Helbrecht knight of the.., p.15
Helbrecht Knight Of The Throne, page 15
Towards the back of the hall, flanked by staircases which curved up and away into the shadows, sat a throne. A simple thing, proportioned for a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes. It had been hewn from black iron, so rich and dense that it drank in the light.
It had not been made here. It bore none of the marks of a dead and meagre world such as Hevaran. Helbrecht doubted it had been created entirely within the materium. It was a fane as much as it was a symbol of rule. To sit upon it, to use it, was to give homage to those that dwelt beyond. To false gods and daemon kings beyond comprehension.
He raised the Sword of the High Marshals, turned it in his hands, and exhaled. The blade flashed down. Where it struck the throne there was a moment of resistance. Sacred steel met unholy iron. The storm without was mirrored within. The chamber was filled with a sudden wind. Roaring, howling, the air turned close and electric, striated with black lightning. He struck again and gritted his teeth as the energy washed over him in a wave.
Each blow was a cleansing thing. There was no greater service than to expunge evil. He turned the blade over in his hands and drove the point through the back of the throne, impaling it to the floor and splitting it entirely. A pillar of black light screamed skyward. The entire structure shook with a sudden palsy.
‘Thus shall suffer all who stand against His light. And all who would betray Him.’
Every eye was upon him now, mortal and Astartes both. It was as though a great weight had been lifted from the chamber and its occupants. The passing of some terrible dark scrutiny, as deep and lightless as the gravity of a collapsed star. The cosmic scale of such things dissipated as the idol-throne died.
‘Praise be,’ Raimbert breathed. He rose from his knees and brought his fist against his breastplate. ‘Behold the Emperor’s blade.’ Theodwin and Andronicus rose unsteadily, ready to lend their own voices in support.
‘Impressive. I would expect nothing less from the High Marshal of Dorn’s own bloodline.’
A voice cut in through hidden vox-speakers, drowning the Chaplain’s praise. The mortals shrank from it but Helbrecht stood firm. He ground the remains of the throne to smouldering powder beneath his boot and turned back to his brothers. They remained kneeling. Bolheim had his forehead pressed to the floor, locked in prayer and contemplation, channelling the Emperor’s will.
‘Vakra,’ Helbrecht breathed.
‘I trust my hospitality is a fitting match for your own? Having seen the state you left Hevaran in once before, I thought it apt to prepare it further.’
‘You have raised an abomination in the eyes of the Emperor and, Throne willing, we shall tear it down. I would kill this entire world to stymie your petty goals, but I would far rather do the deed myself.’
‘Are we sons of the Lion and the Wolf, now? To settle our squabbles with honour duels?’ Vakra laughed and the sound carried about the great hall, rich with mockery. ‘There was always more purity in our feud. They played at conflict while our gene-sires readied themselves for the ultimate test. You thin-blooded whelps cannot imagine what it was like to stand upon Terra and make war. To exist at the very apex of siegecraft. Instead you have committed yourself to ceaseless crusade, flitting from war to war. Ever in search of purpose. Will you find it, I wonder? Has this world satisfied your longing?’
‘I long only to do His will. To serve, as a knight must serve. Life is duty. Duty is strength. And strength can drive back even the deepest darkness.’
‘If you truly believe that then I pity you,’ Vakra scoffed. ‘War is coming. The Imperium is broken, and we shall shatter it further. A thousand hammer blows, ten thousand salients. Wars beyond count and battles without end. That is the glorious future that awaits you. The Lord of Iron need not bestride the galaxy in fire, when he can reduce it to rubble, a world at a time.’
‘And we shall be there to face him down. We do not fear him. We do not fear you. All daemons shall be laid low before the faithful, and repaid for their treachery in blood and fire.’
‘Is that why you have come, High Marshal? To face me down? To make an example of me?’
Helbrecht looked to the gathered mortals. Laren returned his gaze with abject fear. The hammer in his hands trembled. His legs gave out and he slumped to the floor. Where once a psychic miasma had hung over the chamber, now it was merely the lash of petty mortal terror.
