'Very appropriate,' nodded Uriel.
'It means I don't have to use that other damned weapon…'
'Where is it now?'
'In there,' said Pasanius, pointing at the wreck they had clambered from what must only have been minutes ago. 'I'll let it burn.'
Uriel understood Pasanius's sentiment, for there was no honour and only risk in using a weapon that had been touched by the Ruinous Powers. Better to let it perish in the fire than risk it turning upon you.
Another Chimera pulled up beside them, the hatch in the turret open and Verena Kain leaning on the handles of a pintle storm bolter. The barrels smoked and Kain's face was black with dirt, pink lines streaking her features where sweat had run from her scalp.
'Get in,' she barked. 'They could be back.'
'Unlikely,' said Uriel, but he picked himself up and helped Pasanius to his feet. The armoured door at the back of the Chimera opened and Sergeant Tremain and two other troopers stepped out, their lasguns trained on the roof-lines.
Tremain beckoned them over and Uriel and Pasanius jogged over to the rumbling vehicle.
The street was filled with smoke and five blazing wrecks were abandoned where they had been destroyed. There were no bodies to be seen, the dead and wounded gathered up by the crews of the surviving vehicles. The Sentinel whose pilot Uriel had seen shot had collapsed, its leg broken by a careening Chimera. The pilot was nowhere to be seen.
Uriel shielded his eyes and asked Kain, 'Where to now?'
'To the barracks,' said Kain. 'It's closer and we have wounded.'
He had more questions, but the needs of the wounded took precedence and seconds could make the difference between life and death for some of these soldiers. Tremain clambered inside the Chimera, but as Uriel gripped the sides of the door, he saw that the compartment was full to bursting with wounded men who groaned as they lay on the sloshing floor. Uriel knew that the other vehicles would also be like this, thick with the stench of fear and pain and blood.
Soldiers sat shoulder to shoulder, packed in more tightly than even the most ambitious vehicle designer could have hoped, and Uriel saw a respect and admiration in their eyes that hadn't been there before.
Soldiers shuffled as they made room for them, word of Uriel and Pasanius's involvement in the fight having spread to those who hadn't seen it. Corpsmen cared for the wounded as best they were able in the red-lit compartment and a sullen anger simmered below the surface of every man on board.
'We'll ride on top,' said Uriel. 'You need all the room you can get in here.'
The Chimeras sped onwards through the city of Barbadus, and Uriel was afforded his first proper look at this Imperial capital. It appeared to have grown up around the ruins of an ancient battlefield, such was the litter and detritus of warfare that lay strewn around. Entire graveyards of armoured vehicles had been abandoned and left for the elements to devour and the people of the planet to colonise.
Buildings of agglomerated stone, brick and metal leaned precariously, supported by iron buttresses that had once been the main guns of armoured vehicles. The further into the city the racing column of vehicles went, the more solid and conventional the structures became, high-walled towers of pink stone and bleached timber.
Buildings of dark iron and tempered glass that were of Imperial origin nestled uncomfortably amongst the pale stone and clay bricks of the city and Uriel saw evidence of the war that had been fought to win this world on every one of the older buildings: las-burns and bullet marks, the latter worn smooth by the elements.
Uriel caught glimpses of green and gold streamers wafting from high spires and sagging clotheslines, the same green and gold that the man with the forked beard had been wearing. Many of the memorials in the dead city had streamers of the same colours attached to them and Uriel wondered what they symbolised.
'Emperor's blood!' hissed Pasanius, looking towards a gently sloping hill that rose to the west of the city.
'What?' said Uriel, fearing another ambush.
'Would you look at that?' said Pasanius. 'I've never seen the like.'
Uriel followed Pasanius's gaze and saw a strangely shaped building on the plateau of the hill. There was a familiarity to its silhouette, but it took him some moments to realise why.
The inhabitants of the city had been thorough in their cannibalisation of the discarded armoured vehicles, rendering many of them into dwellings, but this act of refurbishment was surely the apex of the scavenger's art.
Three towering Capitol Imperialis, mighty leviathans of vehicles used for command and control of entire battlefronts, sat side by side and had been transformed into something else entirely. Hundreds of crewmen and officers could operate from within each of these incredible war machines, directing entire regiments of artillery, hundreds of thousands of men and entire companies of armoured vehicles. To see one such colossus on a battlefield was rare, but to see three, abandoned no less, was unheard of.
They were surely abandoned, for the rust and corrosion on their sides was clear proof that these machines were no longer in use. The Imperial eagles on the sides of the outer two were gone, though it was impossible to tell whether they had been erased by the elements or by design. Swaying walkways joined them and iron-sheathed tunnels connected them at lower levels.
'What do you suppose it is?' asked Pasanius.
Uriel had been wondering the same thing. As he looked closer, he saw what might have been a winged staff encircled by a pair of entwined serpents above the control bridge of the middle vehicle.
A caduceus?
'A medicae facility perhaps?' suggested Uriel. 'Seems a bit excessive to use Capitol Imperialis for that.'
'True, but perhaps that was all they were fit for.'
'What do you mean?'
'Look at everything else we've seen,' said Uriel. There is a whole army's worth of abandoned armour here. Half the city's built among the mined chassis of Imperial Guard tanks. When the Falcatas took this place, I think whatever Crusade force left them here didn't leave them with much to maintain their equipment.'
'Meaning it all went to wrack and ruin.'
'Eventually, yes.'
'Damn shame that,' said Pasanius. 'Not a good idea to show that lack of respect to something that would have saved your life in battle.'
'No, not a good idea at all,' agreed Uriel, remembering the harsh treatment meted out to his armour on Medrengard.
Uriel longed to be enclosed in the battle plate of the Astartes, to feel that he was whole once again and a righteous servant of the Emperor, clad in the strongest armour and armed with the deadliest weapons. Uriel's battle gear was more than simply artefacts of war, they were instruments of the Emperor's will.
At the foot of the hill upon which stood the medicae facility was a multi tiered, colonnaded dome that could only belong to the roof of an Ecclesiarchy temple. The soaring grandeur of the building was no doubt designed to dominate the more lowly structures around it with its Imperial majesty. Its glories had not spared it the harsh ministrations of war, however, for two of the four spires that rose from the cardinal points of the dome were broken stumps of stone and steel.
Eclipsing even this temple in its display of Imperial power was a tall, grim-spired palace that towered over the ramshackle city spread around it like debris tumbled from a mountain. Stark against the sky, it was an austere structure, cold and bereft of the glorious ornamentation that Uriel had seen on many other such buildings.
'The Imperial palace?' he said.
Pasanius nodded. 'Certainly grim enough for this place.'
Uriel nodded at Pasanius's assessment. The forbidding aspect of the palace, with its brutal architecture of drum towers topped with hooded turrets, lightning-wreathed antennae and shuttered hangars was certainly in keeping with the sombre atmosphere of this world, but more than that, the building's architecture gave the impression of power without compassion.