‘I have dreamed of this many times, but in my worst nightmares, I did not witness this.’
– Slaydo, Warmaster of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade
History would say all of Balhaut burned that month. For once, these words could be spoken without a poetic simile or a mind to dramatise an event into the pages of Imperial archives.
Day and night, earth and sky, Balhaut burned.
Bal Prime and Boruna Hive, Zaebes City and the Western Plains, the Tark Islands and Ascension Valley. Every critical site on Balhaut endured punishing orbital bombardment, the skies above them alight with the Warmaster’s anger.
Balopolis, the capital city, died in the heart of those flames.
Through sulphur skies, great whale ships breached the ashen cloud cover, gliding groundwards. Each one was fat with armour plating and swollen with legions of troops – Guard carriers, each eager to be the first on the surface and disgorge its soldiers into the Last Battle.
In the years to come, when Balopolis was a shrine-city – a monument to the trillions slain over the Crusade’s course – the memorials for this invasion would paint a glorious picture. Ten days of victory after victory; ten days of unstoppable Imperial advance into Archenemy territory. Wreckage from the Archon’s annihilated fleet rained onto the world below, each hunk of ship’s hull raising cheers in the Imperials that beheld it.
With no capacity to flee the planet’s surface, the enemy leaders barricaded themselves inside their strongholds, legions of loyal followers between them and Slaydo’s landing forces.
By nightfall on the ninth day, Slaydo had driven his bleeding forces into the heart of Balopolis with a crusader’s zeal. His army besieged the High Palace itself, regiment after regiment marching into the wasteland that Balopolis had become. Every record of the Great Victory would describe this in excruciating – and verbose – detail, for Slaydo’s death was only hours away.
Comparatively few records would recall the Warmaster’s face on the morning he met his fate.
‘You look tired, sir.’
In the wake of this observation, the old man scratched at his beard with soot-blackened fingers. His fingernails were darkened by dirt crescents beneath them, and his beard – once a feral red – was now stone grey, dashed with flecks of colour like fading fire.
The old man forced his scarred lips into what passed for a smile. It looked like a gash of mirth slitting his beard.
‘I am tired, boy. It’s what happens when you get old.’ He returned his gaze to the burning skyline, at the ruined cityscape of once-grand Balopolis. Through the devastation rolled a horde of iron beetles – Leman Russ tanks and Basilisk gun platforms of every class. The walls of the High Palace stood cracked and crumbling under the onslaught of entire siege tank companies. Even the air tasted of ash and engine fumes.
‘Not long now,’ he said, and closed his eyes, unsure if he was hearing his heartbeat or the pounding of distant guns.
‘You should rest while you can, Warmaster.’
Slaydo snorted. ‘I’m not ready to call off the hunt yet. What about you, Commodus? Still keeping up with this old war hound?’
The sergeant answered with a grin.
When the palace walls came down, Imperial cheering shook the city.
From his vantage point at the western edge, the Warmaster exhaled a shivering breath. Around him, the Argentum stood proud, hellguns primed and officers exchanging last words with the men.
‘Do you see that?’ the old man asked. The question was to none of them and all of them, and it made the old man smile to say it. ‘Watch how the verminous tide claws its way through the breakages.’
Commodus looked on, squinting through his visor. Battered armoured personnel carriers, scorched tanks, broken squads of men in mismatching armour... all fled through the rents that Imperial guns had hammered through the palace walls. Those Archenemy troopers still outside were falling back for the last time, to stand and fight with their Archon.
‘I’ve heard that rats always flee a sinking ship.’ The old man’s smile was like a bad scar. ‘But these vermin flee into one.’
His hand rested on the pommel of his sheathed sword as he watched the cracked, burning palace ahead – its battlements of white stone tumbling, falling, breathing out clouds of dust as they died.
Around those immense walls, the dead slept in their thousands, a carpet of split flesh and stinking blood punctuated by the graveyards of slain tanks. Slaydo turned away at last, blinking eyes that suddenly stung.
‘What is it, sir?’ asked one of his men.
‘Such bravery,’ the old man almost laughed. ‘Such sacrifice. Hear me well and mark my words. No accounting, no retelling, will ever do these days justice. Balhaut will become a memorial after the victory we’ve bled for here.’ Slaydo brought his gaze back to the razed city streets, and the bodies that blanketed them. There was nowhere else to look. The skies burned. The city was rubble. The dead were everywhere.
‘And what else could it become? We‘ve made a tomb of this world.’ Every one of the Argentum that heard those words also heard the crack in their master’s voice, audible despite the mumble of distant artillery, and the rumbling of engines as the regiment’s silver-painted troop transports idled nearby.
Carron, the squad’s vox-officer, approached with the receiver in hand. The bulky vox-caster backpack strapped over his shoulders hummed in the light rain.
‘Warmaster,’ Carron offered the receiver to the old man. ‘It’s Colonel Helmud of the Pragar.’
Slaydo took the speech-horn. The men smiled at his terrible habit: he cleared his throat loudly while his mouth was next to the vox-mic.
‘Slaydo,’ he said, once he’d spat sooty phlegm onto the ground.
‘It’s Helmud.’ The voice was rasped by bad frequencies. ‘The walls are going down like pieces on a regicide board. We’re ready, Warmaster. This is it. We win Balhaut this day.’
Slaydo didn’t answer. His callused fingers stroked the grip of the blade still sheathed at his hip, and he stared at the urban ruin acting as a mass grave for the loyal dead.
‘Warmaster?’
‘I’m here, colonel.’
‘The Palace will be ours, sir, but for a few thousand lives.’
Slaydo drew his sword for the first time in four hours. Gold flashed as it caught what little light broke through the smoke-choked sky.
‘Start with mine,’ the Warmaster said, and hung up the receiver without waiting for a reply.
His blade fell in a chop, the order to advance. After a brief respite, the Argentum went back to war.
Commodus wasn’t a bad driver, but nor was he a particularly good one.
Vellici, the squad’s previous driver, had got it in the neck the day before – a sniper with a truly evil aim had tagged him through the Chimera’s front vision slit. Commodus and three of the others had buried the body, while the rest of the squad did what they could to clean up the tank’s interior. Vellici seemed to have a lot of blood, not uncommon in a man as big as he was. Sadly, at the end, it had all been on the wrong side of his skin.
Behind the driver’s seat, a ladder let up to the gun turret. The old man stood up there, peering from the open hatch with tired eyes. The men had commented on this many times before, citing that he was making himself an easy target.
The old man always replied the same way. This tank is festooned with flags, beribboned with honour markings, and as silver as Luna’s smiling face. If the enemy want me dead, they already know where to shoot.