Helsreach

CHAPTER XIII The Thirty-Sixth Day

DARGRAVIAN.

The 5th day. Meritorious defence of the Torshav refuelling complex.

Gene-seed: Recovered.

FARUS.

The 7th day. Discovered in the Kurule Junction surrounded by no fewer than twelve of the slain enemy.

Gene-seed: Recovered.

THALIAR.

The 10th day. Lost in the petrochemical explosions at White Star Point.

Gene-seed: Unfound / Unrecovered.

KORITH.

The 10th day. Lost in the petrochemical explosions at White Star Point.

Gene-seed: Unfound / Unrecovered.

TORAVAN.

The 10th day. Lost in the petrochemical explosions at White Star Point.

Gene-seed: Unfound / Unrecovered.

AMARDES.

The 11th day. Unable to survive 83% body tissue immolation suffered at White Star Point. Granted the Emperor's Peace.

Gene-seed: Ruined / Unrecovered.

HALRIK.

The 13th day. Eyewitness reports from Armageddon 101st Steel Legion relate intense personal courage and heroism in the face of overwhelming odds. Awarded posthumous Crusade Mark of Valiant Conduct for rallying Guard forces at the fall of Cargo Bridge Thirty.

Gene-seed: Recovered.

ANGRAD.

The 18th day. Single-handedly destroyed five enemy tanks at the Breach of the Amalas Concourse. Brought down by alien treachery and lost beneath enemy tank treads.

Gene-seed: Ruined / Unrecovered.

VORENTHAR.

The 18th day. Fought at the Breach of the Amalas Concourse.

Gene-seed: Recovered.

ERIAS.

The 18th day. Fought at the Breach of the Amalas Concourse.

Gene-seed: Recovered.

MARKOSIAN.

The 18th day. Fought at the Breach of the Amalas Concourse. Notably slew an enemy warlord in single combat, atop the alien's command tank. Awarded posthumous Crusade Mark of Unbroken Courage. Body was incinerated by the enemy in wrathful response.

Gene-seed: Ruined / Unrecovered.

It was always going to happen.

That did not make the reality any easier to bear, or the defeat any less bitter. But preparations were in place. When it happened, the Imperials were ready.

It happened first on the eighteenth day, at the Amalas Concourse, Junction Omega-9b-34. That was its assigned identifier according to the Imperial hololithic displays.

Colonel Sarren was watching through heavy fatigue-dulled eyes as the flickering holo-images moved silently back from the location of their barricade. It was such a small thing - no more than a few marking runes blinking back a few centimetres, moving away from the point of the map marked Amalas Concourse, Junction Omega-9b-34.

Behind the flickering holo-runes was an illusory ramp, which in turn threaded into a much, much, much wider road. Sarren watched the runes falling back along this ramp, and tried to breathe in. In took four attempts, his breath catching in his throat on the first three.

'This is Colonel Sarren,' he spoke into his hand-vox. 'All units in Omega Sector, Subsector Nine. All units, prepare to retreat. Cancel assigned fallback locations, repeat: cancel withdrawal to assigned fallback locations. When the order comes, you will retreat, retreat, retreat to contingency positions.'

He ignored the storm of demands for confirmation, letting his vox-officers respond on his behalf.

'We did well,' he said to himself. 'We did damn well to keep the bastards away for this long.' Eighteen days - over half a month of siege warfare. He had every reason to colour his bitterness with that fierce core of pride.

The minutes passed in unblinking slowness. An aide came to his side, and quietly asked for his attention.

'Sir, your Baneblade stands ready.'

'Thank you, sergeant.'

She saluted and moved away. Finally, Sarren reached for his vox-mic again.

'All units in Omega Sector, Subsector Nine. Retreat, retreat, retreat. The enemy has reached Hel's Highway.'

MALATHIR.

The 19th day. Missing in action since the successful enemy siege of the Yangara Installation.

Gene-seed: Unfound / Unrecovered.

SITHREN.

The 20th day. Fell in personal combat with an enemy Dreadnought at the Danab Junction, Titan rearming site.

Gene-seed: Recovered.

THALHAIDEN.

The 21st day. Fell in personal combat with an enemy Dreadnought at the Danab Junction, Titan rearming site. Survival depended on extensive and immediate surgical augmentation. Granted the Emperor's Peace.

Gene-seed: Recovered.

DARMERE.

The 22nd day. Body discovered with massacred elements of the 68th Steel Legion at the Mu-15 barricades.

Gene-seed: Recovered.

IKARION.

The 22nd day. Body discovered with massacred elements of the 68th Steel Legion at the Mu-19 barricades.

Gene-seed: Recovered.

DEMES.

The 30th day. Missing in action since the fall of the Prospering Haven habitation sector. Significant civilian casualties recorded.

Gene-seed: Unfound / Unrecovered.

GORTHIS.

The 33 rd day. Led a counterattack after the defences at Bastion IV were overrun. Also lost in the engagement were two Warlord-class Titans of the Legio Invigilata.

Gene-seed: Recovered.

SULAGON.

The 33rd day. Missing in action since the failed defence of Bastion IV. Last sighting reported his honourable conduct in the face of overwhelming enemy numbers.

Gene-seed: Unfound / Unrecovered.

NACLIDES.

The 33rd day. Orchestrated and inspired the last stand defence at Bastion IV, seeking to hold the militia fortress until reinforcements could arrive.

Gene-seed: Recovered.

KALEB.

The 33rd day. Part of the counterattack at Bastion IV. Body suffered extreme mutilation and dismemberment at the hands of the enemy.

Gene-seed: Ruined / Unrecovered.

THOMAS.

The 33rd day. Pilot of the Thunderhawk Avenged - vehicle destroyed by gargant anti-air fire on routine patrol.

Gene-seed: Unfound / Unrecovered.

AVANDAR.

The 33rd day. Co-pilot of the Thunderhawk Avenged - vehicle destroyed by gargant anti-air fire on routine patrol.

Gene-seed: Unfound / Unrecovered.

VANRICH.

The 35th day. Lost in an action to mine the road before an enemy armour division.

Gene-seed: Recovered.

Nerovar lowers his arm, his attention drifting from his narthecium bracer-gauntlet.

Cador lies on the cracked road, the old warrior's armour broken and split.

'Brother,' I tell Nero, 'now is not the time to grieve.'

'Yes, Reclusiarch,' he says, though I know he does not hear me. Not really. With mechanical dullness, his movements are leaden as he lowers his hand to Cador's chest.

Around us, the shattered highway is deserted but for the bodies of our latest hunt. The war here is a distant thing, and though the sound of battle in other sectors reaches our ears, this far behind enemy lines, all is quiet and still. The skies are calm and untroubled - unbroken by wrathful turrets.

The sharp crack! of the reductor doing its work splits the silence. First once, then again. The meaty, wet sound of flesh being pulled open follows.

Nero lifts his arm, the surgical gauntlet's armour-piercing flesh drills buzzing, spraying dark, rich Astartes blood against his armour. In his hand, with great care, he holds the glistening purplish organs that had rested within Cador's chest and throat. They drip and quiver, as if still trying to feed their host with strength. Nero slides them into a cylinder of preserving fluids, which is in turn retracted into his gauntlet's protective housing.

I have seen him perform this ritual too many times in the past month.

'It is done,' he says, dead-voiced, rising to his feet.

He ignores me as I approach the corpse, occupying himself with entering information on his narthecium's screen.

CADOR.

The 36th day. Ambush along enemy-controlled portions of Hel's Highway.

Gene-seed: Recovered.

The thirty-sixth day.

Thirty-six days of gruelling siege. Thirty-six days of retreat, of falling back, of holding positions for as long as we are able until inevitably overwhelmed by the insane, impossible numbers arrayed against us.

The entire city smells of blood. The coppery, stinging scent of human life, and the sickening fungal reek of the foulness purged from orkish veins. Beneath the blood-scent is the stench of burning wood, melted metal, and blasted stone - a city's death in smells. At the last gathering of commanders in the shadow of Colonel Sarren's Baneblade, the Grey Warrior, it was estimated that the foe controlled forty-six per cent of the city. That was four nights ago.

Almost half of Helsreach, gone. Lost to smoke and flame in bitter, galling defeat.

I am told we lack the force to take anything back. Reinforcements are not coming from the other hives, and the majority of the Guard and militia that still fight are exhausted remnants of the regiments, forever falling back, time and again, road by road. Hold a junction for a few nights, then withdraw to the next position when it finally falls.

Truly, we are fated to die in the most uninspired crusade ever to blight the name of the Black Templars.

'Reclusiarch,' the vox calls me.

'Not now.' I kneel by Cador's defiled body, seeing the holes in his armour and flesh - some from alien gunfire, two from the ritual surgery of Nerovar's flesh-boring tools.

'Reclusiarch,' the voice comes again. The rune blinking at the edge of my retinal display signifies it as from the Grey Warrior. I suspect I am to be begged, again, to fall back to Imperial lines and help in the defence of some meaningless roadway junction.

'I am administering the rites of the fallen to a slain knight. Now is not the time, colonel.'

At first, the colonel had replied to such words with the worthless, polite insistence that he was sorry for my loss. Sarren no longer says such things. The tens of thousands of lives lost in the last four weeks have utterly numbed him to such personal sentiment. That, too, is almost admirable. I see the strength in the way he has changed.

'Reclusiarch,' Sarren's voice betrays how ruined by exhaustion he is. Were I in the room with him, I know I would feel the weariness in his bones like an aura around where he stands. 'When you return from your scouting run, your presence is required in the Forthright Five district.'

Forthright sector. The southernmost docks. 'Why?'

'We are receiving anomalous reports from the Valdez Oil Platforms. The coastal auspex readers are suffering from offshore storms, but there are no storms off the coast. We suspect something is happening at sea.'

'We will be there in an hour,' I tell him. 'What anomalies are we speaking of?'

'If I could give you specifics, Reclusiarch, I would. The auspex readers look to be suffering some kind of directed interference. We believe they're being jammed.'

'One hour, colonel.' Then, 'mount up,' I say to my brothers. It is not a short ride down the Hel's Highway, especially when it crawls with the enemy. Scouting teams are more often mounted on motorcycles now - the risk of Thunderhawks being shot down in enemy territory is too great.

'It is strange,' Nero says, cradling Cador's helm in his hands, as if the old warrior merely slept. 'I do not wish to leave him.'

'That is not Cador.' I rise from where I have been kneeling next to the body, anointing the tabard with sacred oils, before tearing it from the war plate. In better times, the tabard would be enshrined on the Eternal Crusader. In this time, here and now, I rip it from my brother's body and tie it around my bracer, carrying it with me as a token to honour him. 'Cador is gone. You are leaving nothing behind.'

'You are heartless, brother,' Nero tells me. Standing here, in this annihilated city, with the bodies of so many dead aliens around us, I almost burst out laughing. 'But even for you,' Nero continues, 'even for one who wears the Black, that is a cold thing to say.'

'I loved him as one can love any warrior that fights by your side for two hundred years, boy. The bonds that form from decade upon decade of shared allegiance and united war are not to be ignored. I will miss Cador for the few days that remain to me, before this war kills me, as well. But no, I do not grieve. There is nothing to grieve over when a life has been led in service to the Throne.'

The Apothecary hangs his head. In shame? In thought?

'I see,' he says, apropos of nothing.

'We will speak of this again, Nero. Now mount up, brothers. We ride south.'

Half of the city was a wasteland, one way or the other. Some of it burned, some of it was silent in death now that the xenos had moved onto other sectors, and some of it was simply abandoned. Habitation towers stood under Armageddon's yellow sky, lifeless and deserted. Manufactories no longer churned out weapons of war, or breathed smoke into the heavens.

Packs of orks - the jackal-like stragglers who had fallen behind the main advance - looted through the empty sectors of the city. While there was little of calculated malice in the beasts' minds, what few human civilian survivors remained were slain without mercy when they were found.

Five armoured bikes growled their way down Hel's Highway. Their sloped armour plating was as black as the war plate worn by each rider. Their engines emitted healthy, throaty roars that told of a thirst for promethium fuel. The boltguns mounted on the motorcycles were linked to belt-feeding ammunition boxes contained within the vehicles' main bulks.

Priamus throttled back, falling into formation alongside Nerovar. Neither warrior looked at the other as they rode, weaving through a shattered convoy of motionless, burned-out tank hulls spread across the dark rockcrete of the highway.

'His death,' the swordsman began, his vox-voice crackling from the distortion of the engines. 'Does it trouble you?'

'I do not wish to speak of this, Priamus.'

Priamus banked around the charred skeleton of what had once been a Chimera trooper carrier. His sword, chained to his back, rattled against his armour with the bike's vibrations.

'He did not die well.'

'I said I have no desire to speak of this, brother. Leave me be.'

'I only say this because if I were as close to him as you were, it would have grieved me, also. He died badly. An ugly, ugly death.'

'He killed several before he fell.'

'He did,' the swordsman allowed, 'but his death-wound was in the back. That would shame me beyond measure.'

'Priamus,' Nerovar's voice was ice cold and heavy with both emotion and threat. 'Leave me alone.'

'You are impossible, Nero.' Priamus revved his engine and accelerated away. 'I try to sympathise with you. I try to connect, and you rebuke me. I will remember this, brother.'

Nerovar said nothing. He just watched the road.

The Jahannam Platform.

Six hundred and nineteen workers stationed on an offshore industrial base. Its skyline was a mess of cranes and storage silos. Beneath it, only the deep of the ocean and the richness of the crude oil that could be refined into promethium.

A new shadow entered the depths.

Like a black wave under the water's surface, it drifted closer to the support struts that held the gigantic platform above the water. Lesser shadows, fish-like and sharp, spilled ahead of the main darkness like rainfall falling from a storm cloud.

The platform shuddered at first, as if shivering in the chill winds that always howled this far from shore.

And then, with majestic slowness, it began to fall. A town-sized, multi-layered platform fell into the ocean, crashing down into the water. The ships around it began, one by one, to explode. Each one, once breached, sank alongside the Jahannam Platform.

Six hundred and nineteen workers, and one thousand and twenty-one crewmembers from the ships died in the freezing waters over the course of the following three hours. The few men and women that managed to reach vox-casters shouted into their machines, little realising their voices were carrying no further.

The platform was eventually submerged except for a fleet of floating detritus. The ocean no longer teemed with potential profit, but the scrap metal of destroyed enterprise.

Helsreach heard nothing of this.

The Sheol Platform.

In a central spire, nestled between tall, stacked container silos, Technical Officer Nayra Racinov cast an annoyed look at her green screen, and the sudden fuzzy wash of distortion it was displaying for her.

'You're joking,' she said to the screen. It replied with white noise.

She thumped the thick glass with the bottom of her fist. It replied with slightly angrier white noise. Technical Officer Nayra Racinov decided not to try that again.

'My screen's just died,' she called out to the rest of the office. Looking over her shoulder, she saw that the ''rest of the office'', which usually consisted of an overweight ex-crane driver called Gruli who monitored the communications system, had gone for a mug of caffeine.

She looked back at her console. Warning lights were flickering cheerily around the confused screen. One moment, the green wash showed a chaotic burst of incoming presences on the sonar. Hundreds of them. The next, it showed a clear ocean. And the next, nothing but distortion again.

The room shuddered. The entire platform shuddered, as if in the grip of an earthquake.

Nayra swallowed, watching the screen again. The presences under the water, hundreds of them, were back once again.

She dived across the shaking room, hammering the vox-station's transmit button with the heel of her hand.

She managed to say ''Helsreach, Helsreach, come in…'' before the world dropped out from under her and the second of the Valdez Oil Platforms was brought down, with its steel bones burning, bending and screaming, into the icy sea.

The Lucifus Platform.

The largest of the three offshore installations was manned by a permanent work crew population twice the size of those at Jahannam and Sheol. While they were powerless to prevent their own destruction, they at least saw it coming.

Across the platform, sonar auspex readers were suddenly captured by the storm of distortion that had preceded the deaths of Sheol and Jahannam. Here, a fully-staffed control office reacted quicker, with a low-ranking tech-acolyte managing to restore a semblance of clarity to the screens.

Technical Officer Marvek Kolovas was on the vox-network immediately, his gravelly voice carrying directly to the mainland.

'Helsreach, this is Lucifus. Massive, repeat, massive incoming enemy fleet. At least three hundred sub-mersibles. We can't raise Sheol or Jahannam. Neither platform is responding. Helsreach? Helsreach, come in.'

'Uh…'

Kolovas blinked at the receiver in his hand. 'Helsreach?' he said again.

'Uh, this is Dock Officer Nylien. You're under attack?'

'Throne, are you deaf, you stupid bastard? There's a fleet of enemy submersibles launching all kinds of hell at our support gantries. We need rescue craft immediately. Airborne rescue craft. Lucifus Platform is going down.'

'I… I…'

'Helsreach? Helsreach? Do you hear me?'

A new voice broke over the vox-channel. 'This is Dockmaster Tomaz Maghernus. Helsreach hears and acknowledges.'

Kolovas finally let out the breath he'd been holding. Around him, the world shook as it began to end.

'Good luck, Lucifus,' the dockmaster's voiced finished, a moment before the link went dead.

'This is the situation,' Colonel Sarren began.

The Forthright Sector dockmaster's office was, putting it politely, a pit. Maghernus was not a tidy man at the best of times, and a recent divorce wasn't helping his state of cleanliness. The sizeable room was a hovel of old caffeine mugs that were growing furry mould-masses in their depths, and unfiled stacks of papers were scattered everywhere. Here and there were some of Maghernus's cast-off clothing from the nights he'd slept in his office rather than go back to his depressing bachelor hab - and before that, back to the woman he'd taken to calling The Cheating Bitch.

The Cheating Bitch was a memory now, and not a pleasant one. He found himself worrying against his will. Had she already died in the war? He wasn't sure his bitterness stretched quite far enough to wish something like that.

His dawdling thoughts were dragged back in line by the arrival of the Reclusiarch. In battered black war plate, the knight stalked into the room, sending menials and Guard officers scurrying aside.

'I was summoned.' The words blasted rough from his helm's vox-speakers.

'Reclusiarch,' Sarren nodded. The colonel's bone-tiredness bled from him in a slow drip. In his weary majesty, he moved like he was underwater. The officers gathered around the room's messy table, poring over a crinkled paper map of the city and the surrounding coast.

Room was made at the table as Grimaldus approached.

'Speak to me,' he said.

'This is the situation,' Colonel Sarren began again. 'Exactly fifty-four minutes ago, we received a distress call from the Lucifus Platform. They reported they were under attack by an overwhelming submersible fleet numbering at least three hundred enemy vessels.'

The gathered officers and dock leaders variously swore, made notes on the map, or looked to Sarren to provide an answer to this latest development.

'How long until they reach—'

'…must move the reserve garrisons—'

'…storm-trooper battalions to assemble—'

Cyria Tyro stood alongside the colonel. 'This is what the bastards were doing in the southern Dead Lands. It's why they touched down there. They were taking their landing ships to pieces and building this fleet.'

'It's worse than that,' Sarren gestured to the portable hololithic table with a control wand, zooming out from the city and showing a much wider spread of the southern coast of the Armageddon Secundus landmass.

'Tempestus Hive,' several officers muttered.

Enemy runes flickered as they drew nearer to the other coastal hive. Almost as many as those bearing down on Helsreach.

'They're dead,' Tyro said. 'Tempestus will fall, no matter what we do. A hive half our size, and with half our defences.'

'We're all dead,' a voice spoke out.

'What did you say?' Commissar Falkov sneered.

'We have done all that can be done.' The protests came from an overweight lieutenant in the uniform of the conscripted militia forces. He was calm, sanguine even, speaking with what he hoped was measured wisdom. 'Throne, three hundred enemy vessels? My men are stationed at the docks, and we know what we can do there. But the defences are as thin as… as… damn it, there are no defences there. We must evacuate the city, surely. We've done all we can.'

Commissar Falkov's dark stormcoat swished as he reached for his sidearm. He never got the chance to execute the lieutenant for cowardice. A snarling, immense blur of blackness sliced across the room. With a crash, the lieutenant was slammed back against the wall, held a metre off the ground, short legs kicking, as the Reclusiarch gripped his throat in one hand.

'Thirty-six days, you wretched worm. Thirty-six days of defiance, and thousands upon thousands of heroes lie dead. You dare speak of retreat when the day finally comes for you to spill the enemy's blood?'

The lieutenant gagged as he was strangled. Colonel Sarren, Cyria Tyro and the other officers watched in silence. No one turned away.

'Hnk. Agh. Ss.' He fought for breath that wouldn't come as he stared into the silver replica of the God-Emperor's death mask. Grimaldus leaned closer, his skulled face leering, blocking out all other sight.

'Where would you run, coward? Where would you hide that the Emperor would not see your shame and spit on your soul when your worthless life is finally at an end?'

'Pl— Please.'

'Do not shame yourself further by begging for a life you do not deserve.' Grimaldus tensed his hand, his fingers snapping closed with wet snaps. In his grip, the lieutenant went into spasms, then thumped to the floor as the knight released his grip. The Reclusiarch strode back to the table, ignoring the fallen body.

It took several seconds for conversation to resume. When it did, Falkov saluted the Reclusiarch. Grimaldus ignored it.

Maghernus tried to make sense of the lines being drawn across the map showing troop disposition, but it might as well have been in another language to him. He cleared his throat and said, above the din, 'Colonel.'

'Dockmaster.'

'What does this mean? In the simplest terms, please. All of these lines and numbers mean nothing to me.'

It was Grimaldus who answered. The knight spoke low, staring down at the map with his helm's unblinking scarlet eyes.

'Today is the thirty-sixth day of the siege,' the Templar said, 'and unless we defend the docks against the tens of thousands of enemy that will arrive in under two hours, we will lose the city by nightfall.'

Cyria Tyro nodded as she stared at the map. 'We need to evacuate the dockworkers in the most efficient manner possible, allowing for the arrival of troops.'

'No,' Maghernus said, though no one was listening.

'These avenues,' Colonel Sarren pointed out, 'are already clogged by inbound/outbound supply traffic. We will struggle to get all of the dock menials - no offence, Dockmaster - out in time. Let alone get troops in.'

'No,' Maghernus said again, louder this time. Still, no one paid him any attention.

One of the Steel Legion majors present, a storm-trooper set apart by his dark uniform and shoulder insignia, traced a finger along a central spine road leading from Hel's Highway.

'Evacuate the drones down the other paths and leave the highway route clear. That'll be enough to fill the central docks with trained bodies.'

'That still leaves almost two-thirds of the dock districts,' Sarren frowned, 'with no defence except the garrisoned militia. And the militia will suffer from the fleeing dock menials being in their way.'

'Hello?' said Maghernus.

'We can reroute the traffic through to these secondary veins,' Tyro pointed out.

'Troops would trickle in,' Sarren nodded. 'That might not be enough, but it may be the best we can ask for in the situation.'

A sound emerged, machine-like and harsh, like the engine of a Chimera troop transport choking on the wrong fuel. One by one, heads turned to Grimaldus. The sound was emitted from his helm's vocalisers. He was chuckling.

'I believe,' said the knight, 'the dockmaster has something to say.'

All heads turned to Maghernus.

'Arm us,' he said.

Colonel Sarren closed his eyes. The others watched the dockmaster, unsure if they had heard correctly. Maghernus continued, as the silence spread out, 'There are over thirty-nine thousand of us on those docks - and that's just the workers, not including the militia. If you need time, arm us. We'll give you the time.'

The storm-trooper major snorted. 'You'll be dead in an hour. All of you.'

'Maybe,' said Maghernus. 'But we were never going to win this war, were we?'

The major wasn't done, and his voice had less of a sneer now. 'Brave, but insane. If we allow the enemy to butcher the dockworker forces, the city won't be able to function for decades after this war. We're fighting to preserve our way of life, not just survive.'

'Let us focus,' Sarren opened his eyes, 'on surviving first. The fact remains that the majority of the Steel Legion cannot be moved. They are holding the city, and pulling them back from their positions will see the city fall as surely as if we leave the docks undefended. Invigilata and the militia can't hold everything.'

'There's little choice,' said Tyro. 'The dockworkers will die unsupported.'

'Arm them first,' Grimaldus said, his vox-voice heavy with finality. 'Then argue how long they have left to live.'

'Very well. Our course is clear.' Colonel Sarren cleared his throat. 'Dockmaster. I thank you.'

'We'll fight like… like… We'll fight damn hard, colonel. Just don't take too long getting the troops to back us up.'

'We have immense stockpiles of materiel in the dock districts.' The colonel nodded to Cyria Tyro. 'You heard the Reclusiarch. Arm them.'

She saluted with a grim smile, and left the table.

'We can hold,' Sarren told everyone that remained. 'After all we have done, I refuse to believe this will be the treacherous blow that breaks our back. We can hold. Major Krivus, the movement of storm-trooper squads to the docks is already under way, but I need you to take personal command of that process immediately. Grav-chute them in if you have to. Drop them from the Valkyries that remain. Every rifle counts.'

The major saluted, and moved out of the office with all the grace and speed his bulky carapace armour allowed.

'The civilians,' Tyro murmured, staring at the hololithic. Almost all of the city's reinforced shelters were situated - and sealed - within and beneath the docks district. Sixty per cent of the hive's population, crowded in civilian shelter bunkers, now no longer away from the front lines. 'We can't have that many people left in the direct line of fire.'

'No? We can't release them onto the streets.' Sarren shook his head. 'There is nowhere for them to run, and the panic would choke the byways, preventing the Steel Legion ever reaching the docks. They are as safe as they can be in their shelters.'

'The beasts will tear down those shelters,' Tyro argued.

'Yes, they will. Nothing can be done now.' Sarren would not be deterred. 'There will be no evacuation. We can't arm them in time, and we can't protect them if they leave the shelters. They will do nothing but die in the streets and clog the veins of reinforcements.'

Tyro didn't raise another objection. She knew he was right.

Sarren continued, 'I need insurgency walkers and light armour battalions riding in from the tertiary arterial roads here, here, here and here. Sentinels, my friends. Hellhounds and Sentinels. Everything we can muster.' More officers left the table.

'Reclusiarch.'

'Colonel.'

'You know what I am going to ask of you. There is only one way we will survive this assault long enough to flood the docks with tried and tested troops. I cannot order you, but I would ask it nevertheless.'

'There is no need to ask. My knights will deploy from our remaining gunships. We will stand with the civilians. We will hold the docks.'

'My thanks, Reclusiarch. Now, we are as ready as it is possible to be, given the nature of this unwelcome surprise. We are, however, placing a great deal of pressure on Invigilata and the bulk of the Imperial Guard. The city will bleed while we divert our elite infantry to the docks, and this fight… it'll take days. At best.'

'Let Invigilata hold the city,' Grimaldus said, gesturing to the map with a black gauntlet. 'Let the Steel Legion stand with them. Focus on what matters in the here and now.'

'No grand speech? I'm almost disappointed.'

'No speech.' The Templar was already stalking from the room. 'Not for you. You won't be dying this day. I save my words for those who will.'

CHAPTER XIV The Docks

They came as the sun began its downward arc in the sky.

The Helsreach docks took up almost a third of the hive's perimeter. Thousands of uninspiring warehouses and harbour office towers stood watch over an expansive bay which featured an endless number of quays and piers that stabbed out into the sloshing, filthy greyish water.

The air across the entire world might have always reeked of something faintly sulphuric, but here - at the heart of Helsreach's industry - the reek bordered on petrochemically unhealthy. It only took an hour for a person's clothes and hair to become saturated with the greasy, heavy stink of spilled oil and ammoniac seawater. Lifers, the dockworkers who spent their entire careers here, hacked up a fair share of blackness when they hawked and spat. Respiratory tumours were the second-largest cause of death among the populace, only behind industrial accidents by a small margin.

The chaos of the docks was a natural deterrent to the enemy assault, but not a true defence. The first sign of the enemy came as crews leaped from their vessels, risking a kilometre-long swim through pollution-foul waters to reach the docks. On dry land, the defenders of Helsreach watched as the hundreds of undocked tankers, lurking offshore with their volatile manifests, began to explode.

The men and women of Helsreach stood together on cargo crates, on the paved groundways, on steel piers, all eyes turned to the seas and the fleet of enemy vessels breaching the surface of the water, powering closer to the city. A horde of humanity, looking out to sea.

Maghernus was close to the front of one crowd, leading his worker gang in their filthy overalls, clutching a newly-forged lasgun to his chest. They were being handed out by Guard officers from weapon crates stored in warehouses across the dock districts. Every dock gang was treated to a short, simple talk on how a lasrifle was loaded, unloaded, set to safety and fired after aiming. Maghernus had felt his palms sweating as he collected the rifle and extra power cells, which now sat in a small sack hanging from the side of his belt. The hurried Guard sergeant had shouted his way through a quick demonstration, and now here Maghernus was, gun in hand, dry-mouthed.

'Follow your assigned leaders,' the sergeant had yelled above the noise of so many men and women gathered in one place. 'Every dock gang, and every group of fifty people, will have a storm-trooper with them. Follow that storm-trooper the way you'd follow the Emperor Himself if He descended from the sky and told you what to do with your sorry arses. He will tell you when to fight, when to run, when to hide and when to move. If you do what this trooper tells you to do, you've got a much greater chance of getting through this in one piece, and not messing up another unit's movements. If you don't listen, there's a greater chance you'll be fouling it up for everyone else, and getting your friends killed. Understood?'

General assent answered this.

'For the next few days, you're in the Imperial Guard. First rule of the Guard: Go forward. If you get lost, you go forward. You lose your way? You go forward. You fall away from your group? You go towards the enemy. That's where you'll do the most good, and that's where you'll find your friends. Understood?'

General assent answered this, too. It came with a little more reluctance.

'Right. Next groups!'

With that, Maghernus's gang and several others filed from the warehouse, making room for others to get exactly the same lecture.

Outside, dozens of Steel Legion storm-troopers in their ochre jackets and heavy, thrumming power generator backpacks were directing the flow of human traffic. Maghernus led his gang to one that waved him over. The man was slender, unshaven, scratching his forehead under the domed helmet he wore. His goggles were raised up, fastened around the helmet, and his rebreather mask was hanging slack around his neck. He had the look of someone who, if not lost, was at least not entirely sure where he was.

'Hello,' Maghernus swallowed. 'We need an assigned soldier.'

