Numeon finished muttering some words of encouragement to the Techmarine and rose to his feet.
‘We move on. Find another way to achieve our mission.’
Leodrakk approached, noticing Numeon touching the sigil of Vulkan he had carried ever since they had fled Isstvan.
‘What do you think it’s for?’ he asked.
Numeon glanced down at it. Fashioned into a simple blacksmith’s hammer, it looked unremarkable.
‘I think it’s a symbol,’ he said. ‘When I see it, I believe in our primarch, that he is still alive. Beyond that, I don’t know.’
‘I hope you’re right, brother.’
Pergellen, returning from scouting out the tunnel ahead, interrupted them.
‘The way on is clear,’ he put in. ‘This tract ends in an outflow. It’s towards the edge of the city and should give us a good vantage point to plan our next move.’
Numeon nodded. ‘Make sure there are no surprises.’
Taking K’gosi with him, the scout headed back off into the darkness.
‘I hate to echo the human,’ said Leodrakk when Pergellen had gone, ‘but what isour next move?’
Numeon regarded Grammaticus.
‘They’re after him now. The attack on the manufactorum is proof of that. We might be able to use that. To use him.’
And just like that, fate twisted again and Grammaticus bemoaned that he had ever been ‘saved’ by the Salamanders.
The outflow ended in a broad sink, a few metres deep. It was raining heavily overhead, causing the dirty sewer run-off in the manmade basin to flow over its rockcrete lip in a rushing cataract that crashed down in an ever-deepening pool below.
At one side of the sink there was a wooden jetty. The bodies of three men laid face down on it. Their attire suggested they were sump-catchers. They had been stabbed to death, and the crude sigil daubed in blood on the jetty suggested it was cult-related. Above them hung a lattice of fishing lines, dead sump rats strung along them by their tiny feet. There were a couple of long pikes, too, and a crumpled-up net stuffed into an empty oil drum. A tarpaulin provided ineffective protection against the elements, covering two thirds of the jetty and suspended on guide poles like a crude tent.
‘Don’t want to slip in there, human,’ muttered Leodrakk as he escorted Grammaticus over a wooden walkway that creaked with the legionary’s every step.
Grammaticus looked down into the viscous, grimy soup slowly coagulating in the sink. Foulness practically radiated from it, the water an ugly pale yellow. Carcasses bobbed up and down in it, disturbed by the effluvia running out from the pipe and cascading over the basin edge.
It reminded him of the drainage basin on the outskirts of Anatol Hive when he had been just a child. As he looked down into the sink’s murky depths he tried not to picture the corpse-white face of the boy, and found that he had to look away. Instead, he thought about the eldar who had flectedhim in the infirmary. He had offered him a way out, a choice, a truth. Albeit one that had yet to be revealed to him in full. It went against his mission – it might also be a pack of lies, a test by the Cabal to see if he could be trusted. Tired wasn’t the word for how he felt now. He was ragged, just like the warriors who were escorting him. Not only that, he was a traitor to his race. His entire fugging race! That was something not many could claim, not that he was proud of it. He felt grubby, and not just from the sewer pipe. He wanted to believe what he had seen in the infirmary, he neededto. But what if it wasn’t real? What if Slau Dha, Gahet and all those other bastards were manipulating him still? All he had was his mission, and even that sickened him.
Thoroughly miserable, Grammaticus winced as a droplet from above splashed his eye.
Numeon lifted up his dripping gauntlet for retinal analysis.
‘High acid content,’ he said. ‘Better give him something to keep off the worst of it.’
‘How about we go somewhere other than a fugging sewer,’ suggested Grammaticus, ‘perhaps indoors and not surrounded by shit and piss?’
‘Here.’ K’gosi handed him his cloak. It was drake hide, virtually impervious to fire and more than adequate protection against acid-rain.
Grammaticus took it, grudgingly.
‘Why not give me one of theirs?’ he asked, gesturing to the dead Salamanders being carried out onto the jetty.
‘Not mine to give,’ said K’gosi.
‘They’re not going to need them.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ the Pyroclast replied and went to help secure the outer perimeter.
Pergellen was standing at the edge of the basin, a couple of metres away from the gushing cataract.
‘It’s sheer, over eighty metres straight down,’ he told Numeon, who had just joined him. ‘Though the water makes it look shorter than that.’
The dirty torrent from the sewer pipe was coming down so hard that it frothed and foamed below, rising and bubbling in a small but violent tumult. The spray kicked up all the way to the top of the outflow, but Pergellen’s gaze had moved skywards, to a high column which comprised part of an aqueduct that flanked the torrent.
‘Looks like a good vantage point,’ he said.
A walkway led from the jetty, along the side of the outflow pipes, all the way to the aqueduct, and had enough room for men to traverse in file. Beyond the aqueduct, the rest of Ranos was laid open. Numeon could see that since making planetfall they had moved east, towards the edge of the city.
His eyes narrowed.
‘Is that…?’ he asked.
‘The space port? Yes, it is,’ said Pergellen.
Numeon looked back over his shoulder to where Grammaticus was huddled up and shivering in K’gosi’s cloak.
‘This is no place to make a stand, brother.’
‘Agreed,’ said Pergellen. ‘What do you have in mind?’
Numeon watched the lines of dead sump-rats swaying with the foetid breeze.
‘Bait,’ he said.
Narek’s gladius slid from the Salamander’s neck with a wet slurrch. The legionary was dead before he had cleaned the blade and was moving on to the next. Bodies from both sides littered the street. Of the three squads he had taken to eliminate the loyalists, only a handful remained. It had been bloody, and harder fought than he had expected. The sniper had escaped. Again. This stuck in Narek’s craw, and irritated. Approaching the edge of the pit where the manufactorum had collapsed, he thought of the ones who had escaped. An underground river flowed beneath this part of the city, connected to its drainage system. He had no map of those tunnels, no knowledge of their existence or where the outflow would deposit anyone caught in the current, so he let it go.
The loyalists were running out of places to hide. Even if it took him to the edge of the city and the lightning-blasted wastes beyond it, he would track them down. He had sworn, so it would be done. Or he would die in the attempt. Honour about one’s duty, he felt, should still mean something.
‘Stop,’ he said, his boot pressed down on the chest of another half-dead enemy, but Narek was looking at Vogel, who was straddling a Salamander’s chest and was about to begin cutting flesh with his ritual knife.
‘What?’ asked the Word Bearer, head snapping round to regard the huntsman.
‘None of that.’ Narek left the other dying legionary where he was and walked over to Vogel.
‘I honour the Pantheon,’ Vogel hissed, evidently displeased.
‘You dishonour the deed, your kill,’ Narek replied, holding his gladius casually in his off-hand. ‘Mutilate the human chaff, by all means, but these were Legion warriors, once our brothers-in-arms. That should still mean something.’
Vogel went to rise, but Narek put the tip of his gladius to his throat and he stopped in a half-crouch.
‘You overstep your bounds,’ hissed Vogel.
‘If I do, it’ll mean this blade goes through your neck.’
Vogel didn’t look like he wanted to back down just yet.
‘Dagon agrees with me,’ said Narek.