Bale Rane knew that death would probably hurt. War would probably hurt. Breaking up with your brand-new bride and leaving her to go off to war, that would hurt too. Like a bastard.
He never, ever, in a million light years, expected treachery to hurt so much.
They’ve been betrayed. Calth, Primarch Guilliman, Ultramar, the Emperor, the fugging Imperium and Bale Rane of the Numinus 61st; they’ve all been betrayed.
Rane wants to kill someone for turning his world upside down. He wants to kill one of those bloody Word bloody Bearers, although he knows he wouldn’t stand a single, solitary chance, not for a second.
What the fug are they thinking? What are they after? What bloody toxic poison shit is in their heads that they thought this was something they should do?
Krank is falling behind. He’s getting tired. The fog’s all around them, and it’s getting hard to know which way to go. They’ve both got rifles, Illuminators, though neither of them are the weapons they were issued with at muster. They took them from corpses during their escape. When they were running from the bloody heathen Army forces that butchered their regiment.
‘Come on, Krank,’ Rane mutters. ‘Come on now, Kranky mate. We can keep going. We can get out of here.’
Krank nods, but he’s weary. There’s shock in his blood, in his spirit. Rane dare not let him stop or sleep. He might not wake up.
It ought to be the other way around. It ought to be Krank, the veteran, bucking up Rane, the rookie. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. That’s the way it’s been until today.
Rane thinks about Neve a little bit. He thinks he needs to go and find her, and take her out of the city with them. He had convinced himself she was pretty safe, tucked up in the cellar at her aunt’s. But that was before the Word Bearers turned, before the Word Bearers and their heathen fugging cult troops turned and started killing everything, before it turned out not to be an accident at all.
That was before the daemons in the fog.
Bale Rane knows that it’s his moral duty to go and find his young bride. He has to go and find her, and her bloody aunt too, if needs be, and get them out of the city before the city becomes an entirely dead place. That’s all. That’s the up and down of it.
He tells Krank that’s what he’s going to do.
‘You can come along, if you like. Won’t blame you if you don’t want to.’
Krank tells him how stupid he is, but he doesn’t stop walking along beside him.
The funny thing is, and Rane doesn’t mention this to Krank because he knows it sounds strange, but the funny thing is, Rane doesn’t believe it will take long to find Neve. He can feel her. He can feel, somehow, that she’s close. She’s almost calling to him. She’s right there, close by, waiting for him.
They say that about people who are in love. They can find each other, find each other through thick and thin, against all the odds. He’s going to find Neve, and she’s going to find him.
The fog is like a silk curtain. Everywhere is grey. Fuzzy amber lights pulse where fires burn in the distance. The ruins are black and smell of smoke, of fycelene, of mud and broken drains.
Bale.
‘What?’ Rane asks Krank.
‘What what?’ Krank replies.
Bale. Bale. Where are you?
‘You hear that?’ Rane asks. ‘Kranky, can you hear that?’
He can hear her. It’s Neve. She’s close. She’s very close and she’s calling to him. It’s like a miracle play where the lovers are finally united at last curtain.
‘Neve?’
He stops. He sees her. Just across the street, through the mist, standing in a doorway. She’s pale. It looks like she’s made out of mist. How the hell did she manage to track him down?
He’s never been so happy to see anyone in his entire life. He feels love. He feels uplifted by love.
He takes a step forward to cross the cratered street.
Krank grabs his arm. Krank can’t speak because his mouth is stoppered up with terror.
What Krank can see doesn’t look like Bale Rane’s young bride at all.
The tunnel system opens out on the perimeter of Leptius Numinus. For the last few kilometres, the subsurface structure is fractured, and the tunnels are flooded to knee-height. Liquid from the dislocated water table and sewage from city treatment plants has seeped up and washed out the tunnel system. They are obliged to wade.
Ventanus leads them out into the palace grounds, flanked by Arook’s primary squad. They’ve added to their force during the journey. Several squads of skitarii have joined them, swelling the Mechanicum numbers to close to one thousand. They’ve also connected with about thirty Ultramarines from various decimated units, and four hundred men from the Neride Regulators 10th, nominally under a Colonel Sparzi.
The palace is elegant, a rectilinear villa complex. It reveals its stately lines slowly through the thick mist. The gardens of the estate are tumbledown. Shockwave winds and blast scorching have denuded the ploin, haps and pistachio orchards, and turned the vines into charred ropes. Ornamental walls have spilled over. Carp ponds are dry basins, the water evaporated. They find the cowering, burned skeletons of gardeners and groundsmen behind splintered trees.
The palace is closed for the winter. The city governor was in residence at Dera Tower in the city. Ventanus reflects that the governor is probably dead by now. All the casements, apart from armourglas and crystalflex reinforced sections, have been blown in by the savage transcontinental winds. The rooms, most of them filled with furniture covered by dustcloths, are littered with broken glass and snapped muntins.
Outside, the valley and the plains beyond are dark under a blanket of fog. There is no wind. Everywhere is eerily tranquil. A calm that recalls the obligatory stillness of death.
To the north-west, the Mountains of Twilight form a grey limit to the fogbound plains. To the south and south-east, the dark shape of the Shield Wall hems the city. A rugged natural formation, the back of the ridge rises above the languid, unctuous fog. Its famous forests are spines of tattered wood, stripped of limbs and leaves.
Numinus burns, a giant haze of golden light. It is not the only massive blaze they can see. Others show up in the distant fog in almost every direction, and the brutalised sky is speckled with them. Every now and then, something falls down the back of the heavens, trailing a tail of flame, and crumps into the hidden landscape with a distant tremor.
They move into the palace, breaking down doors where necessary. Some of the halls and chambers are littered with broken masonry where walls or ceilings have fallen. Ventanus sees fragments of moulded plasterwork, some of it painted. He sees shattered heroes from the early days of the Five Hundred Worlds. He sees the Ultima symbol, the one they all wear on their armour, broken in pieces.
Tawren assembles a working party of magi to locate and prepare the palace’s data-engine and the high-cast vox array. Ventanus, in consultation with Selaton, Arook, Sparzi and Captain Sullus, a survivor from 39th Company, prepares the defences. Though its perimeter wall and ditch are quite considerable, the palace proper is not designed for military resistance of any appreciable magnitude. Sparzi’s men find some tractor guns and light field pieces in a stable block to the west, and set them up facing the plains.
‘If they find us here,’ says Sullus, ‘they will punish us.’
‘If they find us here,’ replies Ventanus, ‘I will kill them.’
Sullus nods. A half-smile crosses his mouth. He has lost most of his company brethren since dawn. He has seen other sections of the XIII cut down by troop fire or obliterated by heavy weapons. Ventanus knows that, to keep Sullus effective, he has to spur him out of his despondency. Ventanus has already considered putting Greavus, Sullus’s sergeant, in his place in the chain of command. Sullus is old, a veteran. It is as though the wind has been struck out of him.