'Ah, I know this already. That is me. I am Andrej.'

'Thank you, sir.'

The storm-trooper laughed, slapping the dockmaster on the shoulder. 'That is funny ''Sir''. I may keep you after the war is done, to make me feel good, eh? I am not Sir. I am Andrej. Perhaps I will be Sir after I make sure none of you are dead. I would like that. It would be nice.'

'I…'

'Yes, it is a big pressure. I understand this. I would like a promotion, so you must all stay alive. We play for big stakes now, no? I thank you for this idea you have given me. You have made the day more fun.'

'I…'

'Come, come. No time for making friends now. We will talk much soon. Hey! All of you dock-working people, come with me, yes?'

Without waiting for an answer, Andrej began to walk through the crowds, followed by Maghernus's gang. The storm-trooper would occasionally wave at other soldiers, most of whom offered silent nods or gruff greetings. One of them, a pale beauty with black hair so thick and rich it had no business being leashed in a plain ponytail, smiled and waved back.

'Throne, who was that?' Maghernus asked as he trailed just behind Andrej. 'Your wife?'

'Ha! I wish. That is Domoska. We are squadmates. She is nice to look at, no?'

She was. Maghernus watched her leading another group through the masses. As Domoska was lost in the teeming crowds, his gaze fell on the men she was leading. Maghernus prayed he didn't look as nervous as they all did.

'It is very funny, I think. Her brother is the ugliest man I have ever seen, yet the sister is touched by fortune with great beauty. He must be very bitter, no?'

Maghernus just nodded.

'Come, come. Time is running away from us.'

That had been an hour ago. Now, they stood with Andrej, unfamiliar weapons held to their chests, pressed against quickened heartbeats. Andrej was occupying himself by picking his nose. This was something he struggled to do in gloves of thick, brown leather, but he went about the task with a curiously stately tenacity.

'Sir,' Maghernus started.

'A moment, please. Victory is almost mine.' Andrej flicked something grotesque from his fingertip. 'I can breathe again. Emperor be praised.'

'Sir, shouldn't you say something to us?' He lowered his voice, stepping closer. 'Something to inspire the men?'

Andrej frowned, absently biting his cut lip as he looked around at the other groups spread down the dock lines. 'I do not think so. No other Legionnaire is talking. I was going to wait for the Reclusiarch's speech, you know? Would you prefer me to speak now?'

'The Reclusiarch will speak?'

'Oh, yes. He is good at this. You will like it. It will happen soon, I am thinking.'

A blast of screeching feedback slashed through the air as across the docks - kilometre upon kilometre of them - every vox-tower came alive in a distorted whine.

'See?' Andrej grinned. 'I am always right. It is what I do best.'

For several seconds, the people of Helsreach heard nothing but breathing - low, heavy, threatening - over the vox-speakers.

'Sons and daughters of Hive Helsreach,' the voice boomed across the shore districts, too low and resonant to be human, flavoured by the slight crackle of vox-corruption. 'Look to the water. The water from which you draw the wealth of your city. The water that now promises nothing but death.

'For thirty-six days, the people of your world, the people of your own city, have been selling their lives to defend you. For thirty-six nights, your own mothers and fathers, your own brothers and sisters, your own sons and daughters have been fighting the enemy to ensure that half of the hive remains in human hands. They have battled, road by road, sweating and fighting and dying so you can enjoy a handful of days of freedom.

'You owe them. You owe them for the sacrifices they have made so far. You owe them for the sacrifices they will make in the days and nights yet to come.

'Here and now, you will have the chance you deserve, the chance to repay them all. More than that, you will have the chance to punish the enemy for daring to lay siege to your city, for breaking your families apart and destroying your homes.

'Watch the tides. See the scrap fleet that sails into your port, bearing a horde of howling beasts. When the sun sets at the end of this week, every single invader in those surfacing ships will no longer draw breath from the sacred air of this world. They will fall because of you. You are going to save this city.

'Fear is natural. It is human. Feel no shame for a heart that beats too fast in this moment, or fingers that tremble as you hold a weapon you have never wielded before. The only shame is in cowardice - in running and leaving others to die when everything comes down to your actions.

'You are led by Guard veterans - the best of your Steel Legions - Imperial storm-troopers. But they are not alone. The forces of Helsreach are coming. Stand and defy the enemy for long enough, and you will soon see thousands of tanks constructed in this very city grinding the invaders into dust. Help. Is. Coming. Until then, stand proud. Stand resolute.

'Remember these words, brothers and sisters. ''When death comes, the good we have done will mean nothing. We are judged in life for the evil we destroy''.

'That time of judgement is upon you. I know every man and women here feels it in their blood, in their bones.

'I am Grimaldus of the Black Templars, and this is my vow to you all. While one of us stands, these docks will never fall. If I have to kill a thousand of the enemy myself, the sun will rise once more over an unconquered city.

'Look for the black knights among you. We will be where the fighting is fiercest, at the heart of the storm. Stand with us, and we will be your salvation.' Silence descended once more.

Maghernus sighed, tension ebbing from him as his breath misted in the cool air. Andrej was adjusting the slide rack settings on his modified lasrifle. The weapon emitted a pulsing, charged hum that set the dockmaster's teeth on edge.

'That was a stern talking-to, no? Not many will run now, I am thinking.'

Maghernus nodded. It took him several moments to speak. 'What's that rifle?'

'This?' Andrej finished his ministrations, gesturing to the thick power cables feeding from the rifle's bulky stock to the humming metal power pack he wore between his shoulders. 'We call them hellguns. Like yours, only brighter and louder and hotter and meaner. And no, you cannot have one. This is mine. They are rare, and only given to people who are right all the time.'

'And what's that?'

'This is a det-pack.' He tapped the hand-sized detonator disc hanging from his belt. 'Used for sticking to tanks and making them explode into many pretty pieces. I once had many, now I have only one. When I use it, I will have none, and that will be a sad day.'

Maghernus wanted to ask if Andrej was really a storm-trooper. He settled for saying ''You are not exactly what I expected''.

'Life,' the soldier said, looking off to the side in what appeared to be distracted consideration, 'is a series of very wonderful surprises, until a final bad one.' Turning to the entire group, Andrej buckled his helmet's chin strap with a grin.

'My handsome new friends, it is soon to be time for war. So, my beautiful ladies and fine gentlemen, if you want to remain beautiful and fine, keep your heads down and your rifles up. Always aim from the cheek, with your eyes down the barrel. Do not be firing from the hip - that is the best way to feel excellent about yourself and yet hit nothing. Oh, and it will be loud and scary, no? Much panic, I think. Always wait one second before pulling your trigger, to make sure you are aiming at something you should be aiming at. Otherwise you may be shooting other people, and that is bad news for you, and worse news for them.'

The gangs of workers began to disperse across the docks, taking up positions in alleys between warehouses, behind crate stacks, around the edges of buildings and on the various floors of multi-storey hangars and work blocks facing the sea.

'Come, come.' Andrej led his group into the shadows of a loader crane, ordering them to spread out and take cover around the huge metal strut columns and cargo containers close by.

'Sir?' called one of the men.

'My name is Andrej, and I have said this many times. But yes, what is the problem?'

'My gun's jammed. I can't get the power cell back in.'

From where he crouched at the head of the group, Andrej shook his head with a melodramatic sigh. With his goggles over his eyes and the infantile grin plastered across his features, he looked like some breed of gigantic, amused fly.

'One has to wonder why you would be taking it out in the first place.'

'I was just—'

'Yes, yes. Be nice to the weapon's machine-spirit. Ask it nicely.'

The dockworker looked awkward as he turned his gaze down at the rifle. 'Please?' he said, lamely.

'Ha! Such reverence. Now click that lock switch on the other side. That is the release catch, and you need to slide it back to get the cell back in.'

The man dropped the power cell from his shaking hands, but slapped it home on the second try. 'Thank you, sir.'

'Yes, yes, I am a hero. Now, my brave friends, a siren will soon begin to sing. When it does, it means the enemy is within range of our artillery defences, which are sadly too few in number to make me smile. When I say it is time to be ready, you are all to sit up and start looking for huge and ugly beasts to shoot.'

'Yes, sir,' they chorused.

'I could become used to that, oh yes. Now, listen with both ears my wonderful fellows. Aim for the bodies. It is the biggest target, and that is what counts if you are new to this.'

'Yes, sir,' they said again.

'There is a very beautiful woman I would like to marry after this war. She will almost certainly be saying no to my proposal, but hey, we will see. If she says yes, you are all invited to my wedding, which will be in the eastern territories where the weather is much less like being pissed on by the sky every day. Also, the drinks will be free. You have my word on this. I am always truthful, this being one of my many glorious virtues.'

A few of the men smiled, despite themselves.

The siren began to wail. A banshee's keen across kilometres of docks, howling over tens of thousands of frightened Imperial souls. Muffled thumps started up in response as the Sabre-class defence platforms opened fire on the incoming fleet.

'It is time,' Andrej grinned again, 'to earn some very shiny medals.'

'For the Emperor,' one man breathed the words like a mantra, his eyes closed, 'For the Emperor.'

'Oh, no. Not for Him.' Andrej fastened his rebreather mask, but they could still hear the smile in his voice. 'He is happy on His Golden Throne, a long way from here. This is for me, and it is for you, and that is more than enough.'

The sirens began to fade, one by one, until a last lone wail sputtered out.

'Any moment now,' Andrej said, leaning up to aim over the top of the container he'd been kneeling behind. 'We will have company.'

The first vessels crashed into the docks with the noise of a storm wave breaking against the shore. With no finesse, without even slowing down, they crunched into the gangways and loading platforms, ferociously beaching themselves. Doors and portals immediately blasted open, disgorging a tide of foul alien flesh onto the docks.

The very first of the alien beasts to spill from its underwater scrap-pod was a brute, easily half again the size of its lesser brethren, bearing a trophy rack on its hunched shoulders with human skulls and Astartes helms from other wars on other worlds. It had been leading its tribe across the edges of the Imperium for decades, and in a fight with all else even, would have been more than a match for a lone Astartes.

Its face, shoulder and torso disintegrated in a ruthless volley of las-fire that sent the burning remains spinning off the edge of the docks and into the polluted water below. Less than a hundred metres away, Domoska shouted encouragement to the dockworkers she led, and ordered them to fire again. Many had missed, but more than enough had struck home. It was a pattern being repeated along the Helsreach docks now, as the first wave of xenos creatures howled and laughed their way into the city.

From his makeshift cover within the den of loosely-stacked cargo containers, Maghernus fired shot after shot, feeling the rifle in his hands growing warmer with each crack of release. He lowered himself below the lip of the crate he knelt behind, and reloaded his lasgun with inexpert fingers. The bastard thing was stuck.

'Use force,' Andrej said from his place next to the dockmaster. The storm-trooper didn't look at him, didn't even glance away from where he was aiming and firing. Another migraine-bright beam of overcharged energy spat from the soldier's hellgun. 'The slides often jam on new rifles. This is a sad truth with the rifles of our home world. Their spirits take time to wake up.'

Maghernus was amazed he could even hear the other man over the din of beaching vessels, alien roars and discharging lasguns filling the air with a scattered chorus of mechanical cracks.

'I fired a Kantrael rifle once,' Andrej was continuing, his words punctuated by slight shifts in his posture and aim as he tracked target after target, releasing round after round, it was a very keen weapon, oh yes. 'That world forges eager guns.'

Maghernus slotted the fresh power cell home and raised himself back into position. His back already ached from his first two minutes as a soldier. How the Steel Legion crouched like this for days on end and got used to battle was a mystery to him. He fired at distant figures, lumbering alien hulks that ran with almost no sense of direction or purpose, as if hunting for a scent - lost until they found it. Others in the emerging packs would race to the source of the las-fire being thrown at them, and were cut down in their headlong run. A few, clearly cunning by the standards of these creatures, remained back and loaded heavy weapons. These last beasts sent shrieking missiles into the entrenched Imperial lines, exploding stacks of cargo crates or pulverising the sides of warehouses.

Slowly but surely, with an insidious creep, the docks were being enveloped by thick smoke from the destroyed submersibles and burning buildings.

'We will have to move soon,' Andrej called over his shoulder to the others. The words proved prophetic. With a crash of metal on stone and a wave of flooding water, a submersible beached itself on the docks not thirty metres from their position. Saltwater splashed down on the crouching dockworkers. Alien growls came from the wrecked sub as its doors blasted open.

'That is far from good,' the storm-trooper scowled behind his rebreather as he slammed back into his firing position, drawing a bead on the first creature to emerge. It dropped like a puppet with its strings cut as the harsh beam lanced through its face and blew out the back of its head.

Maghernus and the others joined their fire to his. Still more beasts came spilling from the submersible. The greenskins were charging now, having sniffed out the nearby cluster of humans behind the barricade, and following the streams of laser fire.

'Sir…' one of the men stammered, his eyes wide and bloodshot. 'Sir, they're coming…'

'That is a fact I am aware of,' Andrej replied, not stopping his stream of fire for a moment.

'Sir—'

'Please shut up and keep firing, yes?'

The beasts reached the cargo containers. They reeked of blood, smoke, bitter sweat and the alien stench of fungal corruption. Bunched muscles hauled the beasts over the barricades, and the brutes roared down at the humans - no longer in cover, but hemmed in by the cargo pods.

Las-rounds sliced up, punching dozens of the scrambling beasts back. The remnants of the first wave were joined by the second, and the creatures dropped in amongst the dockworkers, scrap-pistols barking and heavy axes swinging.

'Fall back!' Andrej shouted, firing his hellgun at point-blank range, using it to slash a way through the erupting melee. 'Run!'

The dockworkers were already in a panicked flight. 'With me, you idiots!' the storm-trooper yelled, and for a wonder, it actually worked. The dockers with enough presence of mind to clutch their lasguns in the chaos moved with Andrej, adding their fire to his again.

He left a third of his team in the shelter of the containers and crane struts. Screaming dockworkers, unable to escape the invaders. Andrej sensed a momentary hesitation in those that remained with him; a handful of seconds where they ceased against all logic, some freezing rather than open fire on their dying friends, and others mesmerised in astonished fear by the sight of such slaughter.

'They're already dead!' Andrej slammed his gloved palm into the side of Maghernus's head, jolting him back into the moment. 'Fire!'

It was enough to break the spell. Las-fire opened up again, streaming into the embattled aliens.

'Fall back only when you must reload! Stand and fire until then!'

Andrej swore under his breath after he gave the order. The orks were already scrambling closer in an avalanche of green flesh, axe blades and ragged armour. Around the retreating team, the docks burned and thundered with the sounds of more submersibles beaching themselves. Andrej caught a momentary glimpse of another team of dockworkers through the smoke some distance away, breaking into flight as they were chopped to pieces by the orks in their midst.

The same was about to happen to his ragtag gang, and he swore again. He hoped Domoska was faring better.

What a stupid place to die.

Kilometres away from Helsreach, beneath the sands of the wastelands to the north-west, there was a loud and unprecedented clunk of heavy machinery.

Jurisian, Forgemaster of the Eternal Crusader, rose to his feet with a slowness born of exhaustion. Tears stood in his eyes - a rarity indeed for a being that had not wept in over twenty decades. His mind pulsed with a thundering ache, a dull and thudding heat that had nothing to do with physical weakness.

He could smell his servitors now that his senses were returning from their focusless lock on his primary task. Turning to regard them where they lay, Jurisian could smell the decay setting into their organic parts. They had been dead for weeks, starved of sustenance. He hadn't noticed. They had proven useless after the first few hours, over a month ago, their internal cognitive processors unable to keep up with the ever-evolving code. Jurisian had needed to work alone, cursing Grimaldus all the while.

Another deep clunk of grinding machinery restored his attention to the present. His joints ached - both the mechanical ones and his still-human ones - from such a period of inactivity. He had been a statue in place for four weeks, his mind alive and his body in hunched, tense stasis by the console.

He had not slept. He knew that on several occasions, as his closing, exhausted mind had drifted close to shutting down, he had almost lost grip on the code. With his thoughts moving sluggishly, the code had outpaced him just as it had done to his servitors. In these moments of panicked intensity, he had resisted by silencing sections of his mind with clinical meditation, operating at a lessened capacity, but at least he was still awake.

Jurisian stared ahead at the vast doors.

- OBERON -

That word burned itself into his core, written in towering letters, more a warning than a tomb marker.

A last resonant machine-sound signalled the grinding rollback of the final interior lock. Pressurised coolant vapour flushed into the corridor as the door's seal systems vented it. It reeked of chlorine - not poisonous, but stale from being cold-cooked for so many years while the door remained silent and still. In a ballet of rumbling, shuddering technology, the portal began to open.

'Reclusiarch,' Jurisian voxed, horrified at the dull scratchiness of his voice. 'The defences are broken. I am in.'

CHAPTER XV Balance

The chamber offered nothing at first. Nothing except a powerless darkness that was blacker than black, even to Jurisian's visor lenses. A whispered keyword cycled his vision filters through a thermal-seeking infrared, through to a crude echolocation that falsified an auspex scanner's silent chimes to detect movement. He had made these modifications himself, with the proper respect to the machine-spirit of his wargear.

It was this last sense that produced a response. A vague grey blur passed his vision, and with it, the whirring of internal mechanisms. Hinges. Cogs. Fibre muscles. The sound was as familiar to Jurisian as his own breathing, but brought with it an edge of disconcerting curiosity.

Joints. He was hearing joints.

Something was wrong. The suggestion of static interference at the edges of his vision display told a tale of interference, obfuscation, more than a darkness born from a lack of light. He was being jammed, and the manipulation was insidiously subtle.

Jurisian's bolter came up in steady hands, panning left and right in the darkness as his eye lenses continued to cycle through filters. At last, a targeting monocle slid over his right eye lens - the mechanical echo of a lizard's nictitating membrane.

Better. Not perfect, but better.

'I am Jurisian,' he said to the creature before him, as it resolved into focus. 'Master of the Forge for the Eternal Crusader, flagship of the Black Templars.'

The creature didn't answer immediately. The size of a man, it smelled of ancient machinery and sour breath.

It was likely the thing had once been human - or some part of it was organic, even if only the smallest aspect. Hunched, robed in a ruined cloak of woven fabric, misshapen lumps in its surface area suggested additional limbs or advanced modification. It remained faceless, either refusing to look up or unable to do so.

Jurisian lowered his bolter. The servo-arms extending from his back-mounted power generator still clutched a host of weaponry, aiming it at the robed being before him. He voiced his next words through his helm's vox-speakers, letting his armour's spirit twist the human language into a universal, bluntly simple machine code - a basic program for communication which he had acquired during his long years of tuition and training on Mars, home world of the Mechanicus.

'My identity is Jurisian,' the code pulsed, 'of the Astartes.'

The reply came in a burst of snarled code, the words and meanings bleeding into each other. It was akin to machine-slang evolved from the viral program that sealed the doors. This creature, whatever it was, had an accent born of hundreds of years of isolation here.

'Affirmative,' Jurisian responded in the foundation code. 'I can see you. Your interference should be aborted. It is no longer relevant.'

The creature raised itself higher, no longer lurking on all fours. It now reached Jurisian's chestplate, though it came no closer, remaining a dozen metres away. The weapons in the Forgemaster's servo-arms tracked the being's movements.

It pulsed another tangled mess of accented code.

'Affirmative,' Jurisian replied again. 'I destroyed the sealant program.'

This time, the creature's response was rendered through a more simple code. Jurisian narrowed his eyes at this development. Like the chamber's virus lock, the creature was adapting and working with new information at a faster rate than standard Mechanicus constructs.

'This is the sanctuary of Oberon.'

'I know.' The Forgemaster risked a panning glance left and right, seeking any resolution in the artificial darkness. His targeting monocle couldn't pierce the gloom more than a few metres ahead. Flickering static was beginning to crawl across his eye lenses. 'Deactivate the interference,' Jurisian raised his bolter again, 'or I will destroy you.'

Against his will, emotion coloured the code-spoken declaration. To be limited like this was an affront to his sense of honourable conduct - there was no glory or prudence in allowing oneself to be kept at an enemy's mercy.

'I am the guardian of Oberon. Your presence generates negligible threat to me.'

Jurisian tasted anger on his tongue, bitter and metallic. His finger tensed on the thick trigger of his bolter.

'Deactivate the interference. This is your final warning.' Static mottled his vision now, like a thousand insects clustering on his eye lenses. He could make out no more than the barest silhouette as the Mechanicus warden moved closer.

'Negative,' it said.

Jurisian's servo-arms, answering his mind's impulses a fraction of a second after his true limbs, had raised his axe and other weapons in a threatening display, almost akin to some feral world arachnid predator increasing its size to warn off prey.

The knight's final threat was spoken with conviction, the machine-cant laced with numerical equations indicating emphasis.

'Then die.'

Their saviour was one of the black knights.

He charged the enemy from the sky with a whining howl of protesting thrusters. Fire streaked from his flight pack as he landed in the aliens' midst, a dark blur of movement outlined in flame.

Andrej immediately scrambled back, ordering his gang into the relative cover provided by an overturned cargo loader truck.

'Do not dare cease fire,' he shouted over the sound of alien bellowing and thousands of guns crying out. He doubted any of them heard him, but they went back to firing as soon as they slid into cover.

The Templar cut left and right with his chainsword, ripping stinking green flesh from malformed orkish bones. His bolt pistol sang out in a thudding refrain, embedding fist-sized bolts in alien bodies which detonated a moment later. Andrej, who had seen Astartes fight before, did all he could to keep up his rate of fire in support of the suicidal bravery taking place. Several of his dockworker crew lowered their guns in slack-jawed, frightened awe.

Perhaps, Andrej cursed, they believed the Astartes would actually survive unaided.

'Keep firing, damn you!' the storm-trooper yelled. 'He's dying for us!'

The ferocious advantage of surprise did not last long. The greenskins turned to the deadly threat among them, laying about with their crude axes and firing their clattering pistols at close range. Several of them hit each other in their fury, while stragglers and those on the edges of the melee were punched down by las-fire from Andrej's gang.

The Templar screamed - a vox-distorted cry of wrath that went crawling across the skin of every human in earshot. His chainblade fell from his black hand, hanging loose on the thick chain that bound the blade to his forearm.

Behind the staggering warrior, one of the few remaining greenskins tore a crude spear back out from the knight's lower spine. The beast had no more than a moment to enjoy its victory: a searing lance of headache-bright energy dissolved its face and blew the contents of its skull over the dying knight's armour. Andrej recharged his weapon without even needing to look away from the melee.

The Templar regained his balance, then recovered his grip on the revving chainsword a heartbeat after. He lasted for three more savage cuts, tearing gobbets of flesh and shattered armour from the orks closest to him, before the remnants of the alien pack impaled him on their spears and bore him to the ground. His flight pack crashed to the floor, rent from his body. They aimed with brutal efficiency, ramming blades into his armour joints and using their immense strength to force him to his knees. The Templar's pistol came up one final time to hammer a bolt into the chest of the nearest beast, spraying those nearby with inhuman gore as it primed and exploded.

The last three orks were scythed down by Andrej's dock team, collapsing next to the Astartes they had slain.

The scene before them was a slice of eerie calm, the heart of a storm, while the rest of the clocks burned.

'Throne,' the storm-trooper hissed. 'Stay here, yes?'

Maghernus didn't even have time to agree before the soldier was making a break across the rockcrete platform, crouched low, moving to the downed knight's body.

'What's he doing?' asked one of the dockworkers.

Maghernus wanted to know that himself. He moved after the storm-trooper, doing his best to mimic the crouching run Andrej had just performed. Something hot and angry buzzed past his ear, like the passage of a poisonous insect. It took several seconds to realise he'd almost had his head taken off by a stray shot.

'What are you doing?' He knelt by the storm-trooper.

What he was doing seemed obvious to Andrej. His gloved fingers quested under the chin of the knight's helm, seeking some kind of catch, or lock, or release. Throne, there must be something…

'Seeing if he lives,' the soldier muttered, clearly distracted. 'Ayah! Got you.'

With a muted hiss almost drowned out by nearby gunfire, the helm's seals parted and the expressionless helmet came loose. Andrej pulled it off, handing it to Maghernus. It was about three times as heavy as the dockmaster had been expecting, and he'd been expecting it to weigh a hell of a lot.

The knight wasn't dead. His face was awash in blood, the dark fluid filming over his eyes and darkening his features as it ran from his nose and clenched teeth. Astartes blood was supposed to clot within instants, so the tales told. It wasn't happening here, and Andrej doubted that was a positive sign.

'Can't move,' the Templar growled. His voice was wet from a burbling throat. 'Spine. Hearts. Dying.'

'There is something inside you, I know,' Andrej spared a glance around, making sure they weren't in immediate danger. 'Something important inside you, that your brothers must reclaim, yes?'

'Progenoid,' the knight's breathing was as raw as a chainsword's snarl. The warrior's oversized armoured hand gripped the front of Andrej's armour. It was strengthless.

'I do not know what that is, sir knight.'

'Gene-seed,' the Templar spat blood as he forced the words through numbing lips. His eyes were lolling now, half-closed and rolling back. It was clear he was blind.

'Legacy!'

Andrej nodded to Maghernus. 'Help me move him. Do not argue. It is important that his brothers find his body. Important for their rituals.'

'Emperor…' the knight grunted, 'Emperor protects!'

With those words, the hand gripping Andrej's chest-guard went slack, thumping to rest on the heraldic cross on the warrior's own breastplate.

Their eyes met once, and the dockworker and the career soldier started dragging the dead knight.

We are dying.

We are dying, scattered across kilometres of docks, mixed in with the humans, torn from the unity of brotherhood.

'Wear your helm,' I say to Nero without looking over my shoulder at him. 'Do not let the humans see you like this.'

With tears in his eyes, our healer does as I order. The list of failing life signs is transferred from his wrist display to his retinal readouts. I hear him draw a shaking breath over the vox.

'Anastus is dead,' he says, adding another name to those that came before.

I lean forward, the racing wind clawing over the surface of my armour, sending my parchment scrolls and tabard streaming in its grip. We are several hundred metres up, making ready to drop on the beasts below. The Thunderhawk's turbines lower their growl as they throttle down.

The docks below us are already in ruin. They burn - black and grey, amber and orange - making the view from the polluted skies like staring down into the mouth of some mythical dragon. Percussive thumps signal the crash landings of more submersibles, or our own munitions stores going up in flames.

'Helsreach will fall tonight,' Bastilan says, giving voice to something we must all be thinking. I have never, in over a century of waging war at his side, heard him speak such a thing.

'And do not lie to me, Grimaldus,' he says, sharing the bulkhead's space with me. 'Save your words for the others, brother.'

I tolerate such familiarity from him.

But he is wrong.

'Not tonight,' I tell him, and he doesn't look away from the skull I wear as my face. 'I swore to the humans that the sun would rise over an unconquered city. I do not mean to break that vow. And you, brother, will help me keep it.'

Bastilan turns away at last. What closeness had been near to the surface cools fast, leaving us distant again. 'As you command,' he says.

'Make ready to jump,' I vox to the others. 'Nero. Do you stand ready?'

'What?' He lowers his narthecium, retracting surgical saws and cutting blades. I see the empty sockets for gene-seed storage withdraw and lock under smooth armour plating.

'I need you, Nero. Our brothers need you.'

'Do not lecture me, Reclusiarch. I stand ready.'

The others, Priamus especially, are taking note now. 'Cador is dead. Two-thirds of the Helsreach Crusade will not live to see the coming dawn. You will carry their legacy, my brother. Grief has its place - none of us have suffered such losses before - but if you are lost in sorrow then you will be the death of us all.'

'I said I stand ready! Why do you single me out like this? Priamus is likely to see us all dead because he cannot follow orders! Bastilan and Artarion are not half the fighters Cador was. Yet you lecture me about being the weak one, the crack in the blade?'

My pistol is aimed at his head, at the faceplate marked white as a symbol of his expertise and valuable skills.

'Bitterness is taking root within you, brother. Much longer, and it will bore through you, hollowing out your heart and soul, leaving naught but empty bones. When I tell you to focus and stand with your brothers, you respond with black words and treacherous thoughts. So I tell you again, one last time, that we need you. And you need us.'

He doesn't stare me down. When he looks away, it's not in defeat or cowardice, but in shame.

'Yes, Reclusiarch. My brothers, forgive me. My humours are unbalanced, and my mind has been adrift.'

'A mind without purpose will walk in dark places,' Artarion quotes. A human philosopher; one I don't recognise.

'It is fine, Nero,' Bastilan grunts. 'Cador was one of the Chapter's finest. I miss him, just as you do.'

'I forgive you, Nerovar,' Priamus says, and I thank him on a private vox-channel for not sounding like he is sneering for once.

The Thunderhawk slows, thrusters keeping it aloft as we make ready to jump. In the air around us, snapping explosions decorate the sky.

'Anti-air fire? Already?' Artarion asks.

Whether they've beached several submersibles with surface-to-air weapons or taken control of wall defence cannons is irrelevant. The gunship swings violently, shaking as the armour plating takes its first hit. They're firing up through the smoke, tracking the gunship through primitive methods that are apparently effective enough to work.

'Incoming missiles,' the pilot voxes to us. The Thunderhawk re-engages its forward thrust, boosting forward. 'Dozens, too close to evade. Jump now or die with me.'

Priamus goes. Artarion follows. Nero and Bastilan next, launching out of the airlock.

The pilot, Troven, is not a warrior I know well. I cannot judge his temperament the way I can with my closest brothers, except to say that he is a Templar, with all the courage, pride and resolution that honour entails.

In a human, I'd call such behaviour stubbornness.

'There is no need to die here,' I say as I enter the cockpit. I have no idea if I'm right to say such a thing, but if this hope can be forged into the truth, I will make it happen now.

'Reclusiarch?'

Troven has chosen to wrench the Thunderhawk through evasive manoeuvres, rather than disengage himself from the pilot's throne and try to leap from the gunship. Both choices, such as they are, are likely to fail. I still believe he chose wrong.

'Disengage now!' I haul him from the throne, power feeds snapping from connection ports in his armour.

He spasms with the electrical feedback of an unsafe and flawed disconnect, half of his perception and consciousness still melded with the gunship's machine-spirit. His protests are reduced to garbled, wordless grunts of pain as his armour's power supply kicks back in and the union with the gunship's systems dims.

