When the wall came down in an avalanche of dead soldiers, gunship wreckage and powdered rubble, Yael was one of the first to make a break for the opening.
Commodus remained where he was for long enough to close Grunner’s lifeless eyes. Only then did he scramble up from cover, picking his way through the ravaged botanical garden, stepping over the bodies of his brothers and sisters – and the twisted remains of those they’d killed.
One of the dust-covered Argentum corpses grasped at his boot with a bleeding hand.
Commodus went to his knees, rolling the body over. Not only was it not dead, it also wasn’t one of the Argentum.
‘Commodus...’ the old man said, ‘don’t leave me here.’
A voice that had bellowed orders on hundreds of battlefields now left Slaydo’s cracked lips as a strained whisper.
With the walls down, it was difficult to see through the dust. Commodus cleaned the Warmaster’s face with trickles of lukewarm water from his canteen. Little blood showed through the filth on his uniform, but the whistling rasp in Slaydo’s breathing told enough of a tale.
The sergeant lifted Slaydo’s silver breastplate, and there it was. A knife-sliver of sharp rock, stabbed into the old man’s stomach. A chance thing; no doubt ricocheted from the ground as the walls tumbled down.
Commodus was already drawing breath to shout for a medic when a fierce claw latched onto his wrist with a talon’s grip.
‘Don’t you dare,’ hissed the old man. ’Think of morale, you fool. We’re inside now. It’s almost over. Now shut your mouth and bind that wound, or... or I’ll find a new senior sergeant.’
Commodus spoke as he obeyed. As soon as the rock shard came free, blood followed in an eager flow. ‘This is straining your heart,’ the sergeant said. ‘The trauma first, and the blood loss will–’
Warmaster Slaydo spat dust onto the grass, his lined face the very picture of impatience. ‘I like you, my boy, but you’ve always talked too much. Now tighten it up, and get me to my feet.’
‘Sir, you need to–’
Defiance gave the blow strength, and the sergeant flinched back as Slaydo’s backhand crashed against the side of his helmet.
‘I need to finish the hunt, Commodus. And so do you. Now get me to my feet.’
The Warmaster’s weary stagger soon became a lurching walk, then a subtle limp, and then nothing more than clenched teeth and a shine in his eyes. Spite and defiance drove him on where the pain should have driven him to his knees. Better than any of the memorials to come when this day was done, these hours exemplified Slaydo’s life in the eyes of the men and women serving him.
In his hand was Liberatus, the silver-wrought sabre granted to him by the High Lords of Terra at the Crusade’s commencement. With it, he carved down the enemy when he could reach them, and pointed the blade to aim the Argentum’s weapons when he couldn’t.
The palace’s corridors, once the halls of the reverent and decadent alike, had fallen into disgusting disrepair during the Archon’s occupation. The Imperials battled through ruined halls that reeked of piss, great corridors once home to works of religious art, used as latrines by the Archenemy’s forces and populated by wreckage where statues once stood.
Slaydo’s voice grew stronger with every step he took. Blood ran from the curved blade at his side and his eyes glittered, as though he stared at sights unseen by any of his men.
‘Clear,’ Commodus called to the seven Argentum troopers with him. At the other end of the corridor, which had once housed masterpiece landscape paintings from twelve other worlds, the last enemy soldier fell dead.
‘Good shot, sarge,’ said Yael. Commodus had nailed the bastard in the throat from at least seventy metres away. ‘If you’d been doing that the whole time, we’d be done by now.’
The sergeant just nodded, his usual banter nowhere in evidence.
‘The stairs ahead lead up to the Western Palisade battlements,’ Commodus said to the Warmaster. ‘Or we can move around to the Central Cloister, cutting left through the servants’ passages.’
‘The Palisade,’ Slaydo ordered. ‘He will be seeking us, just as we seek him. No retreat now. No flight off-world. He knows this is the end.’
‘Are you s–’
‘The Palisade.’ The Warmaster raised his sabre high, as if declaring a cavalry charge from antiquity. ‘It happens under the open sky. She told me herself. It’s time to end this.’
The eighteenth hour of the tenth day, and the Western Palisade reached out for a kilometre – a wide rampart of gun emplacements, dead bodies and annihilated walkways along the palace walls. The bombing had taken its toll here, as had long-range shelling from Imperial artillery.
Rain slashed down in a torrent, the kind of cold downpour that so easily penetrated clothing to leave skin feeling greasy. Slaydo advanced along the stone battlements, Liberatus in an ungloved hand, the elegant gold etching along the silver blade turned to flickering amber as it reflected the burning city below. The coiled engravings shimmered in the caught firelight, weaving like serpents along the steel.
‘I was so certain,’ the old man whispered. ‘So very sure.’
The Argentum storm troopers fanned out around him, powered backpacks buzzing in the rainfall, hellguns thrumming in ready hands. Several squads had linked together in the last advance. Commodus stayed at the Warmaster’s side.
‘They’re all dead up here, sir.’ He kept his voice neutral, masking both disappointment and concern.
‘I was so very certain,’ the old man repeated. Slaydo looked out over the razed city, then down the long rampart with its population of broken weapons batteries and slaughtered enemy soldiers. ‘She told me it would end like this, you know. In the rain.’
Commodus cast a worried glance at the others. The Warmaster leaned against an unbroken section of wall and took a shuddering breath. ‘I’m tired now,’ he said. ‘And I ache like you wouldn’t believe.’
The sergeant had seen the wound now eating at the old man’s life, so he could indeed believe it. Gut wounds killed slowly, but they killed with a vengeance. The Warmaster would never leave Balhaut unless he fell back to proper medicae facilities soon.
‘What are your orders, my Warmaster?’ asked Trejus, a sergeant from another Argentum squad. Commodus waved him away.
Slaydo wasn’t listening, anyway. The fight had bled from him. In a palsied hand, he clutched a small bronze relic formed into the shape of a young woman. The figurine was no larger than a finger, and the old man’s knuckles whitened around it in his fervency.
‘Not like this.’ He hissed the words as he stared at Balopolis in flames. The fires raged through the parts of the city still standing, savage enough to resist the rainfall.
He closed his eyes and listened to the rain. Liberatus steamed as water hissed against the live blade.
‘Gunfire,’ said Commodus behind him.
‘Contact, contact,’ Argentum troopers were calling to each other. ‘There, contact, dead ahead.’
Slaydo turned in time to see his most loyal bodyguards raise their weapons and stream beams of energy down the ramparts. A raw, roughshod pack of robed figures was emerging from an arched tower doorway, moving onto the battlements, returning the welcome with lasguns and solid-slug rifles of their own.
Three of the Argentum were punched from their feet by the first barrage, where they died with faces upturned to the oily rain. The others scrambled for cover, laying down a curtain of fire that ripped through the mob’s ranks.
Slaydo saw none of this. He saw only that the mob of enemy warriors – clad as priests and worshippers rather than soldiers – were led by a creature that may once, perhaps, have been human.