The Sixth Bell

The ram came up the main street at a steady walk, a hundred Orks bearing it on their shoulders in time with the chant.

Mathias watched it from the parapet. It was not fast and did not need to be. The girder was longer than a Thunderhawk, with an iron head considerably taller than a man, and wherever it went the other Orks cleared a path and howled. It was making straight for the foot of the gatehouse wall.

Hadrian spoke first, in the even voice he’d used since the hangar.

“Sergeant. The street narrows a hundred paces out. Three of us could meet it there, before it reaches the wall. I would take the head.”

Teron did not look away from the street. “No.”

“A hundred bearers and an iron head,” Hadrian said. “It is a small thing.”

“I do not doubt it.” Teron glanced at him. “A gate is held by standing in it, not by leaving it. Take the arch.”

Aldric had come in from the corner of the parapet, and there was no mistaking his opinion. “Sergeant, with respect. Once that reaches the wall they will have the gatehouse down in minutes.”

“I know how long it will take.”

For a moment nobody spoke. Mathias found that his hand was on his hilt and his feet had turned toward the stair. He knew exactly how it would go: a hundred bearers, one clean thing to do, and it would be done. Then he looked back through the arch at the line on the bridge. It had slowed to a crawl as everyone looked toward the street, but it had not stopped. A woman was talking to a child in a low, steady voice, and the child was nodding. He turned his feet back.

“As you command, Sergeant,” Hadrian said. Aldric said it a moment after, and Mathias after Aldric.

The Orks did not wait for the ram. They hit the gate again as the three of them came down the stair, a thick press with no more order than a landslide, and the line on the bridge was a hundred paces behind Mathias and still moving. He met the first with his sword and the second with his shoulder. His thigh had stopped bleeding sometime in the last hour and had started to stiffen, and he fought it like any other weight. The Salamanders’ flamers laid a long burning lane across the square, and the Orks ran into it anyway, and the ones behind them climbed over the ones that fell.

A very big Ork came out of the press with a claw of crackling steel on one arm. Hadrian walked out to meet it. They traded blows for longer than seemed possible, the claw tearing at plate, the sword at everything else, and the claw closed on Hadrian’s left shoulder, the old pauldron, and tore it away in a single piece. Hadrian put his sword through the Ork’s eye and kicked the body off the blade. He looked at the pauldron where it lay on the ground. Then he stepped over it.

The first blow landed while Mathias was in the middle of killing something.

It came through the stone as a single enormous note, the gatehouse ringing like a struck bell, and the chains overhead rang with it all the way out across the gulf. Everyone stumbled, the Orks included. Dust sifted from the arch. Somewhere on the bridge a woman screamed, and then a great many people did. A block of stone the size of a fist fell from the parapet and burst on the road beside him.

“Sixty-three thousand, five hundred and four,” said Teron’s ledger-keeper, in an unchanged voice. Teron had his head tilted to listen to the second blow.

It landed harder. The note was lower this time and did not stop; it went on under their feet like a groan. A crack opened in the wall beside the arch, a hand’s width, and widened as Mathias watched.

“Clear the bridge,” Teron said.

He said it on the squad channel and then aloud, at the full volume of a Space Marine’s voice, so that it carried the length of the bridge to the line. “Clear the bridge. All of you. Run.”

Nobody ran at first. Mathias heard the sound of three thousand people trying to understand a thing at once. Then the third blow came, and they ran.

It was not orderly. Teron’s brothers waded into the crowd and began lifting, and Mathias did the same, one arm under a woman and the other around a child, then a man with a broken leg, then another. The Orks were still coming. Hadrian had stayed in the mouth of the arch and was holding it alone, slowly giving ground, his sword rising and falling in the dust and fire, and from time to time Mathias heard the flat bark of Aldric’s bolter from somewhere to his left. Teron went past carrying the girl with the boot, one arm under her knees, and her small face was turned to look back at the ruin.

The fourth blow did not make a note. It sounded like a wall giving way.

Mathias was sixty paces out on the bridge when the gatehouse came down. He felt it in his legs before he saw it: a lurch, and then the stone behind him folding in on itself and the chains screaming out of it, and the first stretch of the bridge dropping away with the whole mass into the gulf. The Orks went first. There were more of them on the road than anything else, and they fell howling, and the sound they made on the way down was nothing like the chant. The rest of the bridge bucked and sagged and held, hanging from the dock end. Behind it, in the square, there were people, too. Mathias did not look at them for long. He was carrying someone.

He carried them the length of the bridge, which was longer than he remembered, and set down a woman and a child on the dock and turned back for the next. There was no next. The bridge ended behind him in a ragged tangle of chain, and beyond it there was only smoke and the stump of the gatehouse.

Hadrian came off the bridge onto the dock at a walk, with his sword in his hand and the old pauldron gone from his shoulder. Aldric was behind him. Neither of them said a word.

They stood at the end of the dock for the rest of the hour and watched the Orks gather on the far edge of the gulf, howling and firing across at nothing. Then the lighters came down and the line began to move again, away from the water, toward the ramps. It was a different line now. It was shorter.

At the sixth bell they were on the dock with the last of the Thunderhawks, and the fleet opened fire.

It began as a point of light in the sky and was suddenly the whole sky. The lower hive lit from the top down, a line of white fire that rolled out across the far side of the gulf and kept going. The sound arrived afterward, and it did not so much sound as press. Mathias stood on the ramp with his sword at his side and watched the broken bridge go, and the street beyond it. He did not know where the child was, or the cart, or the old man.

Teron stood beside him with his helm off. His ledger-keeper had put the book in his hand, and for a time he did not say anything. Then he wrote a number in it, slowly, and read it aloud.

“Sixty-four thousand, six hundred and eleven.”

“You were given ninety,” Hadrian said.

“I was.” Teron shut the book. “There were three thousand in the square and on the bridge when the first blow landed. Eleven hundred and seven reached the docks.” He looked at Mathias then, at the thigh and the new gouge in the shoulder plate. “You went for the cart.”

“I did.”

“I saw.” That was all he said about it.

The ramp began to rise. Behind them the hive went on burning.