open but the cacophony bounces off the walls right back at us. We have heard nothing from the north-western contingents. Second Whip Etham and Brothers Lemuel and Zurion sighted Sisters of Battle in the St Gorgonia district and received some surviving support from Keturah’s Scouts. Nothing has been heard from any of them in over an hour, and drop-pods did seem to hit the far side of the city hardest.
‘The Mausoleum!’ I yell back, but my words are drowned by the whoosh of Sister Casiope’s heavy flamer. The good Sister has been doing the Emperor’s work with the weapon, using it to greatest effect in the cramped environs of the narrow city streets. Flame has gutted the alleys and archways of our uphill escape route, forcing back countless hordes of cultists baying for our blood or else flash-stripping them of their flesh and turning them into corpses dancing and flailing through an inferno. Sapphira and Sister Zillah finish off any warp-spawned malevolents creeping through the flames, while my absterge holds up her wounded brother, blasting the occasional cultist who makes it over a roof or through a building with her chunky laspistol.
‘What?’ Skase calls back, his gladius twanged back off the teeth of a World Eater’s chainsword.
‘Close quarters!’ Brother Simeon calls, dropping his empty boltgun. One of the Blood God’s armoured disciples falls before the last of the weapon’s wrath, only for another berserker to come straight at Simeon with an axe. Bringing his gladius out of its sheath, my battle-brother’s blade is smacked aside by the raging action of the Chaos Space Marine’s chain weapon. The last few bolt-rounds from my Mark II go into buying Simeon a few moments of time, my offering glancing off the World Eater’s pauldron and helm, knocking the Traitor to one side and off balance.
‘The Mausoleum roof!’ I yell to Skase. ‘It’s the safest place for a pick-up.’
Brother Eliam dies horribly before me, the thrashing axes of several World Eaters brothers hacking his armoured body apart. With his blood across my face, I send the butt of my empty pistol across the faceplate of the nearest of his berserker killers, only to have the hallowed weapon smashed out of my grip with the flat of his axe. I turn. As I do, I unclip my chainsword and bring the flared blade to gory life. Bringing the blade around and up, I chew through the World Eater from the navel to the throat.
‘Novah can’t raise the Gauntlet,’ Skase insists, his gladius blade having found its way past the chainsword and into the madman’s neck. As he twists the gladius there is a crunch and the World Eater’s grip goes slack, silencing his weapon.
‘Still the best holdpoint,’ I bawl as my chainsword tangles momentarily with a World Eater’s axe. ‘Thick walls, and Sister Sapphira claims that the ceremonial gate is an adamantine alloy.’
The bastard-sons of Angron are among us. World Eaters pour into the cloistrium, wolfishly drawn down on us by the stench of our loyalty. Bolt-rounds don’t stop them. Grenades don’t stop them. They push on fearlessly through our bottlenecks and gauntlets, stepping through the mangled corpses of their Traitor brethren to get to us. Each maniac Angel sustains the grievous wounds of two of his loyalist kind. They hear nothing but pain and see nothing but victims. They feel… nothing. Duty is not enough for them. They live for battle, but even that seems insufficient to satisfy the kill-wired berserkers. They want our blood. They want our skulls for their Ruinous lord and nothing, it seems, is going to stop them.
Squad Whip Joachim fights for his life – a gladius in each gauntlet, a World Eater on each flank. One of the Traitors has been blessed by his merciless god with a bone-spiked club on one arm. He swings the flesh-weapon at the Excoriator but hits his mindless compatriot by accident. The Chaos Space Marine turns on his afflicted battle-brother with his axe, and moments later the madmen are fighting each other. This is a small mercy since already there is another of Angron’s supersons swinging his ravenous blade at the squad whip.
I feel the moment. I feel the city slipping away on the regicide board, and then I feel the pieces swept from the board by an angry fist. It’s the heavy flamer. I hear it chug, gasp and run dry. I can hardly be surprised. Sister Casiope has roasted a legion of slave-soldiers in the alleyways leading into the cloistrium. As the flamer falls silent, the Sister unhooks the support straps and shrugs off the weapon, bringing the half-clip she has left in her boltgun to bear. We all feel the heavy weapon’s absence, the beginning of an end. Even though the alleyways are still flame-filled mayhem, cultists and Blood Crusaders sprint through the inferno – blades held high. Bubbling and crackling, writhed in orange tongues of hot fury, the slave-soldiers of Khorne make their doomed assault.