The Thunderhawk tilts, diving from the sky on dead engines. Nausea fades as soon as it threatens, balanced by the gene-forged organs replacing my standard human eyes and ears. Troven's genetic compensators take a moment longer to adjust, ruined by the disorientation of the severed connection. I hear him grunting through his helm's vox-speakers, swallowing his bile.

This freefall will delay the missiles' impact. I hope.

In this weakened state, he's easy to drag from the cockpit to the open bulkhead. The visible sky is twisting as the gunship plummets. Mag-locked step by mag-locked step, my boots adhere to the iron floor, preventing the spiralling death-dive from hurling us around the cabin.

As I face the air-rushing portal, my targeting display overlays the spinning sky. I blink at a flashing rune of crossed blades pulsing in the centre. A propulsion gauge spills across my retinas, and the jump pack weighing my shoulders down whines into life.

'You'll kill us both,' Troven almost laughs. I spare no more than a second's thought for the two servitors operating the other flight stations.

'Brace,' is all I have time to say. The world around us dissolves into jagged metal and screaming fire.

Once the noises had faded and the air reeked of the powdery, familiar scent of bolter fire, Jurisian hauled himself back to his feet.

The immediate area around him was illuminated by flashing sparks and energy flares vented by his broken servo arm and savaged armour. The expulsions of electrical force from wounded metal were bright enough to leave violent smears across his sensitive eye lenses. Jurisian blanked the filters with a command word, restoring standard vision mode.

A moan of pain emerged from his vox-speakers as a harsh crackle. Even with no one nearby, it shamed him to voice his weakness in such a way. He would seek out the Reclusiarch and perform penance when… Well, there would be no when. This war would never be won.

Retinal displays showed in grim detail the damage to his internal biological and mechanical components. The Forgemaster spared several seconds to examine the flashing warning runes, indicating leaking vital oxygenated haemo-plasma from areas near several organs. Jurisian felt a grin steal over his face as his pain-drunk mind latched onto an altogether more human explanation.

I'm bleeding.

He barely cared. It wasn't terminal damage, neither to his living components nor his augmetic modifications. He stepped forward, crushing underfoot one of the many segmented blade-arms the warden had deployed as it launched at him only minutes before.

It lay in motionless repose, its internal power generators cycling down, descending into silence. In death, the truth was revealed with an almost melancholic clarity. The warden was no more than a shadow of what it had claimed to be.

Certainly, the creature would have been a match for most intruders - be they alien or human. But with its robe parted to show the decrepit truth it had concealed, what was once a stalwart Mechanicus tech-guardian was revealed as little more than an ancient, degrading magos, long-starved of the supplies it needed to maintain itself. Once, it had been human. And in an era after that, it had been a powerful sentinel for the Mechanicus, watching over this most precious of secrets.

Time had robbed it of a great deal.

The ancient warden had leapt at Jurisian, its limb-blades snapping into life, stabbing and cutting as they descended on flailing mechadendrites.

The knight's own servo-arms had hit back, slower, weightier, inflicting pounding and lasting damage in opposition to the scrapes and gouges inflicted by the warden. By the time the sentinel creature had severed one of the knight's machine-limbs, Jurisian's bolter was hammering shot after shot into the guardian's torso, detonating vital systems and rupturing the human organs that yet remained. Suspension fluid and chemical lubricants ran in place of blood that would no longer flow.

Piercing pain signalled the moments that the warden punctured Jurisian's ceramite armour. It still possessed enough of its attack routines to stab for his joints and armour's weak points, but just as often as it struck a gouging hit, its efforts were deflected by the customised, revered war plate that Jurisian had modified himself so long ago on the surface of Mars.

He rose after it had finally fallen. Damaged, but unashamed. Regretful, but with his conviction burning.

Already, the creature - the sentinel that had come so close to ending his life - was forgotten. The interference had cleared with its destruction.

Jurisian stared into the resolving darkness of the colossal chamber, and became the first living being in over five hundred years to see Oberon, the Ordinatus Armageddon.

'Grimaldus,' he whispered into the vox. 'It's true. It's the holy lance of the Machine-God.'

The thrusters kicked in with desperate force, arresting their insane descent. The jolt was savage - without his armour's fibre bundle musculature, Grimaldus's neck would have snapped as soon as the boosters fired to bring them both stable.

They were still falling too fast, even with the jump-pack's engines howling hot.

'Acknowledged, Jurisian,' the Reclusiarch breathed. Of all the accursed times…

Grimaldus grunted at the weight of Troven's armour. His pistol dangled on its wrist-bound chain, while he gripped the other knight's vambrace. Troven, in turn, hung in the air, holding to Grimaldus's own wrist. Their burning tabards slapped against their armour, caught in the wind.

With retinal gauges flashing scarlet, the Reclusiarch and the prone knight descended into the atmosphere of black smoke rising from the docks. Before their vision was blocked entirely, Grimaldus saw Troven reaching with his free hand, drawing the gladius sheathed to his thigh.

Interference crackled thick from the surrounding chaos, but Bastilan's vox-voice made it through the distortion, coloured by brutal eagerness.

'We saw that, Reclusiarch. Dorn's blood, we all saw it.'

'Then you are unfocussed on the battle, and will do penance for it.'

He bunched his muscles, negating thrust in the moment before thudding into the ground with bone-shaking force. The two knights skidded across the rockcrete surface of the docks, sparks spraying from their armour.

As they both regained their footing, the hulking silhouettes of alien beasts ambled through the surrounding smoke.

'For Dorn and the Emperor!' Troven cried, and brought his bolter to bear from where it hung at his side, forever bound to his armour by the ritual chains.

Grimaldus twinned his cries with Troven's, laying into the enemy.

If these docks could be saved, then by the Throne, they would be.

CHAPTER XVI A Turning Tide

A wing of fighters bolted overhead, their engines leaving smoke-smears across the darkening sky. In pursuit, alien craft rattled after them, tracer rounds spitting across the clouds in futility as they tried to hunt the Imperial fighters back to one of the city's few remaining airstrips.

Beneath the aerial chase, Helsreach burned. Avenue by avenue, alley by alley, the invaders flooded through the docks district, gaining ground with the death of every defender.

Where the fighting was fiercest, vox-contact was a broken, unreliable mess of lucky signals breaking through the interference. The Imperials fell back through the night, sector by sector, leaving thoroughfares packed with their dead. The city added new scents to its reek of sulphur and saltwater. Now, Helsreach had come to smell of blood and flame, of a hundred thousand lives ending in fire between a single sunrise and sunset. Poets from the impious ages of Old Terra had written of a punitive afterlife, a hell beneath the world's surface. Had that realm ever existed, it would have smelled like this industrial city, dying in fire on the shores of Armageddon Secundus.

In unconnected catacombs below the ground, the citizens of Helsreach remained shielded from the slaughter above. They clustered together in the darkness, listening to the erratic drumbeat of factories, workshops, tanks and munitions stores exploding. Although the walls of the subterranean shelters shook with tremors that bled down through the ground, the booms and thumps on the surface echoed down like peals of thunder. Many parents told their young children that it was just a violent storm above.

Across the embattled world, the besieged cities were visible from orbit as blackened patches scarring the planet's surface. As the planetary assault entered its second month, Armageddon's atmosphere was turning thick and sour with smoke from the burning hives.

Helsreach itself no longer resembled a city. With the docks under siege, the last pristine sectors of the hive were aflame, wreathing the city in a black pall born of burning oil refineries.

The hive's spine, Hel's Highway, was a wounded serpent winding through the city. Its skin was mottled with patches of light and dark: pale and grey where the fighting had ceased, leaving graveyards of silent tanks, and blackened where conflict still raged, pitting the armoured fist of the Steel Legion against the junk-tanks of the invading beasts.

The city walls were half-fallen, resembling some archaeological ruin. Half of the hive was surrendered, abandoned to defeat's lifeless silence. The other half, held by Imperial forces that diminished by the hour, burned in battle.

And so dawned the thirty-seventh day.

'Hey, no sleep for you.'

Andrej kicked at Maghernus's shin, jolting the dockmaster back to the waking world. 'We must move soon, I am thinking. No time for sleeping.'

Tomaz blinked the stickiness of exhaustion from his eyes. He'd not even realised he'd fallen asleep. The two of them were crouched behind a stack of crates in a warehouse with the remaining nine men of Maghernus's dock gang. He met their faces now, each in turn, barely recognising any of them. A day of war had aged them all, gifting them with sunken eyes and soot-blackened skin that brought out the lines in their middle-aged faces.

'Where are we going?' Maghernus whispered back. The storm-trooper had removed his goggles to wipe his own aching eyes. They'd not slept - they'd barely even stopped fighting - in over twenty hours.

'My captain wishes us to move west. There are civilian shelters above ground there.'

One of the men hawked and spat on the ground. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. Andrej didn't think any less of him for the fact he'd been weeping.

'West?' the man asked.

'West,' Andrej said again. 'That is my captain's order, and that is what we will do.'

'But the beasts are already there. We saw them.'

'I did not say the order was what I wished to do with my retirement years. I said it was an order, and obeying orders is what we are going to do.'

'But if the aliens are already there…' another worker piped up, snapping Andrej's patience.

'Then we will be behind enemy lines and see many dead civilians we were too late to save. Throne, you think I have good answers for you all? I do not. I have no good answers, not for you, not for anyone else. But my captain has ordered us to go there, and go there we most certainly shall. Yes? Yes.'

It did the trick. A ghost of focus returned to their slack, weary gazes.

'Let's do it, then,' Maghernus said, his knees clicking as he rose up. He was amazed he could still stand. 'Blood of the Emperor, I've never ached like this.'

'Why are you complaining, I wonder,' the storm-trooper refastened his goggles with a grin. 'You worked insane shifts on these docks. This is surely no more tiring, I think.'

'Yeah,' one of the others grunted, 'but we were getting paid then.'

With muted laughter, the team moved back out onto the docks.

Colonel Sarren's injured arm was securely fastened in a makeshift sling. What annoyed him most was the loss of his right arm to gesture with to the hololithic display, but then, that was the price to pay for foolishly leaving the Grey Warrior in hostile territory. Shrapnel in the arm was a lucky break, all things considered. The enemy sniper team had killed four of his Baneblade's command crew as they surfaced from the bowels of their tank for much-needed fresh air after countless hours breathing the rank, recycled fumes of the internal filtration scrubbers.

Another sector cleared, only to be wormed through again by bestial scavengers mere hours later.

In the low-ceilinged confines of the tank's principal command chamber, Sarren sat on his well-worn throne, letting the tension ebb from him and trying to forget the column of pain that had been a perfectly normal arm only an hour before. The sawbones, Jerth, had already recommended amputation, citing the risk of infection from dirty shrapnel and the likelihood the limb would never return to - as he put it – ''full functionality''.

Bloody surgeons. Always so keen to graft on some cheap, jury-rigged bionic that would click every time he moved a muscle and seize up because of low-grade components. Sarren was no stranger to augmetics in the Guard, and they were a far cry from the modifications afforded to the rich and decadent.

He stared at the hololithic table now, watching the docks recede from Imperial control with agonising, desperate slowness. Seeing the flickering regiment runes and location sigils, it was hard to translate the skeletal vision to the fierce fighting that was truly taking place.

More and more Steel Legion infantry units were reaching the docks, but it was like holding the sea back with a bucket. The Guardsmen being sent in did little but bolster the general retreat. Reclaiming ground was a distant fiction.

'Sir?' the vox-officer called out. Sarren looked over to him, drawn from his reverie, not realising the man had been trying to get his attention for almost a minute.

'Yes?'

'Word from orbit. The Imperial fleet is reengaging again.'

Sarren made the sign of the aquila - at least, he tried to, and ended with a grunt of pain as his bound arm flared up in pained protest. One-handed, he made a single wing of the Imperial eagle instead.

'Acknowledged. May the Emperor be with them all.'

This scarce acknowledgement made, he lapsed back into watching the deployment of his forces throughout the city. Around him, the tank's crew worked at their stations.

So the Imperial fleet was reengaging. Again.

Every few days, the same story played out. The joint Astartes and Naval fleet would break from the warp close to the planet, and hurl themselves at the ork vessels ringing the embattled world. The engagement would hold for several hours as both sides inflicted horrendous losses on the other, but the Imperials would inevitably be hurled back into a fighting retreat by the immense opposition.

Once they'd fallen back to the safety of a nearby system, they'd regroup over time, under the command of Admiral Parol and High Marshal Helbrecht, and make ready for another assault. It was blunt, and crudely effective. In a void war of such magnitude, there was little place for finesse. Sarren wasn't blind to the tactics at play - lance strikes into the heart of the enemy fleet, bleed them for all that was possible before a retreat back to safety. It was a necessary grind, a war of attrition.

It was also hardly inspiring. The hive cities were on the edge now. Without reinforcements in the coming weeks, many would fall outright. The infrequent transmissions from Tartarus, Infernus and Acheron were all increasingly grim, as were Sarren's reports of Helsreach to them.

If there was no—

'Sir?'

Sarren glanced to his left, to where the vox-officer sat at his station. The man held his headphone receivers to his ear with one hand. He looked pale.

'Emergency signal from the Serpentine in orbit. She requests immediate cessation of all anti-air weaponry in the docks district.'

Sarren sat forward in his chair. There was barely any anti-air firepower left in the docks district, but that wasn't the point.

'What did you say?'

'The Serpentine, Astartes strike cruiser, sir. She requests—'

'Throne, send the order. Send the order! Deactivate all remaining anti-air turrets in the docks district!'

Around him, the tank's crew was silent. Waiting, watching.

Sarren breathed a single word, almost fearful giving voice to it would shatter the possibility it was true. 'Reinforcements.'

One ship. The Serpentine.

Sea green and charcoal black, it dived like a dragon of myth through the enemy fleet while the rest of the Imperial warships hammered into the orkish invaders, breaking against the ring of alien cruisers surrounding the planet.

One ship broke through, running a gauntlet of enemy fire, its shields crackling into lifelessness and its hull aflame. The Serpentine hadn't come to fight. As the Astartes vessel tore through the upper atmosphere, drop-pods and Thunderhawks rained from its ironclad belly, streaming down to the world below.

Its duty complete, the Serpentine powered its way back into the fight. Its captain gritted his teeth against a screed of damage reports signalling the death of his beloved ship, but there was no shame in dying with such a vital duty done. He had acted under the orders of the highest authority - a warrior on the surface below whose deeds were already inscribed in a hundred annals of Imperial glory. That warrior had demanded this risk be taken, and that reinforcements be hurled down to the Armageddon no matter the odds facing them.

His name was Tu'Shan, Lord of the Fire-born, and the Serpentine did his will.

The Serpentine's end never came. A black shape eclipsed the fat-hulled orkish destroyers cutting the Astartes vessel to pieces. Another ship, a far greater ship, pounded the alien attackers into wreckage with overwhelming broadside fire, buying the Serpentine the precious moments it needed to escape the gauntlet it had run a second time.

As they broke clear, the Serpentine's captain breathed out a prayer, and signalled across the bridge to the master of communications.

'Send word to the Eternal Crusader,' he said. 'Give them the sincerest thanks of our Chapter.'

The response from the Eternal Crusader came back almost immediately. The grim voice of High Marshal Helbrecht echoed across the Serpentine's bridge.

'It is the Black Templars that thank you, Salamander.'

The beasts have cracked open another of the above-ground civilian shelters.

Like blood spilling from a wound, humans flood into the streets through the destroyed wall. When the choices are to die cowering, or die fleeing to a safety that may not even exist, any human can be forgiven for giving in to panic. I tell myself this as I watch them dying, and do all I can not to judge them, to hold them to the exalted standards of honour I would demand of my brothers. They're just human. My disgust is unfair, unwarranted. And yet it remains.

As they die, families and souls of all ages, they squeal like butchered swine.

This war is poisonous. Trapped here, locked away from my Chapter, my mind echoes with bleak prejudices. It is becoming hard to accept that I must die for these people to live.

'Attack,' I tell my brothers, my voice barely carrying over the ranting of the engine. Together, we run from the moving Rhino transport, smashing into the enemy's rearguard.

My crozius rises and falls, as it has risen and fallen ten thousand times in the last month. The adamantium eagle chimes as it cuts through the air. It flares with unleashed energy as its power field connects with flesh and armour. The brazier orb built into the weapon's pommel breathes sacred incense in a grey mist, like coils of smoke weaving between us all - friend and foe.

The weariness ebbs. The grudges fade. Hatred is the greatest purifier, the truest emotion overriding all others. Blood, stinking and inhuman, rains across my armour in discoloured spurts. As it marks the black cross I wear on my chest, my revulsion flares anew.

Crunch. The crozius maul ends another alien's life. Crunch. Another. My mentor, the great Mordred the Black, wielded this weapon in battle against mankind's foes for almost four centuries. It sickens me to know it may never be recovered from Helsreach. Nor our armour. Nor our gene-seed. What legacy will we leave once the last of us falls to the filthy blades of these beasts?

One of them roars into my face, spattering my visor with his unclean saliva. Less than a second later, my crozius annihilates his features, silencing whatever pathetic alien challenge I was supposed to be answering.

My secondary heart has joined the primary. I feel them thudding in concert, but not in unison. My human heart pounds like a tribal dram, fast and hot. Twinned to it in my chest, my gene-grown heart supports it in a slow, heavy thud.

They swarm over each other in their mindless fervour to claw at us. Fistfuls of scrap metal that have no right to function as weapons cough solid rounds that clang off our armour. Each shot tears more of the black paint from our war plate but sheds none of Dorn's holy blood.

At last, they recognise the threat we represent. The aliens abandon their wanton slaughter of the fleeing civilians that still spill from the shell-broken wall. The mob of beasts, flooding the street, has turned to more tempting prey. Us. Our banner falls.

Artarion's cry of pain carries across the close-range vox as a roar of distortion, but I hear his voice beneath the interference.

Priamus is with him before the rest of us can react. Throne, he can fight. His blade lunges and cuts, every gesture a killing blow.

'Get up,' he snarls at Artarion without even looking.

I crash the faceplate of my helm into the barking maw of the alien before me, shattering his jaw and the rows of shark-like teeth. As he falls back, my crozius crunches into his throat, hammering his wrecked corpse to the ground.

The banner rises again, though Artarion favours his left leg. The right is mauled, his thigh punctured by an alien spear. Curse the fact these beasts have the strength to violate Astartes war plate.

Another vox-distorted growl signifies Artarion has pulled the lance free from his leg. I have no time to witness his recovery. More beasts shriek before me - a thrashing wall of sick, jade flesh.

'We're losing this road,' Bastilan grunts, his signal marred by the sound of weapons crashing against his armour. 'We are but six, against a legion.'

'Five.' Nerovar's voice is strained as he fights with his chainblade two-handed, hewing down the beasts with none of Priamus's artistry but no less fury. 'Cador is dead.'

'Forgive me, brother,' Bastilan's voice breaks off as he fires a stream of bolter shells at point-blank range. 'A moment's lack of focus.'

Ahead, our targets - three junkyard tanks that have long since ceased to resemble their original Imperial Guard hulls - continue shelling the shelter block. These have none of the security offered by the subterranean shelters, for they are not civilian evacuation shelters at all. Each of these squat domes houses a thousand at capacity, designed to resist violent sandstorms and the tropical cyclones all too common on the equatorial coast - not sustained shelling from enemy armour. They are used now because there is nothing else to use, with the city grown far beyond its capacity to shelter all its citizens beneath the ground.

The beasts know us well. They seek to draw the city's forces into the most fevered fighting, so they hurl themselves at our defenceless civilians with sick cunning, knowing we will do all we can to defend these sites above any others.

How easy it is, to despise them.

'Gnnh,' Nerovar voxes, his voice wet and ruined by pain. I vault the falling corpse of the alien closest to me, and stand by his side - maul swinging with relentless motion - as our Apothecary struggles to rise again.

He fails. The beasts have brought him to his knees.

'Gnnnnnh. Not coming out,' he coughs. His hands clutch weakly at the axe hammered into his stomach. His gauntlets stroke without strength along the haft, gaining no grip. Blood from the sunder in his armour is painting his tabard scarlet. 'Can't do it.'

'In the name of the Emperor,' my chastisement comes forth as no more than a low growl, 'stand and fight, or we all die.'

With Nerovar wounded and prone, he becomes a lodestone for the creatures desperate to deliver the death blow to one of the Emperor's knights. They bellow and charge.

My crozius kills one. A kick to the sternum sends another staggering back long enough for me to bring the maul down on his head. A third is claimed by plasma fire, tumbling back as a blur of white-hot flame. Stinging ash, all that remains of the wretched alien, blasts back into the eyes of its bestial comrades. Too many.

Even for us, this is too many.

I have a momentary glimpse of human families fleeing in all directions down the burning streets, able to escape while the horde focuses its fury on us. Several of the civilians are cut down by sponson fire from the junk-tanks, but many more survive - even if only to run blind into the unsafe labyrinth of their dying city. Before this war, I would never have counted such a thing to be a victory.

With a cry that mixes anger and pain, Nero tears the axe blade from his abdomen. Any relief I feel is swallowed, for he has no time to rise before the beasts are on us.

'I see some knights,' Andrej said. This announcement was followed by a whispered 'Damn it,' and the humming of his hellgun powering up again.

The work gang kept their backs to the rooftop's low wall, with only Andrej peering over the edge to look down into the street. 'Everybody, load rifles and be very ready.'

'How many?' Maghernus asked. 'How many knights?'

'Four. No, five. One is injured. I also see thirty of the enemy, and three tanks that were once our Leman Russes. Now, no more talking. Everybody take aim.'

The dockworkers did as ordered, drawing beads on the melee unfolding below.

'Aim low,' Maghernus told his men, drawing a silent smile from Andrej. 'Aim for legs and torsos.' No one needed to be told to be careful with their fire and not hit the Templars.

The storm-trooper fired first, his bright lance of laser the signal for the others to join in. Lasguns bucked in increasingly sure hands, focusing lenses burning as they spat their lethal energy into the street below. The tearing laser fire punched into shoulders, legs, backs and arms, and the Imperials had managed three volleys before the beasts ripped their hungry attention from the knights and returned fire up at the men crouching on the warehouse rooftop.

'Down!' Andrej ordered the others. They obeyed, sinking back into cover. The storm-trooper hunched lower, but remained where he was. He risked another shot, and another, splitting two aliens through the skull with pinpoint fire.

Around him, around them all, the low wall edging the roof was shredding under the surviving aliens' fire, but it didn't matter. The knights were free. Andrej crouched at last, after seeing the figure of one Templar, the knight's armour more gunmetal grey than black now from battle damage, hurl aside three attackers and lay waste to them with his monstrous, crackling relic hammer.

His last act before falling back was to untrap his last det-pack, and set the timer for six seconds. With a roar of effort, Andrej hurled it down at street towards the tanks. It exploded a half-second after clanging against the lead tank's turret, decapitating the war machine in a burst of noise and fire.

The Templars could deal with the other two.

'Back!' the storm-trooper was laughing. 'Back across the roof!'

'What the hell is so funny?' one of the dockworkers, Jassel, was complaining as they ran in crouches away from the disintegrating roof edge.

'They weren't just knights,' Andrej's voice was coloured by a sincere grin. 'That was the Reclusiarch we just saved. Now, quick quick, down to the street again.'

In the calm that followed, the streets gave birth to an atmosphere that was somewhere between serene and funereal. A very different warrior greeted Maghernus this time. The towering figure was far from the regal, impassive statue that merely acknowledged his existence with a nod.

The Reclusiarch's armour still set his teeth on edge, its active hum making his eyes water if he stood too close. But Maghernus knew machines, even if he didn't know ancient artefacts of war, and he could hear the faults in the war plate now. Its once-smooth, angry purr had a waspish edge to its tone now, and intermittent clicks told of something internal no longer running at full function. The joints of the battered armour no longer snarled with tensing fibre-cable muscles - they growled, as if reluctant to move.

Five weeks. Five weeks of fighting, night and day, in the same suit of armour, with the dock assault rising as the most punishing week yet. It was a miracle the armour still functioned at all.

The tabard was ripped and stained grey-green with alien blood. The scrolls that had adorned the warrior's shoulders were gone, with only snapped chains showing they were ever held there at all. The armour itself was still impressive in its violent potential and faceless inhumanity, but where it had been blacker than black before the war, most of the blackness remaining was from scorch marks and laser burns marking the armour like bruises and claw wounds. Much of the war plate was revealed in a dull, unpolished grey now that the paint was lost to a thousand weapon chops and glancing gunshots.

Somehow, it had the inelegant presence of a rifle or tank churned out of an Armageddon factory: plain, simple, but utterly brutal.

The other Templars looked no better. The one who bore the Reclusiarch's standard now bore battle damage akin to his leader. The banner itself was a ragged ruin, little more than scraps hanging from the pole. The one with the white helm was barely able to stand, supported by two of the others. The voice that rasped from his mouth grille was a wordless, hacking cough.

And rather than humanise them, rather than reveal the warriors beneath the trappings and the knightly war gear, this damage instead stole what little personality had ever been in evidence to human eyes. How could any men, even ones shaped by genetic forges on a distant world, withstand so much punishment and survive? How could they stand before others of their own species and seem so utterly unlike them?

'Hello, Reclusiarch,' said Andrej. He carried his hell-gun, uncharged now, resting on his shoulder. He thought this made him look rakish and casual, and he was right. He looked that way to the dockworkers, at least.

Grimaldus's voice didn't growl or boom - it intoned, a low and bleak and grim drawl. It was all too easy to imagine this man back aboard a great, gothic warship, speaking a sermon to his brothers in the endless cold of void travel.

'You have the thanks of the Black Templars, storm-trooper. And you, dockworkers of Helsreach.'

'It was good timing, I think,' Andrej continued, a vague nod and the same smile showing he thought nothing of conversations with badly-wounded towering inhuman warriors surrounded by slaughtered aliens. 'But the docks, they are not looking good. I am hearing no orders anymore. So I see you, noble sirs, and I am wondering: perhaps they can give me orders.'

There was a pause, but not a silent one. The city was never silent, offering up a background chorus of gunfire rattles and the crump of distant explosions.

'All units are called to the shelter blocks. Guard, militia, Astartes. All.'

'Even without my captain's voice, we have followed that path. But there is more, sir.'

'Speak.' Grimaldus looked away now, the silver skull that served as his face glaring in the direction of a burning commerce district several streets away.

'One of your knights fell at the docks. We have hidden his body from the enemy jackals. The etchings on his armour named him as Anastus.'

The white-helmed Astartes spoke, his voice emerging like a man speaking through a mouthful of gruel.

'Anastus died… as we deployed… last night. Life signs faded fast. Warrior's death.'

Grimaldus nodded, his attention restored to the humans.

'What is your name?' the Reclusiarch asked the storm-trooper.

'Trooper Andrej, 703rd Steel Legion Storm-trooper Division, sir.'

'And yours?' he asked the next man in line, taking every name until the last, whom he recognised without needing to ask. 'Dockmaster Tomaz Maghernus,' the knight grunted, finally. 'It is good to see you on the field. Courage such as yours belongs at the vanguard.'

Maghernus's skin crawled, not with distaste but raw awkwardness. How does one reply to such a thing? To say he was honoured? To admit that every muscle in his body ached and he regretted ever volunteering for this madness?

'Thank you, Reclusiarch,' he managed.

'I will remember your names and deeds this day. All of you. Helsreach may burn, but this war is not lost. Every one of your names will be etched into the black stone pillars of the Valiant Hall aboard the Eternal Crusader.'

Andrej nodded. 'I am very honoured, Reclusiarch, as are these handsome and fine gentlemen with me. But if you could tell my captain about this, I would be even happier.'

The harsh sound emitted from the Reclusiarch's vox-speakers was somewhere between a bark and a snarl. It took Maghernus several moments to realise it had been a laugh.

'It will be done, Trooper Andrej. You have my word.'

'I am hopeful this will also impress the lady I intend to marry.'

Grimaldus wasn't sure how to reply to that. He settled for ''Yes. Good.''.

'Such optimism! But yes, I must find her first. Where do we move now, sir?'

'West. The shelters in Sulfa Commercia. The alien dogs are taunting us.' The Reclusiarch gestured with his massive hammer, the weapon's power field deactivated for now. Between warehouses and manufactories, distant domes were aflame.

'See them. Already, they burn.'

Priamus didn't look where the others did. His attention was lifted higher, to the smog-thick skies.

'What's that?' He gestured skyward, to a ball of flame trailing down. 'It can't be what it looks like.'

'It is,' Grimaldus replied, unable to look away from the sight.

'Ayah!' Andrej cheered as several similar objects appeared, blazing earthward, leading fiery contrails like comets.

'What are they?' asked Maghernus, caught off-guard by the storm-trooper's capering and the knights' reverence.

'Drop-pods,' said the Reclusiarch. His silver skull turned amber with the reflection of the burning tank hulls nearby. 'Astartes drop-pods.'

CHAPTER XVII Into the Fires of Battle, Unto the Anvil of War

The Sulfa Commercia district had been a bastion of militia reserves and a strongpoint for the docks' anti-air defences.

The few turrets that remained atop buildings, both automated and manned, fell silent. Around them, the district burned. Above them, ork fighters and bombers dropped their payloads with abandon, barely held in check even when the defence turrets were operational.

Sulfa Commercia, as a trading hub for the western docks that was always densely populated in times of peace, was home to a particularly large concentration of above-ground storm shelters, most of which were already broken by the besieging orks. The enemy advance was at a standstill in this section of the dockyards, not because of Imperial resistance, but because there was so much blood to shed, and so much to destroy. To leave the area devoid of life and in utter ruin meant the aliens had to linger here, slaying with wild joy in their feral eyes.

When writing of the siege in a personal journal some years after the war, Major Lacus of the 61st Steel Legion lamented the ''unbelievable loss of life'' that occurred with the dock breaches, citing the destruction of the Sulfa Commercia as ''among the bloodiest events in the Helsreach siege, which no man, no tank battalion, no legion of Titans could have dreamed of preventing''.

The trading concourse resembled little of its former grandeur. While warehouses were less in evidence here, the houses of the wealthy mercantile families of Helsreach burned just as well, and those citizens that had elected to remain in their homes rather than seek out the subterranean municipal shelters now fell to the same fate as the civilians trapped in the cracked-open storm shelters. The aliens descended without mercy, and no contingent of house guards, no matter how well-trained they were, were capable of defending their lords' estates against the xenos tide that swarmed the docks districts.

