and come to investigate.
He took Wollkenden’s right arm, draped it around his shoulders, put his arm around the
confessor’s waist and hauled him to his feet.
“We need to find you some water,” he muttered. “We need to find us both some water.”
He carried Wollkenden out into the cavern, walked him up and down. He was gratified to feel
the confessor responding, finding his strength again — but worried, at the same time, that he
wouldn’t find enough.
“Who… who are you?” the confessor asked hoarsely.
“Colonel Stanislev Steele, sir, of the Valhallan 319th.”
“They… sent a regiment to rescue me?” Wollkenden seemed to find the idea amusing, although
Steele had no idea why. Perhaps it was just relief, or a mild form of hunger-induced hysteria that
choked a spluttering laugh out of him. “I told Mangellan. I told him they wouldn’t leave Helmat
Wollkenden to rot in these dungeons, he is too important… too, too important.”
“The Ecclesiarchy is keen to get you back, confessor,” said Steele. He thought it best not to
mention, for now, that he hadn’t exactly brought a whole regiment with him.
And then Wollkenden was struggling in his grip, trying to stand by himself although he
evidently wasn’t able.
“Where are they?” he babbled. “Where are your men? I wish to address them. They need to
know what is expected of them, and they will listen to me. I can inspire them, turn them into
heroes.”
“I know, confessor, but—”
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Wollkenden squirmed around, gripped the front of Steele’s ragged coat, and stared intensely into
his eyes. “That’s the worst thing, you know, the hardest thing about imprisonment. So much time to
think, and yet… Did they tell you about the Artemis System? They say that, without my words, we
would have lost a score of worlds to the Chaos blight there.”
“I know you have had a distinguished career,” said Steele, “but we ought to—”
“What am I, then, without an audience? What am I without my voice?”
“We’ll find you an audience,” Steele promised, “but not here. Mangellan is—”
“How did he die? Las-beam? Grenade? Did he live to see his Ice Palace fall? I imagine that was
some sight, yes? Did you break down the walls, or just melt through them? Water running through
the streets, washing away the blood… Oh, I knew you’d come, I knew you’d kill Mangellan for
taking me, I told him so.”
Wollkenden’s voice was getting louder, more strident, and Steele couldn’t interrupt him. He
pressed his hand over the confessor’s mouth, stifling the flow, and prayed that the Emperor would
forgive his discourtesy.
“With respect, sir,” he hissed, “Mangellan’s palace has not fallen, and if we make too much
noise his men will be down here in a second. We have to get out of here, and we have to do it
quietly. Do you understand?”
Wollkenden nodded frantically. He looked almost afraid of his rescuer now; still the message
appeared to have got through to him. Steele removed his hand, and guided the confessor to the steps.
It became apparent, as they tried to climb them, just how weak Wollkenden truly was. He slipped on
the purple fungus, and would have fallen on his face had Steele not caught him. With each
subsequent step they took, he threatened to overbalance the pair of them, send them over the side.
Somehow, though, they made it to the top. Steele lowered his charge into a sitting position,
cautioned him to be silent and still. He put out his lamp, flattened himself beside the doorway
through which he had been dragged almost four hours before, and peered out into the Ice Palace’s
grand hallway.
A part of him had hoped to find the hall empty, its sentries off-duty for the night. He had known,
however, that this was unlikely. Almost immediately, he heard the footsteps of a pair of Traitor
Guardsmen, and he shrank back into the shadows. The traitors had hardly gone by when another pair
approached from the opposite direction.
Mangellan had set regular patrols. Funny, thought Steele, how men like that preached Chaos and
yet were so quick to dispense orders. That said, there was no point in his trying to time the traitors,
to deduce when there might be a gap between their patrols — they would hardly be so disciplined.
There was no hope of crossing the hallway unseen, and the portcullis would be guarded anyway.
But Steele remembered the ice bridges spanning the expanses between the palace’s upper levels and
the hive streets around them. And closing his eyes, concentrating, he also remembered something
else, something to which he had paid scant attention as he had passed it earlier. He remembered a
door, standing half-open — and behind that door, the base of a winding staircase.
