The Count

Ash had been falling on Hive Vesper for nine days, and Mathias had stopped brushing it off his pauldrons. It came down from the fires in the lower hive, fine and grey and steady, and lay in the streets in drifts that the transports had cut into long ruts.

The Thunderhawk set them down in the square before the gate. Behind them the main street ran back into the lower hive and the smoke. Ahead lay a gulf so deep that the bottom was lost in haze, and across it ran the Chain Bridge, a long iron road slung on chains as thick as a man’s waist, reaching out to the docks on the far side. At the near end the chains were sunk into a squat stone gatehouse with a single wide arch. The first thing Mathias noticed was the line going through it.

The refugees came in from the side streets and out onto the bridge, three abreast, shuffling. They were not running. They’d gone past running a few days ago. Workers in grey coveralls, women carrying infants, an old man pushing a cart with another old man sitting in it. Nobody was shouting. The only sound was the shuffle of feet and, from somewhere down the main street, a deep, irregular thudding, like something very large knocking on a very large door.

In the mouth of the arch stood a Salamander. Mathias had seen them in the briefing plates and thought the plates had exaggerated: skin black as slate, eyes like banked coals, armor the deep green of old bottle glass. This one had his helm off and a child’s boot in his hand. He was looking for the child it belonged to. He found her a moment later, three places back in the line, and knelt and put it on her foot, and she let him.

Then he stood and looked at the three Templars. He did not seem much impressed.

“Sergeant Teron,” he said. “You are the Black Templars.”

“We are,” Hadrian said.

“The Marshal said three.”

“Three is what he sent.”

“He said three would hold the gate.”

“He was correct.”

“This is a Salamander operation,” Teron said. “The Marshal has placed you under my command until the sixth bell. If that is a difficulty, say so now.”

“It is not,” Hadrian said.

Teron looked at Hadrian’s armor, the mismatched greaves and the one old pauldron, and something moved at the corner of his mouth that might have been the start of a smile. He pointed past them down the main street, to where it vanished into the smoke. “The greenskins came up out of the tunnels nine days ago. Orks. There are more of them down there than I have a number for. The bridge is the only way out of the lower hive, and this gate is the only way onto the bridge. Every hour they come down that street. Every hour we send them back.”

“And the Navy?” Aldric said. He was the only one of the three who would ask.

“At the sixth bell the fleet burns the lower hive to the bedrock. Eleven hours.” Teron said it in the same voice he’d used for the greenskins. “There are nine million people in the lower hive. The Navy’s lighters and the Thunderhawks of my company can lift perhaps ninety thousand before dawn, if the bridge holds. If it does not hold, fewer.”

Nobody said anything. Down the line, a baby had started to cry, thin and hoarse, and a woman was trying to quiet it. Mathias found that he’d been looking at the line for some time, at the faces in it, and made himself stop. He saw fresh grey ash settle on the child with the boot.

“You hold the gate with us,” Teron said. “Nothing gets under the arch.”

“Understood,” Hadrian said.

“One more thing.” The Salamander glanced at Mathias, briefly, and then at the four bright scars across his breastplate where the paint had never been repaired. “I have a ledger. My squad tallies each one we put across. The last count was eleven thousand four hundred and six, out of the ninety I was told to reach.” He turned back to the line. “I would prefer if it were higher.”

He went back to the arch. The next group of refugees had reached him, and he bent to take a small, ash-colored boy by the hand and walk him the first few steps onto the bridge, out of the shadow of the arch.

The three of them took their places in the gateway. Aldric climbed the stair in the gatehouse wall to the parapet, where he could see the whole length of the street. Hadrian walked the width of the arch once, slowly, the way he’d have walked a deck, and then planted himself in the middle of the road and drew his sword. Mathias took the place beside him.

Down the street, in the smoke, the thudding stopped. Mathias heard a great many voices begin to chant, in unison, one word, over and over, and the stones of the gate began to hum in answer.