The most notable defence - one that captured the spirit of defiance surging throughout the hive's stunted propaganda machine - was not, as might be suspected, the one that inflicted greatest harm upon the enemy. The estate defence that did the most damage numerically-speaking was performed by the House Farwellian Constabulary, employed for seven generations by the noble Farwell bloodline. Their extended survival wasn't quite the soul-lifting story that Commissar Falkov and Colonel Sarren were seeking, as the esteemed House Farwell were, in truth, considered decadent pigs in the public eye, and its various scions were no strangers to political scandal, financial investigation, and rumours of trade double-dealing. In short, they performed so well in this district war because they had shrewdly cheated their way to immense wealth, and had a standing army of six hundred soldiers at their beck and call.

A standing army that, it was noted in Imperial records, the Farwells refused to lend to the defence of the docks or the city's militia.

This sizable force was also their bane. As words flashed through the orkish ranks that there was a nexus of defence formed at the House Farwell compound, the aliens stormed it en masse, ending the tenacious resistance - and the bloodline itself.

The most notable defence, as stated, was a far cry from this exercise in doomed selfishness. House Tarracine, with only five off-world mercenaries hired as protection, defended their modest estate through a series of guerrilla strikes and automated security traps for nineteen hours. Although their home was destroyed by the invaders, seven family members emerged unscathed in the days after the dock battle, leaving them in a relatively strong position for the rebuilding of the city, with Lord Helius Tarracine's four daughters suddenly pursued with great vigour by weakened and heirless noble bloodlines.

At shelter CC/46, one of the few shelters still intact as the second day of the dock war stretched on, annihilation was averted at the very last moment.

The first drop-pod came down with a thunderbolt's force, striking into the roadway leading to the front doors of the sanctuary dome. The ork rabble that had been clamouring in the street was thrown into disarray, and several of the beasts were incinerated in the pod's retro burst or crushed beneath its hammering weight.

The pod's sides blasted open, slamming down into descent ramps which pulverised the beasts that had recovered enough to start beating their axe blades against the green hull.

Across the docks, several more pods rained down, their arrival mirroring the destruction unleashed by the first.

With bolters raised, crashing out round after round, and flamers breathing dragon's breath in hissing gouts of chemical fire, the Salamanders joined their Templar brothers in defence of Hive Helsreach.

'We are seventy in number,' he says to me. Seven squads.

His name is V'reth, a sergeant of the Salamanders' 6th Company. Before I speak, he says something both humbling and unexpectedly respectful. 'I am honoured to fight at your side, Reclusiarch Grimaldus.'

This confession throws me, and I am not certain I keep my surprise from my voice when I reply.

'The Templars are in your debt. But tell me, brother, why you have come?'

Around us, my knights and V'reth's warriors stalk among the dead and the dying, slaying wounded orks with sword thrusts to exposed throats. The storm-trooper and his dockworkers follow suit, using the bayonets of their rifles.

V'reth disengages his helm's seals and lifts it clear. Even having served with the Salamanders before, it is difficult to look upon one of the sons of Nocturne and feel nothing at all. The gene-seed of their primarch reacts to their home world's viciously radioactive surface. The pigmentation of V'reth's skin is the same charcoal-black as every unhelmeted warrior of the Chapter I've ever seen. His eyes lack pupils and irises. Instead, V'reth stares out at the world around us through orbs of ember red, as if blood has filled his eye sockets and discoloured his eyes in the process.

His true voice is a low, aural embodiment of the igneous rock that leaves the surface of his home world dark, barren and grey. It is all too easy to see how these warriors come from a world of lava rivers and volcanic mountain ranges that turn the sky black.

'We were the last of the Salamanders in orbit. The Lord of the Fire-born called us to him, and we obeyed.'

I am familiar with the title. I have heard their Chapter Master referred to by this name many times before.

'Master Tu'Shan, may the Emperor continue to favour him, fights far from here, brother. The Salamanders bleed the enemy many leagues to the east, and the Hemlock river runs black with alien blood.'

V'reth inclines his head in a solemn nod, and his red-eyed gaze rises to take in the shelter dome at the end of this very street.

'This is so, and it gladdens me to know my brothers fight well enough to earn such words from you, Reclusiarch. The Lord of the Fire-born makes his stand with the war engines of Legios Ignatum and Invigilata.'

'So answer my question, for time is not our ally. Helsreach burns. Will you stay? Will you fight with us?'

'We will not stay. We cannot stay.'

I bite back the wrath that rises from disappointment, and the Salamander continues, 'We are the seventy warriors chosen to make planetfall here and stand with you until the docks are held. My lord and master heard of the assured civilian devastation in the fall of this city's coastal districts.'

'Few messages reach the ears of our allies elsewhere in the world. Few messages from them reach us.'

'The Salamanders were not blind to your plight, honoured Reclusiarch. Master Tu'Shan heard. We are his blade, his will, to ensure the survival of the city's most innocent souls.'

'And then you will leave.'

'And then we will leave. Our fight is along the banks of the Hemlock. Our glory is there.'

This gesture alone is enough to earn my eternal gratitude. For the first time in decades, emotion steals the words I wish to voice. This is all we needed. This is salvation.

We can hurt them now.

I remove my own helm, breathing in the first taste of Helsreach's sulphuric air in… weeks. Months.

V'reth inhales deeply, doing the same.

'This city,' he smiles, teeth white against his onyx features, 'it smells like home.'

The heated wind feels good on my skin. I offer my hand to V'reth, and he grips my wrist - an alliance between warriors.

'Thank you,' I tell him, meeting his inhuman eyes.

'If you are needed elsewhere,' V'reth matches my gaze with his own, 'then go to your duty, honoured Reclusiarch. We stand with you, for now. And together, we will not let these docks fall.'

'First, tell me of the orbital war. What news of the Crusader?'

'The deadlock remains. It grieves me to say this, but it is so. We are shattering the enemy, battle by battle, but it is like hurling fire at stone. Little is achieved against such an overwhelming foe. It will take weeks before your High Marshal dares a full assault to reclaim the heavens. He is a shrewd warrior. My brothers and I were honoured to serve with him in the fleet.'

To hear his words is like a lifeline. A connection to existence beyond the broken walls of this accursed city. I press him for more.

'What of Tempestus Hive? They suffered as we did.'

'Fallen. Lost to the enemy, its forces in retreat. The last word from any remnant of command structure was that the city was being abandoned, and its retreating survivors were making their way overland to connect with the Guard regiments serving alongside my lord and master.'

Scattered defence forces and Guard units, crossing hundreds of kilometres of wasteland. Such tenacity was to be admired.

This world will never recover, that much is clear. Fatalism may not be bred into my bones, but there is no valour in living a lie. What we do here is defiance - the selling of life as dearly as possible. We are not fighting to win, but waging war out of spite.

This Salamander, brother though he may be, has a destiny beyond this city. I relent to it.

'Coordinate the dispersal of squads with Sergeant Bastilan. Focus your efforts on the westernmost districts, where the bulk of storm shelters are to be found. Bastilan will provide you with the required vox frequencies to connect with the storm-troopers leading the civilian defences. Do not expect clarity in communications. Many of the city's vox-relay towers have fallen.'

'It will be done, Reclusiarch.'

'For the Emperor.' I release V'reth's wrist. His reply is a curious one, betraying his Chapter's unique focus. 'For the Emperor,' he says, 'and His people.'

Jurisian, Master of the Forge and knight of the Emperor, threw his head back and laughed. He had not laughed in many years, for he was not a soul given to humour. What he was seeing now however struck him as immensely funny. So he laughed, without meaning to.

The sound echoed throughout the immense chamber, resounding off metal-reinforced walls of stone and the hulking adamantium shape that stretched for fifty metres into the darkness.

The Ordinatus Armageddon. Oberon.

Jurisian's armour had been the only sound in the chamber for hours, the overlaid ceramite plating clacking and whirring as he moved around the great weapon.

He'd circled it several dozen times, staring, scanning, taking in every detail with his own eyes and his war plate's auspex sensors.

It was, without question, the most beautiful creation he had ever laid his augmetic eyes upon.

In aesthetics, perhaps it would not appeal to a poet or a painter. But that was hardly the point. In power, it would appeal to any general in the Imperium. It was a triumph of design and intent, a glorious success in mankind's quest to master a greater ability to destroy its enemies.

The great construct consisted of a strong, three-sectioned base that held up a weapons platform on gantries and struts. Atop the platform was the weapon itself. Jurisian considered each aspect of the war machine in turn, silent in its deactivation.

From the front, Oberon was as wide as two bulky Land Raider battle tanks side by side. Its length was fifty metres in total, giving it the appearance of a land train, long and segmented. Immense to say the least, it was of approximate size to a towering battle Titan lying on its back.

The war machine's base was divided into three sections - a helm segment, the drive module, with a reinforced cockpit chamber; a thorax section next, pinned under the weight of massive metal stanchions; lastly, an abdomen segment, bearing the same weight as the section before. Each of these base sections was bulked up further by side-mounted power generators, shielded behind yet more armour plating. These, Jurisian knew, were the gravitational suspensor generators. Anti-gravitational technology on such a scale was no longer heard of in the Imperium, except for the deployment of war machines of this calibre.

These generators' rarity made them the most precious thing on the entire planet, bar nothing.

The stanchions and gantries supported the colossal weapons platform, which in turn housed dozens of square metres of energy pods, fusion chambers and magnetic field generators. It was as if an industrial manufactorum had been installed on the back of a column of tanks.

These generators would, if active, supply power to the land train's weapon mount: a tower of a cannon forged of heat-shielded ceramite and joined to the forward power generators. Coolant vents ran the length of the cannon like reptilian scales. Like parasitic worms, nests of secondary power feed cables hung from the barrel, while industrial support claws held the weapon in place.

A nova cannon. A weapon used by starships to end one another across the immensity of the void. Here it was, mounted on priceless and infinitely-armoured anti-gravitational technology from a forgotten age.

'Titan-killer,' the Master of the Forge whispered.

Jurisian reverently stroked his gloved fingertips down the drive section's metallic skin, feeling the thick armour plating, the chunky rivets… down to the miniscule differences in the layers of adamantium: the tiniest variations and imperfections from its forging process hundreds of years before.

He'd withdrawn his hand, and that was when he'd laughed.

Oberon, the Death of Titans. It was real. It was here. And it was his.

He gained access to the forward command module through a ladder leading to a bulkhead that required opening manually. Once inside the powerless cockpit chamber, Jurisian spared a glance for the winches, levers and black, blank screens along the drive console. It was all new, all alien to him, but nothing he considered beyond his intuition and Mechanicus training. Another bulkhead barred his way to the second module. With the Ordinatus powered down, this one also required him to manually turn the iron wheel on its surface.

The door squealed open with the reluctance of an unused airlock. Jurisian's gaze pierced the blackness beyond with aid from his helm's vision filters. It was confined and claustrophobic, despite there being little in the module beyond armoured pods fixed to the walls that housed the power generators for the anti-grav lifters, and crew ladders leading up into the main generatorium on the platform above. Jurisian ascended, opening another two bulkheads as he rose through the support gantries.

The innards of the platform-top generatorium were familiar enough in their cluttered, industrial layout. He stood within the heart of a spaceship's weapon system, condensed to offer less range and power, but on a more manoeuvrable and manageable scale. The projectiles from this sacred cannon didn't, after all, have to travel across thousands of kilometres of open space to strike a target.

It was, bluntly speaking, the sawn-off shotgun of nova cannon technology. The notion brought a smile to Jurisian's mirthless lips.

It took a further three hours of investigation, feed-checks and generator testing to ascertain whether the Ordinatus Armageddon could be reactivated, and how such a feat could be achieved.

The result at the close of the investigations was a bittersweet one.

This weapon of war should have been crewed by dozens of specialist skitarii, magi and tech-adepts, born and raised for this purpose above all others. It should have been ritually blessed by the Lord of the Centurio Ordinatus and its newest duty inscribed upon its hull alongside the ninety-three prayers of reawakening.

Instead of the chanting and worship due to the spirit of such a war engine, the soul of Oberon awoke in silence and darkness. Its vague, reforming consciousness did not detect a gestalt host of abased Centurio Ordinatus minds supplicating themselves for its attention, but a single other soul in union with its own.

This soul was strong: ironclad and dominant. It identified itself as Jurisian.

In the drive module, his brain, spine and body armour linked via telemetry cables to the interface feeds in the princeps throne, the Master of the Forge closed his eyes. Around him, the systems flared into life. Scanners chimed as they began to see again. Overhead lights flickered and held at low illumination settings.

With a great shudder and the accompanying thrumming of power generators coming back to life, all three modules shook once, twice, and jolted hard.

In the drive section, Jurisian lurched in his seat. He hadn't jolted forward, but up.

Five metres up.

There the modules remained, cradled on a pulsing anti-grav field that distorted the ground below with something that was, and was not, a heat-shimmer.

'Activation Phase One,' the war machine's voice issued from vox-speakers around the command module.

Beneath the mechanical tone seethed a roiling, uncoiling hatred. Jurisian bowed his head in respect, but did not cease his work.

'My brothers call me to Helsreach,' he spoke into the cold control pod, expecting no answer and receiving none. 'And though that may mean nothing, I know that war calls to you.'

Through the interface connection, the spirit of Oberon growled, the sound inhuman and untranslatable.

Jurisian nodded. 'I thought so.'

Asavan Tortellius lingered over a single phrase.

He had no idea how to describe just how cold he was.

Around him, the deserted cathedral still bore more than its share of wall scars and battle damage. On a fallen block of masonry, the acolyte composed his memoirs of the Helsreach war, while the great Titan pitched slowly forward and back in the rough rhythm of walking. Occasionally, air pressure and gravity would exert themselves on his left or right side, as Stormherald rounded a corner. As he had done for years, Asavan ignored these things.

The ruined cathedral around him was altogether harder to ignore. It still appeared much as it had over thirty days ago, when the alien brutes had brought the god-machine to its knees. The statues still lay as alabaster corpses in broken, facedown repose, limbs cracked off to lie several metres distant. The walls were still decorated by gunfire holes and ugly cracks that cobwebbed outwards from impact points. The stained glass windows - his only succour from the irritation of the Shield above - were still gaping holes in the war-blackened architecture, as unpleasant to look upon as missing teeth in the smile of a saint.

Day in, day out, Asavan sat in the lonely, contemplative quiet of the cathedral, and composed what he knew full well were poorly-worded poems commemorating the coming victory in Hive Helsreach. He would destroy well over half of what he wrote, sometimes wincing as he reread the words he'd brought into being.

But of course, there was no one else to witness them. Not here.

The cathedral had stood almost empty since it had been besieged. The Templars had come, ''in purity, protecting us; in wrath, indefatigable'', Asavan had written (before deleting the cringe-worthy words forever), but they had come too late to do much more than preserve the wounded, hollow bones of Stormherald's monastery. Weeks had passed since. Weeks during which nothing had changed, nothing had been repaired.

Asavan was one of the few people still living in the cathedral. His fellows consisted mainly of servitors hardwired into the battlement turrets, slaved to the targeting and reloading systems along the walls. He saw these wretches often, because it had become his duty to keep them alive. The lobotomised, augmented once-humans were little more than limbless and slack-jawed automatons installed in life support cradles next to their turret cannons, and had no means to sustain their own existences. Several had lost their feed/waste bio connection cables with the damage taken in the siege, and even all these weeks later, the remaining magi in Stormherald's main body had not reached repairs so minor on the long list of abuses in need of correcting. Key systems took priority, and few enough Mechanicus adepts remained alive as it was. The fighting had been fierce below, as well.

So it fell to Asavan, as one of the few cathedral survivors, to spoonfeed these mindless creatures with soft protein-rich paste in order to keep them from dying, and flush their waste filters once a week.

He did this not because he was ordered to, or because he particularly cared about the continuing functionality of the handful of battlement cannons that were still unscathed. He did it because he was bored, and because he was lonely. It was the second week when he started talking to the unresponsive servitors. By the fourth, they all had names and backstories.

At first, Asavan had sought to order one of the seven medial servitors still patrolling the cathedral to perform these actions, but their programming was cripplingly limited. One was mono-tasked with walking from room to room, broom in hand, sweeping up any dust from the boots of the faithful.

Well, there were no faithful anymore. And the servitor had no broom. Asavan had known the servitor before his augmentation, as a particularly dull-witted acolyte that earned his fate for stealing coins from his lay-brothers. His punishment was to be rendered into a bionic slave, and Asavan had shed no tears at the time. Still, it was no joy to see the simple creature stagger from chamber to chamber, clacking the broken end of a brushless broomstick against the rubble-strewn ground, never getting closer to cleaning up the mess, and unable to rest until its duty was done. It refused orders to cease work, and Asavan suspected what was left of its mind had been broken at some point during the battle. An unnoticed head wound, perhaps.

Six weeks in, the servitor had collapsed in the middle of a row of broken pews, its human parts no longer able to function without rest. Asavan had done with it as he'd done with all of the slain. He and the handful of survivors threw the body overboard. A morbid curiosity (and one that he always regretted afterwards) compelled him to watch as the bodies fell fifty metres to rupture on the ground below. Asavan took no thrill or amusement from such sights, but found he could never look away. In work he quickly erased, he confessed to himself that seeing the bodies fall was a means of reminding himself he was still alive. Whatever the truth of the situation, the sights gave him nightmares. He wondered how soldiers could get used to such things, and why they would ever want to.

His main concern this past week was the cold.

With the Titan committed to battle for this prolonged engagement, the damage it had sustained in the ambush weeks ago was forever being repaired, compensated for, and re-aggravated by new war wounds sustained in the conflict. The command crew ('blessings be upon them as they lead us to triumph,' Asavan still whispered) were drawing ever-increasing maintenance attention and power from secondary systems throughout the Titan.

Minor systems went unrepaired by the adept tech-teams that were already spread thin throughout the gigantic construct and dealing with the vital systems. Some systems even went powerless as energy feeds were drained and disconnected, their thrumming fuel flooded to the plasma cells used to power the Shield and the main weapons.

A week ago, the heating systems to the cathedral had been drained to the point of no longer functioning. With typical Mechanicus efficiency, there were secondary and tertiary fallback options in the case of such a development. Unfortunately for Asavan and the few acolytes left alive up there, both the secondary and tertiary contingencies were lost. The secondary fallback had been a smaller, self-sustaining generator that fed itself from a power source reserve that was linked to nothing else, and could therefore never be drained for other purposes. The generator was now no more than scrap metal in the ruined mess that had once been the cathedral's maintenance deck.

The generator's destruction also annihilated the tertiary contingency plan, which was for four mono-tasked servitors - good for nothing else - to be activated and set to turn the generator's manual pumps by hand. Even if the generator had been fully functional, all four of the servitors were killed in the battle five weeks ago.

Asavan had gamely tried to turn the first of the hand-cranks himself, but lacking a servitor's strength meant all he achieved was a sore back. The crank never moved a centimetre.

So now, here he sat on a fallen pillar, trying to compose something to describe how bone-achingly cold he was, and how bone-achingly cold he had been for the last six days.

In place of organs, Stormherald possessed a generator core of intensely radioactive and fusion-hot plasma. Asavan found it a curious paradox that the heart of a sun was hermetically sealed and insulated many decks below him, yet here he was, on the edge of freezing to death.

These were the kinds of observations that he would write down, and then destroy in shame at daring to complain while so many innocent Imperial souls were out there in the burning city, dying moment by moment.

It was in that moment Asavan Tortellius decided he would change fate himself. He would not freeze to death on the Titan's back, in this hollow monastery. Nor would he gripe about the cold while thousands of deserving and loyal people died in their droves.

His fellow acolytes had never been kind to him regarding his intelligence, but people could say what they wished about his wits, slow or otherwise - Asavan liked to believe he always arrived at the right answer eventually. And now he had.

Yes. It was time to make a difference to the people of Helsreach.

It was time to leave the Titan.

CHAPTER XVIII Consolidation

Three more nights passed as every day had passed before them. The docks were lost at dawn on the sixth day after the submersible assault.

The defeat was unusual enough to bring the Imperial commanders together again. Around the battle-damaged hull of the Grey Warrior, Sarren gathered the leaders. In the dawn gloom, most of the Guard colonels were dead on their feet with fatigue, several showing telltale signs of combat narcotics to keep them going - a twitch here, a shiver there. Overtaxed minds and muscles could only be kept active for so long, even with stimulants.

Sarren wouldn't reprimand them for this. In times of need, men did as they must in order to hold the line.

'We've lost the docks,' he said, and his voice was as tired and scratchy as he felt. This was not news to any of the gathered officers. As the colonel outlined the details of what little remained of the dock districts, a Chimera rumbled up to park in the Grey Warrior's shadow. The crew ramp slammed down, and two people disembarked. The first was Cyria Tyro, her uniform still clean but clearly ruffled from constant wear. The second was dressed in a pilot's grey flightsuit.

'I've found him,' Tyro said, leading the pilot to the gathered commanders.

'Captain Melius reporting,' the pilot saluted Sarren. 'Commander Jenzen died two nights ago, sir.'

Third in line, after Jenzen and Barasath? They were lucky to have any flyers left.

'A pleasure, captain.'

'As you say, sir.'

Sarren nodded, returning the aquila salute with his wounded arm still aching like a jungle wildfire. A morning breeze, chilling and unwelcome, gusted across the stretch of the Hel's Highway. The Baneblade's hull blocked most of the wind, but not enough as far as Sarren was concerned. Throne, he was tired of aching all over.

'Remaining forces?'

'Three airstrips, though it looks like the Gamma Road will fall today; it's been besieged for days now. At last count, we had twenty-six Lightnings remaining. Only seven Thunderbolts. Gamma Road is already being evacuated and the fighters are landing on the Vancia Chi Avenue.'

Sarren made a grumbling noise. He still lamented the loss of Barasath and the majority of his air power, even after all this time.

'Intentions?'

'Currently, no change from Jenzen's orders. Provide air support for embattled Titan forces and armour battalions. The enemy are still showing next to no offensive capacity in the air. It's reasonable to suggest that, this far in, they've simply got nothing left.'

'Was that a barb, captain?'

Helius saluted again. 'By no means, sir.'

Sarren smiled, the indulgent grin ruined by weariness. 'If it was, it's forgiven. Barasath was right, and he sold his life at great cost to give us an edge in the air. The beasts have thrown up nothing but a handful of scrap-fighters since the siege began, and I've already noted on the campaign record - as well as Barsath's personal file - that he made the right call.'

'Yes, sir.'

'I'm sorry to hear about Jenzen. She was an asset we'll greatly miss: solid, reliable, steady.'

And she had been. Commander Carylin Jenzen, for better or worse, had been a by-the-book flyer, dependable and constant, if rather uninspired. Under her, the city's air forces had maintained a campaign of reliable defensive support for over a month. The Crone of Invigilata herself had commended Jenzen's endeavours in recent weeks.

'Sir—' Helius began.

Here it comes… Sarren thought.

'I had hoped to discuss the possibility of a more aggressive tactical pattern.'

Yes. Yes, of course you had hoped to discuss that.

'In good time. For now, the docks.'

Sarren nodded back to the gathered officers. Cyria Tyro and Captain Helius joined them, standing next to one another. Major Ryken scowled at the pilot, and Sarren resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Bloody Throne, Ryken. Now is hardly the time for schoolyard jealousy.

'We did not lose the docks,' one of the Astartes argued, his vox-voice laden with resonant calm. Colonel Sarren had not met Sergeant V'reth of the Salamanders before this morning. He knew from vox-traffic that the green-armoured warriors had deployed close to the remaining civilian shelters and their valour was directly responsible for a great many lives spared.

But it seemed his tactical outlook varied wildly from the colonel's.

'I'm not sure I understand, sir,' Sarren offered.

Vreth's armour was dented and scratched, but remained pristine in comparison to the wreckage worn by the Reclusiarch at his side. A golden-eyed helm glared down at the human officers.

'I am merely stating, Colonel Sarren, that we did not lose the docks. The enemy is beaten. The seaborne invasion was denied, for the city still stands. The invaders lie dead at the docks.'

This was and wasn't true, from the way Sarren looked at it. The disparity was the reason the colonel had called this gathering.

'Allow me to amend my appraisal. The docks are gone. As an industrial factor in Armageddon's collective output, Helsreach no longer exists. We're receiving reports now of ninety-one per cent harm to the city's refinery infrastructure, taking into account the loss of the offshore oil platforms.'

The soldiers shared uncomfortable glances. The Imperium demanded heavy tithes of materiel from Armageddon. If the other hive cities suffered as Helsreach had, the grade of Exactis Extremis would be lowered significantly. Certainly to Solutio Tertius, and perhaps to Aptus Non. If Armageddon provided nothing it would be offered little in return. The Imperium would turn away. Without the support and finances to recover after the war, the world might never recover.

'However, all is not dark. As the noble Sergeant V'reth makes clear, thanks to the tenacity of the dockworker population, our own storm-troopers, and our Astartes allies, the xenos were repelled.'

At insane cost, he decided not to add. Tens of thousands dead in four days. The city's industry reduced to a worthless husk.

'We have received further word from the Crone of Invigilata,' the colonel continued. What he had to say next almost caught in his throat. 'The most honourable Legio Invigilata has been petitioned by outside forces to leave the city.'

'She will stay.' The Reclusiarch's tone was cold even through his helm's vox-speakers. 'She swore to fight.'

'As I understand it, the Imperial advances along the length of the Hemlock River are grinding to a halt. The settlements there, protected by the Salamanders and regiments of the Cadian Shock, are now considered a higher priority than the city.' Sarren let the words resonate for a few moments. 'This is from the Old Man himself. It came over the vox an hour ago.'

Grimaldus snarled as he spoke, 'I do not care. Our mandate is to defend Helsreach.'

'Our mandate, yes. But Princeps Zarha's mandate was to deploy where she desired. Most of the Legio Invigilata is already stationed along the Hemlock and across the wastelands, alongside elements from Ignatum and Metalica.'

'She will not leave,' Grimaldus snorted. 'She is here until the end.'

Sarren felt his ire rising at the way the Reclusiarch dismissed his concerns with such blase finality. On another day, another morning, after any other week of fighting, he would have reined in his emotions better. As it was, he sighed and closed his gritty eyes.

'Enough, please, Reclusiarch. Stormherald is embattled seven kilometres down the Hel's Highway, with an enemy scrap-Titan battalion in the Rostorik Ironworks. She has given no further word of her decision.'

Grimaldus crossed his arms over his ruined heraldry. 'Tartarus Hive and the battles along the shores of the Hemlock will be won and lost without us. This war has taken everything from the city, and we are reduced to fighting like desert jackals over Helsreach's bones. The only question that matters to us is: What can we still save?'

Ryken removed his rebreather and took a deep breath. 'It may be time to consider the last fallback point.'

Sarren nodded. 'That's why we're here. We stand in the heart of a dying city, and the time has come to decide where we will make our final stand. What of the… weapon, Reclusiarch?'

'A fool's hope. The Master of the Forge is a single soul. Without Mechanicus support, Jurisian has been able to do nothing more than activate Oberon's core systems. He can certainly not crew it alone. As of four nights ago, the Ordinatus has locomotion, and on his own the Forge-master is able to fire the Oberon Cannon once every twenty-two minutes. But that is all. It cannot be defended by a lone pilot. It is worthless in battle.'

The colonel's ire rose again. 'You waited four days to tell me of this? That the Ordinatus has power once more?'

'I have not waited. I filed coded confirmation across the command network the same night I learned Oberon was operational. Yet as I said, it is almost worthless to us.'

'Is your Forgemaster bringing the weapon to the city?'

'Of course.'

'Has the Mechanicus been informed we are defiling their weapon and dragging it into a warzone, almost certain to lose it in its first engagement against the enemy?'

'Of course not. Are you insane, human? The best weapons are those that remain secret until wielded. This truth would force Invigilata to act against us, or to leave the city.'

'You are not the commander of this city. You surrendered that honour to me. This is information I have been eagerly awaiting, only to find it denied to me because of broken vox-traffic?'

The silver skull breathed out a mechanical growl.

'I was knee-deep in alien dead at the docks, Sarren, selling the lives of my brothers to ensure the people of your home world lived to see another sunrise. You are tired. I understand the limitations of the human form, and you have my sympathies for them. But remember to whom you are speaking.'

Sarren bit back his disappointment. It wasn't supposed to be like this, yet with the Astartes, it always was. Compliant and valuable one moment, superior and distant the next, shaped as much by their fierce independence as they were by their loyalty to the Imperium.

It felt… petty. That was the only word that encapsulated it in the colonel's mind. An awkward divide between humans fighting for their home, and once-humans fighting for intangible ideals and heroic codes of conduct.

'Well…' Sarren began, but knew he had nowhere to go with the words.

'I am not to blame for your malfunctioning vox. It is a plague upon the city's defence, and a burden we must bear. I was not about to abandon the docks to deliver the news into your ears like some enslaved courier, nor would I entrust such a development to any other soul. If the Mechanicus learns of this, we lose Invigilata.'

'None of us had much hope pinned on the Ordinatus,' Ryken said, seeking to defuse the tension. 'It was the longest of long shots, any way you slice it.'

'Have you tried the Mechanicus forces again?' Cyria Tyro asked. Her tone didn't hide the fact she still pinned a great deal of hope on the weapon, despite what Ryken had just said.

'Of course.' The Reclusiarch gestured west along the Hel's Highway, in the direction of Stormherald fighting out of sight in the Ironworks. 'Zarha refused as she refused before. It is blasphemy to do what we have done.'

'Still no word from Mechanicus royalty,' Sarren put in. 'Wherever this arch-priest of theirs is, he's not responding to any of our astropathic pleas.'

He spat onto the broken roadway beneath his feet. Indeed, whoever this Lord of the Centurio Ordinatus was, his arrival in the Armageddon system would be far too late to make a difference to Helsreach.

'At least the weapon may yet be put to use in the defence of other cities,' the colonel forced a chuckle. 'We stand on the very edge now. The fallback plan is, however, not something I wish to consider anymore. There are few enough surviving Imperial forces left in the city. Let us not gather together for the last days of our lives and offer an easy target.'

'So it's over,' one of the captains said.

