Astelan took a few paces back and forth, his brow creased in a frown as he considered what to do. Eyes narrowed with anger, he turned his glare upon Belath.
‘Do it!’ Astelan snapped. ‘Order the assault!’
Belath nodded, showing no signs of emotion. He turned away and whispered something into his comm-piece.
‘It is done,’ Belath said, turning his attention back to Astelan. ‘What of the council?’
‘I fear there is little to be salvaged here,’ said Astelan.
The two of them pushed past the Terminators guarding the door back to the main chamber, whose weapons had been silent for more a minute. The council hall was a scene of utter ruin. The marble was slicked with blood, chairs smashed and bodies, of soldier and delegate, were piled up around the doors. Some still moved, groaning from their wounds. Slumped at the bottom of a flight of steps was Grane, a fist-sized hole in his lower back. Astelan crossed the chamber to gaze down at the decrepit Chairman. There was no sign of life.
A thunderous rumble shook the floor and Astelan looked up sharply. Another followed swiftly after, shaking the entire hall and sending dust and shards of stone showering down from the ceiling above.
‘It has begun,’ said Belath, gesturing towards a high window. Astelan followed his pointing finger and gazed outside.
As he walked towards the window Astelan could see fire raining down from the heavens as the ship lying in space above unleashed its bombardment. The city stretched for kilometres in every direction around the hill upon which the council chambers sat. Avenues of high buildings radiated outwards and long terraces of houses clung upon steep hills in the distance. Plasma warheads detonated upon the boulevards and bombardment cannon shells obliterated parks and tenements.
After several minutes the devastating torrent of fury abated. Astelan looked upwards and saw the dark shadows of drop-ships growing in size. On fiery tails drop-pods screamed downwards, slamming into the roofs of buildings and smashing into cracked and burning streets. Their doors opened like armoured petals and the Astartes within disembarked with bolter and flamer. Astelan could hear nothing from here but could imagine the crack of bolter and the screams of the dying.
The wrath of the Dark Angels had been set free.
Belath stepped up to the window and gazed out, the fires reflected in his eyes. He turned his head and looked at Astelan.
‘The cities will be under our control within hours,’ he said. ‘The world, in a few days.’
‘The blood of all who die is on your hands,’ said Astelan. ‘I will not let this go unpunished.’
Belath smiled at that moment, and it was a hard, emotionless expression that chilled Astelan to see it.
‘You do not decide guilt or punishment,’ said the young Chapter commander. ‘My astropaths already send word to Caliban of what occurs here. You will soon learn the consequences of disobedience, Terran.’
The Last Church
(Graham McNeill)
Midnight services had once been crowded at the Church of the Lightning Stone. Fear of the darkness had drawn people in search of sanctuary in a way the daylight could not. For as long as anyone could remember, the dark had been a time of blood, a time when raiders attacked, monstrous engines descended on wings of fire and the violence of the warlike thunder giants was fiercest.
Uriah Olathaire remembered seeing an army of those giants as it marched to battle, when he had been little more than a child. Though seven decades had passed since then, Uriah could picture them as though it were yesterday: towering brutes who carried swords of caged lightning and were clad in plumed helmets and burnished plate the colour of a winter sunset.
But most of all, he remembered the terrible magnificence of their awesome, unstoppable power.
Nations and rulers had been swept away in the dreadful wars these giants made, entire armies drowned in blood as they clashed in battles the likes of which had not been seen since the earliest ages of the world.
Now the fighting was over, the grand architect of this last world war emerging from the host of toppled despots, ethnarchs and tyrants to stand triumphant on a world made barren by conflict.
An end to war should have been a wondrous thing, but the thought gave Uriah no comfort as he shuffled along the nave of his empty church. He carried a flickering taper, the small flame wavering in the cold wind sighing through the cracks in the stonework and the ancient timbers of the great doors to the narthex.
Yes, the midnight service had once been popular, but few now dared come to his church, such was the ridicule and scorn heaped upon them. Changed days from the beginning of the war, when fearful people had sought comfort in his promises of a benign divinity watching over them.
He held his gnarled claw of a hand around the fragile flame as he made his way towards the altar, fearful that this last illumination would be snuffed out if his concentration slipped even a little bit. Lightning flashed outside, imparting a momentary electric glow to the stained-glass windows of the church. Uriah wondered if any of his last remaining parishioners would brave the storm to pray and sing with him.
The cold slipped invisibly into his bones like an unwelcome guest and he felt something singular about this night, as though something of great import were happening, but he couldn’t grasp it. He shook off the sensation as he reached the altar and ascended the five steps.
At the centre of the altar sat a broken timepiece of tarnished bronze with a cracked glass face, and a thick, leather-bound book surrounded by six unlit candles. Uriah carefully applied the taper to each candle, gradually bringing forth a welcome light to the church.
Aside from the magnificence of the ceiling, the interior of his church was relatively plain and in no way exceptionaclass="underline" a long nave flanked by simple timber pews and which was crossed by a transept that led to a curtained-off chancel. Upper cloisters could be reached via stairs in the north and south transepts, and a wide narthex provided a gallery prior to a visitor entering the church itself.
As the light grew, Uriah smiled with grim humour as the light shone upon the ebony face of the bronze timepiece. Though the glass face was cracked, the delicate hands were unscathed, fashioned from gold with inlaid mother-of-pearl. The clock’s internal mechanisms were visible through a glass window near its base, toothed cogs that never turned and copper pendulums that never swung.
Uriah had travelled the globe extensively as a feckless youth, and had stolen the clock from an eccentric craftsman who lived in a silver palace in the mountains of Europa. The palace had been filled with thousands of bizarre timepieces, but it was gone now, destroyed in one of the many battles that swept across the continent as grand armies fought without care for the wondrous things lost in their violent spasms of war.
Uriah suspected the clock was perhaps the last of its kind, much like his church.
As he had fled the palace of time, the craftsman had cursed Uriah from a high window, screaming that the clock was counting down to doomsday and would chime when the last days of mankind’s existence were at hand. Uriah had laughed off the man’s ravings and presented the clock to his bemused father as a gift. But after the blood and fire of Gaduaré, Uriah had retrieved the clock from the ruins of his family home and brought it to the church.