He gave the order for the final column to advance towards the palace. At his command we laid down a curtain of fire, not at the palace, not at its defenders, but at the obstacles in our way. The hail of fire smashed through the blazing fungus. The sticky tar beneath the treads slowed the tanks but did not stop them.
Then the enemy opened fire with incendiaries and I saw the purpose of that dark residue. It caught fire, blazing up with incredible heat. It was something that would have fried an infantryman on the spot, but a tank is massive and it takes some time to heat.
‘Push on!’ Macharius ordered. We drove forward into a curtain of flame.
I held my breath. I could see nothing except flames and oily smoke ahead of me. I was simply driving forward in the direction of the palace entrance as I remembered it and praying to the Emperor that we did not deviate too far from the line.
There was nothing out there that I could think of that would deflect us by sheer mass, but even a slight inclination caused by an obstruction could shift us a fraction of a degree out of line and the cumulative effect of those might cause a lot of drift. I was tempted to make adjustments to the controls, but that way, too, might lead to disaster. My own imagination could take us out of the correct line.
Something smashed down into the Russ from above. The guns on the palace walls were still firing at us. The Leman Russ shook under the impact but its armour held.
‘Keep moving, Lemuel,’ Macharius said. His voice was calm and confident. ‘We will soon be under the angle the guns can fire at.’
In his head, he was keeping the speed and range of our tank to the palace as well as all the other factors in the battle. He started giving out orders in response to reports coming in from the gates behind us. It sounded like the walking dead were attacking in force.
Ahead a burning man emerged from the flames. His flesh had been seared black but still he struggled to move. The dead were rising even in the former fungal forest but the flames incinerated them as that happened. It was a small mercy but I was grateful for it.
Suddenly we were clear of the fire. Ahead of us I could see a massive ornate staircase, flanked by two huge statues of diseased angels. Both were cowled. Both had great bat-wings rising from their backs. One of them had a skeletal face, the lower half of which was covered in a rebreather mask. The other apparently depicted a man in the throes of a plague. He was smiling malevolently, his mouth a death’s head rictus, his eyes narrowed in glee. The statues were so realistic they appeared to be alive.
I aimed the Leman Russ at the stairwell and drove up it, splintering the marble beneath the treads of the tank. The vehicle roared up and I glanced out ahead of us. Space Wolves held the hallway beyond us, crouched in cover behind pillars and obscene statuary. A hail of incoming fire splashed over us, until our own guns spoke in response.
A grinding sound behind us told me that other vehicles had arrived. I nudged the Leman Russ forward as gently as I could into the hallway, and pulled up, hull down alongside a stagnant ornamental pool. We could take the tank no further.
The guns kept firing. Macharius reached up and flipped the seal above him, opening the hatchway and pulled himself out. I followed swiftly, determined to guard him with my life.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I went up through the hatch, unslinging my shotgun, feeling the warmed metal of the hull vibrate beneath my feet. I risked a glance around and saw more and more Leman Russ emerge at the top of the stairs. There were so many of them now that the entranceway was all but blocked. Behind the tanks, towers of flame leapt and danced, and clouds of oily smoke spiralled upwards towards the roof of the hive.
I looked around and saw that the ornamental pool held scummy, stagnant, diseased-looking water. It was greenish and clogged with algae. Obscenely fat, whitish, slug-like bodies floated in it. Most of them bore the exploded-from-the-inside look that I associated with bolter shells.
There were corpses everywhere. Every single one of them either had its head torn off or its skull destroyed by bolter fire. The Space Wolves were taking no chances of having their foes return from death to trouble them again. I suspected it was less because the thought bothered them than because they did not want to waste the time.
The palace might have been beautiful once. There was a lot of marble and a lot of statuary but the place was contaminated. That was the only word I could think of to describe it. Things were blotched by mould and covered in curtains of mucus. A statue raised both hands to the sky, a bolter held between them. Yellowish slime dripped from under its arms. Paintings on the walls were covered in a fur of whitish mould. Small things scuttled everywhere. They might have been rats, they might have been beetles or they might have been some unholy hybrid of both.
Who could dwell amid all of this, I wondered? No one sane.
Macharius jumped from the side of the tank and landed on the edge of the pool. He kept his balance like a great cat. I dropped after him, and my boots slipped on the slimy lip at the water’s edge and I almost tumbled in. I flailed my arms to keep my balance, somehow pulled myself upright and let myself drop to the ground. The thought of touching the polluted liquid made me shudder. Ivan dropped down from the side of the tank directly to the ground, which struck me as entirely more sensible.
Drake and the two members of his guard joined us. More troops moved up all around, taking cover where they could find it. Macharius moved over to one of the pillars to join Grimnar and his honour guard. The Space Wolf grinned at us, revealing his sharp fangs. He was not wearing a helmet or a rebreather here and seemed to feel no need for one.
‘Glad you could finally join us,’ he said. ‘These unbelievers are most unwelcoming towards the Allfather’s Chosen.’
‘This is where the traitor Richter is,’ Macharius said. ‘We shall find him.’
‘Of course, Lord High Commander,’ said the Space Wolf. ‘It will take more than a few thousand of these heretics to stop us.’
‘What have you found out so far?’
The Space Wolf indicated the mould on the wall with one armoured finger. With no squeamishness whatsoever he drew a swift map of the entrance hall and the surrounding area using his finger. Once he tilted his head to one side as if listening to something and then drew a swift correction. He was obviously picking up reports from his scouts still.
I studied the diagram. It was large and covered a score of rooms radiating out from our position. One large corridor ran ahead and it had chambers running off it. An x marked rooms that had been cleared; a large number of them marked the map.
Grimnar started another map, indicating the levels above us. He sketched in the balconies on which the heavy weapons were mounted and swiftly marked those destroyed as well. It looked like he had cleared the area overlooking the route we had taken into the palace even as we advanced. It was an astonishing feat considering how few warriors he had compared to the defenders.
‘The majority of the heretics were hardly fit to be counted as foes, more like target practice,’ he said and laughed. It was an eerie sound. I could not detect anything like human mirth in it although his face showed something of the expression of a man making a joke. ‘There are some present who appear much tougher than others. They have been changed.’
‘Changed?’ Drake asked.
‘They look diseased but in their cases their illness makes them stronger and faster and feel pain less. They show signs of mutation.’