‘All tyrants fall,’ Helbrecht stated bluntly. ‘You will be no different. Your legacy is failure. You failed at Terra. You failed here.’
‘And at Sebastus?’ Vakra’s laughter returned. ‘Oh, we wounded your Legion there… You had pride before that. To be resolute and unbroken. To never submit. After that… you were nothing. Yet more whipped curs for the Avenging Son to shape as he saw fit. Now he walks abroad once more. I wonder if you have learned to love the lash as keenly as your primarch did. Or the First Captain of old. The Emperor’s Champion.’
Bolheim looked up as Vakra’s taunts echoed about the chamber. He rose unsteadily and moved to stand beside Hel-brecht. The Armour of Faith was scored and battered, the Black Sword was still in his hand, burning with its own furious intensity. He nodded as he drew even with the High Marshal, content to listen for now.
Vakra’s voice did not come again.
‘They taunt us with the lies of the past, as though they could prise open old wounds,’ Bolheim said. There was a meditative quality to his speech. With every passing moment it seemed that less of the Apothecary remained, subsumed into the wisdom of ages. When he spoke it was with the true gravitas of a Champion. ‘Vakra knows he cannot break you in open combat.’
‘And so he thinks to unman me with taunts and jibes? I had expected better of one who bears a lofty title, even by the standards of the Fourth Legion.’
‘Such men are hollow things. Animated only by the spite of their past. They have seen fit to betray their purpose. To betray Him. There is no salvation for such beings. He shall show them no mercy come the end.’ He looked down. ‘And the end is nigh.’
‘You have been gifted with a vision,’ Helbrecht said. ‘You have seen truth in revelation.’
‘I was sent here to tend to your soul and guide you from the penance you believe you deserve. You have sacrificed more than many others. You have given of yourself. You shared in our first vision and saw Hevaran aflame. Now you know why that came to pass. We walk in the shadow of that great war, itself a mere echo of the greatest of conflicts. An ancient enmity.’
‘And now we rise to meet the foe. We drag it from its towers and cast it to the rocks.’
‘No.’
‘No?’ Helbrecht laughed. ‘It is the Emperor’s will that you deny me?’
‘The miasma of the enemy has cleared. My mind and sight are once again His to illuminate.’ Bolheim bowed his helmed head solemnly. ‘We came here for a reason. Guided by His hand to seek it. Even with all that has come to pass, that truth remains.’
‘The relic,’ Helbrecht said. He almost laughed at the thought. ‘The armour? Here, of all places?’
‘The enemy is voracious. As much as they range upwards and rebuild, so too must they plumb the depths. Wherever the armour was concealed, it has been revealed. To them and to us. Now, in this moment, the opportunity presents itself. To safeguard that which is most holy. To reclaim what is owed to our Chapter. If we stand in its light, then we cannot falter. It is the armour of the Praetorian himself, he who kept the walls of Terra inviolate beyond what anyone would have dared to hope. He is our gene-father, and we shall stand with him, in honour of him, even as the enemy bears down upon us.’
‘A son of Dorn may make any place a fortress,’ Helbrecht quoted. ‘For in them is the surety of stone.’
‘Such is the wisdom of Dorn. Carried by all his noble sons, whether they hold walls or break them. In us his choler burns, hot and urgent. We do not stop. We do not wait. We fight. We have fought the length and breadth of the galaxy, in numbers undreamed of until the Unnumbered Sons returned in their grey legions. For us the Great Crusade never truly ended.’
‘Nor shall it, until the last world of this galaxy is secured and the aquila flies over a compliant Imperium.’ Helbrecht turned the sword over in his hands, suppressing his agitation. ‘We are the last sons of a lost age. So few amongst our brotherhoods yet bear His light. We carry it forth into the darkest of places.’ He paused. ‘Even now. Even here.’
He looked around the chamber at the dark stone. Not the natural rock of the mountain but a more robust off-world material. This place, for all its trickery and deceit, had not been an idle construction. It had been a labour to construct and maintain, when it had been more than a mere ruin. Slowly it had been rebuilt. Remade for a new age of warfare and cruel dominance. It had no resources to command or exploit. It would have existed purely out of spite. Forged to frustrate the Imperium, lodged in its skin like a parasite in a grox’s hide.