He would have to rely on his enhanced ear to alert him to approaching patrols — and on the
Emperor’s grace, to ensure that the guards at the entrance wouldn’t turn and see him and
Wollkenden while they were exposed. But Steele thought that they could reach that door. And from
there…
The palace was an enormous building. There had to be places in which they could hide. And
maybe they could find weapons, and robes to disguise themselves. Maybe they could find an
unguarded bridge. Anything was possible… if they could just reach that door.
Steele crouched beside Wollkenden, told him what he had planned, asked him if he felt up to it.
Wollkenden stared through him, and he said, “It looks majestic out there, doesn’t it? All that ice… It
reminds me of the victory celebrations on Artemis Major, of the crystal statues they erected in
Imperial Square.”
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Steele explained the plan again, patiently. Then he helped Wollkenden up to the doorway and
waited.
They crept out behind the next two-man patrol, Steele praying that neither of the traitors would
look over their shoulders. He could already hear the next pair, tramping towards them. They had…
his processors quickly worked out the figure… eleven seconds before they came into view around
the grand staircase. He tried to pick up the pace, but Wollkenden chose that moment to apparently
lose all strength in his legs. He let out a grunt as Steele caught him, and the colonel felt his heart
freeze, expecting the sound to reveal them.
Five seconds… and the door, that inviting door, was still an unattainable four metres away.
Wollkenden’s chin sagged onto his chest. He was losing consciousness, but they had come too
far to turn back now. Steele bundled the confessor’s limp body into his arms, almost staggered by
the weight. He would have to run, have to sacrifice silence for speed.
He had made it all of three paces when Wollkenden began to struggle violently. “No!” he yelled.
“No, you won’t take me through that door, you won’t put me in chains again!”
Steele tried to hush him, made to put his hand over the confessor’s mouth again, but it was
already far, far too late.
Wollkenden wriggled out of his grip, tried to stand, but fell to his knees, and crawled up to an
ice statue of a leering, gargoyle-like figure. “Help me,” he beseeched it, extending his clasped hands
towards as it as if in prayer. “It is your duty to help me, for the Emperor, for the score of worlds I
liberated from—”
There was more, much more. But Steele heard none of it — because Traitor Guardsmen were
streaming in from all directions, even through the door that he had hoped would be his escape route.
And even if he had been in any condition to fight them, he could never have won. Even if he could
have run, there was nowhere he could have run to.
They were dragged along endless passageways, Steele and Wollkenden, by cultists and traitors —
their numbers growing as more of their kind rushed out of their rooms or abandoned patrols to join
the throng, until the two prisoners were all but borne aloft on a fast-moving river of bodies.
Steele said nothing, bearing his fate stoically, but Wollkenden was delirious. He was waving to
the crowd, thanking them, assuring them that a parade was not necessary, that he had only done
what any man of his considerable talents would do.
They emerged, at last, into a large courtyard, bordered by four sheer walls, overlooked by
hundreds of windows. Ice trees grew around its edges, reaching sizes of a hundred storeys tall, their
branches spreading across the yard to intertwine with each other. Moonlight streamed in through
this intricate frozen web, and bathed the courtyard in a cool shade of blue.
Overlooked amid the crowd, one cultist watched all this, and tried his best not to rub shoulders
with those around him. He kept his hood pulled over his head, concealing his face, and was careful
not to catch anybody’s eye. When the crowd yelled out anti-Imperium slogans, he pretended to join
in, although he couldn’t bring himself to give voice to the words.
A huge stone dais stood in the centre of the courtyard — and from this, there rose an ice column,
eight-pointed like the Chaos star, its sides engraved with sigils that hurt the naked eye to look at
them. Steele and Wollkenden were thrust against two of the column’s points, secured to them with
chains.
That was when Mangellan appeared, with an imposing figure marching at his shoulder. The lone
cultist recognised the Chaos Space Marine, and could tell that he had been in a fight since last he
had seen him. His black power armour was damaged, his face bloodied. Still, the crowd parted as he
moved through it, even the heretics keen to give this abomination a wide berth.
