Blood of Asaheim

Chapter Nineteen



The first sign of change came with the sounding of klaxons out on the plain. A few blared out, braying tinnily, then others joined them. The banners hanging over the legions of diseased troops twitched, then started to sway as their bearers broke into the march. Great booming gongs rang out from beaten hammers of brass. The cloud of drifting soot split and severed, fractured by the sudden movement of thousands of troops.

All along the battlements, Guardsmen immediately tensed, hoisting their lasguns onto the parapet edge and staring through the sights. The twin barrels of the bolter turrets swung into position, angling at the terrain before the walls. Warning chimes sounded throughout the city, echoing along what remained of the narrow spaces and courtyards below.

Váltyr watched it unfold with a calm, expert eye.

‘The first wave,’ he murmured, watching the front ranks of mutants start to creep across the dust-pan towards the outer gates.

More dust kicked up as the legions picked up momentum. The entire expanse of desert seemed to be shifting. Regiment after regiment began to move, lumbering heavily into motion, still whispering the same words, maddeningly repeated far beyond the tolerances of mortal sanity.

Terminus Est. Terminus Est.

Shielded behind the front ranks of infantry came the crawling siege engines. They hauled their way through the muck and murk, belching smoke and venting gas. Some carried rusty toxin vats on their backs, just like the ones destroyed in the ravine; others dragged along multi-barrelled artillery pieces, their snouts corroded and dry with ancient rot and metal cancer; others were tottering creations of iron scaffolding and ramshackle ladders, topped with grapple-claws and chain launchers. Dozens of them emerged out of the preternatural fog, then dozens more.

Stand firm, defenders of Hjec Aleja!

The recorded voice blasting from the vox-casters along the wall was more hectoring than reassuring.

The Immortal Emperor protects! Aim true, hold fast, and no creature of darkness shall pass these walls! Preserve your power-pack! Fire only on command!

Olgeir grunted. ‘If they don’t kill that man, I will.’

Váltyr didn’t smile. ‘They’re coming within range of the wall guns,’ he said. ‘So slow. This’ll be a slaughter.’

‘Aye. But it’ll soak up bullets.’

The enemy host picked up some speed, stumbling from a limping stagger into a half-paced jog. They never launched into battle-cries, just kept up the eerie, incessant chanting. As the heavy sun slammed down on them, feeding the sweaty, stale fug of their sickness, they hissed and wheezed in unison, their dull eyes gazing stupidly.

All along the parapet, lascannon feeder units whined up to full pitch. Their long barrels swivelled into position alongside the squat heavy bolters.

Váltyr glanced over his shoulder, up to the Ighala Gate fortifications in the distance. He could see the canoness standing at the summit of the gatehouse. Gunnlaugur had left her side, no doubt heading down to the perimeter before the storm broke against it. De Chatelaine looked isolated up there, her cloak hanging heavily in the airless heat and the metal lining of her battle-plate glinting. She raised her arm, and a thousand pairs of eyes all across the city waited for the signal.

For a moment her fist hovered motionless, raised above her like a salute. Then it fell.

The wall batteries opened up. The stone beneath Váltyr’s feet trembled as serried lascannons, heavy bolters, sabre platforms and mortar launchers unleashed their contents. Blinding spears of energy lanced out from the city’s edge, shooting clear of the smoke-choked discharge of missile launchers and heavy ordnance.

The front rows of enemy infantry disappeared behind a rippling wave of exploding earth. The cracks and booms of secondary detonations rang out, drowning out their whispering and replacing it with a hammering chorus of mechanical devastation.

More volleys followed, loosed in a steady rain of destruction, tearing through the oncoming horde and miring its advance into a bloody, dust-swirled morass.

Hundreds died in those opening seconds. They just kept marching through it, swinging their scrawny arms even as they staggered into the heart of the maelstrom. Not one of them turned back, not one of them hesitated.