How long can a thing exist, purely for petty cruelty?
Helbrecht almost laughed at the irony. The sons of Dorn would lay it low, yet it was mortal hands that would deal the greatest wounds. The pilgrim faithful with their hammers and picks were undoing plans ten thousand years old, the fantasies of tyrants and fools. Faith, unbridled human faith, would end these spiteful dreams.
He clenched his fist around the sword’s hilt and rounded on Bolheim once more. The two blades were almost close enough to touch, sparks leaping between their power fields. One forged for vengeance, the other sanctified in shame.
Fitting, Helbrecht thought. Bolheim was exalted. A warrior elevated. Helbrecht though, he was riven by old doubt. Haunted by the ghosts of his past. It had not fallen to Bolheim to stand before the primarch and defend his actions. Nor had the Champion led the charge against the traitors as they assailed the holiest sites in the Imperium.
Had he fought in the blood and ashes of the Shrine Worlds Crusades? Driven back the hordes of scar-skinned cultists with their filed teeth and blood-rimed blades? Helbrecht had watched walking atrocities conjured from the very air. Daemons summoned for the sole purpose of desecrating the holy places. Statues had wept blood, faces split by silent screams.
There was none of the cold and callous, measured defiance that they found here. Like iron woven through stone.
The enemy has patience. We must match them blow for blow.
Helbrecht closed his eyes. ‘I will do whatever the Emperor demands, if it means that these slights are avenged.’
‘When we set out upon this course you wished a solitary pilgrimage. To walk this world alone and to find the relic.’ Bolheim smiled, but there was no warmth in it. ‘You may yet have your prayer answered.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
The stairs rang with the thunder of their passage as ceramite boots hammered against the stone, or clattered against black iron where rough scaffolding had replaced collapsed sections. Here and there the walls were marred with the signs of combat, where bolter rounds and plasma bursts had detonated in times gone past.
The citadel had been intimately gutted. Not merely burned out and left for the carrion crows. It had been swept. The ancient battles here had been reduced to close melees within the narrow confines of the corridors.
Bolheim pushed on ahead, leading the squad as though born to it. As an Apothecary, such command would have been beyond him. Now he bore the mantle of leadership, and all looked to him for guidance. The Black Sword blazed in his hands, cutting a line of fire through the darkness. Even with the enhanced senses of his helm there was an oppressive shadow, a pall which hung over their advance.
He turned and regarded those who followed him. The eagerness of youth burned in every movement Andronicus made. He thought he was subtle, his bravado contained behind a warrior’s bearing, and yet it was unmistakable. Bolheim remembered his own impetuous past. Before his ascension to Champion, before even his induction into the Apothecarion, he had fought with that same vigour.
Raimbert had been silent for the duration of their march. The Chaplain’s bellicose oratory had ebbed in the Champion’s wake. His thoughts, Bolheim was certain, lay with the High Marshal and the task that awaited him alone. Where Andronicus’ agitation was born of impatience, Raimbert’s body was wracked by a call to urgency. Had he not been ordered otherwise, he would have turned about and marched to Helbrecht’s aid. Then there would have been a prayer upon his lips and the joy of battle in his heart.
Of all of them it was Theodwin who was the most introspective. Quiet focus bled from the Apothecary. He checked his supplies, saw to his weapons, and followed on. His prayer lay in action, even if it was a tightly bound and reserved action.
They advanced upwards, never pausing. At the apex of the ruin lay the astropathic eyrie, from whence messages could be sent beyond the world on the whispers of dreaming minds. Their hopes of contacting the fleet lay with gaining control of the astropaths, just as their chances of victory lay with the High Marshal.
‘Hold,’ Bolheim said suddenly. He held up a hand and the small knot of warriors halted. The air had grown cold and still, like deep water filling the space. The chill quiet engulfed them, unnatural in its immediate intensity.
