Helsreach (29 page)

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.

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…

In wordless silence, he lowered the bolter again.

‘There is nothing to like in them,’ Priamus spat as he paced the prayer room. ‘They wage war to defend, to preserve. Everything in their way is devoted to maintaining what humanity already has.’

Bastilan was sharpening his combat blade, running a whetstone along the gladius’s killing edges. The small chamber was filled with Priamus’s crunching bootsteps and the
resssh, resssh
of the whetstone scraping.

‘It is flawed,’ the swordsman added. ‘I mean no offence to them as warriors. But drop-podding into the city purely to defend civilians? Madness.’

Resssh, resssh.

‘Why do you not answer, brother?’

‘I have little to say.’
Resssh, resssh.

‘Do you think ill of me for my beliefs? Bastilan, please, you know I am right.’

‘I know you are treading on unstable ground. Do not besmirch the honour of our brother Chapter. The Salamanders shed as much blood as we did this week.’

‘That is not the point.’

Resssh, resssh.
‘That is where you and I disagree, brother. But you are young. You will learn.’

Priamus didn’t bother to hide his disgusted sneer from infecting his voice. ‘Do not patronise me, old man. You know of what I speak. You are just quietened by the mounting years and too reserved to say it aloud.’

‘I am not that old,’ Bastilan laughed. The boy was annoying, but he certainly knew how to drag out a smile or two with his misguided fervour.

‘Do not laugh at me.’

‘Then stop making me laugh. What two Chapters fight the same? What two Chapters wage war according to the same principles? We are all born of different worlds and trained by different masters. Accept the differences and stand with them as allies.’

‘But they are
wrong
.’ Priamus stared at the older warrior in disbelief. How could he be so obtuse? ‘They could have landed anywhere in the city. They could have struck at one of the alien commanders. Instead, they crash down amongst us at the docks to defend the humans.’

‘That is why they came. Do not mistake their compassion for tactical idiocy.’

‘That is my point.’ Priamus resisted the rising urge to draw his blade. There was nothing to cut beyond the air before him, yet he felt a keen need to draw steel. ‘They preserve. They defend. We are Astartes, not Imperial Guard. We are the spear thrust to the throat, not the blunt anvil. We are all that remains of the Great Crusade, Bastilan. For ten thousand years, we and we alone have crusaded to bring the Emperor’s worlds into compliance. We do not fight for the people of the Imperium, we fight for the Imperium itself. We attack. We
attack
.’

Resssh, ressh.
‘Not here. Not at Helsreach.’

Priamus lowered his head, unwilling to concede the point, despite the fact he knew he was defeated. That bastard Bastilan always did this to him. A few quiet words and he’d puncture all of what Priamus was trying to say. It was far, far beyond annoying.

‘Helsreach is…’ the swordsman’s voice was lower now – less bitter, and somehow less confident. ‘Nothing about this war has felt right.’

Nerovar had also retreated from the others.