'No,' Grimaldus answered. 'But we must keep the enemy locked in the city as long as we can. Each day we survive increases the chances of reinforcement from the Ash Wastes. Each day we hold out costs the enemy more blood, and keeps them here in Helsreach, where they cannot add their axes to the beasts besieging the other cities.'

Ryken scratched at his collar, soothing an itching scar he'd earned the week before. 'Uh. Sir?' he said to Sarren. 'Major?'

Ryken let his expression of disbelief do the talking. Sarren rubbed grit from his eyes with dirty fingertips as he answered. 'I have studied the hololithic projections in the wake of the dock siege. I have managed, blessings upon the Emperor, to actually maintain a conversation over the vox with Commissar Yarrick that lasted for more than ten seconds, and offered more productivity than merely listening to the crackle of static for once. We are following a pattern being used in several of the other hive cities. The Steel Legion will disperse throughout the city, centring at population centres that remain untouched.'

'What about the highway?'

'The enemy already claims most of it, Captain Helius. Let them have the rest. As of this morning, we are no longer fighting to preserve the city. We are fighting to save every life that can be saved. The city is dead, but over half of its people are not.'

The captain scowled, rendering his handsome face immediately unattractive. Unreliable friends borrowed a great deal of money with expressions like that.

'None of our remaining airstrips are anywhere near civilian population centres. Forgive me for pointing it out, colonel, but that was the very point of setting them up where we did. To hide them.'

'You did well. And I'm certain you will hold off the enemy for an admirable space of time before you are overrun. Just like the rest of us.'

'We need to be defended!'

'No. You would like to be defended. You do not wish to die. None of us do, captain. But I command the Steel Legion, and the Steel Legion marches in defence of the hive's people now. I cannot spare regiments of men just to continue covering the air squadron's inexorable dance across the city. The plain truth is that there are no longer enough of you to be worth defending. Hide when you must, and fight when you can. If Invigilata stands with us, fly in support of them. If Invigilata leaves, then fly in support of the 121st Armoured Division, who will be based at the Kolav Residentia District, defending the entrances to the subterranean bunkers. Those are your orders.'

The captain's salute was reluctant. 'Understood, sir.'

'The coming weeks will go into Imperial records as the ''hundred bastions of light''. We no longer have the forces required to defend large swathes of territory. So we will fall back to the cores - the most vital points - and die before we ever give another metre of ground. The Jaega District, with its storm shelters. The Temple of the Emperor Ascendant, at the heart of the Ecclesiarchal sector. The Azal Spaceport in the Dis industrial sector. The Purgatori Refinery, that blessedly still stands on the docks. A list of primary and secondary defence points is being circulated over the vox-network and via hundreds of courier teams throughout the city.'

The colonel turned to the hulking figures of the Astartes. 'Sergeant V'reth, the people of Helsreach and Armageddon offer their thanks to you and your brothers for the assistance. You'll quit the city today?'

'The Lord of the Fire-born calls.'

'Quite so, quite so. I offer my personal thanks. Without your arrival, many more would have lost their lives.'

V'reth made the sign of the aquila, his green gauntlets forming the familiar shape to mirror the bronze eagle on his chest.

'You are fighting with ferocity unmatched, Steel Legionnaire. The Emperor sees all and knows all. He sees your sacrifices and your courage in this war, and you are earning your place in the Imperium's legends. It was an honour to fight at your side, on the streets of your city.'

Sarren glanced between the two Astartes - the warrior and the knight. He could not doubt the valour of the Templars in past weeks, but Throne, if only he'd had the Salamanders here. They were everything the Templars were not: communicative, supportive, reliable…

He found himself offering his hand. A moment's tension followed the gesture, as the towering warrior remained unmoving. Then, with care, the Salamander held the colonel's small, human hand in a shake. The joints of the sergeant's power armour hummed with the minor movement.

'The honour was ours, V'reth. Hunt well in the wastelands, and give my thanks to your lord.'

The Reclusiarch watched this in silence. No one knew what expression was masked by his relic helm.

Once the discussion is done, I walk from the gathered humans. V'reth remains with me, shadowing my movements. Away from the pitted and cracked hull of Sarren's Baneblade, I slow in my stride to allow him to catch up. Does V'reth not have his own orders to obey? Does the Hemlock not call? Curious that he chooses to remain.

'What do you want, Salamander?'

As we walk along the Hel's Highway, I cannot help but stare at the city below. The platformed road rises above the habitation blocks here, once allowing traffic to rattle through the heart of the city between the spires of its tall residential towers. Now it remains aloft - a rockcrete wave riding above urban devastation. The buildings here are flattened, reduced to rubble by the enemy's scrap-Titans and shelling from our own forces.

Across the city, the Highway has come down in several places. Fortunate that it has not done so here, as well.

'To speak, if you are willing, Reclusiarch.'

'I would be honoured,' I tell him, but this is a lie. We have spent a week fighting together, side by side, and although his presence was invaluable, his warriors are not knights. Too often, they fell back to guard civilian shelters rather than press the attack and prevent the enemy from escaping. Too often they withstood repeated assaults rather than strike first and eliminate any need of further retaliation.

Priamus loathes them, but I do not. Their ways are not our ways. It is not cowardice that drives them to these tactics, but rather tradition. Yet still, their valour is as alien to me as the disgusting savagery of the orks.

It is difficult to hold my tongue. I wish him to leave before honesty stains the deeds we have achieved together, and before truth spoken too brutally threatens the alliance between our respective Chapters.

'My brothers and I came to this city without the illuminating guidance of our Chaplain. We would offer reverent thanks if you would lead us in prayer before we quit the city and rejoin our Chapter by the shores of the Hemlock.'

'I know little of your Chapter's cult and creed, Salamander.'

'We know this, Reclusiarch. Still, we would offer sincere thanks.'

It is a magnificent and bold gesture, and I know it honours me far more than it would honour them if I agreed. To lead brothers from another Chapter in prayer is beyond merely rare. It is almost unheard of. In my life, I can recall only one such instance, and that was with our gene-brothers and fellow sons of Dorn, the Crimson Fists, when the Declates system burned.

'Think of the battle last night,' I tell him. 'Think of the rooftop battle in the Nergal district. There was one moment in the chaos that still preys upon my mind. It casts a shadow over us now, like an enemy's spear threatening to fall.'

He hesitates. This is clearly not the way he thought his request would be answered. 'What aspect of the battle troubles you, Reclusiarch?'

A fine question.

The beast falls from my hands, its skull broken, to die at my feet.

I hear the burning hiss of Priamus's blade tearing through alien flesh. I hear the strained snarls of meat-clogged chainblades. I hear the yelling of panicked humans as they cower in the storm shelter, their fear reaching my senses through the armour plated walls.

Another creature snarls in my face, spitting thick saliva over my faceplate. It dies as Artarion's bolter kicks once from a few metres away, shearing its malformed head off in a burst of gore.

'Focus,' he grunts over the vox.

I return the favour a moment later, my maul pounding into a beast that sought to leap at him from behind.

The battle is close, down to pistols, blades and the crashing beat of fists into faces. In the centre of the expansive plaza, the thickly-armoured storm shelter endures siege from close to two hundred of the enemy.

Footing is treacherous. Our boots are stamping down on pools of cooling blood and the bodies of dead dockworkers. The Salamanders are…

Curse them all…

Priamus blocked a cut from the closest ork, the beast's chopping sword deflected with a shower of sparks from the brief blade contact.

He killed it with the riposte - an ugly strike he felt no pride for, slipping past the creature's non-existent guard and ramming the blade's point into the beast's exposed neck.

The brute's axe slammed with clanging force against the side of his helm. His vision receptors showed angry static for two seconds.

Not deep enough. The swordsman yanked back with the blade, and on the second plunge he hilted it in the ork's collarbone. The beast collapsed in a heap of dead limbs.

Priamus resisted the urge to laugh.

The next ork to leap at him came with two of its brothers. The first fell to Priamus's blade lashing out to carve through its torso, the energised blade going through meat and bone like soft clay. The second and third would have had a fair chance at overpowering him, had they not been battered to the ground by a sweep of the Reclusiarch's maul.

'Where are the Salamanders?' he voxed, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

'They're holding.'

'They're what?'

Bostilan's fist vibrated with the crashing judder of his bolter. Streaks of alien blood painted his battered armour yet again.

Recriminations spilled out over the vox. The Salamanders weren't advancing with the Templars. The Templars were pushing ahead too far, too fast.

'Follow us, in the name of the Throne!' Bastilan added his voice to the vox-chatter.

'Fall back,' came the staid voice of Sergeant V'reth. 'Fall back to the eastern platform and be ready to engage the second wave.'

'Advance! If we strike now, there will be no second wave. We're at the warlord's throat!'

'Salamanders! V'reth spoke calmly, 'Hold and be ready. Cut down any stragglers that seek to breach the shelter!

Bastilan kicked a hunched alien in the chest, breaking whatever passed for its rib structure. In the moment's respite, he ejected his spent bolt magazine and slammed a fresh one home.

They were advancing unsupported, away from the shelter, in pursuit of the fleeing orks. Ahead, through the crowd of panicking beasts, Bastilan could see the armoured warlord of this wretched tribe, its staggering gait made all the more pronounced by the ablative armour plating that seemed surgically bolted to its nerveless flesh.

Bolts slashed after the retreating warleader, roaring from the muzzles of Templars fighting their way through a bestial and ferocious rearguard. Several shells detonated against the creature's armour, while others smacked into the backs and shoulders of fleeing orks around their commander.

'He's getting away,' Bastilan grunted. The words shamed him even to speak them.

'Fall back,' came the Reclusiarch's growl.

'Sir,' Bastilan began, coupled with Priamus's decidedly more annoyed 'No!'

'Fall back. This is not worth dying over. We do not have the numbers to spill the warlord's blood now!'

V'reth, to his credit, nods.

'I see. You consider this a stain on your personal honour.'

He does not see. 'No, brother. I consider it a waste of time, ammunition, and life. Two of your own squad were killed in the successive waves that followed. Brother Kaedus and Brother Madoc from my own force were slain. If we had pursued in unity, we could have broken through to the enemy leader and taken his head. The rest of the beasts would have scattered, and the bulk could easily have been purged by kill-teams in the aftermath.'

'It is tactically unsound, Reclusiarch. Pursuit would have left the shelter undefended and vulnerable to regrouping waves attacking from other sectors. Three thousand lives were saved by our defiance last night.'

'There were no attacks from other sectors.'

'There may have been, had we pursued. And there was still no guarantee we would have overpowered the rearguard quickly enough to reach the warlord.'

'We weathered six further assaults, wasted seven hours, lost four warriors, and expended a hoard of ammunition that my knights can ill-afford to throw away.'

'That is one way of seeing the final cost. I see it more simply: we won.'

'I am finished with this… debate, Salamander.' Again, I recall the grinding cut of Nero's medicae-saw, and the puncturing retrieval of cutting tools extracting glistening gene-seed organs from the chests of the slain.

'It grieves me to hear you speak this way, Reclusiarch.'

Listen to him. So patient. So calm.

So blind.

'Get out of my city.'

CHAPTER XIX Fate

The giant stood above its worshippers in silence.

Its skin and bones were harvested from crashed and salvaged ships, each column, gear, pylon, girder and plate of armour that went into its birth stolen from something else. Although the giant was not alive, living creatures served it in place of blood and organs. They clambered through the god's form, insulated by the armour, hanging from the metal bones, moving like the blood cells in sluggish arteries.

The giant had taken over two thousand labourers over a month to build. It had finally awoken outside the walls of Hive Stygia three days before, to great roars of praise from its devoted faithful.

And then, in its first hours of life, it had wiped the hive city from the face of the planet. Stygia was a modest industrial city, defended by the Steel Legion and its own militia with little in the way of Astartes or Mechanicus support. From the moment the giant awoke to the moment the last vestiges of organised Imperial resistance was crushed, the city lasted a total of five hours and thirty-two minutes.

And now, the giant stood silent, idle, making ready for its journey south.

Its face was piggish and round-eyed, all jagged jaw and red-iron tusks. Behind the broken windows that served as its eyes, hunched crewmembers moved in loping gaits, attending to their bestial imitations of Imperial Titan command.

The giant's name, splattered across its ugly, fat-bellied hull in crude alien hieroglyphs, was Godbreaker.

With a slow tread that shook the earth around it, Godbreaker began to move south, toward the coast.

Toward Helsreach.

If it could remain mobile without breaking down - a difficult feat given the skills of its creators - it would arrive by dawn the following day.

In a fateful sense of opposed unity with the Godbreaker, another powerful war machine drew nearer to Helsreach. Its journey was a far longer one, and its progress was a melancholy fraction of what it might have been in a better age.

Waves of ashy soil blew aside in the land train's wake, as its gravity suppression field exerted its influence on the ground below the rattling, serpentine vehicle. Jurisian felt its resistance in every touch upon its controls. The soul of the machine was rising from its slumber now, finding itself disrespected and on the edge of lashing out at the living being responsible.

'Reclusiarch,' he spoke into the vox again, once more receiving no answer.

Oberon'sexistence in his mind was akin to a beast alone in the woods. Jurisian could keep it at bay as long as he focussed on its presence, just as a traveller could face down a wolf in the wild if he kept watch for the beast and carried a torch of flame to ward it away. It was a game of focus, and despite his weariness, the Master of the Forge possessed focus in abundance. He was a conscientious and patient soul, devoted to each of his tasks like a predator hunting prey. This demeanour and dedication, coupled with his ability and deeds of honour, had seen him promoted to his rank aboard the Eternal Crusader nineteen years before.

Jurisian had been present at Grimaldus's induction into the inner circle, and though it shamed him to admit it now - even silently, even only to himself and the lurking soul of the war machine - he had cast his vote against the Chaplain ascending to Mordred's role as Reclusiarch.

'He is not ready,' Jurisian had said, adding his voice to Champion Bayard's. 'He is a master of small engagements, and a warrior beyond peer. But he is a not a leader of the Chapter.'

'The Forgemaster speaks the truth, High Marshal,' Bayard had added. 'Grimaldus is flawed by hesitation. A second's delay in all he does, and it is no secret why. He holds himself to his master's standards. Doubt clings to him, darkening his place in the Chapter.'

'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 swarms, 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.

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. But apparently not far enough.

'Brother,' came a voice. Grimaldus had returned. Nero acknowledged him with a nod, and returned to his feigned examination of the blistered and burned mural on the temple wall. Scenes of the Emperor watching over Helsreach: a golden god with His radiant visage regarding scenes of great industry below. With the wall ruined by flame and the artwork charred, it now resembled the city outside more than it ever had.

'How was the command meeting?'

'A tedious discussion of last stands. In that respect, it was no different from any other time. The Salamanders have withdrawn.'

'Then perhaps Priamus will cease his complaints.'

'I doubt that.'

Grimaldus removed his helm. Nerovar watched him as he examined the paintings, seeing the Reclusiarch's scarred features set in a thoughtful frown.

'How is the wound?' Grimaldus asked, his voice both deeper and softer now, unfiltered by helm vox.

'I will live.'

'Pain?'

'Does it matter? I will live.'

The chains binding his weapons to his armour rattled as the Reclusiarch moved across the chamber. Ceramite armour boots thudded on the dusty mosaics, breaking them underfoot. In the centre of the room, Grimaldus looked up at the holed ceiling, where a stained glass dome had once mercifully blocked the view of the polluted sky.

'I was with Cador,' he said, staring up into the heavens. 'I was with him at the end.'

'I know.'

'So you will believe me when I say that you could have done nothing for him had you been at our side? He was dead the moment the beast struck him.'

'I saw the death wound, did I not? You are telling me nothing I do not already know.'

'Then why do you still mourn his fall? It was a magnificent death, worthy of a vault on board the Crusader. He killed nine of the enemy with a broken blade and his bare hands, Nero. Dorn's blood, if only we could all inscribe such deeds on our armour. Humanity would have cleansed the stars by now.'

'He will never rest in that vault, and you know it.'

'That is not worth mourning over. It is just a regrettable truth. Hundreds of our own heroes have fallen and remained unrecovered. You carry Cador's true legacy. Why is that not enough? I wish to help you, brother, but you are not making it easy.'

'He trained me. He taught me the blade and bolter. He was a father in place of the parents I was stolen from.'

Grimaldus had still not looked at the other knight. He watched as an Imperial fighter streaked overhead, and wondered if it was Helius, the heir to Barasath and Jenzen.

'It is the way of the warrior,' he said, 'to outlive the ones that train us. We take their lessons and wield them as weapons against the enemies of Man.'

Nero snorted.

'Did I say something amusing, Apothecary?'

'In a way Hypocrisy is always amusing.' The Apothecary removed his own helm. As he did so, he could suddenly feel the unwelcome weight of the cryo-sealed gene-seed in his forearm storage pod.

'Hypocrisy?' Grimaldus asked, more curious than annoyed.

'It is not like you to comfort and console, Reclusiarch. Forgive me for saying so.'

'Why would I need to forgive you for speaking the truth?'

'You make it sound so clear and easy. None of us have been truthful with you since… we came here.'

Grimaldus lowered his gaze from the dark skies. He fixed his eyes - eyes that the commander of a god-machine had called kind, of all things - on Nerovar's own.

'You say ''Since we came here''. I sense another lie.'

'Very well. Since before we came here. Since Mordred died. It is difficult to be near you, Reclusiarch. You are withdrawn when you should be inspiring. You are distant when you would once have been wrathful. I believe you are wrong to lecture me on Cador's death when you have been lost to us since Mordred fell. There are flashes of fire beneath the cold surface, and we have warned you of these changes before. But to no avail.'

Grimaldus chuckled, the sound leaving his lips as a soft exhalation through a reluctant smile.

'I am seeing the world through his eyes,' he said, looking down at the silver skull mask in his hands. 'And I am seeing, night after night, that I am not him. I did not deserve this honour. I am no leader of men, nor am I skilled at dealing with the humans. I should not be wearing the mantle of a Reclusiarch, yet I was certain once the war began, my doubts and discomforts would fade away.'

'But they have not.'

'No. They have not. I will die on this world.' Grimaldus looked at the Apothecary again. 'My master died, and mere days later, I was consigned to die on a world that has no hope of surviving an ugly war, far from my brothers and the Chapter I have served for two centuries. Even if we win, what does victory buy? We will be kings astride a ruined world of dead industry.' He shook his head. 'And this is where we will die. A worthless death.'

'It is glorious, in its own way. The Helsreach Crusade. Our brothers and the people of this world will remember our sacrifice forever. You know this as well as I.'

'Oh, I know it. I cannot escape it. But I do not care for glory. Glory is earned through a life lived in service to the Throne. It should not be a consolation gift, or something sought to sate a hunger. I want my life to matter to my brothers, and I want my death to further the cause of the Imperium. Do you not recall Mordred's last words to me? They are written in gold upon the plinth of the statue that honours him.'

'I remember them, Reclusiarch. ''We are judged in life for the evil we destroy''. And we will be judged well, for a great many have fallen before us already.'

'Our deaths inspire no one. They benefit no one. Do you recall the Shadow Wolves? When we saw the last of that Chapter die, I felt my heart sing. Never before had I craved the taste of alien blood as I did in that moment. Their deaths mattered. Every warrior clad in silver armour died in true glory that day. What of Helsreach? Who will draw courage from a footnote in the archives of a fallen city?'

Grimaldus closed his eyes. He did not open them again, even as he heard Nerovar approaching. The fist crashing against his jaw knocked him to the ground, where he at last looked back at the Apothecary. Grimaldus was smiling, though in truth he had not expected the blow.

'How dare you?' Nero asked, his teeth clenched and his fist still tight. 'How dare you? You throw filth on our glory here, yet you dare tell me Cador's death means something? It means nothing. He died as we will all die: unremembered and unburied. You are my Reclusiarch, Grimaldus. Do not lie to me. If our glory matters to no one, then Cador's death is meaningless and I have every right to mourn him as you mourn for all of us.'

The Chaplain licked his lips, tasting the chemical-rich blood that marked them. In silence, he rose to his feet. Nerovar did not back away. Far from it, he stood his ground, and activated his bracer-mounted storage pod. A plastek vial slid from its secure housing, and Nerovar threw it to Grimaldus.

The Reclusiarch caught it in hands that threatened to shake. NACLIDES, the script on the vial denoted. The gene-seed of a brother fallen days before.

'Nero…'

Nerovar ejected another tube and tossed it to the Reclusiarch. DARGRAVIAN, it read. He had been the first to fall.

'Nerovar…'

The Apothecary ejected a third vial. This one he held in his fist, his gauntlet clutching it just shy of crushing it into shards. CADOR showed between Nero's fingers.

'Answer me,' the Apothecary demanded, 'is what we do here worthless? Is there nothing to be proud of in our sacrifice?'

Grimaldus didn't answer for several moments. He looked around the modest, broken temple, the light of thought bright in his eyes.

'The city is falling, brother. Sarren and the other humans faced that fact today. The time has come for us to choose where we will die.'

'Then let it be where we will be remembered.' Nerovar reverently handed the vial bearing Cador's cryogenically frozen gene-seed organs to the Chaplain. 'Let it be where our deaths will matter, and give birth to tales worthy of being recorded in humanity's history.'

Grimaldus looked at the three vials resting in his gauntleted palm.

'I know of a place,' he said softly, a dangerous flicker appearing in his eyes as he looked back up at his battle-brother. 'It is far from here, but there is no holier place on this entire world. There, we shall dig our graves, and there, we will ensure the Great Enemy forever remembers the name of the Black Templars.'

'Tell me why you have chosen this place. I must know.'

The truth is… surprising, but as I speak the words, there is no doubt within them. This is what we must do, and it is how we must die. Our lives are sacrifice, from implantation of the gene-seed to its extraction from our bodies.

'We will die where our deaths matter. Where we can spite the enemy with our last breaths, and inspire the warriors of this city.'

'Now those,' Nero says, 'are at last the words of a Reclusiarch.'

'I am a slow learner,' I confess. This brings a smile to my brother's lips.

'Mordred is dead,' Nero said, keeping his voice low. 'But he trusted you as his heir above any other for one reason. He believed you were worthy.'

I say nothing.

'Do not die without ever living up to him, Grimaldus.'

CHAPTER XX Godbreaker

Maralin moved across the botanical garden, her fingertips trailing along the dewy leaves and petals of the rosebushes.

They were not hers, but that didn't stop her admiring them. Only one of her sisters had the patience and skill to grow roses in the choking air and sickened soil of the city, and that was Alana. All other blooms in the botanical garden were raised by cultivation servitors, and in Maralin's opinion, it showed. Her fingers danced along the wet petals of the soot-darkened roses, amazed as always at how lovelier and fuller Alana's flowers were in comparison to the modest blooms grown by the augmented slave workers.

They lacked inspiration, clearly, and no doubt the severance of their souls had much to do with it.

Passing through the spacious garden, she entered the rectory. The building's air filters were straining, keeping the main chamber cooled. Prioress Sindal was sat, as she almost always was, at her oversized desk of rare stonewood, scribing away in meticulous handwriting.

She looked up as Maralin entered, peering through the corrective eyelenses that had slipped to the end of her nose.

'Prioress, we've received word from Tempestora.'

Sindal's cataracted eyes narrowed, and she gently sprinkled sand across her parchment, drying the fresh ink. She was seventy-one years old, and she didn't just look it - she also sounded it when she spoke.

'What of the Sanctorum?'

'Gone,' Maralin swallowed.

'Survivors?'

'Few, and most are wounded. The hive has fallen, and the Sanctorum of the Order of Our Martyred Lady is overrun by the enemy. We received word now that there aren't enough survivors to retake their Sanctorum as of yet. Our own sisters in the Ash and Fire Wastes are moving to support.'

'So Tempestora is gone. What of Hive Stygia to the north?'

'Still no word, prioress. They are surely enduring the siege as we are.'

The old woman's hands were palsied, though she found that writing always steadied them for reasons beyond her understanding. They shook now as she set the completed parchment aside, on a loose pile of several others.

'Helsreach has weeks left, but little beyond that. The siege is almost at our own gates.'

'That… brings me to the second of the morning's messages, prioress.' Maralin swallowed again. She was clearly uncomfortable, and resented being the one sent to deliver these messages, but she was the youngest, and often relegated to these tasks.

'Speak, sister.'

'We received a message from the Astartes commander in the city. The Reclusiarch. He sends word that his knights are en route to stand with us in the defence.'

The prioress removed her eyeglasses and cleaned them with a soft cloth. Then, carefully, she placed them back onto her face and looked directly at the young girl.

'The Reclusiarch is bringing the Black Templars here?'

'Yes, prioress.'

'Hmph. Did he happen to say why he felt the sudden wish to fight alongside the Order of the Argent Shroud?'

He had not, but Maralin had been paying close attention to the scraps of information that made it over the vox with any clarity. This, too, was one of her duties as the youngest, while her sisters were preparing for battle.

'No, prioress. I suspect it ties into Colonel Sarren's decision to break up the remaining defenders into separate bastions. The Reclusiarch has chosen the Temple.'

'I see. I doubt he asked permission.'

Maralin smiled. The prioress had fought with the Emperor's Chosen before, and many of her sermons had included irritated mentions of their brash attitudes. 'No, prioress. He didn't.'

'Typical Astartes. Hmph. When do they arrive?'

'Before sunset, mistress.'

'Very well. Anything more?'

There was little. The compromised vox-network had offered several suggestions of severe enemy Titan movement to the north, but confirmation wasn't forthcoming. Maralin relayed this, but she could tell the prioress's mind was elsewhere. On the Templars, most certainly.

'Damn it all,' the old woman muttered as she rose from her chair, placing the quill in the inkpot. 'Well, don't just stand there gawping, girl. Prepare my battle armour.'

Maralin's eyes widened. 'How long has it been since you wore your armour, prioress?'

'How old are you, girl?'

'Fifteen, mistress.'

'Well, then. Let's just say you couldn't wipe your own backside the last time I went to war.' The old woman's forehead barely reached Maralin's chin as she shuffled past. 'But it'll be good to deliver a sermon with a bolter in hand again.'

Elsewhere in the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant, the sisters were making ready for war. The Order of the Argent Shroud were not in Helsreach in any significant force, their contributions thus far being little more than a series of fighting withdrawals from churches across the city.

Ninety-seven battle-ready sisters manned the Temple's walls and halls, standing guard over several thousand menials, servitors, preachers, lay sisters and acolytes. The Temple itself was formed of a central basilica, surrounded by high rockcrete walls bedecked in leering angels and hideous gargoyles staring out at the city beyond. Between the walls and the central building, acre upon acre of graveyard reached out from the basilica in every direction. Thousands of years before, they had been lush garden grounds, grown and tended by the first of Armageddon's settlers. Those same settlers were buried here, their bones long turned to dust and their gravestones weathered faceless by time. Interred alongside them were generations of their descendants; holy servants of the Imperium; and the respected dead of Armageddon's Steel Legions.

No one was buried here now; the graveyard was considered full. Official records numbered the graves around the basilica as nine million, one hundred and eight thousand, four hundred and sixty. Currently, only two people knew this was incorrect, and only one of them cared about the discrepancy.

The first was a servitor who had been a gardener in life, and had devoted several of his living years, before the augmetics had stolen his reason and independence, to counting the graves as he tended the gardens around them. He'd been curious, and it had satisfied him to learn the truth. He kept it to himself, knowing to report it to his superiors might bring down accusations of laxity in his primary duties. He was, after all, a garden-tender and not a stock-counter or cogitator. Three months after he had satisfied himself with the truth, he was found stealing from the Temple's tithe boxes, and sentenced to augmetic reconfiguration.

The second person who knew the truth was Prioress Sindal. She had also counted them herself, over the course of three years. To her, it was a form of meditation; of bringing herself to a state of oneness with the people of Armageddon. She had not been born here, and in her devoted service to the people of this world, she felt her meditative technique was apt enough.

She had, of course, filed amendments to the records, but they were still locked in the bureaucratic cycle. The Temple's cardinal council were notoriously foul at having their staff deal with paperwork.

Most gravestones were stacked close together in clusters of bloodline or fealty, and there was no conformity in the markers - each was a slightly different size, shape, material or angle to those nearby, even in sections where the rows were ordered in neat lines. In other parts of the graveyard district, finding one's way along a pathway was akin to navigating a labyrinth, with weaving a way between the graves taking a great deal of time.

The Temple of the Emperor Ascendant itself was, by Imperial standards, a thing of haunting and gothic beauty. The spires were ringed by stone angels and depictions of the Emperor's primarchs as saints. Stained glass windows displayed a riot of colours, showing scenes of the God-Emperor's Great Crusade to bring the stars into union beneath humanity's vigilant guidance. Lesser depictions were of the first settlers themselves, their deeds of survival and construction exaggerated to deific proportion, showing them as the builders of a glorious, perfect world of golden light and marble cathedrals, rather than the industrial planet they had founded in truth.

The Sisters of the Order of the Argent Shroud had not been idle during the months of warfare that ravaged the rest of the city. Lesser shrines in the graveyard were both heavy weapon outposts and chapels to their founder, Saint Silvana. Angular statues of solid silver - each one of the weeping saint in various poses of grief, triumph and contemplation - stood silent watch over turret pods and barricaded gun-nests.

The walls themselves were reinforced in the same way as the city walls, and bore the same ratio of defence turrets per metre. These remained manned by Helsreach militia.

The Temple courtyard's great gates were not closed. Despite the protestations of the cardinal council, Prioress Sindal had demanded the doors be kept open until the last possible moment, allowing more and more refugees to enter over the weeks of siege. The basilica's undercroft housed hundreds of families who hadn't been able to enter the subterranean shelters, for reasons of criminal activity, administrative error, or outright bad luck. Bunched together in the gloom, they came up for morning and evening prayer, adding their voices to the singing pleas that reached up the immaculately-painted ceiling, where the God-Emperor was depicted staring off into the heavens.

The Temple of the Emperor Ascendant was, in short, a fortress.

A fortress filled with refugees, and surrounded by the largest graveyard in the world.

We are the last to arrive.

Twenty-nine of my brothers already await my arrival, with our cargo gunship grounded nearby. It brings our total force to thirty-five, if one was to count Jurisian labouring on the forlorn hope, bring the weapon across the Ash Wastes.

Thirty-five of the hundred that landed in Helsreach five weeks before.