Váltyr felt disgust rise in his gorge. He had seen men used callously on battlefields by the Imperium in the past, but the rank slaughter in front of him went far beyond that. There was malice in it, a casual destruction ordained by powers that loathed humanity and delighted in its degradation. Somewhere, in some forsaken vault of eternity, ruinous intelligences laughed to see such wanton suffering inflicted on their own servants.

For all that, the tactic was not mindless. The lascannons had to pause between barrages to allow the power units to be recycled. Bolter turrets needed reloading, mortar arrays took time to replenish. The crews worked quickly, getting their weapons firing again as soon as they could, but the tiny gaps created opportunities. Enemy infantry, their masks glowing with a dull-edged resolve, clambered across smouldering blast craters and trod down the sagging bodies of the slain. They kept on coming, inching closer with every pause in the firing. Eventually the gun crews were forced to angle their barrels down, ratchet-notch by ratchet-notch. The filthy tide of broken bodies and tangled metalwork edged closer, metre by clogged metre, their progress bought dearly amid the hammering rain of las-beams and bloody bolt-shells.

Through breaks in the growing screens of dirty smoke, war engines could be made out, grinding towards the walls in the wake of the sacrificial infantry. Their heavy treads rolled over the corpses, crushing the stacked cadavers into a slurry of brown-frothed slime. Every so often a lascannon would get a clear shot and one of them would burst into green-edged flame, collapsing into ruin as other weapons zeroed in. But for every one that was downed many more crept nearer, slowly crunching and snapping their way through the pools of twitching, necrotic flesh.

Váltyr drew holdbítr. Olgeir hoisted sigrún. The two of them stood on the wall’s edge, watching the first of the big machines draw into range. Alongside them on the parapet’s length, mortal troops held their lasguns tightly, blinked into their sights and tried not to seize up too much. The few Battle Sisters among them stood silently, patiently, like ebony statues of lost saints.

‘The Hand of Russ be with you, Heavy-hand,’ said Váltyr.

Olgeir nodded. ‘And with you, blademaster. Reap a swathe.’

Váltyr flourished his blade. Even in the dull, smog-thick air the metal flashed brilliantly, polished to a glass-clear sheen.

‘I intend to,’ he said.

The dusk was hours away but the sky darkened swiftly. A dilated pall the colour of sour plums soared up from the horizon, blotting out the light of the sun. Rearing towers of airborne ash snaked out, bleeding up from the skirts of the boiling hordes as they advanced. Lightning, picked out in lurid green, flickered under the ragged hems of the racing clouds, closely followed by the dull roll of unnatural thunder.

The air, already hot, became stiflingly humid. Insects swarmed up from the plains and began to plague the battlement level of the walls. They clustered around the air intakes of the Guards’ chem-suits, buzzing furiously as their swollen abdomens jammed in the mechanisms. Gun crews began to leave their stations, choking, slapping and clawing at their gas masks. The intensity of the defensive barrage fell away.

‘Stay where you are!’ roared Gunnlaugur, striding up to the edge of the broad gun platform that perched over the outer wall gatehouse. He was surrounded by hundreds of Guardsmen, all manning one of the dozens of bolter-mounts that lined the ornate bulwark. Despite the droning mass of biting insects they laboured on as best they could, dragging fresh crates to the gaping gun-breeches and spinning elevating wheels two-handed.

By then the enemy had almost reached the walls. Their losses were still incredible, but with every passing minute the gap closed by a few paces more. Some of the mutants even managed to loose grappling hooks or hurl spiked incendiary bombs up at the defenders. Such futile attempts did little more than scrape the foundations of the city’s perimeter, but the fact they’d got so close, and so fast, was sobering.

Gunnlaugur grasped the lip of the platform’s railing and leaned out over the raging tumult below, craning for a better view. The siege engines were getting closer, wrapped in thick coats of oily smoke. The first flickers of enemy las-fire started to spike upwards from ground level. As bigger guns were dragged into range, that trickle slowly grew more disruptive.

