The Gate

The first wave came down the main street in a single rush, and it was a good deal bigger than Mathias had expected.

The Orks poured out of the smoke in a solid grey-green mass, howling, hauling guns that looked welded together from three other guns and swinging blades the size of doors. Some of them wore armor made from hab-block shutters. A few were on fire and did not seem to have noticed. The street shook under them. The chant he’d heard was a single word, and he understood it now, because several hundred of them were shouting it at once.

Aldric fired first, from the parapet above the arch, and the lead rank came apart. It made no difference. The ones behind climbed over what was left.

“The arch,” Hadrian said, and walked forward.

Mathias walked with him. They met the Orks in front of the gate as the first rank hit it, and the world became noise and weight. The first one swung a cleaver at his head and he took it on his blade and put the point through its throat. The second came in low, and he drove his boot into its chest and sent it back into the third. A big one, taller than he was, with a steel plate bolted over half its face, hit him square in the breastplate with a fist like a hammer and Mathias felt the ceramite flex. He cut at the arm and the thing roared, and he cut again, and then Hadrian’s sword came down across its shoulders and it folded.

Green fire went over his shoulder from the arch behind him. A brother in deep green stood in the gateway with a heavy flamer on his hip, and a long tongue of burning promethium swept across the square, and the Orks in it simply stopped being a mob and became a row of shapes that kept running for a few steps, then fell. Teron came out of the arch with five brothers at his back, a bolt pistol in one hand and a chainsword in the other.

“Left,” he said, and Mathias moved left.

They held it. It was not elegant. The Salamanders fired in disciplined bursts and moved as one, and the Templars went straight into the thickest part of the press and stayed there, and neither force spoke to the other beyond the odd word. Mathias lost track of how many he’d killed. His arm ached to the shoulder. A choppa found the seam under his left pauldron and he felt it bite, and then he opened the Ork from collarbone to hip and it went down.

He was looking for the next one when he saw the cart.

It was the old man’s cart, the one he’d seen in the line, with the second old man still sitting in it. They had come out into the square when the line moved, as they had been told to, and now they were caught in the open, thirty paces from the arch, with a mob of Orks bearing down on them. The man pushing had stopped. He’d let go of the handle and was standing with his arms out, as though that might do anything.

Mathias did not decide to go. He was already running.

He got there first by a stride. The leading Ork swung and he took it across the pauldron, and the next, and the next, and he held the lane behind him by being in it. He could hear the cart wheels behind him, the old man shouting at his friend in a language he didn’t know, and then the wheels began to roll again, away from him, toward the gate. An Ork put a rusted blade into his thigh, above the knee. He broke its neck with the pommel.

Hadrian arrived on his left without a word and Aldric’s fire swept the street ahead of them, and the lane held until the cart had gone in under the arch.

Not everyone had been so lucky. Mathias saw the shape of it afterward, as the smoke cleared. There had been fifty or sixty people in the square when the wave hit, and the Orks had been among them for the first thirty seconds. A line of shapes lay along the front of the gatehouse in grey coveralls. A woman’s shawl was caught on a gatepost, snapping in the wind. He did not look for the others.

The Orks broke at last, as they always did, in a sudden collapse, all at once and for no reason that Mathias could see, and went back up the street howling. The square was silent except for the creak of the chains overhead and the sound of his own breathing.

“Ledger,” Teron said, to one of his brothers.

“Thirteen thousand, nine hundred and two.”

Teron nodded once and looked at the square, which was covered in the dead of both sides, and then at the ash falling softly on all of it. “Again in a quarter hour,” he said. He said it the way he’d said everything else.

They came again in a quarter hour. And again, and again. The waves were bigger each time, or perhaps only the same size and arriving into fewer hands. The Salamanders lost a brother on the third assault, a heavy-flamer bearer pulled bodily out of the gateway by something with a hook for an arm, and nobody remarked on it. The line kept moving. Mathias fought through the dark hours with a hip that no longer worked properly and a thigh that bled slowly into his greave, and Hadrian fought on his left, and for a long time there was nothing in the world but the next thing to kill.

Near the end of the ninth hour, Teron called him up to the parapet.

Mathias climbed the stair in the gatehouse wall. Aldric was already there, and below them the whole length of the main street lay open, running back into the smoke. The fires had burned lower. The Orks had stopped charging. They were pulling something up the street from the dark.

“Sixty-one thousand, two hundred and nine,” Teron said. “At this pace we reach seventy-two by the sixth bell. I was given ninety.” He did not look away from the street. “Two hours. The line is still four thousand deep.”

“What are they bringing?”

Teron didn’t answer at once. Down in the smoke, a steady, deliberate rhythm began, a shout and a heave and a shout, and Mathias saw the first of it come into the light: a length of black girder as thick as a hab-block pillar, borne on the shoulders of a hundred Orks, with a head of beaten iron on one end.

Hadrian had come up the stair behind him. He regarded the thing for a moment, quite calmly, with the ash gathering on his shoulders.

“That,” he said, “is going for the gatehouse.”

“The chains are sunk in the stone under our feet,” Teron said. “Break the gatehouse and the bridge goes with it.”

Aldric, beside them, was already turning to look.