Atop a nearby ridge I noticed something. It was a cage, made of metal, resting on a metal platform on a high spot above us. It was an odd shape – not square like most of cages I had seen but curved towards the top. Inside it were a number of X-shaped structures made from metal. I was too far away to make out what exactly these cages contained although I could see that they were blackened and scorched and covered in what appeared to be soot. Curious, I set off up the hill, shouldering my shotgun just in case. Anton and Ivan followed me.
I began to notice something else about the cages. Beneath them was some sort of residue. The bottoms seemed more scorched than the tops as if fires had been lit beneath them and heated the metal framework. As I got closer, I saw that this was exactly the case and I saw something else. There were fire-blackened human skeletons attached to the X-frames within the cages. They had been chained there.
‘What in the name of the Emperor?’ Ivan said and whistled. Anton just let out a high-pitched nervous giggle as if not quite able to come to terms with what he was seeing. I walked closer, thinking there must be some mistake.
There was no mistake. Somebody had chained up a number of men within the cages. They had set them alight. In places the flesh was scorched black, in other places pink meat and charred bone was visible where the flesh had sloughed away. Long metal tentacles descended from the top of the cage. They contacted the scorched skulls. At first I thought they were more chains designed to lift the victims’ heads at an unnatural angle but then I saw they were fire-proof tubes connected to metal rebreather filters over the victims’ mouths.
I stared, not quite able to get to grips with what I was seeing. It was mechanically-minded Anton who figured it out.
‘The tubes kept those poor bastards breathing,’ he said.
‘What?’ Ivan said.
‘The smoke from the flames might have suffocated them. The tubes fed air into their lungs, kept them breathing while the flames burned them alive.’
He paused for a moment and thought for a moment. ‘No. It was worse. They were not just burned alive. There are heating elements in the metal. The bars, the chains, those cross-bars would all be white hot. They would be branded as they burned.’
‘Why?’ I asked, for once not astonished by the fact I was asking Anton the reason for something.
‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Discipline maybe?’
‘You mean like a flogging?’
‘More like an execution.’
‘They are a cruel bunch on this world,’ said Ivan. We had lived under Imperial Guard discipline for a decade so you had to plumb impressive depths for Ivan to think you were cruel.
We walked around the cages, looking at them from all angles, trying to make sense of what was going on here. I’ve fought orks and they can be vicious but this was something else. It was calculated and strange and nasty beyond words. Someone had wanted whoever was imprisoned in these cages to suffer in the most profound way, to drag out every second of their blazing agony as their red-hot surroundings consumed their lives.
I stopped and stared at it for a long time.
‘What are you thinking, Leo?’ Anton asked.
‘I am thinking it would be a bad idea to be taken prisoner by whoever did this.’
‘You’ll get no arguments from me,’ said Ivan.
‘If I find the bastards who do this stuff, I’ll show them the sort of burning a lasgun can do,’ said Anton. He meant it to sound mean. It came out frightened.
I turned away from the cage and looked down at the aftermath of the battle. There were tens of thousands of Imperial Guardsmen down there, swarming over the position like ants, and I was suddenly very glad of that.
I could see the Indomitable and Corporal Hesse on top of it, waving up at us.
‘You reckon we ought to report this?’
I glanced around. From up here I could see there were other cages and other groups of soldiers and officers clustered around them, gawping.
‘I don’t think we’ll need to,’ I said. ‘Other people have already noticed.’
The columns of our mechanised force roared southwards, moving as fast as they could. Valkyries and Vultures filled the sky overhead. All around us the landscape began to change. Great pipelines ran to the horizon. Signs of human occupation became more visible: empty irrigation canals and the huge crystalline geodesics of hydroponic farms. There were small pueblos and larger hab-zones.
Sometimes in the distance I caught sight of dust plumes as if refugees were fleeing before us. Sometimes, very far in the distance the clouds seemed to glow, although I had no idea why.
So far, we had not met any real opposition, which was worrying. Karsk was an industrial world – it should have had a mighty army defending it. We had overcome all resistance a little too easily.
I found it suspicious.
I could tell from the chat that I heard on the comm-net that the others were uneasy too. Ivan was making a few slurred jokes about how soft the heretics were. We were all wondering when the real war would begin.
Here and there about the landscape were more of the cages for burning folks alive. Some of them were large enough to hold hundreds. They seemed to become more common as we approached the city.
The ground beneath us was firmer now. We were out of the great ash deserts and on to what was either more solid rock or a foundation of plascrete set there for purposes of construction. The buildings started huddling together to form small towns. We swept by them, heading for our goal. It was swiftly becoming visible on the horizon.
A huge excrescence emerged out from the planet itself, a dense jumble of towers, each thrusting into a polluted sky. The clouds hung so low over the city that they obscured the top of the towers, as if the world was ashamed of Irongrad and sought to hide it beneath a blanket of fog. It took some time for me to realise that the clouds and fog were a product of the city itself, so strong was this initial impression. At the very tip of the hive where it vanished into the clouds, the sky was lighter and flickered as if something was aflame within the toxic fog.
Around the city were what looked to be the cones of small volcanoes. Some of them were. Others were the terminus of pipes for industrial waste. It bubbled up and formed slagheaps and polluted ash fields.
The city had an odd organic look. Effluent from the factorum towers had flowed down like lava from a volcano. It had been caught in prepared frameworks and allowed to harden, forming layers between the buildings, roofs on which other structures had been built. Some of the layers looked like hardened candle wax. Others had been sculpted by builders. The imprint of intelligence was all too clear. Huge greenhouses glittered on the slopes.
Irongrad was as large a hive city as any I have ever seen and Belial was not a world short of giant metropolises. Each of those towers was a small fortress in and of itself. Each was like the bulkhead in a ship – it could be sealed off and defended even if its neighbours were taken or destroyed. And that would only be the beginning. Most of the city was hidden from view. Hives have endless layers, one on top of the other, descending into the very bowels of the planet.
The possibility of fighting street to street and block to block in that vast apparition was not a reassuring one. Of course, we had enough firepower to level the place if the need should arise. I told myself that was an idiotic thought – the whole purpose of the invasion was to take Irongrad and its pyrite processing plants. We needed what they could produce in order to keep the Crusade moving across the stars.
Another thought occurred to me – if they really wanted to cripple us, the inhabitants could simply destroy the city and thus remove all strategic reason for us attacking them. Of course, that would mean sacrificing their homes and seeking refuge in the empty, deadly desert. It would mean the rulers of that great hive city forswearing all of their wealth and possessions and reducing themselves to paupers simply in order to thwart our will and the will of the Imperium.