One of those awaiting our arrival is the one warrior I have done all I can to avoid for the last five weeks.

He kneels before the open gates of the Temple's compound, his black sword plunged into the marble before him, helmed head lowered in reverence. As with the Templars around him, almost all evidence of scripture parchment, wax crusader seals and cloth tabard is gone from his armour. I recognise him because of his ancient armour and the dark blade he prays to.

Jurisian himself has worked on that armour, repairing it with reverence each time he has been honoured with the chance to touch it. Before Jurisian, a host of other Masters of the Forge maintained the relic war plate through the centuries, back to its original forging as a suit of armour for the Imperial Fists Legion.

While our armour shows dull grey wounds under the stripped paint, this knight's war plate, forged in a time when primarchs walked the galaxy, shows gold beneath the battle damage. The legacy of Dorn's Legion is still there if one knows where to look; between the cracks, revealed by war.

The knight rises, pulling the sword from the marble with no effort at all. His helm turns to face me, and a faceplate that once stared out onto the battlefields of the Horus Heresy regards me with eye lenses the colour of human blood.

He salutes me, sword sheathed on his back and his gauntlets making the sign of the aquila over his battered breastplate. I return the salute, and rarely in my life has the gesture been so heartfelt. I am finally ready to stand before him, and endure the judging stare of those crimson eyes.

'Hail, Reclusiarch,' he says to me.

'Hail, Bayard,' I say to the Emperor's Champion of the Helsreach Crusade.

He watches me, but I know he is not seeing me. He sees Mordred, the knight whose weapon I bear, and whose face I wear.

'My liege.' Priamus comes forward, kneeling before Bayard.

'Priamus,' Bayard vox-laughs. 'Still breathing, I see.'

'Nothing on this world will change that, my liege.'

'Rise, brother. The day will never come that you must kneel before me.' Priamus rises, inclining his head in respect once more before returning to my side. 'Artarion, Bastilan, it is good to see you both. And you, Nero.'

Nerovar makes the sign of the aquila, but says nothing.

'Cador's fall tore at my heart, brother. He and I served in the Sword Brethren together, did you know that?'

'I knew it, my liege. Cador spoke of it often. He was honoured to serve at your side.'

'The honour was mine. Know that fifty of the enemy died by my blade the day I heard of his passing. Throne, but he was a warrior to quench the fires of the stars themselves. I miss him fiercely, and the Eternal Crusade is poorer without his sword.'

'You… do great honour to his memory.' Nero's voice is choked with emotion.

'Tell me, brother,' Bayard's tone lowers, as if the refugees standing and staring at us outside the great gates have no right to hear of what we speak. 'I heard his death-wound was in the back. Is this so?'

Nero's nod comes with reluctance. 'It is.'

'I also heard he killed nine of the beasts alone, before succumbing to his wounds.'

'He did.'

'Nine. Nine. Then he died facing his enemy, as a knight must. Thank you, Nero. You have brought me comfort this day.'

'I… I…'

'Welcome, brothers. It has been too long since we stood united.' There are general murmurs of assent, and Bayard looks to me.

I smile behind my mask.

They rode in the back compartment of a trundling Chimera armoured personnel transport, their backs thumping against the metal walls with each sharp turn. It had been parked on the highway itself, riddled with bullet holes and las-burns, but still very much fuelled and ready to roll. Andrej and the others had dragged the bodies of dead Legionnaires out onto the road, and the storm-trooper had forced the dockers to say a short prayer over the corpses before he would, as he put it, ''steal their ride''.

'Manners cost nothing,' he told them. 'And these men died for your city.'

The troop section in the back of the Chimera was a typical slice of Guard life, smelling of blood, oil and rancid sweat. On creaking benches, Maghernus and his dockers, along with Asavan Tortellius recruited to their cause, sat and waited for Andrej to get them all the way down the Hel's Highway.

He was not a good driver. They had mentioned this to him, and he professed not to know what they were talking about. Besides, he'd added, the left tank tread was damaged. That was why he kept skidding.

Also, he'd amended last of all, they should shut up. So there.

Andrej cycled through vox-channels, still getting no luck on any frequency. Whether every vox-tower in the city was gone or the orks had some intense jamming campaign going on was beside the point at this stage. He couldn't get in touch with his commanders, and that left him to his own devices. As always, he would go forward. It was the way of the Legion, and the creed of the Guard.

The way he saw it, the Reclusiarch owed him a favour. In this case, going forward meant making a stand with the black knights until he could find someone, anyone, from his command structure.

There'd been a particularly galling moment when he'd managed to contact elements of the 233rd Steel Legion Armoured Division, but they were in the middle of being annihilated by an enemy scrap-Titan formation and had no time for pleasantries. Fate was laughing at him, Andrej was sure of it - the one Imperial force he'd been able to reach were minutes from being wiped out anyway.

This was no way to fight a war. No communication between any forces? Madness!

Smoke and flames were on the horizon ahead, but that indicated next to nothing of any use in determining direction or destination. Smoke and flames were on every horizon. Smoke and flame was all each of the horizons had become.

Andrej was not laughing. This did not amuse him, no sir.

He changed gear with a nauseating grind of metal hating metal. A chorus of complaints jeered from the back as the Chimera juddered in protest and shook his passengers around some more. He heard someone's head clang off the interior wall. He hoped it was the fat priest's.

Andrej sniggered. At least that was funny.

'…ckr… sn… tl…' declared the vox.

Aha! Now this was progress.

'This is Trooper Andrej, of the—'

He closed his mouth as the transmission crackled into a semblance of clarity. The burning district ahead, through which he'd need to pass to reach the distant Temple… it was the Rostorik Ironworks. The vox told of a Titan's death-wails.

'Hold on,' he called back, and accelerated the battered transport along the Hel's Highway, towards the emerging shape of Stormherald above the surrounding industrial towers.

The link was savaged by Bound in Blood's mortis-cry. Zarha twisted in her coffin, trying to filter the empathic pain from the influx of sensory information she needed to focus on.

Her fistless arm pushed forward in the milky fluid, and the Titan obeyed her furious need.

'Firing,' Valian Carsomir confirmed.

In the centre of the industrial sector, ringed by burning towers and crushed manufactories, the Imperator Titan weathered a hail of enemy fire from scrap-walkers that barely reached its waist. Its shields rippled with searing intensity, corona-bright and almost blinding.

The plasma annihilator amassed power, sucking in a storm of air through its coolant vanes and juddering as it made ready to release. Around the god-machine's legs, the waddling ork walkers blared sirens and howling warnings to one another. Burning vapour clouded around the shaking plasma weapon as it vented pressure, and with a roar that shattered every remaining window in a kilometre-wide radius, Stormherald fired.

Three of the lesser scrap-Titans were engulfed in the flood of boiling plasma that surged from the weapon, melting to sludge in the white-hot sunfire.

Zarha's arm was aflame with sympathetic agony. She did her best to blank it from her mind, focusing instead on the rattling crawl of insects over her body. Her shields were taking grave damage now. Stormherald could not linger here for much longer.

'Bound in Blood isn't rising, my princeps.'

Zarha knew this. She'd heard its soul scream across the Legio's princeps-level link.

He is dying.

'He is dying.'

'Orders, my princeps?'

Stand. Fight.

'Stand. Fight.'

The Titan shuddered as another wreck-walker staggered closer, its shoulder cannons booming. Standing above the downed Reaver-class Titan Bound in Blood, Stormherald returned, fire with its incidental weapon batteries, flash-frying the lesser machine's void shields in a hail of incendiary fire.

Zarha pushed her other arm forward through the ooze, laughing as she moved. Stormherald's other arm, the colossal hellstorm cannon, thrummed as its internal mechanics chambers and drive engines cycled up to firing speed.

'My princeps…' Lonn and Carsomir warned in the same breath. Zarha cackled in her tomb of fluid. 'Die!'

'Die!'

The enemy scrap-Titan was shredded by five energy lances blasting from Stormherald's hellstorm cannon. In less than three seconds, its plasma core was breached and critically venting, and in less than five it had exploded, taking the bulk of the fat-bodied gargant with it. Shrapnel shards the size of tanks hammered off the Imperator's void shields, leaving distortions of bruising while the generators struggled to compensate.

'Secondary impact from the turbolaser batteries… Cog's teeth, we struck the G-71 orbital landing platform. My princeps, I implore you to use caution…'

Engine kill. She licked her cold, wrinkled lips. Engine kill.

'Engine kill.'

Half a kilometre behind the dead enemy walker - its foundation struts destroyed by the laser salvo from Stormherald's hellstorm cannon - a sizeable landing platform crashed down to the ground, sliding on fouled gantries to smash through the roof of a burning tank manufactorum. An avalanche of rockcrete, broken iron and steel was all that remained of both installations, at the heart of a cloud of grey-black smoke and rock dust.

The ironyard had played host to the pitched battle between Titans and infantry for several days. Little was left, yet neither side was giving ground.

'My princeps…'

No more lectures. I do not care.

'No more lectures. I do not care.'

'My princeps,' Valian repeated, 'new contact. Behind us.'

She spun in the fluid, fish-like and alert. Stormherald followed with ponderous slowness, its fortress-legs thudding down onto the ground. The cityscape view through the Titan's eyes panned, showing nothing but devastation.

'The scanner blur is either several walkers together, or a single engine of our size.'

The adept hunched by the auspex console turned to regard the pilot crew with three bionic eyes, each with a lens of dark green glass. A blurt of machine-code disagreed with Lonn's appraisal.

[]Negative. Thermal signature registers distinct single pulse. [ ]

One enemy engine.

That isn't possible, she thought, but never let it reach her vocalisers. An uneasy tremor was running through the Titan's bones, and she felt it as keenly as she'd once felt the wind on her skin in another lifetime.

'My princeps, we must disengage,' Lonn said, staring out into the burning ironyard. 'We need to rearm and cool the plasma core in standard sustained venting procedure.'

I know that better than you, Lonn.

'I know that better than you, Lonn.'

But I am not abandoning a district I have spent four nights fighting to hold.

'But I am not abandoning a district I have spent four nights fighting to hold.'

'My princeps, there's precious little left standing to defend,' Lonn pressed. 'I repeat my recommendation to withdraw and rearm.'

No. I am sending Regal and Ivory Fang north to hunt the inbound enemy engine and confirm with visual scanning.

'No. I am sending Regal and Ivory Fang north to hunt the inbound enemy engine and confirm with visual scanning.'

Lonn and Carsomir shared a glance from across the command deck. Both men were restrained in their control thrones, and both men wore the same expression of frustrated doubt.

'My princeps,' Carsomir tried, but he was cut off.

'See? They move.' On the hololithic display screen, the runes denoting the scout Titans Regal and Ivory Fang broke away from their perimeter-stalking patrol to the west, and strode northward in search of the incoming thermal pulse.

'My princeps, we do not have the ammunition reserves required to inflict destruction-level damage on an enemy engine of comparable size to us.'

'I am venting the heart-core's excess fusion matter and flushing the heat exchangers.' Even as she vocalised the orders, she was sending empathic pulses through her links to make it so.

'My princeps, that is not enough.'

'He is right, my princeps,' Carsomir had turned in his throne, and was looking back at her fluid tank now. 'You are too close to Stormherald's wrath. Return to us and focus.'

'We are defended by three Reavers and our own scout screen. Be silent.'

'Two Reavers, my princeps.'

Yes. Two. She pulled back from the immersion of rage. Yes… two. Bound in Blood was silent and dead, its power core cooling and its princeps voiceless. In her confused thinking, she did not mean to vocalise her next words.

'We have lost seven engines in one week of battle.'

'Yes, my princeps. Prudence would serve us best now. If the auspex is true, we must withdraw.'

She floated in her coffin, hearing the curious humanity in their voices. Such emotion. Such curious intensity, affecting their speech tones. She recognised it as fear, without truly recalling what the sensation felt like.

'We have killed almost twenty of the foe's engines… but I concede. Sound the withdrawal as soon as the Warhounds have confirmation.'

The first Imperial engine to bear witness to the Godbreaker was Ivory Fang. It stalked fast and low on its backwards-jointed legs, the side-to-side pitch of its stomping gait adding a feral, if mechanical, grace to its dawn hunt.

Warhound-class. And it suited the name, lone wolfing its way through the wrecked industrial sector, striding around the shells of tanks destroyed in the week-long straggle for the Rostorik Ironyard. Sometimes, its hooved feet would crunch down on the soft meat of burned bodies and render them into pulped smears along the ground. Dead skitarii, Guardsmen, factorum workers and greenskins littered the district.

Ivory Fang was commanded most ably by a princeps by name of Haven Havelock. Princeps Havelock dreamed, as did most of his ilk, of one day mastering a great battle-Titan, and perhaps even one of Invigilata's precious few Imperators. His fellow princeps - equals and superiors alike - spoke well of him, and he knew his place in the Legio as a solid, reliable scout-Titan commander was assured, valued, and deserved.

Patience was foremost among his virtues - patience and cunning. That reasoned, meticulous hunting instinct bled through the mind-bond into Ivory Fang. Twinned, man and machine were past masters at the kind of deep-urban stalks where Warhound Titans most excelled.

The rough link between Titan commanders maintained throughout the city had suffered just as Imperial vox had suffered, but Havelock was reassured by the fragments of meaning that pulsed through the chaos. If there truly was an enemy scrap-Titan out there, it was nothing the battle group could not deal with. Stormherald was no more than two kilometres to the south, and with it were Danol's Retribution and The Ghoul, both Reavers with victory banners descending from their armour plating that would put mid-range Titan princeps from any other Legio to shame.

Nothing the beasts could hurl at them would break such a formation. Even the largest gargant would fall to Stormherald.

I see nothing, came the aggravated spurt of machine code from his fellow princeps, Feerna of Regal.

Havelock spent a quarter of a second consulting his internal tracking runes. The link to his Titan's auspex sensors formed a rough, instinctive knowledge of his kin's locations in his mind.

Regal was a half-kilometre to the north-east, moving at speed through a small cluster of iron smelteries. It would have been in visual range, had the space between the two Titans not been obstructed by ruined manufactories.

I see nothing, either.

It's the heat, she complained. Hunting for thermal signatures in this inferno is like seeking black in the night sky. My auspex readers show nothing but thermal disruption. Horus himself could be hiding in here, and I would not kn—

Feerna? Feerna?

'Registering energy discharge of significant size to the north-east,' Havelock's moderati called out.

'Confirmed,' murmured the tech-adept that hunched in a station behind the princeps throne.

Feerna? Havelock tried once more. 'Bring us about and move north-east at aggressive intent speed. Everyone be ready.' He twitched in his restraint throne as the Titan obeyed his pilot's urgings. The connection feeds were alive with subtle static, itching at his nerves. Ivory Fang was keen. It had sensed something.

And then it hit Havelock, too.

'Hnnngh,' he drooled through clenched teeth, shuddering against the leather bindings that restrained him in place. 'Hnn… Hw…'

The pain of Regal's mortis-cry faded, and Havelock breathed again. Feerna was gone, as was her Titan. She'd been a Warhound, and her link to the others was tenuous and weak in comparison to the strength of a bond to the greater god-machines. The pain bled away fast, bringing relief in its wake.

The Titan clanked its way down a subsidiary alley, its weapon-arms rising in readiness. Havelock sent several mental urgings in quick succession, triggering autoloaders, coolant valves and bracing pistons into activity. Ivory Fang rounded the corner at the alley's end, stalking out into the main street. As it had been since this morning, this sector was still aflame because of the destroyed refineries and petrochemical stores, with about half the buildings finally quieting into smouldering ruins.

But the fighting was done here.

'Where is the bastard?' Havelock whispered.

The auspex chimed - once, weak.

'We have movement,' the tech-adept grumbled, not looking up from his scanner console. 'There is—'

'I see, it, I see it. Back away now!'

It came from the black clouds, rumbling forward on a clumsy mess of tank treads and crushing feet. Its body was slanted, tapering to a head that was all brutal jaw and piggish, alien eye-windows. Every metre of its scrap metal torso bristled with tiered weapons platforms.

It was quite the ugliest and most offensive thing Havelock had ever seen, and that was more than simply because it was an affront to the purity of Mechanicus god-machine creation. No, more than that, it offended him because its manifestation before him made no sense. It… dwarfed Stormherald.

It seemed impossibility given form, striding, limping from the oily smoke that blanketed the district.

Havelock pulsed a digitally-translated pict of the enemy gargant across the mind-bond to Princeps Zarha and any other Titan commander in range. It was all the warning he would be allowed to send, for Godbreaker opened fire the very moment its main armaments cleared the smoke.

Ivory Fang was pulverised beneath enough solid, laser and plasma weapon fire to level a city block. Its demise, and the end of Havelock's mediocre career, was marked by a vast crater that would remain for decades after the war had bled the whole world almost dry.

Godbreaker moved onward.

CHAPTER XXI Stormherald Down

The two engines faced one another across the burning ironyard, as alike in power as they were unlike in dignity. Both were ablaze, both bleeding fire and smoke into the clouded air.

The air between them was a blizzard of weapon fire as secondary turrets and battlement guns spat anti-infantry firepower at each other in the hopes of inflicting as much damage as possible. Inside both Titans, it sounded like a flood of pebbles clattering against the armour-plated hulls.

Inside Stormherald, the sirens were wailing long and loud.

Zarha writhed in her fluid-filled tomb, her limbs pushing through the blood-pinked water. Psychostigmata was ravaging her, as Stormherald's wounds played out in a map across her naked body. Where the Titan was battered, she was discoloured by bruising or bent by broken bones. Where the god-machine was rent and torn, her flesh smiled and bled in open wounds. Where Stormherald burned, she was haemorrhaging internally.

The Titan's command deck smelled of burning oil and rancid sweat.

'Primary shield layer restored,' Carsomir announced, his hands working at his console with a near-furious focus. 'Core containment holding.'

Raise… raise shields…

'Krrrsssshhhhh.'

RAISE THE SHIELDS.

'Raise the shields.'

'Already done, my princeps.'

She was slowing down. The pain stole so much of her attention now. With a moan that was swallowed into silence by the water, she pulsed orders to the various decks and pushed both of her arms forward through the pinkish ooze.

Nothing happened.

She tried again, screaming into the oxygen-rich fluid, the stumps of her hands thumping against the front of her coffin.

Nothing.

'Plasma annihilator venting for sixteen more seconds, my princeps. Fourteen. Thirteen. Twelve.'

Fire the… the… other arm. Fire it.

'Krrrsssssshh.'

FIRE THE HELLSTORM CANNON. Her stunted right limb thudded over and over against the glass side of her amniotic tank.

'Fire the hellstorm cannon.'

'As soon as it has recharged, my princeps,' Lonn replied, half-ignoring her now. She'd given the order to fire at will several minutes before. Drifting in her pain as the Titan fell to pieces, she was barely trustworthy now. Carsomir and Lonn worked almost independently of their princeps's wishes. They only had one more shot at walking away from this - the enemy Titan was already advancing over the mangled body of The Ghoul, which had lasted less than a minute beneath the Godbreaker's initial volleys.

The scrap-Titan was capable of a merciless amount of firepower. None of Stormherald's command crew had seen anything like it before, let alone suffered on the receiving end. Only a few minutes into the god-machines' duel, and the Imperator was wreathed in flame, temperature gauges whining and warning lights flashing throughout the confined corridors threading through the giant's steel bones.

The multitude of layered energy screens that served the Titan as void shields had been torn apart with insane, laughable speed by the ork walker.

'I'm ready,' Carsomir announced. 'Firing.'

'Wait for the stabilisers to come back online!' Lonn yelled. 'They only need another minute.'

Carsomir thought his fellow pilot's faith in the tech-crews working in the shoulder joints was admirable, but unbelievably misguided given the circumstances. He blinked once, wasting precious seconds to even think about listening to Lonn's plea.

'The arm isn't badly damaged. I'm taking the shot. I can make it.'

'You'll miss, Val! Give them thirty seconds, just thirty more seconds.'

'Firing.'

'You son of a bitch!'

Stormherald's knees locked in preparation and the plasma annihilator tower that served as its left arm began its air-sucking inhalation of coolant.

'You've killed us,' Lonn breathed, watching the enemy Titan through the steamed-up view windows. An unremitting torrent of incidental fire rained against Stormherald's shields, turning them violet with strain.

'Void shields buckling,' one of the tech-adepts called from a side terminal.

'Enemy engine making ready to fire primary weapons,' another said.

'They'll never get the chance…' Valian Carsomir smiled with a wicked light in his eyes.

Lonn's shouted protest was drowned out in the roar of discharging sunfire. A beam of plasma - roiling, boiling and white-hot - vomited from the cannon's focusing ring, blasting across the four hundred metres separating the two Titans. Stormherald stood rigid, defensive, no longer advancing after the first two minutes of punishing exchange. Godbreaker had not stopped its thunderous, slow charge.

'You bastard!' Lonn yelled. Carsomir had missed. The jet of plasma blanketed the ground to the left of the closing ork gargant, where it began to dissolve everything it touched in a vast pool of acidic corruption.

Lonn had been right. The arm-weapon had strayed despite targeting locks, as the supreme force of its own firepower sent it veering off-centre.

'I had the shot,' Carsomir shook his head.

'Void shields failing,' the tech-adept announced without any emotion whatsoever.

'I had the shot,' Carsomir repeated, unable to look away from the wreck-Titan bearing down upon them. Behind the moderati thrones, Zarha floated in her suspension tank, slack and unconscious.

'No, no, no…' Lonn worked at his console, his brow furrowed. 'This can't be.'

The Titan began to shudder around them as the void shields died again, the Imperator's dense armour taking the brunt of the alien attack.

Lonn had never worked like this before in his life. It was a flurry of effort, performed half in the flesh and half with the mind. He could feel the Titan falling into slumber, and its dimming consciousness dragged at his thoughts, slowing them to a crawl. Where he met resistance like this in the mind-link, he compensated by overrides on his command console.

The command deck grew dark as he worked. The enemy gargant eclipsed all outside light, looming before the idle Stormherald.

'Why hasn't it fired?' Carsomir worked as Lonn did, cooling essential systems, ordering repair teams to afflicted joints, feeding power from the coughing shield generators to the thirsty weapon energy cells.

To Lonn, the reason was obvious. Like the savages that acted as the gargant's puppeteers, the scrap-Titan was built to kill with its hands. Several of the thing's weapon mounts were taken up by crude arms that ended in spears and claws of salvaged metal. It wanted to savour Stormherald's death, like some many-armed daemon from the impure millennia of pre-Imperial Terra.

Zarha's augmetic eyes flicked back to active as the chamber grew dark. She awoke, seeing the doom bearing down on her, feeling secondary fire devastating her armour plating like she was being skinned alive.

Through the bloody fluid and maddening pain, she raised her shivering arms. Stormherald mirrored the gesture as it was pummelled under Godbreaker's guns. Jagged metal fell from the Mechanicus giant like rainfall, ripped from its body and crashing to the ground below. Many of the Imperator's crew that had the sense of self-preservation to flee were killed by the falling chunks of armour plating.

Zarha put the last of her strength, and the last of her life, into throwing both her arms forward. The plasma annihilator did not fire. Neither did the hellstorm cannon. Both were locked in the time-consuming process of recharging from depleted power generators.

Both towering weapon-arms speared forward, hammering through the fat hull of Godbreaker and impaling it in place. The cry of tearing scrap metal was cacophonous as Stormherald's cannons pushed deeper, stabbing like daggers through meat, seeking to grind and crush the enemy's heart-reactor.

Grimaldus. I stood until the end, as promised. Awaken Oberon. Awaken it, or die as we have.

Perhaps her thoughts echoed across the empathic link to her moderati, for one of them voiced something of her sentiments.

'We're dead,' Carsomir murmured. He wanted to rise from his throne, but the restraints and connection cables bound him too completely. He settled for closing his eyes.

Lonn had sensed the Crone's intent. He leaned all his weight on the control levers, adding his demands to Zarha's, plunging the arms deeper into the enemy Titan's chest with scraping, grinding slowness. He felt sick to stare up through the darkened viewports to see the bestial, tusked aliens clambering along the impaling arm-cannons, using them as bridges to board Stormherald as they bled from the wounds in their own Titan's body.

With no peaceful fade or foreshadowing, the power died, leaving him in darkness. He eased up on the levers, knowing without needing to look that the Crone was gone.

Stormherald was a statue, joined to the war machine that was slowly carving it to pieces with great chops of its bladed limbs. As endings went, Lonn mused, this was neither grand nor glorious.

As the command deck shook with rhythmic violence from the pound, pound, pounding of Godbreaker's many weapon-arms, Lonn drew his laspistol, and watched the sealed doors, ready for the aliens to eventually breach them. His skin crawled at the gentle sound of Zarha's corpse bumping against the glass front of her coffin, in time to the Titan's shaking.

'I… I had the shot,' Carsomir stammered from the adjacent throne as he waited to die in the dark. 'I had the shot…'

The side of his head burst open as a las-beam slashed through his skull.

'You bastard,' Lonn said to the twitching body. Then he lowered his pistol, took a deep breath, and began the laborious process of disengaging himself from the control throne.

There was something human in the way Stormherald died. The way it went slack, the way it staggered, the way it crashed to the ground, its heart-core cold, swarming with enemy bodies like insects feeding upon a corpse.

The god-machine shook the earth when it finally toppled. The spined, spiked cathedral tumbled from its back in a spillage of priceless architecture, left as no more than rubble and scraps of armour plating in a mountain of wreckage by the Titan's head. Stormherald's arms were wrenched from the torso, squealing free of the ruptured shoulder joints when the ancient engine hammered into the ground with enough force to send tremors through the entire city.

The head itself was torn free before the main body fell, leaving a socket of trailing power cables and interface feeds, like a nest of a million snakes. Gripped in the lifter-claw at the end of one of Godbreaker's many arms, the Titan's head was clamped and crushed, then hurled aside as a twisted ball of scrap metal. Its landing flattened a small manufactorum, as the armoured command chamber weighing several dozen tonnes blasted through the building's side wall and pulverised several support pillars.

On board Godbreaker, the bestial creature in charge ranted at its subordinates for destroying and discarding the Titan's head in such a way. To the beast's mind, it would have made a very impressive trophy to mount on their own god-machine.

The few Legio crew members, skitarii defenders and tech-adepts that survived Stormherald's fall scrabbled from exits and breaks in the behemoth's skin. In the midday light of Armageddon's weak sun, they were cut down by the ork reavers around the dead Titan.

Miraculously, Moderati Secundus Lonn was one of these. He had managed to break free of the bindings and interface cables linking him to the dying god-machine, and make it out of the bridge by the time Godbreaker decapitated Stormherald. In the following fall, he broke his leg in two places, earned a concussion as the tilting corridor sent him falling down a flight of spiral stairs, and busted several of his teeth clear out of his gums when his head smacked off a handrail.

On hands and knees, dragging his dead leg and half-drunk with concussion, Lonn hauled himself out of an emergency bulkhead to lie on the warm armour plating of Stormherald's torso. There he remained, panting and bleeding in the thin sunlight for several seconds, before starting to crawl his slow way down the ground. He was killed less than a minute later by the marauding greenskins swarming over the downed Titan.

Through the pain, he was laughing as he died.

Grimaldus came at last to the inner sanctum.

He was no longer a warrior here, but a pilgrim. Of this he was certain, though in the wake of his words with Nero, he felt certain of little else.

It had taken very little time within the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant to bring about this certainty within him, but the feeling was undeniable. He felt home, on familiar and sacred ground, for the first time since he had left the Eternal Crusader. It was purifying.

The cool air didn't taste of fire and blood on a world he had no wish to walk upon. The silence wasn't broken by the drumbeat of a war he had no stake in.

Augmented infants - the lobotomised bodies of children kept eternally young through gene manipulation and hormone control - were enhanced by simple Mechanicus organs and pressed into service as winged cherub-servitors, hovering on anti-grav fields as they trailed prayer banners through the halls and arched chambers.

In the myriad rooms of the basilica, the devoted and the faithful of Helsreach went about their daily reverence despite the war blackening their city. Grimaldus walked through a chamber of monks offering prayer through inscribing hundreds of saints' names on thin parchments that would hang from the weapons of Temple guards. One of the holy men kneeled as the Astartes passed, imploring the ''Angel of Death'' to wear the parchment on his armour. Touched by the man's devotion, the knight had accepted, and voxed an order to the rest of his men scattered throughout the temple grounds to acquiesce to any similar charity.

Grimaldus let the lay brother tie the scroll to his pauldron with twine. The offered parchment was a modest but appreciated replacement for the iconography, oath-papers and heraldry that had been scoured from his armour in the last five weeks of battle.

The Reclusiarch had ventured alone into the undercroft, wishing to bear witness to the civilians there in his patrol to examine all defences and locations within the basilica. The subterranean expanse might once have been austere and solemn, featuring little more than infrequently-spaced sarcophagi of black stone. To the knight's eyes, it was a refugee bunker, packed tight with humans that smelled both unwashed and afraid as they sat around in family clusters - some asleep; some speaking quietly; some comforting crying babies; some spreading out meagre possessions on dirty blankets, taking stock of everything they now owned in the world, which was all they had managed to carry with them as they'd fled their homes.

Wordlessly, he'd walked among them. Every one of them had moved from his path; every one of them so openly awed by their first sighting of an Astartes warrior. Parents whispered to children, and children whispered more questions back.

'Hello,' a voice called from behind him as he was moving back up the wide marble stairs. The Reclusiarch turned. A girl-child stood at the bottom of the staircase, clad in an oversized shirt that clearly belonged to a parent or older sibling. Her ratty blonde hair was so dirty that it snarled quite naturally into accidental dreadlocks.

Grimaldus descended again, ignoring the girl's parents hissing at her, calling her back. She was no older than seven or eight. She stood up straight, and reached his knee.

'Hail,' he said to her. The crowd flinched back from the vox-voice, and several of those closest gasped in a breath.

The girl blinked. 'Father says you are a hero. Are you a hero?'

Grimaldus's gaze flicked across the crowd. His targeting cursor danced from face to face, seeking her parents.

Nothing in two centuries of war had prepared him to answer this question. The gathered refugees looked on in silence.

'There are many heroes here,' the Chaplain replied.

'You are very loud,' the girl complained.

'I am more used to shouting,' the knight lowered his voice. 'Do you require something from me?'

'Will you save us?'

He looked at the crowd again, and chose his words with great care.