Hjec Aleja was completely surrounded. The plague-host stretched away in all directions, devouring the open land and turning it black. The pale stone of the city turned scab-brown under the gathering smog and the golden lining of the banners lost its lustre. Lumen banks began to flicker into life across the walls and defence towers, but their light was quickly muffled in the dense murk.

Gunnlaugur stood defiantly above it all, poised atop the beleaguered gates like some ancient sea captain at the prow of his wave-cutter.

Ahead of him, vast and wreathed in underlit gouts of steam, a tottering mobile tower rig emerged from the gloom. It reached up to the level of the battlements, dwarfing the ranks of marching mortals before its huge segmented tracks. Its flanks were formed of an intricate skein of interlocking iron webs. Banners of crudely stitched human hide fluttered in its wake, still bloody and unscraped, bolted to the scaffold with metal pins. As Gunnlaugur watched, a row of bronze-throated cannons rolled out along the tower’s top tier, each one already smoking from its baleful contents.

‘Bring it down!’ he thundered at the crews around him.

They tried to. Two lascannon stations found their target, sending beams tearing through the superstructure and nearly sending it crashing back to earth. Somehow, the siege tower kept on coming, teetering and rocking.

Then, with a glottal roar, the tower’s cannons returned fire. Shells screamed across the exposed gun platform, whistling across the space at head height. Gunnlaugur, ducking under the barrage, saw Guardsmen hit full on, hurled into shreds of flesh as the barbed missiles exploded. Metal shards flew out from the shells in bursting clouds of spinning debris, scything through body armour and cutting into stone. Trails of vomit-yellow mucus flew out from the exploding ordnance, clinging to whatever it splattered across and eating at it like acid.

In that single volley half the gun stations had been taken out. The rest of them had mauled crews and only slowly scrambled to respond.

Gunnlaugur kicked back to his feet. He raced over to the nearest heavy bolter turret – an open platform with a single twin-linked gun mounted on a swivel-plate. He grabbed the two-handed grip, spun the barrels round and opened fire. Twin columns of mass-reactive shells blazed straight back at the tower’s approaching summit.

The line of cannons blew up one after the other as the stream of bolts flew into their gaping maws. Skeletal figures clinging to the tower’s structure fired back at Gunnlaugur, concentrating las-beams at his position. Those shots that hit him glanced from his armour, scoring it but not penetrating. Gunnlaugur weathered the storm, firing all the time, holding firm as the long chain of shells spun through the bolter’s feeder mechanism.

By the time the heavy bolter clicked empty the other gun crews were recovering. Stark white las-beams and solid projectiles hammered into the reeling siege tower. With a sighing crack, the spine of it broke, sending the top level crashing down to the smoke-filled plains below. Ammo-dumps stored inside ignited with a whooshing bang, and a thick bloom of orange flame raced up the tower’s cracked sides. It reeled on its tracks, hanging precariously for a moment, then toppled, breaking up into burning shards as it disintegrated over the jostling throngs below.

Gunnlaugur looked around him. Three more war engines were approaching, each as large as the first one, crushing and tearing their way through the legions that pressed around them. At ground level, heavily armoured plague-bearers in dull black armour were hauling what looked like huge bomb carcasses towards the barred gate entrance. The volume of fire aimed up at the battlements was growing all the time.

He drew his bolter grimly, trying to gauge just how long the defences on the perimeter could hold before retreat became inevitable. The task was already nearly hopeless, like trying to hold back a storm-tide of the Helwinter.

‘Hold fast!’ he roared defiantly, picking his next target out and opening fire again. The familiar hammering clatter of his bolter rang out across the growing cacophony of the battlefield, adding to the steady crescendo of rage and fury. ‘In the name of the Allfather, hold fast!’

Ingvar heard the blasts from far off. In the sanctuary of the Halicon’s apothecarion they were little more than dull rumbles. Some of the larger impacts made the walls vibrate, sending hairline cracks along the cement between the tiles.

