Helsreach

name='FontStyle49'>in moments such as this.'

The Emperor's Champion watched him for a long moment, during which Grimaldus found his heart thumping faster. He was angry, and feeling the anger rise was as purgative as his time within the temple's serene halls. Bayard spoke, his voice sincere despite the crackle of vox-breakage.

'My voice was one of the few that spoke against your ascension to Mordred's rank.'

Grimaldus snorted, returning to watching the arriving forces. 'I would have said the same in your place.'

S

eventy soldiers of

the Steel Legion 101st came together in a battered convoy of Chimera transports. The ramp slammed down as the lead vehicle pulled up to a halt. A squad of Legionnaires disembarked, not a one of them free of bloodstains or bandaging.

'Leave the Chimeras outside,' Major Ryken ordered the others. Half of his face was wrapped in grubby cloth bandages, and he leaned heavily on an aide's shoulder, limping as he walked.

'Shouldn't we take them inside?' Cyria Tyro asked. She looked back over her shoulder at the tanks being abandoned.

'To hell with them,' Ryken spat blood as she led him to the two knights. 'Not enough ammunition in the turrets to make it worthwhile.'

'Grimaldus,' she said, looking up at the towering warrior.

'Hail, Adjutant Quintus Tyro. Major Ryken.'

'

We

got cut off from Sarren and the others. The 34th, the 101st, the 51st… They're all in the central manufactory sectors…'

'It does not matter.'

'What?'

'It does not matter,' Grimaldus repeated. 'We are defending the last points of light in Helsreach. Fate brought you to the Temple. Fate sent Sarren elsewhere.'

'Throne, there are still thousands of the bastards out there.' He spat pinkish spit again, and Tyro grunted as she took more of his weight. 'And that's not the worst of it.'

'Explain.'

'Invigilata has gone,' Tyro said. 'They left us to die. The enemy still has Titans - and there's one that you'll never believe until you look upon it with your own eyes. We saw it march from the Rostorik Ironworks, collapsing habitation towers in its wake.'

'The 34th Armoured rolled out to stop it,' Ryken winced as he spoke. His bandages were growing more stained, around what was likely an empty eye socket. 'It flattened most of them in the time it takes a desert jackal to howl at the full moon.'

A curious local expression. Grimaldus nodded, catching the meaning, but Ryken had more to add.

'

Stormherald

is down,' he said.

'I know.'

'This

Godbreaker…

it killed the Crone, and slew

Stormherald.'

'

I know.'

'You know? So where's the damn Ordinatus? We need it! Nothing else will kill that gigantic clanking… thing.'

'It is coming. Move inside and see to your wounds. If the end is coming to these walls, you will need to stand ready.'

'Oh, we'll all be ready. The bastards took my face, and that made it personal.'

As they moved away, Grimaldus heard Tyro gently teasing the major for his bravado. When they were beyond the gates but still in sight, the Reclusiarch saw the general's adjutant kiss the major on his unbandaged cheek.

'Madness,' the knight whispered.

'Reclusiarch?' Bayard asked.

'Humans,' Grimaldus replied, his voice soft. 'They are a mystery to me.'

CHAPTER XXII Emperor Ascendant

A

t last, vox

reports began to trickle through to the defenders gathered in the temple's graveyard district. Across Helsreach, Sarren's plan, the ''one hundred bastions of light'', was in effect, with Imperial forces massing in defensive formations around the most vital parts of the city.

Contact was erratic at best, but the fact it even existed was a boost to morale. Every point of focussed defence was holding well, with all divisions breaking down between storm-troopers, Guard infantry, Steel Legion armour units, militia and armed civilians who chose to take to the streets rather than cower in their shelters.

The city was fighting to keep its heart beating, and the orks no longer found themselves advancing against a mobile wave of human resistance. Now the aliens were breaking against a multitude of last stands, hurling themselves against defenders that had nowhere left to run.

Fortunately for the Imperials, enemy scrap-Titans were few in number. With recent engagements such as the Battle of the Rostorik Ironworks, the greenskins' complement of god-machines had suffered furious losses in the face of Legio Invigilata's wrath.

Even as Invigilata recalled its last remaining Titans from the city in the wake of

Stormherald's

death, the Titans were forced to fight their way free of the orks flooding through Helsreach's unprotected streets. Although several Titans escaped through the broken walls and into the Ash Wastes beyond, the Warlord-class engine

Ironsworn

was brought down by a massed infantry assault in an ambush similar to the one that had laid

Stormherald

low all those weeks before.

The last of the Imperial Navy forces in the city had based themselves at the Azal spaceport, where they continued to mount bombing runs and offer limited air support to the tank battalions ringing the Jaega District's surface shelters. The fighting here was among the thickest and fiercest seen in the entire siege to date, and the archives which would catalogue the Third War for Armageddon came to consider many of the glorious propaganda falsehoods born here as cold fact. Many of these heroic twists of the truth were due to the writings of one Commissar Falkov, whose memoir, entitled simply

''I Was There…'',

would become standard reading for all officers of the Steel Legions in the years after the war.

Although there was absolutely no truth in the tale, Imperial records would state that acting-Commander Helius sacrificed his own life by ramming his Lightning into the heart-reactor of the enemy