‘The enemy entreats the warp,’ Raimbert growled. The skull visage loomed out of the darkness, eye-lenses aglow. ‘They will call down their infernal masters upon us and loose the fire of perdition.’
‘Let them try.’ Andronicus laughed. ‘We are armoured with faith. A Champion of the Emperor walks with us. They will break against our aegis and we shall cast them from the heights.’
‘Confidence swiftly becomes arrogance, if not tempered by wisdom,’ Theodwin put in. The Apothecary had drawn his bolt pistol. ‘Be ready. Do not underestimate them. The ways of traitors are not those of honest warfare. When they strike it shall be with treachery and madness.’
Their voices filled the dark space they now occupied. The stairway had finally terminated, forming a long avenue. Alcoves lined it, much like the plinths in the central chamber below. Beyond them lay a great door. Silver glittered upon the plates of it, wound through in stylised constellations. Patterns of warding sigils and binding wards.
Perhaps it was merely the captive strangeness of the astropathic choir leaking out from the sealed chamber.
They moved on. Bolheim led from the front, blade up and ready.
The first shots began to hammer at them from the furthest alcoves before he had time to raise a cry.
As above, so below.
The darkness beneath the fortress was absolute. Stygian. A darkness so intense that it seemed to have physical form. Umbral tendrils coiled about him, void-black against the dark of his armour. Helbrecht did not fear the shadow. It held no power over him. It could not harm him. Not when he bore the Emperor’s light. His soul was bright in the gloom. His blade burned brighter still. The Sword of the High Marshal banished the darkness as it ignited, casting the light of purity about the depths.
The lustrous black stone of the inner fortress had faded away to worn grey, the bedrock of the shattered world itself. Compared to the ruined wards and chambers above, these were fresher. Newly delved into the earth, the passages lacked the regimented layout of the fortress proper, but instead wound and wove beneath the mountain. Some sprawled out into makeshift bunkrooms or storage areas. Supplies were piled haphazardly: weapons and materiel, meagre foodstuffs. Helbrecht scowled to see it. The semblance of life creeping back into the corpse of the fortress. The casual heresy of it was as much an affront as any other act of violation which had unfolded across Hevaran.
To disobey the will of Dorn and the Emperor, there was no greater insult.
This far beneath the earth, the sound of battle had faded to a dull rumble. Detonations shook the ground and reverberated through like a pulse. Helbrecht walked the tunnels and, for a moment, knew a semblance of peace.
He surrendered himself to the Emperor’s will. Fate guided his steps, just as it guided his blade. He thought of the Strategium Occultis upon the Eternal Crusader, from where he surveyed the Chapter’s crusades throughout the galaxy.
By His will am I animated, and by my will fleets and armies move. No matter what else befalls the galaxy, that truth has its own power.
He followed the winding labyrinth of tunnels, tracking the newer pick marks along the rough-cut walls. As he advanced, the bare stone gave way to properly crafted foundations. Arches rose around him. Blunt, solidly Imperial work. After the primitive tunnels dug by the cultists, the return to more familiar environs was reassuring.
The tunnels opened out around a vast, sealed portal. The door was not crafted of stone and iron but shone like gold. Helbrecht placed his hand upon it. It did not yield, nor display any signs of weakness. Burn marks marred the exterior where they had attempted to cut into the sacred material. It had yet to be violated.
‘Auramite,’ Helbrecht breathed. The entire chamber was a vast reliquary. Precious beyond reckoning.
At his approach the doorway seemed to respond. A small hatch unfolded to his right, displaying a brace where a limb could comfortably sit. He leant forward and placed his arm into the waiting device. Mechadendrite tendrils coiled about his limb, slithering over his armour like something alive. It felt as though he were being enveloped by deep-sea life; something tentacled and blood-hungry. He winced as the machines bit at his armour, wending their way through gaps in the ceramite plate. Feeder-tendrils finally found his flesh and drank of his life.
Mag-locks disengaged with a solid thud, sliding back into the edges of the sealed chamber. Light spilled out as the door began to open. Helbrecht felt it wash over him in a cleansing wave, as bright and comforting as the distant rays of Sol itself.