He started to pace around Baldr’s table, his fingers twitching. The mood of despair that had fallen over him following the brawl with Gunnlaugur had faded, replaced by a burning impatience.

He should be out there, standing with his brothers. Watching over Baldr in the Halicon was a waste.

He paced some more, resisting the urge to draw his blade. The sterile air of the apothecarion tasted stale as he breathed it.

I should be out there.

He blink-clicked a comm link to Olgeir.

‘How goes the fight, brother?’ he asked.

The feed was crackly and static-filled. He heard the thin background buzz of what must have been explosions, the low roar of bolter-shells loosing.

‘Ingvar?’ Olgeir’s voice was strained. ‘What do you want? We’re a little busy here.’

‘Where are you? I should be with you. I’ll come to your position.’

The feed broke off briefly, overloaded with white noise, before re-establishing.

‘…ere you are. Blood of Russ, Gyrfalkon, do not leave him. You saw what he looked like.’

Ingvar clenched his fists in frustration, glancing over to where Baldr lay, as immobile as ever, his flesh as torpid as rotting meat. There had been no change. If anything, he looked worse.

‘This is madness,’ hissed Ingvar, starting to walk again. ‘Send the whelp back. You need my blade there, brother.’

Olgeir didn’t reply. The link boomed briefly with more explosions, followed by a series of drawn-out screams. Ingvar heard a mortal voice shouting something in the background.

They’re coming through! Throne, they’re coming through!

When Olgeir finally spoke again, his thick voice was punctuated by panting, as if he’d broken into a jogging run.

‘Do not leave him,’ he said, breaking off to fire another hammering volley before starting to move again. ‘You hear me? At this rate we’ll be back with you within the hour anyway – they’re all over the walls. Stay at the Hali–’

The link snapped out.

Ingvar cursed, his fists still balled. He drew in a deep breath, trying to stay calm. It was hard to resist the urge to move, to prowl across the confines of his prison like a caged beast, to do something.

He glared at the door. The lock mechanism could be crushed from the outside, sealing Baldr in. He hesitated, torn between duty and desire.

He looked back at Baldr. The fallen warrior’s cheeks still bore a greenish hue. It seemed to be intensifying, as if whatever filth had been shoved into his system were breeding away within him.

That was an uncomfortable thought.

Ingvar went back over to the slab, studying Baldr’s pale face. Flecks of foam had collected at the corners of his mouth, speckled with blood. They shivered as his shallow breaths came and went.

Ingvar sniffed. Just as before, the tang of the warp was clearly detectable. That, though, could have been down to the residue of the sorcerer’s art, clinging to the armour like bloodstains on a corpse. In itself, it was no proof.

If Baldr had been mortal, Ingvar would have killed him without another thought.

But he wasn’t mortal. He was one of them.

As Ingvar stood there, his mind racing, more muffled booms rang out from far away, making the floor shudder. They seemed closer than the last ones.

‘Forgive me, brother,’ said Ingvar, straightening. ‘But could you stay here, knowing the battle had come at last? I will return for you.’

He started to move away, then hesitated, looking over his shoulder. For a moment, just as he’d turned his head, he thought he’d seen a flicker of movement in Baldr’s eyes – a momentary tremor of peeled-back lids.

He stared for a little while longer, scrutinising Baldr’s prone outline.

Nothing. Baldr lay as still as graven image in the halls of the Jarlheim. The algal tinge around his cheeks and jawline remained as unsettlingly deep as before.

Then Ingvar grasped his helm from his belt.

‘Forgive me,’ he said again, backing towards the exit as he donned the red-lensed, snarling facemask. ‘If Gunnlaugur wanted one of us to sit this out, he should have chosen the whelp.’

I need to know that you will follow an order.

He paused at the doorway, his fingers resting on the stone frame.

‘I will return,’ he said.

Then he pushed the door open, and headed out into the dark.