The palatine and her Sisters drop the killers with merciful rounds, but as the bodies begin to trip, tumble and burn, others run the gauntlet of the firestorm alley. Blood-red daemons of the Ruinous pantheon sprint horribly through the flames. They look similar to the herald-thing I faced in the Obelisk, but no two of the monstrosities look truly alike. They leap and land on the Sisters with arachnid precision, gutting and stabbing the Adepta Sororitas with supernaturally frenzied thrusts of their hellforged blades. Flashes of light and the bark of Sapphira’s bolt pistols force the monsters from her prone form. As she blasts away, one of the things thrashes this way and that. Rounds tear off horn-tips, claws and a foot, but it doesn’t stop the beast leaping straight back on the Sister and savaging her again.
Crackling energy suddenly leaps across the open space of the cloistrium. The searing soul lightning had passed through the bodies of several slave-soldiers crowding a side-alley. The mortals explode on contact, their torsos detonating in a fine shower of blood-spittle. The silver arc of warp-drawn power slams into the lesser daemon, as it huddles over the Sister of Battle, and throws it into the far wall. It struggles, thrashes and claws against the stream of power until it too is vaporised in an explosive gore-cloud of red mist.
Epistolary Melmoch and Chaplain Shadrath burst into the cloistrium from the alleyway. Melmoch isn’t smiling. He looks tired and drawn – his eyes sunken and his talent a burden. He carries his force scythe in both hands, discharging another soul-scalding burst of energy at the daemons picking over the remains of the dead Adepta Sororitas. Second Whip Azareth is behind them, plugging the alleyway with single discharges from his boltgun. Priming his last grenade, the second whip bounces it down the alleyway at their rabid pursuers. The alleyway flashes and collapses in a rolling dustbank of masonry and pulverised rockcrete.
My heart lifts at the sight of the three Excoriators, but the reinforcement is not enough to save us. More howling World Eaters barge into the cloistrium, their pauldrons clashing in an effort to push past one another and get to us first. I choose my targets and favour manoeuvres for economy. My chainsword flicks and jabs, cleaves and slices. World Eaters get my attention for barely a moment. Just enough for the thrashing teeth of my blade to turn their own aside, take off a gauntlet at the wrist or excavate a hole in the chest. For a moment I imagine the horror before the walls of the Imperial Palace, the onslaught of the World Eaters and the lives they must have taken with their devastating combination of martial skill, fearlessness and bottomless hatred. Few of my opponents drop to the floor. I don’t have the spare seconds it would take to finish them, and before I have turned to face another Traitor Space Marine, his berserker brother – who had the attention of my chainblade moments before – is back on his feet and hacking away.
The hellish melee has forced us back together. Skase and I find ourselves back to back, slapping aside angry blades coming for each other’s plate while at the same time negotiating the murderous thrusts and slashes of multiple World Eaters assailants. The moment that began with Sister Casiope’s flamer continues to unravel. I feel the bite of a chainaxe through my thigh plate. The teeth of some other unseen weapon glances off my shoulder plate, ripping up the ceramite but failing to reach flesh. Brother Simeon’s serf Amos runs before me towards the body of his fallen master. A hulking World Eaters champion steps on Simeon’s armoured form and pulls free the daemon battleaxe he buried there. I see Amos hacked cleanly in half by the soul-hungry weapon.
As Amos falls aside in two pieces, Chaplain Shadrath appears – his midnight plate glistening with the serf’s blood. Holding his crozius arcanum up like a religious icon he commands the hulk and his cursed weapon back. The monstrous World Eater seems uncertain for a moment – a trait I have yet to experience in my Traitor opponents. Suddenly furious with itself, the battleaxe comes up over its head and down on Shadrath. The Chaplain knocks it to one side with his crozius, which seems to glow with a spiritual luminescence, before smashing at the giant’s ancient plate with his sacred staff of office.
World Eaters Space Marines continue to flood the cloistrium, each more blood-hungry than the last. I can hear the gunning of chainblades echoing in the ambulatory beyond, indicating even more of the Traitors, eager to cut up what is left of us. Epistolary Melmoch’s unnatural powers continue to be a boon, dwindling though