That had been an hour ago. The Reclusiarch stood with his closest brothers and the Emperor's Champion in the basilica's inner sanctum.

The chamber was expansive, easily able to accommodate a thousand worshippers at once. For now, it stood bare, the hundreds of Steel Legionnaires that were bunking here in recent weeks currently out on their patrols through the graveyard and surrounding temple district.

The few dozen that had been off-duty were ushered out by monks when the Astartes had entered. Almost immediately, the knights were joined by a new presence. An irritated presence, at that.

'Well, well, well,' the irritated presence said in her old woman's voice. 'The Emperor's Chosen, come to stand with us at last.'

The knights turned in the sunlit chamber, back to the entrance where a diminutive figure stood in contoured power armour. A bolter, cased in bronze with gold-leaf etchings, was mag-locked between her shoulders. The gun was a smaller calibre than Astartes weaponry, but still a rare firearm to see in the possession of a human.

Her white power armour was bedecked in trappings that marked her rank in the Holy Order of the Argent Shroud. The old woman's white hair was cut severely at her chin, framing a wrinkled face with icy eyes.

'Hail, prioress,' Bayard acknowledged her with a bow, as did the others. Grimaldus and Priamus made no obeisance, with the swordsman remaining unmoving and Grimaldus instead making the sign of the aquila.

'I am Prioress Sindal, and in the name of Saint Silvana, I bid you welcome to the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant.'

Grimaldus stepped forward. 'Reclusiarch Grimaldus of the Black Templars. I cannot help but notice that you do not sound welcoming.'

'Should I be? Half of the Temple District has already fallen in the last week. Where were you then, hmm?'

Priamus laughed. 'We were at the docks, you ungrateful little harpy.'

'Be at ease,' Grimaldus warned. Priamus replied with a vox-click of acknowledgement.

'We were, as my brother Priamus explained, engaged in the east of the hive. But we are here now, when the war is at its darkest, as the enemy approach the temple doors.'

'I have fought with Astartes before,' the prioress said, her armoured arms crossed over the fleur-de-lys symbol that marked her sculpted breastplate. 'I have fought alongside warriors who would have given their lives for the Imperium's ideals, and warriors that cared only for accruing glory, as if they could wear their honour like armour. Both breeds were Astartes.'

'We are not here to be lectured on the state of our souls,' Grimaldus tried to keep the irritation from his voice.

'Whether you are or not doesn't matter, Reclusiarch. Will you dismiss your fellow warriors from the chamber, please? There is much to speak of.'

'We can speak of the temple's defence in front of my brothers.'

'Indeed we can, and when the time comes to speak of such things, they will be present. For now, please dismiss them.'

'Do you cleanse yourself, by the Stoup of Elucidation?'

This is the question she asks in the silence that descends once my brothers are gone, and the doors are closed.

The stoup she speaks of is a huge bowl of black iron, mounted upon a low pedestal of what looks like wrought gold. It stands by the double doors, which are themselves bedecked in imagery of warlike angels with toothed swords, and saints bearing bolters.

I confess to her that I did not.

'Come then.' She beckons me to the bowl. The water within reflects the painted ceiling and the stained glass windows above - a riot of colour in a liquid mirror.

She dips a bare finger into the water after taking the time to detach and remove her gauntlets. 'This water is thrice-blessed,' she says, tracing her dripping fingertip across her forehead in a crescent moon. 'It brings clarity of purpose, when anointed onto the doubting and the lost.'

'I am not lost,' I lie, and she smiles at the words.

'I did not mean to imply that you were, Reclusiarch. But many who come here are.'

'Why did you wish to speak with me alone? Time is short. The war will reach these walls in a matter of days. Preparations must be made.'

She speaks, staring down into the perfect reflection offered by the bowl. 'This basilica is a bastion. A castle. We can defend it for weeks, when the enemy finally gathers courage enough to besiege it.'

'Answer the question!' This time, I could not keep the irritation from my voice even if I had wished to.

'Because you are not like your brothers.'

I know that when she looks at my face, she does not see me. She sees the death mask of the Emperor, the skull helm of an Astartes Reclusiarch, the crimson eye lenses of humanity's chosen. And yet our gazes meet in the water's reflection, and I cannot completely fight the feeling she is seeing me, beneath the mask and the masquerade.

What does she mean by those words? That she senses my doubts? That they drip from me like nervous sweat, visible and stinking to all who stand near me?

'I am no different from them.'

'Of course you are. You are a Chaplain, are you not? A Reclusiarch. A keeper of your Chapter's lore, soul, traditions and purity.'

My heart rate slows again. My rank. That is all she meant.

'I see.'

'I am given to understand Astartes Chaplains are invested with their authority by the Ecclesiarchy?'

Ah. She seeks common ground. Good luck to her in this doomed endeavour. She is a warrior of the Imperial Creed, and an officer in the Church of the God-Emperor.

I am not.

'The Ecclesiarchy of Terra supports our ancient rites, and the authority of every Chapter's Reclusiam to train warrior-priests to guide the souls of its battle-brothers. They do not invest us with power. They recognise we already hold it.'

'And you are given a gift by the Ecclesiarchy? A rosarius?'

'Yes.'

'May I see yours?'

The few Astartes singled out for ascension into the Reclusiam are gifted with a rosarius medallion upon succeeding in the first trials of Chaplainhood. My talisman was beaten bronze and red iron, shaped into a heraldic cross.

'I no longer carry one.'

She looks up at me, as if the reflection of my skull visage was no longer clear enough for her purposes. 'Why is that?'

'It was lost. Destroyed in battle.'

'Is that not a dark omen?'

'I am still alive three years after its destruction. I still do the Emperor's work, and still follow the word of Dorn even after its loss. The omen cannot be that dark.'

She looks at me for some time. I am used to humans staring at me in awkward silence; used to their attempts to watch without betraying that they are watching. But this direct stare is something else, and it takes a moment to realise why.

'You are judging me.'

'Yes, I am. Remove your helm, please.'

'Tell me why I should.' My voice is not pitched to petulance, merely curiosity. I had not expected her to ask such a thing.

'Because I would like to look upon the face of the man I am speaking with, and because I wish to anoint you with the Waters of Elucidation.'

I could refuse. Of course I could refuse.

But I do not.

'A moment, please.' I disengage my helm's seals, and breathe in my first taste of the crisp, cool air within the temple. The fresh water before me. The sweat of the refugees. The scorched ceramite of my armour.

'You have beautiful eyes,' she tells me. 'Innocent, but cautious. The eyes of a child, or a new father. Seeing the world around you as if for the first time. Kneel, if you would? I cannot reach all the way up there.'

I do not kneel. She is not my liege lord, and to abase myself in such a way would violate all decorum. Instead, I lower my head, bringing my face closer to her. The joints of her pristine armour give the smooth purr of clean mechanics as she reaches up. I feel her fingertip draw a cross upon my forehead in cold water.

'There,' she says, refastening her gauntlets. 'May you find the answers you seek in this house of the God-Emperor. You are blessed, and may tread the sacred floor of the inner sanctum without guilt.'

She is already moving away, her milky eyes squinting. 'Come. I have something to show you.'

The prioress leads me to the centre of the chamber, where a stone table holds an open book. Four columns of polished marble rise at the table's cardinal points, all the way to the ceiling. Upon one of the columns hangs a tattered banner unlike any I have ever seen before.

'Hold.'

'What is it? Ah, the first archive.' She gestures to the sheets of ragged cloth hanging from the war banner poles. Each once-white, now-grey sheet shows a list of names in faded ink.

Names, professions, husbands and wives and children…

'These are the first colonists.'

'Yes, Reclusiarch.'

'The settlers of Helsreach. The founders. This is their charter?'

'It is. From when the great hive was no more than a village by the shore of the Tempest Ocean. These are the men and women that laid the temple's first foundations.'

I let my gloved hand come close to the humming stasis field shielding the ancient cloth document. Parchment would have been a rare luxury to the first colonists, with the jungle and its trees so far from here. It stands to reason they would have recorded their achievements on cloth paper.

Thousands of years ago, Imperial peasants walked the ashen soil here and laid the first stone bones of what would become a great basilica to house the devotions of an entire city. Deeds remembered throughout the millennia, with their evidence for all to see.

'You seem pensive,' she tells me.

'What is the book?'

'The log from a vessel called the Truth's Tenacity. It was the colonisation seeding ship that brought the settlers to Helsreach. The four pillars house a void shield generator system, protecting the tome. This is the Major Altar. Sermons are given here, among the city's most precious relics.'

I look at the tome's curled, age-browned pages. Then at the archive banner once more.

Last of all, I replace my helm, coating my senses in the selective vision of targeting sights and filtered sounds.

'You have my thanks, prioress. I appreciate what you have shown me here.'

'Am I to expect any more of your kind arriving to bolster us, Astartes?'

I think, for a moment, of Jurisian, bringing the Ordinatus Armageddon overland, uncrewed, at minimal power and of little to no use once it arrives.

'One more. He returns to join us and fight by our sides.'

'Then I bid you welcome to the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant, Reclusiarch. How do you plan to defend this holy place?'

'We are past the point of retreat now, Sindal. No finesse, no tactics, no long speeches to rally the faint of heart and those that fear the end. I plan to kill until I am killed, because that is all that remains for us here.'

Both the Reclusiarch and the prioress turned at the pounding upon the door.

Grimaldus blink-clicked the rune to bring his vox channels live again, but it wasn't any of his brothers seeking his attention.

Prioress Sindal waved her hand in a magnanimous gesture, as if there were a crowd to impress. 'Do come in.'

The great metal-wrought doors rumbled open on clean but heavy hinges. Eight men stood framed by the doors and the austere corridor beyond. Each of them bore a filthy share of blood, mud, soot and oil stains. They carried lasguns with the practiced ease of men who had become utterly familiar with the weapons, and all but two of them wore dirty blue dockworkers' overalls. One of those that did not was dressed in the robes of a priest, but not the cream and blue weave of the temple's own residents. He was from off-world.

The leader of the group raised his goggles, letting them clack back on the top of his helmet. He regarded the knight with wide eyes.

'They said you would be here,' the storm-trooper said. 'I beg the many forgivings of this holy place for my intrusion, but I bring news, yes? Do not be angry. The vox is still playing many unamusing games and I could not speak with anyone in any other way.'

'Speak, Legionnaire,' said Grimaldus.

'The beasts, they are coming in great force. Many are not far behind us, and I have heard vox-chatter that Invigilata is leaving the city.'

'Why would they leave us?' the prioress asked, horrified.

'They would quit the city at once,' Grimaldus admitted, 'if Princeps Zarha was gone. Mechanicus politics.'

'She is gone, Reclusiarch,' Andrej finished. 'An hour ago, we saw Stormherald die.'

Behind the Guardsman, a warrior-maiden in the white power armour of the Order of the Argent Shroud caught her breath, staring at the prioress with her features flushed. 'Prioress!'

'Take a breath, Sister Maralin.'

'We've received word from the 101st Steel Legion! Invigilata's Titans are abandoning Helsreach!'

Andrej looked at the newcomer as if she had announced that gravity was a myth. He shook his head slowly, a deep and solemn pity written across his face.

'You are late, little girl.'

The first wave to break against the walls was not a horde of the enemy.

Close-range vox detected them first, with reports of elements from three Steel Legion regiments engaged in panicked retreat. Grimaldus responded with the temple's vox-systems, boosted far beyond what the squad-to-squad comms systems were currently capable of.

He gave the order to any Helsreach forces receiving the message to fall back to the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant, abandoning any further struggle to hold the few remaining sectors in the Ecclesiarchy District. Several lieutenants and captains sent affirmative responses in reply, including a captain of the hive militia still leading over a hundred men.

The fleeing Imperials began to arrive less than an hour later.

Grimaldus stood with Bayard at the gates, looking out into the city. A dark-hulled Baneblade command tank rolled past, guided into the graveyard sector by a platoon of Guardsmen waving directions to the driver. Behind it, a cadre of Leman Russ battle tanks with various turret weapons trundled in loose formation. Mingling between the rolling armour and trailing behind were several hundred Legionnaires, ochre-clad and visibly weary. Wounded were being stretchered by their fellows in serious numbers, and there were plenty of wails and moans calling out over the grind of tank engines.

Two soldiers passed by the watching knights, bearing the writhing body of a junior officer on a cloth stretcher. The man had lost an arm and a leg, at the elbow and knee respectively. His face was a contorted mess of whatever he really looked like, his visage ruined by the pain flowing through him.

One of the stretcher-bearers nodded to Grimaldus as he passed, and muttered a respectful ''Reclusiarch''.

The Templar nodded back.

'Fought with them?' Bayard asked over the vox.

'Desert Vultures. I was with them when the first walls fell. Good men, all.'

'Very few left,' Bayard said, a strange edge to his voice.

Grimaldus turned his skulled face to the Champion. 'There will be enough. Have faith in your brothers' blades, Bayard.'

'I have faith. I am sanguine with my fate, Chaplain.'

'My rank is Reclusiarch. Use it.'

'By your will, brother, of course. But we stand vigil over the city's death with a handful of bleeding humans, Reclusiarch. I am sanguine, but I am also a realist.'

Grimaldus's vox-snarl drew stares from the soldiers passing nearby. 'Have faith in the people of this city, Champion. Such condescension is beneath you. We are the last guardians of the relics prized by the first of Armageddon's colonists. These people are fighting for more than their homes and lives. They are fighting for their ancestors' honour, on the holiest ground in the entire world. The survivors of this war across the globe will take heart from sacrifices made by the thousands destined to die here. Blood of Dorn, Bayard… the Imperium was born in moments such as this.'

The Emperor's Champion watched him for a long moment, during which Grimaldus found his heart thumping faster. He was angry, and feeling the anger rise was as purgative as his time within the temple's serene halls. Bayard spoke, his voice sincere despite the crackle of vox-breakage.

'My voice was one of the few that spoke against your ascension to Mordred's rank.'

Grimaldus snorted, returning to watching the arriving forces. 'I would have said the same in your place.'

Seventy soldiers of the Steel Legion 101st came together in a battered convoy of Chimera transports. The ramp slammed down as the lead vehicle pulled up to a halt. A squad of Legionnaires disembarked, not a one of them free of bloodstains or bandaging.

'Leave the Chimeras outside,' Major Ryken ordered the others. Half of his face was wrapped in grubby cloth bandages, and he leaned heavily on an aide's shoulder, limping as he walked.

'Shouldn't we take them inside?' Cyria Tyro asked. She looked back over her shoulder at the tanks being abandoned.

'To hell with them,' Ryken spat blood as she led him to the two knights. 'Not enough ammunition in the turrets to make it worthwhile.'

'Grimaldus,' she said, looking up at the towering warrior.

'Hail, Adjutant Quintus Tyro. Major Ryken.'

'We got cut off from Sarren and the others. The 34th, the 101st, the 51st… They're all in the central manufactory sectors…'

'It does not matter.'

'What?'

'It does not matter,' Grimaldus repeated. 'We are defending the last points of light in Helsreach. Fate brought you to the Temple. Fate sent Sarren elsewhere.'

'Throne, there are still thousands of the bastards out there.' He spat pinkish spit again, and Tyro grunted as she took more of his weight. 'And that's not the worst of it.'

'Explain.'

'Invigilata has gone,' Tyro said. 'They left us to die. The enemy still has Titans - and there's one that you'll never believe until you look upon it with your own eyes. We saw it march from the Rostorik Ironworks, collapsing habitation towers in its wake.'

'The 34th Armoured rolled out to stop it,' Ryken winced as he spoke. His bandages were growing more stained, around what was likely an empty eye socket. 'It flattened most of them in the time it takes a desert jackal to howl at the full moon.'

A curious local expression. Grimaldus nodded, catching the meaning, but Ryken had more to add.

'Stormherald is down,' he said.

'I know.'

'This Godbreaker… it killed the Crone, and slew Stormherald.'

'I know.'

'You know? So where's the damn Ordinatus? We need it! Nothing else will kill that gigantic clanking… thing.'

'It is coming. Move inside and see to your wounds. If the end is coming to these walls, you will need to stand ready.'

'Oh, we'll all be ready. The bastards took my face, and that made it personal.'

As they moved away, Grimaldus heard Tyro gently teasing the major for his bravado. When they were beyond the gates but still in sight, the Reclusiarch saw the general's adjutant kiss the major on his unbandaged cheek.

'Madness,' the knight whispered.

'Reclusiarch?' Bayard asked.

'Humans,' Grimaldus replied, his voice soft. 'They are a mystery to me.'

CHAPTER XXII Emperor Ascendant

At last, vox reports began to trickle through to the defenders gathered in the temple's graveyard district. Across Helsreach, Sarren's plan, the ''one hundred bastions of light'', was in effect, with Imperial forces massing in defensive formations around the most vital parts of the city.

Contact was erratic at best, but the fact it even existed was a boost to morale. Every point of focussed defence was holding well, with all divisions breaking down between storm-troopers, Guard infantry, Steel Legion armour units, militia and armed civilians who chose to take to the streets rather than cower in their shelters.

The city was fighting to keep its heart beating, and the orks no longer found themselves advancing against a mobile wave of human resistance. Now the aliens were breaking against a multitude of last stands, hurling themselves against defenders that had nowhere left to run.

Fortunately for the Imperials, enemy scrap-Titans were few in number. With recent engagements such as the Battle of the Rostorik Ironworks, the greenskins' complement of god-machines had suffered furious losses in the face of Legio Invigilata's wrath.

Even as Invigilata recalled its last remaining Titans from the city in the wake of Stormherald's death, the Titans were forced to fight their way free of the orks flooding through Helsreach's unprotected streets. Although several Titans escaped through the broken walls and into the Ash Wastes beyond, the Warlord-class engine Ironsworn was brought down by a massed infantry assault in an ambush similar to the one that had laid Stormherald low all those weeks before.

The last of the Imperial Navy forces in the city had based themselves at the Azal spaceport, where they continued to mount bombing runs and offer limited air support to the tank battalions ringing the Jaega District's surface shelters. The fighting here was among the thickest and fiercest seen in the entire siege to date, and the archives which would catalogue the Third War for Armageddon came to consider many of the glorious propaganda falsehoods born here as cold fact. Many of these heroic twists of the truth were due to the writings of one Commissar Falkov, whose memoir, entitled simply ''I Was There…'', would become standard reading for all officers of the Steel Legions in the years after the war.

Although there was absolutely no truth in the tale, Imperial records would state that acting-Commander Helius sacrificed his own life by ramming his Lightning into the heart-reactor of the enemy gargant classified as Blood Defyla. The truth was rather more mundane - like Barasath before him, Helius was shot down and torn to pieces shortly after disentangling from his grav-chute on the ground.

The presence of Godbreaker was a bane to any Imperial resolve nearby. Although the god-machine appeared a shadow of its former self, bearing a legion of wounds and missing limbs from its death-duel with Stormherald, with Invigilata marching away across the badlands the defenders of Helsreach had little in the way of firepower capable of retaliating against the gargant.

After laying waste to the Abraxas Foundry Complex, the mighty enemy engine adopted a random patrol of the city, engaging Imperial forces wherever it chanced upon them.

Imperial records would state that while the Siege of the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant was entering its second day, the alien war machine Godbreaker was destroyed on its way to finish the temple defenders once and for all.

This, at least, was perfectly true.

Jurisian watched the mechanical giants stride from the city, stepping through its sundered walls. There were three - the first escapees of Legio Invigilata - and the Master of the Forge stared from the quiet confines of Oberon's command module as the Titans left the burning city behind.

The first was a Reaver-class, a mid-range battle Titan that appeared to have sustained significant damage if the columns of smoke rising from its back were any indication. Its flanking allies were both Warhounds, their ungainly gait rocking their torsos and arm-cannons side to side, step by step across the sands.

The wastelands outside Helsreach's walls resembled nothing more than a graveyard. Thousands of dead orks lay rotting in the weak sun; killed in Barasath's initial attack runs or slaughtered in the inevitable inter-tribal battles that arose when these bestial aliens gathered.

Ruined tanks were scattered in abundance, as was the wreckage from countless propeller-driven planes, each one made out of scrap and reduced back to it. The orks' landing vessels stood abandoned, with every xenos capable of lifting an axe now waging war inside the city. The primitive creatures were here to fight and destroy, or fight and die. They cared nothing for what fate befell their vessels left in the desert. Such forethought and consideration was beyond the mental capacity of most greenskins.

Jurisian made no attempt to hide his presence. There would be little point in making the attempt, for he knew the approaching Titans would be able to read Oberon's energy shadow on their powerful auspex scanners. So he waited, all systems active, as the Invigilata Titans drew near. The ground began to shiver with their closing tread, which Jurisian noted by the twisted metal and bodies across the desert floor shaking in rhythm with the god-machines.

The wounded Reaver came to a halt, its immense joints protesting that it was still forced to remain standing. It was damaged enough that a second's focus-drift might see the princeps losing control over the engine's stabilisers. It slowly aimed its remaining weapon arm at the command module, and Jurisian looked up into the yawning maw of a gatling blaster cannon.

With Oberon's shields up, the Master of the Forge would have estimated the Ordinatus could tolerate several minutes of sustained assault even from a weapon as destructive as this Reaver's main armament. But Oberon had no shields. They were one of many secondary systems that Jurisian had lacked the time, expertise and manpower necessary to reengage.

He knew what a gatling blaster was capable of. He'd seen them devastate regiments of tanks, and rip the faces and limbs from enemy Titans. Oberon's armour plating would last no more than a handful of seconds.

The Titan stared down at him in silence, no doubt while the princeps decided how to deal with this unbelievable blasphemy. Hunchbacked and striding with arm-cannons raised in threatening salute, the two Warhounds circled the immobile Ordinatus. Their posturing amused the Forgemaster. How they played at being wolves.

'Hail,' he said into a broad range of vox-channels. In truth, he was growing bored of the silence. He was far, far from intimidated.

'What blasphemy is this?' crackled the reply through the command module's internal speakers. 'What heretic dares defile Oberon's deserved slumber?'

Jurisian leaned back in the control throne, elbows on the armrests and his gloved fingers steepled before his helmed face.

'I am Jurisian of the Black Templars, Master of the Forge aboard the Eternal Crusader, and trained by the Cult Mechanicus for years on the surface of Mars itself. I am also in possession of the Ordinatus Armageddon, after subduing its defences and reawakening its soul, force-binding it to my will. And, lastly, I am summoned to Helsreach to aid wherever I am able. Aid me, or stand aside.'

The delay was significant in duration, and in other circumstances, that would have made it insulting. Jurisian suspected his words were being transmitted to all nearby princeps, almost definitely summoning them to this position.

Half a kilometre away, another Reaver Titan was breaching the city walls, emerging into the Ash Wastes. The knight watched it begin its halting stride in this direction, noting that it was relatively undamaged.

'You are blaspheming against the Machine-God and its servants!'

'I am wielding a weapon of war in defence of an Imperial city. Now aid me, or stand aside.'

'Leave the Ordinatus platform, or be destroyed.'

'You are not about to open fire on this holiest of artefacts, and I am not empowered by my liege lord to comply with your demands. That brings us to a stalemate. Discuss useful terms, or I will take Oberon into the city unprotected, surely to be destroyed without significant Mechanicus support.'

'Your corpse will be removed from the sacred innards of the Ordinatus Armageddon, and all remnants of your presence will be eradicated from memory!'

As Jurisian drew breath to offer terms, his vox-link flickered into life. Grimaldus, at last.

'Reclusiarch. I trust the time has finally come?'

'We are embattled at the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant. How soon can you bring the weapon to us?'

The Master of the Forge looked out of the reinforced windows at the patrolling Titans, then at the city beyond, beneath a smoke-blackened sky. He knew the hive's layout from studying the hololithics before his exile into the desert.

'Two hours.'

'Status of the weapon?'

'As before. Oberon has no void shields, no secondary weapon systems, and suspensor lift capability is limited, hindering speed to a crawl. Alone, I can fire it no more than once every twenty minutes. I need to recharge the fuel cells manually, and regenerate flow from the plasma containment ch—'

'I will see you in two hours, Jurisian. For Dorn and the Emperor.'

'By your will, Reclusiarch.'

'Heed these last words, Forgemaster. Do not bring the weapon too close. The Temple District is naught but fire and ash, and we are surrounded on all sides. Take the shot and flee the city. Pursue Invigilata's retreating forces, and link up with the Imperial assault along the Hemlock.'

'You wish me to run?'

'I wish you to live rather than die in vain, and save a weapon precious to the Imperium.' Grimaldus broke off for a moment, and the pause was filled with the anger of distant guns. 'Wewill be buried here, Jurisian. There is no dishonour that your fate is elsewhere.'

'Call the primary target, Reclusiarch.'

'You will see it as you manoeuvre through the Temple District, brother. It is called the Godbreaker.'

Four Titans soon barred his path.

Mightiest among them - and the last to arrive - was a Warlord, its armour plating black from paint, not battle-scarring. Its weapons trained down - immense barrels aimed at the Ordinatus platform. The numerological markings along the engine's carapace marked it out as the Bane-Sidhe.

'I am Princeps Amasat of Invigilata, sub-commander of the Crone's forces and heir to her title in the wake of her demise. Explain this madness immediately!'

Jurisian looked at the city, and thought about his offer carefully before making it. He spoke with confidence, because he knew full well the Mechanicus had little other choice. He was going back into the city, and by the Machine-God, they were going to come with him.

The graveyard - that immense garden of raised stone and buried bone - played home to the storm of disorder that had until recently been raging its way through the Temple District.

The enemy had breached the temple walls at dawn on the second day, only to find that the graveyard was where the real defences stood in readiness. As tanks pounded the walls down and beasts scrabbled over the rubble, thousands of Helsreach's last defenders waited behind mausoleums, gravestones, ornate tombs of city founders and shrines to treasured saints.

Burning beams of las-fire cobwebbed across the battlefield, slicing the alien beasts down in droves.

At the vanguard, a warrior clad in black and wielding a relic warhammer battled alongside a dwindling hand-fid of his brothers. Every fall of his maul ended with the crunch of another alien life ended. His pistol, long since powered down and empty, dangled from the thick chain binding it to his wrist. Where the fighting was thickest, he wielded it like a flail, lashing it with whip-like force into bestial alien faces to shatter bone.

At his side, two swordsmen moved and spun in lethal unison. Priamus and Bayard, their bladework complementing one another's perfectly, cutting and impaling with the same techniques, the same footwork, and at times, even in the very same moments.

With no banner to raise, not even the barest scraps left, Artarion laid about left and right with two chugging chainblades, their teeth-tracks already blunted and choked with gore. Bastilan supported him, precision bolter rounds punching home in alien flesh.

Nero was always moving, never allowed to rest for even a moment's respite. He vaulted the enemy dead, bolter crashing out round after round as he blasted the beasts away from the body of another fallen brother, buying enough time to extract the gene-seed of the honoured dead.

This he did, time after time, with tears running down his pale face. The deaths did not move him; merely the feeling of dread futility that all his efforts would be in vain. Their genetic legacy might never escape this hive to be used in the creation of more Astartes, and no Chapter could afford to bear the loss of a hundred slain warriors with easy dignity.

Around the time Jurisian was entering the city, escorted by five Titans from Legio Invigilata, the Imperial defences were straining to hold the outer limits of the graveyard. Cries of ''Fall back! Fall back to the Temple!'' started to spread through the scattered lines.

Assigned squads, appointed teams, random groups of men and women - all began to back away from the unending grind of the alien advance.

The Baneblade exploded, sending flaming shrapnel spinning in a hundred directions. The Imperials nearest to the tank - those that weren't thrown from their feet - started to flee in earnest.

But there is nowhere to fall back to. Nowhere to run.

Like a lance pushed close to breaking point, our resistance is bending, the flanks being forced back behind the centre.

No. I will not die here, in this graveyard, beaten into darkness because these savages have greater numbers than we do. The enemy does not deserve such a victory.

My boots clang on the sloped armour plating as I leap and sprint up the roof of the crippled, burning Baneblade. In the maelstrom around the rocket-struck tank, I see the 101st Steel Legion and a gathering of dock-workers trying to fall back in a panicked hurry, their forward ranks being scythed down by bloodstained axes in green-knuckled fists.

Enough of this.

The beast I am seeking seeks me out in turn. Huge, towering above its lesser kin, packed with unnatural muscle around its malformed bones and reeking of the fungal blood that fuels its foul heart. It launches itself onto the tank's hull, perhaps expecting some titanic duel to impress its tribe. A champion, perhaps. A chieftain. It matters not. The brutes' leaders rarely resist the chance to engage Imperial commanders in full view - they are loathsomely predictable.

There is no time for sport. My first strike is my last, hammering through its guard, shattering its crossed axes and pounding the aquila head of my crozius into its roaring face.

It topples from the Baneblade, all loose limbs and worthless armour, as pathetic in death as it had been in life.

I hear Priamus laughing from the tank's side, voxing it through his helm's speakers, mocking the beasts even as he slays them. On the other side, Artarion and Bastilan do the same. The orks redouble their assault with twice the fury and half the skill, and though I could reprimand my brothers for this indignity, I do not.

My laughter joins theirs.

Asavan Tortellius was serene, and that surprised him given the shaking of the walls and the sounds of war's thunder. This was no Titan's fortress-cathedral back, where he had learned to worship in safety. This was a temple besieged.

It had not taken long to find work to do within the basilica. He quickly came to realise that he was the only priest with experience of preaching on the battlefield. Most of the lay brothers and low-ranking Ecclesiarchy servants spent their time attending to their daily tasks in hurried nervousness, praying the war would remain outside the walls. Several others cowered in the undercroft with the refugees, doing more harm than good and failing to ease a single soul with their stuttering, sweating sermons.

Asavan descended into the sublevel, immediately marked out from the other preachers by his grimy robes and dishevelled hair. He walked among the people, offering gentle words to families as he passed. He was especially patient with the children, giving them the blessing of the God-Emperor in His aspect as the Machine-God, and saying personal prayers over individual boys and girls that seemed the most weary or withdrawn.

There was a lone guard stationed at the bottom of the stairs. She was slight of frame, both short and slender, wearing a suit of power armour that seemed too bulky to be comfortable. In her hands was a boltgun, the weapon held across her chest as she stood to attention.

Asavan moved over to her, his worn boots whispering across the dusty stone.