The volume of incoming fire steadily cranked up. It became intermittently dangerous, then solid, then devastating. As fast as the enemy artillery was knocked out by the defenders, more guns were hauled into place. Brass cannon-pieces, their barrels carved into snarling devil maws, bludgeoned the walls remorselessly, hammering away with incendiary bombs, shrapnel-bursts and tumbling vials of toxic sludge. The last were the worst – when they exploded amid the defenders their contents ate through armour with terrifying ease, melting flesh and popping eyes.

The parapets were aflame, burning in all quarters where the torrid mix of accelerants and chemicals ignited. The air shimmered with heat and noise and fear. Gouges had been blown out of the upper levels by the artillery barrages, cracking open the reinforced rockcrete and sending blocks of it crashing into the city beyond. Teams of enemy sappers, covered by ferocious quantities of las-fire and spore-grenades, had already gained the base of the walls and were pitilessly hacking away at the foundations. Several siege towers had reached their targets, cranking open drawbridges and spilling hordes of masked horrors onto the battlements. Each sally so far had been repelled, but more towers kept on coming, emerging out of the poisonous smog with remorseless frequency.

Jorundur stood on the battlements, firing his bolter two-handed. He worked stoically, almost in silence, fully absorbed in what he was doing. The mortals working alongside him continued to fight even as the defences crumbled around them. They all knew the cost of surrendering the walls and clung on to them tenaciously, firing in disciplined barrages while their comrades were cut down by the rain of chem-bombs and shrapnel bursts.

Hafloí was different. He marched up and down the parapet, firing his bolt pistol with abandon and brandishing his axe flamboyantly.

‘That all you’ve got?’ he roared, spreading his arms and taunting the enemy. ‘Skítja, you disgust me! Come up here and test your arms on me!’

Jorundur had seen the mortals break into laughter as Hafloí had strutted past them, despite the unfolding horrors around them. His relentless rain of insults, challenges and expletives was having an effect on them. They saw his brazen lack of fear, and some of it rubbed off on them.

Jorundur smiled wryly. That was good. He swept his bolter muzzle around, looking for targets in the murk. Down on ground level he saw a huge, slack-bellied monster lurching towards the walls, its yellow skin hanging in bags from an obscenely stretched skeleton and what looked like a massive limpet mine cradled in its arms. Claw-fisted infantry shambled along in its wake.

He took aim carefully, adjusting the bolter a fraction as the walls shook beneath him, and fired. The creature’s head exploded in a burst of bone and jellied matter. The mine crashed to the floor at its feet and went off, sending a shuddering boom radiating out through the troops around it.

Even as that assault crumbled into disarray Jorundur searched for the next one. His concentration was distracted, however, by a horribly familiar surge and crackle from behind him. He immediately pushed back, leaving the battlements and moving to the inner edge of the walkway. The stink of discharged ether filtered up from the city below, mingling with the myriad other stinks polluting the smoggy air.

Hafloí had heard it too and broke away from his posturing. He seemed to be moving freely again.

‘You sense that?’ he asked, his voice tightening. ‘I thou–’

‘Hush,’ snapped Jorundur, listening carefully.

He didn’t have to wait long. From below, down at street level in the lower city, a chorus of screaming started up, punctuated by the wet rattle of bolter-fire.

‘They’ve teleported behind us,’ said Jorundur grimly, slamming a fresh magazine into his bolter and preparing to jump. ‘Stay here and hold the walls.’

But Hafloí had already leapt, throwing himself clear of the parapet and plummeting down to the ground below.

‘Damn him,’ muttered Jorundur, following him down. He hit the earth hard and staggered from the impact. His armour servos whined as they compensated, pushing him back upright.

The scene on the ground was fluid. Ahead of him, twenty metres away, rose the nearest buildings. In between them and the walls was the wide area cleared by the engineers, clogged with barricades, ammo-crates, spare weaponry and reserve defence squads. Men were running back from the line of buildings, turning to fire sporadically. Something was in the maze of alleys beyond – Jorundur could hear the noise of walls collapsing, mortals crying out in terror, gunfire rattling.

