things; in the face of the horror that had come to her world, it bordered on obscenity. ‘Though perhaps I have not adequately conveyed the scale of what faces us.’

  She turned to Callia.

  ‘Replay the footage from Jedaj,’ she said. ‘That may prove instructive.’

  Callia nodded, rose from her chair and moved over to a wall-mounted projector. She adjusted the controls and the blinds slid down the windows. At the far end of the chamber, against a bare whitewashed wall, a picter image flickered into life.

  ‘We retrieved this material six weeks ago,’ explained de Chatelaine. ‘It was taken by a defender of the ore-processing plant at Jedaj, five hundred kilometres south of here. I am not sure why he took it, nor why it survived. Perhaps he wanted a record of what had happened, or perhaps the enemy wished us to see what they are capable of. My first inclination was to destroy it, but I decided against it. It is not easy viewing, but then I am sure you are used to such things.’

  As she finished speaking, the footage crackled into life. It was shaky and motion-blurred, as if the images had been shot from a helmet-mounted picter. The first pictures were dark and grainy, indicating night-vision enhancement.

  Bajola hadn’t seen the footage before. She’d been offered the chance when it had first come in, and had declined, guessing what was on it. She shifted in her seat, watching the images with a heavy heart. She had no great wish to keep watching.

  A few seconds afterwards, an audio track kicked in: a man’s breathing, heavy and panicked. The picter-view leapt around wildly as he moved his head. It showed an industrial complex at night – tangled pipes, rows of generator-coils, huge cooling towers. The dark sky beyond was mottled with smoke, the kind of dense, greasy pall that comes from burning promethium.

  The man with the helmet-picter was running, making the picture shake and jerk. Others ran with him, all in Shakeh Guard uniforms, all carrying lasguns two-handed.

  ‘Holy Emperor,’ the man mumbled, snatching the litany between his ragged breaths. ‘Holy Emperor. Holy Emperor.’

  It wasn’t clear where the men were running. Explosions sounded in the background, muffled and tinny on the recording; no doubt deafening to them.

  Other shouts intruded – men’s voices, curdled with fear and disbelief.

  ‘Holy Emperor. Holy Emperor.’

  The Guardsmen opened up with their weapons. Bright lines of las-fire scored the night, overloading the pict-stream and blanking the feed. When the images resumed the men were running again, faster this time.

  Something flitted across the picter’s lurching visual field, just glimpsed for a second: a bloated face amid the far darkness, pale as corpse-light, grinning, stalking towards them.

  ‘Holy Emperor. Holy Emperor.’

  The man’s panting got more urgent, more uncontrolled. More las-beams flashed off.

  The view swept round suddenly. A semi-ruined wall emerged from the smog, gaping with black holes where munitions had exploded. Unidentifiable shapes were moving in the shadows beyond, twitching and rocking and jabbering.

  ‘Grenade!’ screamed one of the Guardsmen, out of view.

  The picter lurched to the floor. A riot of static hissing broke out as explosions maxed-out the audio filters.

  Then the man started moving again. Audio resumed. He was whimpering from fear.

  ‘Holy… Emperor… Holy… Emperor…’

  Someone screamed from behind him, a garish sound of animal horror, high-pitched and keening. The Guardsmen all started sprinting, their formation gone, firing off random rounds into the dark, leaping and stumbling over blast craters underfoot. One of them was hit by something. The view jerked over to him for an instant – his face white with terror.

  ‘Don’t leave me!’ he squealed. Something with spidery limbs was crawling up his leg.

  ‘H-holy… Emp… eror!’

  The men kept running. They stumbled through what looked like a bombed-out manufactorium. Huge machines were still running inside it, clanking and spinning and roiling in the darkness. Screaming started up again, a whole chorus of it. It seemed to come from all directions, from the mouths of all of them, echoing from the jagged wall-remains.

  Objects hung from the roof, twisting in the grainy gloom. The view briefly slewed upwards, exposing a shaky snapshot of man-shaped bundles suspended on corroding meathooks, some shuddering like marionettes, some glistening wetly.

  ‘H-h-ho… Hol…’

  Bloated, grinning horrors crept up out of the shadows. Las-fire downed some of them, knocking them back to the ground with gurgling pops. Others kept on coming. They had swollen faces in the flickering light, the skin stretched tight and held in place by iron pins. They laughed as they scampered, a low, throaty hurr hurr hurr.

