Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [129]
The head itself was torn free before the main body fell, leaving a socket of trailing power cables and interface feeds, like a nest of a million snakes. Gripped in the lifter-claw at the end of one of Godbreaker’s many arms, the Titan’s head was clamped and crushed, then hurled aside as a twisted ball of scrap metal. Its landing flattened a small manufactorum, as the armoured command chamber weighing several dozen tonnes blasted through the building’s side wall and pulverised several support pillars.
On board Godbreaker, the bestial creature in charge ranted at its subordinates for destroying and discarding the Titan’s head in such a way. To the beast’s mind, it would have made a very impressive trophy to mount on their own god-machine.
The few Legio crew members, skitarii defenders and tech-adepts that survived Stormherald’s fall scrabbled from exits and breaks in the behemoth’s skin. In the midday light of Armageddon’s weak sun, they were cut down by the ork reavers around the dead Titan.
Miraculously, Moderati Secundus Lonn was one of these. He had managed to break free of the bindings and interface cables linking him to the dying god-machine, and make it out of the bridge by the time Godbreaker decapitated Stormherald. In the following fall, he broke his leg in two places, earned a concussion as the tilting corridor sent him falling down a flight of spiral stairs, and busted several of his teeth clear out of his gums when his head smacked off a handrail.
On hands and knees, dragging his dead leg and half-drunk with concussion, Lonn hauled himself out of an emergency bulkhead to lie on the warm armour plating of Stormherald’s torso. There he remained, panting and bleeding in the thin sunlight for several seconds, before starting to crawl his slow way down the ground. He was killed less than a minute later by the marauding greenskins swarming over the downed Titan.
Through the pain, he was laughing as he died.
Grimaldus came at last to the inner sanctum.
He was no longer a warrior here, but a pilgrim. Of this he was certain, though in the wake of his words with Nero, he felt certain of little else.
It had taken very little time within the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant to bring about this certainty within him, but the feeling was undeniable. He felt home, on familiar and sacred ground, for the first time since he had left the Eternal Crusader.
It was purifying.
The cool air didn’t taste of fire and blood on a world he had no wish to walk upon. The silence wasn’t broken by the drumbeat of a war he had no stake in.
Augmented infants – the lobotomised bodies of children kept eternally young through gene manipulation and hormone control – were enhanced by simple Mechanicus organs and pressed into service as winged cherub-servitors, hovering on anti-grav fields as they trailed prayer banners through the halls and arched chambers.
In the myriad rooms of the basilica, the devoted and the faithful of Helsreach went about their daily reverence despite the war blackening their city. Grimaldus walked through a chamber of monks offering prayer through inscribing hundreds of saints’ names on thin parchments that would hang from the weapons of Temple guards. One of the holy men kneeled as the Astartes passed, imploring the ‘Angel of Death’ to wear the parchment on his armour. Touched by the man’s devotion, the knight had accepted, and voxed an order to the rest of his men scattered throughout the temple grounds to acquiesce to any similar charity.
Grimaldus let the lay brother tie the scroll to his pauldron with twine. The offered parchment was a modest but appreciated replacement for the iconography, oathpapers and heraldry that had been scoured from his armour in the last five weeks of battle.
The Reclusiarch had ventured alone into the undercroft, wishing to bear witness to the civilians there in his patrol to examine all defences and locations within the basilica. The subterranean expanse might once have been austere and solemn, featuring little more than infrequently-spaced