Shuffling at Mangellan’s heels was his disgusting, mutated little servant, his head bandaged. The
lone cultist had heard that his name was Furst, that he was a man of scant intellect — but favoured
by Mangellan, perhaps for that very reason. The rumours had been rife since the attempted escape of
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Steele and Wollkenden that it was Furst who had let them go. It seemed that Mangellan either didn’t
believe those rumours or did not care.
As the high priest mounted the dais, Wollkenden seemed to recognise him, to realise where he
was at last, and he started to yell out, to struggle. Mangellan ignored him, turning to his audience,
raising his hands for silence. It took a moment for the clamour to subside, and then Mangellan
assembled a squad of Traitor Guardsmen and instructed them to patrol the courtyard for the rest of
the night, to keep a close eye on the prisoners. The Chaos Space Marine had taken up a position at a
back corner of the dais, and it looked like he intended to stay put too.
“Our guests will not trouble us much longer,” Mangellan assured his flock. “Our plans remain as
they were. In four hours’ time, we will meet here to begin the ceremony. As the first light of dawn
touches the courtyard, we will deliver not one but two noble souls to our gods.”
The lone cultist had heard enough.
The crowd was shouting, roaring its approval of Mangellan’s plan. The cultist slipped with
surprising ease through the crush of bodies, heading for the archway through which most of them
had entered. He didn’t want to be the first to leave, so he waited nervously for the crowd to begin to
disperse, to return to their rooms or their duties in twos and threes, chattering about the undoubted
spectacle to come.
He retraced his steps through the Ice Palace, trying not to appear too hurried. As the other
cultists peeled off around him, streaming up staircases, he was left on his own for a moment. He
ducked into a side passageway, narrow, dark, uncarpeted, its floor smooth and slippery in contrast to
the well-trodden paths elsewhere.
An iron door caught in its ice frame, and it took all the cultist’s strength to wrench it free. He
stepped through onto a flight of stone steps, and produced a lamp-pack from beneath his robes to
light the way down into a dank cave.
This unnatural system extended, as far as he had been able to tell, beneath the whole of the Ice
Palace. The dungeons, he had learned, were housed in a part of it — a part that, after much
searching, he had reluctantly accepted could not be reached except through the palace itself — as
were various wine cellars and treasure troves housing the spoils of the Chaos army’s recent victory.
This cave, however, had not found a use yet. Indeed, the cultist had seen no sign that anyone had
passed this way before him.
It was with some relief, then, that he shucked off his purloined robes, and became Trooper
Palinev of the Imperial Guard again.
He squeezed through a niche in the rock wall into a tiny antechamber. Lying there, where he
could not be seen from the steps, was the corpse of a defrocked cultist, his throat slit. The man had
made the fatal error of passing the wrong door at the wrong moment. And of being about Palinev’s
size.
A hole had been knocked through the wall of the small cave. Palinev had to lie on his stomach in
order to squeeze through it. He lowered himself feet first, and dropped the last half-metre into the
tunnel below. He landed on a precarious ledge, its brickwork slimy with sewer water — and
immediately, dark shapes rose around him.
Raising his lamp-pack, he identified those shapes as his comrades. Anakora and Mikhaelev
greeted the scout’s return with relief, and quickly woke Sergeant Gavotski as they had been
instructed. The Ice Warriors had been taking the opportunity to catch up on their sleep, spread out
across the ledge, while they awaited the outcome of Palinev’s scouting mission — although of
course they had left two troopers on watch.
Everyone was cheered by the news that both Wollkenden and Steele were alive. Beside that, the
matter of rescuing them seemed almost inconsequential. Palinev had to remind himself that they still
had much to do.
“We could go in there now,” said Gavotski, “but it sounds as if the colonel and the confessor are
well-guarded, and we’re dog-tired. We can’t take out two squads of traitors, not before they can
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raise the alarm and surround us. I suggest we wait until this ceremony of theirs has started. At least
then we’ll know where most of the heretics are, and that they’ll be distracted. We should have the
run of the palace.”
“Until we reach that courtyard,” said Mikhaelev, as always sounding the first note of caution.
“Then we’ll have to fight our way through the heretics, and they’ll outnumber us by hundreds to
one.”
“You’re right,” said Gavotski, with a quiet smile. “They won’t know what’s hit them.”
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Time to Destruction of Cressida: 04.22.14
