Helsreach

laugh. 'You are far from your walking throne, fat priest. Did you fall off and fail to catch up?'

Asavan drew nearer to the fire, and the workers made room for him.

'Tomaz Maghernus.' One of them offered his hand for the priest to shake. 'Don't mind Andrej, sir. He's not all there.'

'All of me is exactly where it needs to be.' The storm-trooper shook his head, his dark, weasel eyes glinting with the fire's reflection. 'Throne, I have never been so cold. We are all lucky that our balls have not frozen and cracked by now.'

'Good to see you,' one of the other men muttered to the priest.

'Yeah,' another nodded, his voice sincere despite not meeting the newcomer's eyes. Asavan was touched by their almost-shy gratitude to see a priest amongst all this.

'Looters?' Asavan asked. 'Did I hear that correctly?'

'You did,' Maghernus breathed into his hands, before holding them out to the flames. 'Dockworkers. Militia and Guard deserters. It's ugly out here. They're going through the habs, stealing credits and whatever else they can find.'

'May I ask, why are you out here?'

Andrej shook his head as he joined the group. 'Do not sound so suspicious, holy man. We are not hiding from duty. We are merely the Forgotten, lost in the dead city, making our way back to… wherever the closest front line might be.'

'You have no contact with the rest of the Guard?'

'Ha! I like this. I like the way you think. You fell off your Titan, fat man. Do you have a vox-link back to ask your Mechanicus masters for advice? No. Exactly. You were not at the docks, priest. Half the city died last week. The Guard is broken, and the vox is no more than a hundred frequencies of hissing noise. If I am right, and I hope to be wrong, then no Imperial force is able to contact any other in perhaps half of the city.'

'What do you intend to do?'

'We are moving west. The Templars went to the west, and so shall we. Why are

you

here?'

Asavan shrugged. It wasn't something he could explain with any conviction. 'I wanted to walk the streets and help where I could. I was serving no one on the back of a Titan.'

A few of the group made the sign of the aquila and murmured their admiration.

'You wish to come with us, fat priest? You will like what is in the west, I am thinking.'

'What's in the west?' Asavan asked.

'A great number of burning industrial sectors, too many looters for my innocent heart to consider at this moment in time, and of course, the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant.'

'What is this temple you speak of? A monastery? A cathedral?'

Maghernus shook his head. 'Both. Neither. It's a shrine - built by the original colonists who came to Armageddon.'

In his surprise, Asavan almost ordered a servo-skull to take a dictation. '

You

are telling me that the first church ever built in Helsreach still stands? It endured the First War against the daemon armies? It remained unbroken through the Second War, when the Great Enemy first came to this world?'

'Well… yeah,' Maghernus replied.

This was providence. This was why he had left the Titan, and this was why the God-Emperor had guided him through the city to these men.

Andrej snorted at his questions. 'It is not simply the first church built in Helsreach, my fat friend. It is the first church ever raised in the whole world. When the first settlers prayed to the Emperor, they prayed in the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant.'

Asavan felt his hands trembling. 'How do we reach it?'

Andrej gestured to the expansive, raised road in the distance. 'We walk the Hel's Highway. How else?'

A

rtarion stood away

from the others.

The building they occupied had once been a small temple, serving as the spiritual heart of this industrial sector. Now it was a tumbledown ruin, no longer fit to house dawn and dusk prayers for the local workers. In the altar room, Artarion had paused his bored exploration, finding bloodstains on some of the fallen rubble that had buried the floor in broken architecture.

The blood-scent was old, the stains themselves flaking. Whoever was entombed beneath had been dead for days. Artarion breathed in through his helm's filters. Female. Had not bled much after being crushed. Dead for perhaps three days; the delicate scent of decomposition was little more than spice on the air.

He'd removed himself to perform the rites of maintenance on his weapons, as well as to get away from Priamus muttering about the Salamanders.

As he lowered himself to sit on the dead woman's cairn, the knee joint of his armour locked for several seconds. Runic warnings flickered across his visor display. Instead of blanking them, he disengaged his helm's seals, removed it, and breathed in the smell of the fire, ash and brick dust that was all Helsreach had become. The faulty joint crunched back into motion, eliciting a grunt from the knight as he sat.

His bolter, chained to his thigh and mag-locked in place, was starved of ammunition. He had not spoken of this to the others yet, but knew they must surely be approaching similar difficulties. Before the week of bloodshed at the docks, the supplies brought down by the Helsreach Crusade from the

Eternal Crusader

so long ago had been reduced to a Thunderhawk cargo bay half-full of bolts and an almost- empty crate of replacement tooth-tracks for chainswords.

The gunship itself sat cold and silent in the courtyard of a factory complex, almost two kilometres to the west, in a sector of the city still securely in Imperial control.

Artarion examined the bolter's fire-blackened muzzle, turning the weapon over in his hands as he followed the path of winding, once-gold inlaid scriptures etched along the gun's sides. A list of enemies slain, battles won, worlds defended…

In wordless silence, he lowered the bolter again.

'T

here is nothing

to like in them,' Priamus spat as he paced the prayer room. 'They wage war to defend, to preserve. Everything in their way is devoted to maintaining what humanity already has.'

Bastilan was sharpening his combat blade, running a whetstone along the gladius's killing edges. The small chamber was filled with Priamus's crunching bootsteps and the

resssh, resssh

of the whetstone scraping.

'It is flawed,' the swordsman added. 'I mean no offence to them as warriors. But drop-podding into the city purely to defend civilians? Madness.'

Resssh, resssh.

'

Why do you not answer, brother?'

'I have little to say.'

Resssh, resssh.