'Hello, sister,' he said, keeping his voice low.

She remained unmoving, at perfect attention, though he could see the tremor in her eyes that betrayed how difficult she found it to bear this rigid nothingness.

'My name is Asavan Tortellius,' he told her. 'Will you please lower the weapon?'

She looked at him, her eyes meeting his. She didn't lower the bolter.

'What is your name?' he asked her.

'Sister Maralin of the Holy Order of the Ar—'

'Hello, Maralin. Be at ease, for the enemy is still outside the walls. Might I ask you, please, to lower the weapon?'

'Why?' she leaned closer to whisper.

'Because you are making the people here even more nervous than they already are. By all means, be visible. You are their defender, and they will take comfort in your presence. But walk among them, and offer a few kind words. Do not stand there in grim silence, weapon held tight. You are giving them greater reason to fear, and that is not why you were sent down here, Maralin.'

She nodded. 'Thank you. Father.' The bolter came down. She mag-locked it to her thigh plate.

'Come,' he smiled, 'let me introduce you to some of them.'

The Bane-Sidhe's void shields rippled and rained sparks, brought into visibility as another layer was stripped by the explosive shells raining against them. A short growl of accumulating power ended in a blasting discharge of energy as the Warlord annihilated the tanks laying claim to the Hel's Highway ahead.

A black, smoking scorch smear was all the evidence that the tanks had ever existed. Behind the striding Bane-Sidhe, Oberon drifted forward on its gravity suspensors, gently cruising over any obstructions in its path. Bringing up the column's rear were the clanking, ungainly Warhounds that Bane-Sidhe had ordered back into the city.

The agreement made was monumentally simple, and that was why Jurisian was certain it would work.

'Defend Oberon,' he'd said. 'Defend it for long enough to take a single shot, to down the enemy command gargant. Then the Ordinatus will be surrendered into your control during the retreat towards the Hemlock River.'

What choice did they have? Amasat's voice over the vox was harsh with the promise of recrimination should the plan fail to run smooth. Jurisian, for his part, could not have cared less. He had the support he needed, and he had a primary target to destroy.

Infantry resistance was met with punishing and instant devastation. Armour formations endured no longer. Through the Temple District, they encountered precious little in the way of enemy engines.

'That is because, blasphemer, Invigilata left the enemy Titan contingent in ruins,'

'Except for the Godbreaker,' the Forgemaster replied. 'Except for the slayer of Stormherald.'

Amasat chose not to retort.

'I have nothing on my auspex,' he said instead.

'Nor I,' reported one of the Warhound princeps.

'I see nothing,' confirmed the other.

'Keep hunting. Draw closer to the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant.'

The Mechanicus convoy traversed the urban ruination in bitter dignity for another eight minutes and twenty-three seconds before Amasat voxed again.

'Almost one quarter of the enemy inside this hive is embattled at the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant. You are threatening Oberon with destruction as well as desecration? Does your heresy know no end?'

It was Jurisian's turn to abstain from the argument.

'I have a thermal signature,' he said, studying the dim auspex console to the left of his control throne. 'It has a plasma shadow, much too hot to be natural flame.'

'I see nothing. Coordinates?'

Jurisian transmitted the location codes. It was on the very edge of scanning range, and still several minutes away.

'It is moving to the Temple.'

'Locomotion qualifiers?'

'Faster than us.'

The pause was almost painful, broken by Amasat's sneering tone. 'Then I will give you the victory you require. Talisman and Hallowed Verity - remain with the blessed weapon.'

'Yes, princeps,' both Warhounds responded. Bane-Sidhe leaned forward, its armoured shoulders hunching as it moved into a straining stride. Jurisian listened to the protesting gears, the overworked joints, hearing the engine's machine-spirit cry out in the stress of metal under tension. He said a quiet word of thanks for the sacrifice about to be made.

CHAPTER XXIII Knightfall

Andrej and Maghernus skidded into the basilica's first chamber, their bloody boots finding loose purchase on the mosaic-inlaid floor. Dozens of Guardsmen and militia dispersed through the vast hall, catching their breath and taking up defensive points around pillars and behind pews.

The final fallback was beginning in earnest. The graveyard outside was blanketed in enemy dead, but the last few hundred Imperials could no longer hold any ground with their own numbers depleted.

'This room…' the former dockmaster was breathing heavily, '…doesn't have much cover.'

Andrej was unslinging his back-mounted power pack. 'It is a nave.'

'What?'

'This room. It is called a nave. And you are speaking the truth - there is no defence here.' The storm-trooper drew his pistol and started running deeper into the temple.

'Where are you going? What about your rifle?'

'It is out of power! Now follow, we must find the priest!'

Ryken fired with his autopistol, taking a moment between shots to regain his aim. It was a custom, heavy-duty model that wouldn't have been out of place in an underhive gangfight, and as he crouched by a black stone shrine to a saint he didn't recognise, the gun barked hot and hard in his fist, ejecting spent cartridges that clattered off nearby gravestones.

'Fall back, sir!' one of his men was yelling. The alien beasts crashed through the graveyard like an apocalyptic flood, a unbreakable tide of noise.

'Not yet…'

'Now, you ass, come on!' Tyro dragged at his shoulder. It threw off his aim, but to hell with it - it was like spitting into the ocean anyway. He scrambled away from the relative cover of the weeping statue just in time to miss it being shattered into chips and shards by raking fire from a fully-automatic enemy stubber.

'Are they coming?' he shouted to his second officer, limping badly now.

'Who?'

'The bloody Templars!'

They were not coming.

To the retreating human survivors, it seemed as if the black knights had lost all sense, all reason, cutting their way forward while the humans that had supported them broke ranks and fled back.

No one could see why.

No one was getting a clear answer from the vox.

Bayard was dead.

Priamus saw the great champion fall, and all flair in his killing strokes was abandoned in a heartbeat. He slew with all the grace of a peasant chopping lumber upon the face of some backwater rural world, his masterwork sword reduced to a club with a vicious edge and draped in lethal energy.

'Nerovar!' he screamed his brother's name into the vox. 'Nerovar!'

Other Templars took up the cry, summoning the Apothecary to extract the gene-seed of a Chapter hero.

Bayard stood almost slouched against the wall of an ornate mausoleum shaped from pink-veined white stone. The body had not fallen only because of the crude spear pinning it through the throat. A killing blow, without a shadow of doubt. Priamus spared a moment of desperate blocks and thrusts, taking an axe blow against his pauldron, risking a second's distraction to pull the spear free. The ork's axe threw off sparks as it crashed aside from the ceramite shoulder guard. The corpse of the Emperor's Champion slumped to the ground, freed of its undignified need to stand.

'Nerovar!' Priamus cried again.

It was Bastilan that reached him first. The sergeant's helm was gone, revealing a face so bloody only the whites of his eyeballs revealed him as human anymore. Torn flaps of skin hung in wet patches, leaving his head open to the bone beneath.

'The Black Sword!'

Priamus deflected another dozen cuts in four beats of his pounding twin hearts. He had no time to reach for the blessed weapon Bayard had dropped in death.

Bastilan's ruined face vanished in a burst of red mist. Priamus had already rammed his power sword through the chest of the bolter-wielding ork behind the sergeant by the time Bastilan's headless body crashed to the ground with the dull clang of ceramite on stone.

'Nerovar!'

With Bastilan's last words, something changed within the Templars.

Twelve remained. Of these, only seven would escape what followed.

The knights pulled together, their blades slashing and carving not only to kill their foes, but to defend their brothers alongside them. It was an instinctive savagery born of so many decades fighting at each others' sides, and it spread through their failing ranks now as they stood on the precipice of destruction.

'Take the sword!' Grimaldus roared. His charge carried him ahead of the others, hammering his crozius in arhythmic fury, smashing a bloody path through to Priamus. 'Recover the Black Sword!'

We cannot leave it here. It cannot lie abandoned on a battlefield while one of us yet lives.

Over the vox, the humans are calling us insane and begging us to fall back with them. To them, this bloodshed must seem like madness, but there is no choice. We will not be the only Crusade to violate our most sacred tradition. The Black Sword will remain in black hands until there are none left to bear it.

I have a moment - just a single moment - of reflexive pain when I see Bayard's body next to Bastilan's. Two of the finest Sword Brethren ever to serve the Chapter, now slain in glory. More alien bodies block my view. More xenos bleed as I force my way closer to Priamus.

A sense of bloodthirsty, eerie calm descends between us. The battle rages, weapons clashing against our armour, but I speak in a fierce whisper that I know carries over the vox to him and him alone.

'Priamus.'

'Reclusiarch.'

My maul sends two of the beasts flying back, and for a heartbeat's span, there are no alien barbarians separating us. Our eye lenses meet for that precious second, before we are both forced to turn and engage other foes.

'You are the last Emperor's Champion of the Helsreach Crusade,' I tell him. 'Now recover your blade.'

Major Ryken spoke into his hand-vox, repeating the same words he'd been saying for almost a minute. His voice echoed around the nave in curiously calm counterpoint to the ragged breathing and moans of pain from the wounded.

'Any armour units still outside the basilica, respond. The Godbreaker has been sighted due south of the temple walls. Any armour units still outside, engage, engage.'

From his viewpoint by one of the broken stained glass windows, he watched the gargant's torso rising above the broken graveyard walls in the distance.

He didn't recognise the voice that eventually answered. It sounded both bitter and disgusted, but it still made Ryken grin.

'Engaging.'

'Hello? Identify yourself!'

'I am Princeps Amasat of the Warlord Titan Bane-Sidhe.'

The Bane-Sidhe, named for a shrieking monster from ancient Terran mythology, did everything in its power to gain the Godbreaker's attention. Opening salvos from its arm-cannons and shoulder-mounted weapon batteries lashed against the larger Titan's force fields. Siren horns, used to warn loyal infantry of the Titan's passing close - or even through - their regiments, blared now at the enemy engine. Whatever primitive communications array passed for a vox system on board the Godbreaker was scrambled into white noise by a focussed spike of machine-code from Bane-Sidhe's tech-adepts.

All of this was enough to drag the towering beast-machine away from its intent to flatten the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant.

The Warlord, thirty-three metres of armour plating and city-killing weaponry forged into an iconic image of the Machine-God Himself, began its shameful retreat. All guns fired at will as it clanked backwards, drawing the Godbreaker away from the last Imperials alive in the hive's most sacred sector.

'May I have a weapon, please?'

Andrej shrugged as he cleaned his goggles with a dirty cloth. 'I have no other pistol, fat priest. For this, I apologise.'

Tomaz Maghernus shook his head when Asavan looked his way. 'I don't, either.'

Several maidens of the Order of the Argent Shroud came down the wide stairs into the undercroft. Prioress Sindal led them, carrying her bolter with ease due to the machine-muscles of her power armour.

'It is time to seal the undercroft,' the old woman said, her voice low. She, at least, knew the merits of not panicking the refugees gathered in the sublevel. 'The beasts have reached the inner grounds.'

'May I have a weapon, please?' Asavan asked her.

'Have you ever fired a bolter?'

'Until this month, I had never even seen a bolter. Nevertheless, I would like a weapon with which to defend these people.'

'Father, with the greatest respect, it would do you no good. My thanks for comforting the flock, but it is time to prepare for the end. Everyone who is staying behind, be ready to be sealed down here within the next three minutes. The oxygen should last a month, as long as the xenos do not destroy the air filtration systems above ground.'

Andrej raised a singed eyebrow. 'And if they do?'

'Use your imagination, Guardsman. And return to the surface, quickly. Every able body is needed in defence of the temple.'

'A moment, please.' Andrej turned back to Asavan. 'Fat priest. You are destined to either survive this, or die at least some time later than I.' He handed the holy man a small leather pouch. Asavan took it, clutching it tight in fingers that would have trembled in this moment only weeks before.

'What is this?'

'My mother's wedding ring, and a letter of explanation. Once this is over, if you are still drawing breath, please find Trooper Natalina Domoska of the 91st Steel Elite. You will recognise her - this, I promise to you. She is the most beautiful woman in the world. Every man says so.'

'Move, young man,' the prioress insisted.

Andrej snapped a crisp salute to the overweight priest, and made his way back up the stairs, his laspistol held in both hands. Maghernus followed him, casting a lingering look back at Asavan and the refugees. He waved as the underground bulkheads slammed closed. Asavan didn't seem to see, preoccupied with the refugees who were rising to their feet in panic and protest.

Several of the battle-sisters remained at the base of the stairs, entering codes to seal the doors and imprison the civilians away from harm. The prioress managed to keep up with Andrej and Maghernus. The dockmaster smiled at her, knowing the gesture was meaningless and filled with melancholy. She returned the smile, her expression carrying the same emotions as his. The Temple was shaking as the orks battered at its walls.

The next time Maghernus would see Prioress Sindal of the Order of the Argent Shroud, she would be a mangled corpse in three pieces, spread across the floor of the inner sanctum.

That would be in less than one hour's time, and her body would be one of the last things he saw before he was killed by a bolt round in the back.

Bane-Sidhe tore clean through the Hel's Highway when it fell.

The Warlord had made it half a kilometre before its void shields burst out of existence and its front-facing armour began to suffer the assault from the Godbreaker's guns. No matter how thick the ceramite and adamantium plating covering the Warlord's vital systems, the sheer level of firepower hurled at Bane-Sidhe meant that once its shields died, its existence was measured in minutes.

It was perhaps unfair that such a noble example of the Invigilata's god-machines met its end as a sacrificial lure, but within the Legio's archives, both Bane-Sidhe and her command crew were given the highest honours. The wreckage of the Titan would come to be salvaged by the Mechanicus in the following weeks, and restored to working order fourteen months later. Its destruction at Helsreach was marked upon its carapace with a six-metre square engraved image upon its right shin, depicting a weeping angel over a burning, metallic skeleton.

Unable to withstand any more punishment, with flames pouring from its bridge, the great Warlord fell backwards on howling joints. Its immense weight was enough to break the rockcrete columns holding up the Hel's Highway, sending the Bane-Sidhe and a significant section of the main road crashing down to land in a mountain of rubble.

The Godbreaker stood over the crater of broken road, as if staring down at the body of its latest kill.

Fourteen seconds after the Warlord's shattered remains came to a rest, a flare of sun-bright and fusion-hot energy screamed across the Hel's Highway It was the shape of a newborn star, flaring with arcing coils of plasma light and surrounded by a blinding corona.

The Godbreaker's shields disintegrated at the sunfire's touch. Its armour disintegrated mere seconds later, as did its crew, skeletal structure, and all evidence that it had ever existed.

Jurisian drooled through clenched teeth, feeling the untamed machine-spirit's quivering rage at being used without being ritually blessed and activated via the correct rituals. As the knifing pain in his skull faded to tolerable levels, he opened a vox-link to Grimaldus, and breathed two words.

They were laden with both agony and meaning - symbolising the completion of his duty, and a final farewell.

'Engine kill,' he said.

'The Godbreaker is dead,' Grimaldus voxed to anyone still listening to the comms channels. The news brought no relief to him, and no joy, even for thought of Jurisian's glory. There was nothing now beyond the next second of battle. Step by step, the Reclusiarch and his last brothers were pushed backwards through the basilica, room by room, hall by hall.

The air reeked of alien breath, spilled innards and the sharp overcooked ozone sent of las-fire.

The walls still shook as xenos tanks shelled the holy temple even while their own forces stormed through it.

A young girl in Argent Shroud battle armour was cut down, wailing as she was disembowelled by the horde. Artarion's two blades, both inactive from meat-clogging and no more use than jagged clubs, ripped across the face and throat of the girl's killer. Then he too was beaten back by the four beasts that took the dead brute's place.

A voice rose above the carnage - harsh and enraged.

'Kill them all! Let none survive! Never has an alien defiled this holiest of places!'

Grimaldus dragged the closest ork against him, gripping its throat and thudding his skulled helm against its face to shatter its hideous bone structure. The voice was the prioress's, and he realised now where he was.

No.

No, how could it all be over already?

We have been beaten back to the inner sanctum in mere hours. Sindal's cries of defiance have the worst effect: they awaken everyone from the mindless heat of battle and bloodshed, dragging us back to face the truth.

The inner sanctum is a gore-slick mess of heaving, slashing, shooting humans and orks. We are beaten. No one in this room is going to survive more than a few more minutes. Already, others have sensed this and I see them through the crowd, trying to run from the room, seeking a way past the orks rather than lay down their lives at the last stand.

Militia. Civilians. Guard. Even several storm-troopers. Half of our pathetic remaining force is breaking from the battle and trying to run.

With my hand still at the ork's throat, I drag the kicking beast up with me, standing atop the Major Altar. The beast struggles, but its clawing is weak with its skull broken and its senses disoriented by pain.

My plasma pistol is long gone, torn from me at some point in the last two days of battle. The chain remains. I wrap it around the beast's throat, and roar my words to the painted ceiling as I strangle the creature in full view of everyone in the room.

'Take heart, brothers! Fight in the Emperor's name!' The beast thrashes as it dies, claws scraping in futility at my ruined armour. I tense my grip, feeling the creature's thick spinal bones begin to click and break. Its piggish eyes are wide with terror, and this… this makes me laugh.

'I have dug my grave in this place…' An explosive round detonates on my shoulder, blasting shards of armour free. I see Priamus kill the shooter with the Black Sword in a one-handed grip.

'I have dug my grave in this place, and I will either triumph or I will die!'

Five knights still live, and they roar as I roar.

'No pity! No remorse! No fear!'

The walls shudder as if kicked by a Titan. For a moment, still laughing, I wonder if the Godbreaker has returned.

'Until the end, brothers!'

The cry is taken up by those of us that yet draw breath, and we fight on.

'They're bringing the temple down!' Priamus calls, and there is something wrong with his voice. I realise what it is when I see my brother is missing an arm and his leg armour is pierced in three places.

I have never heard him in pain before.

'Nero!' he screams. 'Nerovar!'

The beasts are primitive, but they are not devoid of intelligence and cunning. Nero's white markings signal him as an Apothecary, and they know of his value to humanity. Priamus sees him first, two dozen metres away through the melee. An alien spear has punched its way through his stomach, and several of the beasts are lifting him from the ground, raising him like a war banner above the carnage.

Nerovar dies like no warrior I have ever seen before. Even as I try to kill my way closer to him, I see him gripping the spear in his fists, hauling himself down the weapon, impaling himself deeper on it in an attempt to reach the aliens below.

He has no bolter, no chainblade. His last act in life is to draw his gladius from its sheath at his thigh and hurl it down with a Templar's vengeance at the ork with the best grip on the spear. He'd dragged himself down to get close enough to ensure he wouldn't miss. The short sword bit true, sinking into the beast's gaping maw and rewarding the xenos with an agonising death, choking on a sword blade that had ravaged its throat, tongue and lungs. With the beast unable to keep hold, the spear falls and Nero plunges into a seething mass of greenskins.

I never see him again.

Priamus, one-armed and faltering now, staggers ahead of me. A detonating round crashes against his helm, spinning him back to face me.

'Grimaldus,' he says, before falling to his knees. 'Brother…'

Flames engulf him from the side - clinging chemical fire that washes over his armour, eating into the soft joints and dissolving the flesh beneath. The ork with the flamer pans the weapon left and right, dousing Priamus in corrosive fire.

I am hammering my way with painful slowness to avenge him when Artarion's blade bursts from the ork's chest. He kicks the dying ork from his broken chainsword. With vengeance taken, my standard bearer turns with as much grace as can be salvaged in this butchery, and his back slams against mine.

'Goodbye, brother.' He's laughing as he says the words, and I do not know why, but it brings out my own laughter.

Blocks of the ceiling are falling now, crushing those beneath. The orks in here with us, paying for every human life with five of their own, pay no heed to their kin outside damning them by destroying the temple with them still inside.

Not far from the altar, I catch a final glimpse of the storm-trooper and the dockmaster. The former stands above the dying latter, Andrej defending the gut-shot Maghernus while he tries to comprehend what to do with his bowels looping across his lap and the floor nearby.

'Artarion,' I call to him, to return the farewell, but there is no answer. The presence against my back is not my brother.

I turn, laughing at the madness before me. Artarion is dead at my feet, headless, defiled. The enemy drive me to my knees, but even this is no more than a bad joke. They are doomed as surely as I am.

I am still laughing when the temple finally falls.

EPILOGUE Ashes

They call it the Season of Fire.

The Ash Wastes are choking with dust from roaring volcanoes. Planet-wide, the picts show the same images, over and over. Our vessels in orbit watch Armageddon breathe fire, and send the images back to the surface, so that those there might witness the world's anger in its entirety.

Fighting across most of the world is ceasing, not because of victory or defeat, but because there can be no arguing with Armageddon itself. The ash deserts are already turning dark. In a handful of days, no man or xenos beast will be able to breathe in the wastelands. Their lungs would fill with ashes and embers; their war machines would grind to a halt, fouled beyond use.

So the war ceases for now. It does not end. There is no tale of triumph and victory to tell.

The beasts stagger and crawl back to cities they have managed to hold, there to hide away from the Season of Fife. Imperial forces consolidate the territories to which they still lay claim, and drive the invaders out from those where the orks have managed to grasp no more than a weak hold.

Helsreach is one of these places. That necropolis, in which one hundred of my brothers lie dead alongside hundreds of thousands of loyal souls…

That tomb-city, so much of which is flattened by the devastation of two months' road-by-road warfare, with no industrial output left at all…

Imperial tacticians are hailing it as a victory.

I will never again understand the humanity I left behind when I ascended to the ranks of the Templars. The perceptions of humans remain alien to me since the moment I swore my first oaths to Dorn.

But I will let the people of this blighted world claim their triumph. I will let the survivors of Helsreach cheer and celebrate a drawn-out defeat that masquerades as victory.

And, as they have requested, I will return to the surface once more.

I have something of theirs in my possession.

They cheer in the streets, and line Hel's Highway as if in anticipation of a parade. Several hundred civilians, and an equal number of off-duty Guard. They stand in crowds, clustered either side of the Grey Warrior.

My helm's aural receptors filter the noise of their cheering to less irritating levels, the way it would do if an artillery battery was shelling the ground around me.

I try not to stare at them, at their flushed faces, at their bright and joyous eyes. The war is over to them. They care nothing for the orbital images that show entire ork armies taking root in other hives. For the people of Helsreach, the war is over. They are alive, so they have won.

It is hard not to admire such simple purity. Blessed is the mind too small for doubt. And in truth, I have never seen a city resist invasion so fiercely. The people here have earned the lives they still have.

This part of the city, not far from the accursed docks, is relatively unscathed. It remained a stronghold firmly in Imperial control. I am given to understand that Sarren and his 101st fought here to the last day.

A gathering of figures clusters by the Grey Warrior. Most wear the ochre uniforms of the Steel Legion. One of them, a man known to me, beckons me over.

I walk to him, and the crowd erupts into more cheers. It is the first time I have moved in almost an hour.

An hour of listening to tedious speeches transmitted from the gathered group, over to a vox-tower nearby that blares the words across the sector.

'Grimaldus, Reclusiarch of the Black Templars,' the vox-voice booms. More cheers as I draw close. The soldier that beckoned to me offers quiet greetings.

Major, or rather, Colonel Ryken has regained much of his face since I last saw him. Burn scars spread across much of the remaining skin, but over half of his features are dull-metalled augmetics, including significant reconstruction to his skull. He makes the sign of the aquila, and only one of his hands is his own. The other is a skeletal bionic, not yet sheathed in synthetic skin.

I return the salute. The vox-speech - the speaker is a member of General Kurov's staff I have never met before - drones on about my own heroism alongside the Steel Legion. As my name is shouted by thousands of humans, I raise my fist in salute to them all.

And all the while, I am thinking how my brothers died here.

Died for them.

'Did Adjutant Quintus Tyro survive?' I ask.

He nods, his ruined face trying to make a smile. 'Cyria made it.'

Good. I am pleased for him, and for her.

'Hello, sir,' another of the Legionnaires says. I glance behind Ryken, to a man several places down the line. My targeting reticule locks on him - onto his grinning face. He is unscarred, and despite his youth, has laugh lines at the corner of his eyes.

So. He's not dead, either.

This does not surprise me. Some men are born with luck in their blood.

I nod to him, and he walks over, seemingly as bored with proceedings as I am. The orator is declaring how I ''smote the blaspheming aliens as they dared defile the Temple's inner sanctum''. His words border on a sermon. He would have made a fine ecclesiarch, or a preacher in the Imperial Guard.

The ochre-clad soldier offers his hand for me to shake. I humour him by doing the same.

'Hello, hero,' he grins up at me.

'Greetings, Andrej.'

'I like your armour. It is much nicer now. Did you repaint it yourself, or is that the duty of slaves?' I cannot tell if this is a joke or not. 'Myself.'

'Good! Good. Perhaps you should salute me now, though, yes?' He taps his epaulettes, where a captain's badges now show, freshly issued and polished silver.

'I am not beholden to a Guard captain,' I tell him. 'But congratulations.'

'Yes, I know, I know. But I must be offering many thanks for you keeping your word and telling my captain of my deeds.'

'An oath is an oath.' I have no idea what to say to the little man. 'Your friend. Your love. Did you find her?'

I am no judge of human emotion, but I see his smile turn fragile and false. 'Yes,' he says. 'I did find her.'

I think of the last time I saw the little storm-trooper, standing over the dockmaster's bloody corpse, bayoneting an alien in the throat, only moments before the basilica fell.

I find myself curiously glad that he is alive, but expressing that notion is not something I can easily forge into words. He has no such difficulty.

'I am glad you made it,' he uses my own unspoken words. 'I heard you were very injured, yes?'

'Not enough to kill me.'

But so close. I quickly grew bored of the Apothecaries on board the Crusader telling me that it was a miracle I clawed my way from the rubble.

He laughs, but there is little joy in it. His eyes are like glass since he mentioned finding his friend.

'You are a very literal man, Reclusiarch. Some of us were in lazy moods that day. I waited for the digging crews, yes, I admit it. I did not have Astartes armour to push the rocks off myself and get back to fighting the very next day.'

'The reports I have heard indicated no one else survived the fall of the basilica,' I tell him.

He laughs. 'Yes, that would make for a wonderful story, no? The last black knight, the only survivor of the greatest battle in Helsreach. I apologise for surviving and breaking the flow of your legend, Reclusiarch. I promise most faithfully that I and the six or seven others will be very quiet and let you have all the thunder.'

He has made a joke. I recognise it, and try to think of something humorous with which to reply. Nothing surfaces in my mind.

'Were you not injured at all?'

He shrugs. 'I had a headache. But then it went away.'

This makes me smile.

'Did you meet the fat priest?' he asks. 'Did you know him?'

'I confess, I do not recall anyone by that name or description.'

'He was a good man. You would have liked him. Very brave. He did not die in the battle. He was with the civilians. But he died two weeks after, from a problem with his heart. Ayah, that is unfair, I think. To live through the end and die at the new beginning? Not so fair, I am thinking.'

There is a twisted poetry to that.

I would like to speak words that comfort him. I would like to tell him I admire his courage, and that his world will survive this war. I want to speak with the ease Artarion would have done, and thank this soldier for standing with us when so many others ran. He honoured us all in that moment, as did the dying dockmaster, the prioress, and every other soul that faded from life on the night only I survived.

But I say nothing. Further conversation is broken by people chanting my name. How alien it sounds, voiced by human throats.

The orator whips the crowd up, speaking - of course - of the relics. They want to see them, and that is why I am here. To display them.

I signal the cenobyte servitors forward. Augmetic servants, vat-grown by the Chapter's Apothecaries and augmented by Jurisian to haul the Temple's artefacts. None of the mindless wretches bear a name; just a relic that represents all I could do to ease my guilt at such a shameful defeat.

The crowd cheers again as the servitors move from the vulture shadow of my Thunderhawk, each of the three carrying one of the artefacts. The ragged scraps of the banner. The cracked stone pillar, topped by the shattered aquila. The sacred bronze globe, sloshing with its precious holy water.

My voice carries with ease, amplified by my helm. The crowd quietens, and Hel's Highway falls silent. I am reminded, against my will, of the impenetrable silence beneath the mountain of marble and rockcrete when the Temple came down upon us all.

'We are judged in life,' I tell them, 'for the evil we destroy.'

Never my words. Always Mordred's.

For the first time, I have an answer to them. A greater understanding. And my mentor… You were wrong. Forgive me, that it took so long to leave your shadow and realise it. Forgive me, that it took the deaths of my brothers to learn the lesson they each tried to teach me while they yet drew breath.

Artarion. Priamus. Bastilan. Cador. Nero.

Forgive me for living, while you all lie cold and still.

'We are judged in life for the evil we destroy. It is a bleak truth, that there is nothing but blood awaiting us in the spaces between the stars. But the Emperor sees all that transpires in His domain. And we are judged equally for the illumination we bring to the blackest nights. We are judged in life for those moments we spill light into the darkest reaches of His Imperium. Your world taught me this. Your world, and the war that brought me here.

'These are your relics. The last treasures of the first men and women ever to set foot upon your world. They are the most precious treasures of your ancestors, and they are yours by right of legacy and blood.

'I return them to you from the edge of destruction. And I thank you not only for the honour of standing by the people of this city, but for the lessons I have learned. My brothers in orbit have asked me why I dragged these relics from beneath the fallen Temple. But you have no need to ask, for you each already know the answer. They are yours, and no alien beast will deny the people of this world the inheritance they deserve.

'I dragged these relics back into the sunlight for you - to honour you, and to thank you all. And in humility now, I return them to you.'

This time, when the cheers come, they are shaped by the orator. He uses the title I swore to High Marshal Helbrecht, standing before Mordred's statue, that I would not refuse when it was formally awarded to me.

'Iam told,' the High Marshal had said afterwards, 'that Yarrick and Kurov have spoken with the Ecclesiarchy. You are being given the relics, to carry Helsreach's memory and honour with you, in the Eternal Crusade.'

'When I return to the surface, I will offer the icons back to the people.'

'Mordred would not have done so,' Helbrecht said, masking any emotion, any judgement, from me.

'I am not Mordred,' I told my liege. 'And the people deserve the choice. It is for them that we waged that war, for them and their world. Not purely for the holy reaping of inhuman life.'

And I wonder now, as they chant my new title, what they will decide to do with the relics.

Hero of Helsreach, the crowd cheers.

As if there is only one.