Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [114]
When he finally slept, he dreamed of everything he’d seen that day. After three hours of dreaming that every corpse he’d passed was staring at him, he gave up the attempt to find rest and instead pushed on deeper into the city.
On the second day, he had found his first survivors. In the ground floor of a collapsed habitation block, movement drew his eye.
He’d voiced a tremulous ‘Hello?’ before he’d even realised he might be calling out to one of the invaders. The sound of scampering footsteps emboldened him. Alien beasts would not run from a lone human’s cry. ‘I’ve come to help,’ he called.
Silence was the only answer.
‘I have food,’ he tried.
A filthy face rose from behind a pile of rubble. Narrowed eyes never left him – bright and quick like a scavenger’s gaze.
‘I have food,’ Asavan said again, lowering his voice this time. With no sudden movement, he unslung the satchel from his back and held up a dehydrated food pouch in its silver packaging. ‘It’s dehydrated. Rations. But it’s food.’
The face became a person, a middle-aged woman, as she left her hiding place and drew closer. Gaunt and wild-eyed, she moved with the caution of the forever fearful. It took three attempts for her to speak. Before the words left her mouth in a scratchy whisper, she had to clear her throat repeatedly.
‘You’re a priest?’ she asked, still not coming within arm’s reach. She pointed at his white and violet robes, her gesture weak and dismissive.
‘I am. The God-Emperor sent me to you.’
She had wept in that moment, and soon after, they shared a small meal in the ruins of her hab-chamber. He asked questions of her life, and the losses she’d suffered. Before he left an hour later, he made sure she had several days’ worth of food and fluid, and blessed her in the name of the God-Emperor. It was strange to be ministering to the genuinely needy, and the fully-fleshed. So many of his sermons had been to fellow clerics and machine-altered skitarii that a weeping woman praising the Emperor was quite beyond his experience.
It was strange, but it was good. It was worthy.
Asavan Tortellius’s first meeting with a survivor had gone well. He walked on, similar encounters repeating themselves over the next day and night. It was only on the third day that he ran into trouble.
A small group of ragged survivors huddled around a trash-fire, warming their hands as night fell over another tank graveyard along the Hel’s Highway. Asavan cleared his throat as he approached, raising a hand in greeting.
The survivors whirled, bringing lasguns to bear. Several of the group were in workers’ overalls, blood-spattered and dark with grime. One of them was clad in a Guard uniform, a bulky power pack on his back and a cabled lasrifle aimed at Asavan’s face.
‘No more surprises, please, yes?’ The soldier spat onto the ground, his thin face marked with suspicion. ‘I am tired and I am cold and I am sick to my core of shooting looters in the skull.’
‘I’m not a looter.’
‘That is not a surprise to me, given what I have just said I do to looters.’
‘I’m a priest.’
‘Explains the robes,’ one of the workers chuckled. ‘I think he’s telling the truth, Andrej.’
‘A priest,’ the storm-trooper repeated.
‘A priest,’ Asavan nodded.
The storm-trooper lowered his rifle. ‘That is most definitely a surprise. I am Andrej of the Legion. These are my friends, who were unlucky enough to be born in Helsreach instead of a city worth defending.’
The workers snickered.
‘I am Asavan Tortellius, of Stormherald.’
‘The god-machine?’ Andrej barked a 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