Hafloí sprinted towards the source of the noises, his axe already whirling. Jorundur struggled to keep pace with him.

‘Wait!’ he roared, knowing it would be pointless but fearing what the Blood Claw would do. Hafloí was hungry to make up for his failure, and his blood was up. That was a dangerous combination.

Hafloí disappeared into the shadows of the streets. Jorundur raced after him. By the time he caught up, Hafloí was already in combat.

Jorundur burst into a steep-sided courtyard overlooked by burning habs. The floor of it was a cracked mess of rubble and bodies, strewn with torn limbs and crushed weapon barrels. In the midst of it stood a lone Plague Marine, his armour still swimming with shimmering ether-residue, his power claws nearly black with boiling viscera. Two pale green lenses glowed in the murk as he swung round to face the raging Blood Claw.

Jorundur aimed his bolter but Hafloí blundered into the way. Jorundur circled round to the left, closing in to try to get a clear shot.

He never had the chance to fire. As he watched, stunned into inaction by what he was seeing, Hafloí took the Plague Marine apart.

Hafloí’s speed, his fury, his power – it was phenomenal. He fired with the pistol at close range, chipping and cracking the monster’s crusted power armour, all the while hacking with the twin blades of his hand-axe. The Traitor was strong, just as all his kind were, but he had no answer to the sheer pace of the attack. Hafloí’s movements became a blur of velocity, a whirlwind of hammer-blows and axe-bites.

The Plague Marine tried to respond, hauling his bloody claws in broad sweeps, but Hafloí never gave him a chance to bring his greater strength to bear. He ducked under the lunging claws, thrusting up and twisting his axe round in a tight arc. Then his body spun around, propelling the blade across in a glittering line. It severed the Plague Marine’s neck just above the gorget. The strike was perfect – angled between the hard armour plates and dragged through the flesh beneath with staggering power.

The Traitor crashed to the earth, his lopped neck oozing a thick mixture of pus and heartsblood. Hafloí stood in triumph over it, his boot crunched onto the enemy’s swollen breastplate, his axe raised high.

‘Fenrys hjolda!’ he roared, throwing his head back and howling to the fiery heavens.

Jorundur found himself momentarily lost for words.

‘Blood of Russ,’ he breathed, stalking over to Hafloí and gazing at the damage he’d done. ‘A mighty kill. Where did you learn to do that?’

‘From watching you,’ replied Hafloí, his voice savagely cheerful. ‘You’re a miserable pack, truth be told, but I’ve learned a few tricks.’

Jorundur was about to reply when fresh screaming echoed out into the false night. He looked up, over the roofs of the buildings to where the walls loomed.

Plague-bearers had got onto the parapet at last. He could see them swarming along the battlements and grappling with the Guardsmen, overwhelming them through sheer force of numbers. Further along the walls, gouges had been opened up in the stonework as the big artillery found its range. Flames coursed up the flanks of the beleaguered defence towers, snapping and writhing like nests of serpents. The stink of warp-energy remained strong, indicating that other Plague Marines had been dropped behind the defensive lines. Above it all boiled the clouds of flies and chem-spores, whipped up into a thick airborne pall of madness and disease.

The line was breaking. Once that truth became evident the vox-casters blazed out again, matched by the shouted commands of the surviving unit sergeants.

Fall back! Back to the inner walls! Fall back! Back to the inner walls!

As soon as they heard the order men began to pull away from their posts, trying not to break into a headlong run, firing steadily in retreat at the hordes of bloated, twisted mutants that swarmed through every gap and breach in the burning defences.

Jorundur stowed his bolter and drew his power axe. He thumbed the disruptor field on and its blue-edged crackle snarled into life.

‘Time for blades, I think,’ he said, striding back towards the approaching enemy. ‘Your axe and mine, White-pelt.’

Hafloí laughed harshly, falling in behind.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But you have to think of a better name.’