  The picter was shaking badly now,
shuddering so hard it was hard to make out what was going on. The horrors must have got in amongst them. Everything dissolved into a jumbled succession of sickening images – flesh being cut, eyes being pulled, stomachs bursting.

  In a brief flash of clarity, a devilish face reared up dead centre, laughing so hard its lips split open. Its eyes stared wildly, cat-yellow and weeping with pus. It reached out with needle-tipped fingers. The whine of a circular saw started up somewhere close by.

  ‘Ho–! Hol–! Empe–! Ach! Nnngh!’

  The Guardsman’s frenzied litany collapsed into a jerking, frothing shriek. Blood splashed across the picter’s lens, coating the image with a splash of red. It shook violently, rocked back and forth by its bearer’s spasms.

  Then it went dead, replaced by a fizzing wall of white noise.

  A few seconds later it resumed.

  The image was swinging back and forth like a lazy pendulum. The sound had gone. Blood on the lens made everything smeary and indistinct. The viewpoint was higher up, as if the picter were suspended a long way above the floor.

  It showed a manufactorium crawling with movement. Hundreds of enemy troops scuttled between machines like swarms of roaches, clambering over one another, chittering and cavorting. Huge, distorted creatures stalked among them, stomachs ballooning and flesh glimmering with corpse-light.

  Something else approached the lens. A single, glowing eye peered up, lodged in the centre of a rusting, tusk-jowled helm. Massive pauldrons rose up out of the murk, each one studded with gleaming entrail-loops. The edges of twin cleavers could be made out, glistening, steadily dripping.

  For a moment the armour-clad titan just stared at the picter. Then it reached up. The last image was of a gore-splattered gauntlet closing over the lens.

  After that, static.

  Callia cut off the feed. The window-blinds slid up, letting sunlight flood back into the chamber.

  Bajola looked down at her hands. They were damp with sweat.

  ‘That is what our troops have been fighting, Wolf Guard,’ said de Chatelaine. ‘They were heroes just to stand their ground, do you not think?’

  Gunnlaugur gazed back at her steadily. He didn’t look entirely unmoved by what he had seen. That was to his credit, Bajola thought.

  ‘They were,’ he said.

  The atmosphere in the chamber was subdued. One of de Chatelaine’s counsellors, a scholarly man named Arvian Nomu, looked faint, and gripped the edge of the table tightly.

  ‘That thing at the end,’ Gunnlaugur said. ‘You know what it was?’

  ‘I do,’ said the canoness.

  ‘How many of them have landed?’

  ‘That is our only confirmed sighting.’

  Gunnlaugur snorted, his nostrils flaring. He looked pensive. ‘Your troops can’t kill it,’ he said.

  De Chatelaine nodded. ‘I know. I hope yours can.’

  Gunnlaugur didn’t smile that time, which surprised Bajola. Until then, his casual confidence had seemed inexhaustible.

  ‘We can kill anything,’ he said. ‘That’s what we do.’

  He turned towards one of his warriors, a lean-faced killer with a longsword strapped to his back. They exchanged a brief, significant glance.

  ‘Just depends how many there are,’ he said bleakly.

  Chapter Ten

  Three hours later, with the sun burning high in the sky, Váltyr walked up a tight spiral stairway, his shoulder guards grinding against the stone walls. He emerged onto a small square platform at the summit of one of the Halicon’s many towers. The city and its surroundings flowed away from him in every direction, falling down the long, broken mountain ridges before giving way to kilometres of featureless ochre plains. The distant horizon was hazy, masked by a pale screen of dusty grey.

  The arch of Ras Shakeh’s sky was a deep, royal blue. Its earth was dull orange, like rusting iron. Everything shimmered under a beating, constant wall of heat. No breeze stirred the air. No animals called, no birds sang.

  He paced over to the battlements running around the edge of the platform. Olgeir was already there, peering over the edge, his huge gauntlets gripping the sides.

  ‘Planned it out, great one?’ asked Váltyr, coming to join him.

  Olgeir didn’t reply immediately. His amber eyes ran across the warrens of streets below. His cracked, pierced lips moved soundlessly, as if he were calculating angles, strengths, numbers.

  The Halicon squatted at the summit of the mountain city. Beyond its walls lay the upper city, an orderly collection of red-tiled chapels, memorials, habs and admin blocks. Groves of spear-leaved trees grew in shaded courtyards and the sound of running water could be heard from under their eaves. The sigil of the Wounded Heart was prominent on the larger edifices, hanging limp on unmoving banners. A few landing stages were dotted amid the tight-packed buildings, ringed by defence lasers and servitor bays. Vuokho sat on one of them, still leaking smoke, still looking barely functional.

  The upper city was protected at its perimeter by a winding circuit of high, thick walls. Defence towers studded the battlements at fifty metre intervals, each one bristling with lascannon turrets and swivelling missile launchers. Only one gateway broke the enclosure of those walls – the Ighala Gate, a blunt bastion of adamantium and granite that hunkered darkly to the west of the Halicon’s bulk. The Gate was a mini-citadel all on its own, dank, angular and forbidding. Just like the towers on either side of it, weapons clustered all over it. Some of the bigger guns looked like recent additions, cannibalised from overrun installations and bolted into place for the attack they all knew was coming.

  Beyond the Ighala Gate was a narrow bridge that stretched out across a plunging, debris-choked gully. The ravine was a natural cleft in the mountain that ran around the upper city, dividing the two halves of the settlement and adding to the effective height of the inner wall. The cleft was too deep for infantry to negotiate unaided and lay tightly under the shadow of the tower guns. Váltyr grunted with approval when he saw that. It was a killing ground, a formidable barrier for any army to cross.

  On the far side of the ravine was the lower city, a much larger straggle of far shabbier buildings. That was where the bulk of Hjec Aleja’s population lived their lives, clogged up against one another in close-packed hab-towers. The urban landscape ran down through a series of terraces, each one teeming with jostling, multi-storied estates. Váltyr could see very few major transit arteries; the streets were narrow, winding and overlooked.

  Few structures of note existed in the tangled morass of stone beyond the inner walls. Only one caught his eye – the Cathedral of St Alexia, a gothic basilica with three gargoyle-encrusted spires. Its trio of spikes rose up into the clear air, casting long shadows over the houses below.

  Much further out, tiny with distance, was the outer perimeter wall. Like the inner barrier it was buttressed with defence towers and studded with fire-points. A second armoured gatehouse stood on the outer rim, as lumpen and gun-covered as the Ighala Gate.

  After that, nothing – just desiccated scrubland, dissolving slowly into rust-coloured desert. A lone road wound steadily westwards, its broken rockcrete surface marred by blown dust.

  Váltyr looked at it all carefully, taking his time.

  ‘This is no fortress,’ said Olgeir eventually.

  ‘No,’ said Váltyr. ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘You know how many troops they have here?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Thirty thousand regular Guardsmen. A few thousand armed militia. Less than a hundred Battle Sisters. A few dozen tanks and walkers. One crippled Thunderhawk. And us.’

  Váltyr nodded, chewing over the figures. All that was left of a planet’s defences after just a few months of war. Not much to boast about.

  ‘Arm the civilians?’ he suggested.

  ‘They have been armed,’ said Olgeir, in a voice that
gave away how useful he thought that would be. He leaned over the parapet, hawked and spat. The spittle flew a long way down before hitting anything. ‘I’ve seen better defended asteroids,’ he concluded.

  ‘We should strike out,’ said Váltyr, running his eyes along the horizon. ‘Blood them before they get here.’

  Olgeir grunted in agreement.

  ‘Gunnlaugur’s already planning it. The canoness is unhappy. She wants everyone behind the walls, waiting for them to get there.’

  Váltyr looked down at the inner ring of defences.

  ‘We could hold this upper level, perhaps,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The bridge is a choke point, and those walls look solid. But the outer rim… I don’t know.’

  Olgeir nodded. ‘There’s no way we can hold the perimeter. Too long, too low. But she wants to, all the same. They won’t let the cathedral fall without a fight.’

  Váltyr couldn’t blame them for that. It was their cathedral.

  ‘We’re going to need to clear some space, then,’ he said. ‘We can’t move anything through those streets.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Olgeir. ‘I’ve been planning it. They’ve got earthmovers and plenty of manpower. We need trenches, ones we can get burning. The one thing they’ll do is keep on coming. We could soak up thousands if we organise it right.’

  Váltyr didn’t say what he thought.

  It won’t be enough.

  ‘Do they have flyers?’ he asked.

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘That’s something.’

  The two of them fell into silence again. Váltyr felt himself sweating under the relentless glare of the sun. He could have put his helm on and let it regulate his temperature, but that felt like an acknowledgement of weakness. De Chatelaine had said that most of the fighting on Ras Shakeh had taken place at night, and he could see why. Even the damned would struggle to march under that unbroken heat.