Chapter 5: The Emperor Approves of You
Hak Rodney stood guard a short distance behind the priest. This was the honor reserved for the most trusted.
As the most devoted servant of the god of courage and glory, his ferocity in battle since receiving the divine blessing had earned him the cult priest's recognition. That recognition had made him what he now was: a personal guard, an instrument of the god's representative on this world.
And in return, the priest had promised him that after this blood rite was complete, he would receive power beyond anything he had imagined. Everything he had ever wanted to do and had not dared, he would do.
The priest's hoarse chanting drifted on the night wind. With each syllable, the smell of blood in the air grew heavier.
Hak gripped his crude rifle until his knuckles went white.
He closed his eyes.
He thought of his sister's pale face. Of the blood his parents coughed up from lungs worn out by years of labor that never ended.
The village headman with his tax ledger and his whip. The sound of the lash across his father's back. His mother's voice begging for more time, just a little more time.
The nobles in the city in their clean clothes, looking at people like his family the way a farmer looks at pests in the field.
Why? The food they ate came from seeds that Hak's family planted. The surplus they taxed away was paid for with sweat that Hak's family shed. Why did those people get to stand above everyone else?
Why did his family get beaten because illness had kept them from making the full grain tithe? Why?
And the ministers of the God-Emperor. Mouths full of meaningless blessings and not a single useful thing to offer anyone.
Kill the headman, that smug bastard. Kill the nobles with their clean hands. Kill the priests of the false god. Kill everyone who was too frightened or too stupid to join them, kill them all. Kill. Kill.
Once that thought found its footing, it spread like weeds.
Hak's eyes began to fill with red. The priest's chanting was approaching its conclusion. A faint crimson haze had begun to gather in the air.
His blood felt like it was boiling. Close now. So close. Once the ritual finished, the god would bless them again, and the angels of the divine kingdom would descend upon this world, and every injustice would be ground to nothing.
A shriek tore through the night.
Lasfire.
Hak's eyes snapped open. He saw the priest's head disappear into a mist of blood. The man's gaunt body swayed once and then folded backward like a broken stalk of grain.
Silence settled over the threshing ground. There was only the wind moaning through a broken window somewhere nearby.
Then every cultist in the square erupted at once.
Hak had not even raised his rifle before more las-bolts came stabbing out of the farmland shadows on both sides of the village. Blue lines crossed the darkness, and where each one landed there was a wet, flat impact and a scream.
"For the Emperor!" The roar came from the fields and it was enormous.
Hak watched a figure sprinting hard toward the field edge. That was his comrade "Long-legs" Hak, and the man lived up to his name, dodging past several shots that should have hit him. Then a man in a grey greatcoat burst out of the shadows and a chainsword shrieked to life. The spinning teeth took Long-legs' leg off at the thigh.
On the far side of the village another enormous figure came crashing out of the crops, this one broad as a doorway with a beard that covered most of his face, and Hak watched with genuine horror as the man grabbed "Shorty" Brook by the head with both hands and pulled until the screaming stopped.
"Ambush! Engage! Fight back!"
It did not matter. Las-bolts came from two directions simultaneously, crossing in the air above the threshing ground, and there was no piece of cover large enough to be useful. Hak crouched behind a mound of corpses and fired blindly at the fields, but the recoil of his crude automatic rifle made his arms numb and most of his rounds vanished into the crops without touching anything.
The return fire was not blind. Hak watched the man crouching next to him lean out an inch from cover and take a neat burned hole through the skull. Another man made a run for the wall at the edge of the village and was hit by three las-bolts in the chest simultaneously before he made three strides.
The god's blessing made them fearless. It did not make them bulletproof. Fanaticism had no answer to overwhelming fire superiority.
Hak pressed himself flat and listened to the screaming thin out.
Fifteen minutes. Perhaps less. The volume of fire dropped to sporadic shots and the sounds of the dying. He held his breath and looked out from behind the corpse mound.
The grey-uniformed soldiers were coming out of the fields. They moved in pairs, working building to building. Efficient, mutually covering, calm. When they found a cultist still moving they finished the job with a bayonet and kept moving.
Hak waited until the nearest pair had gone through a door on the far side of the square, then slowly stood, pressed himself to the wall, and began edging toward the village perimeter. He remembered a storage shed near the edge. There was a hidden cellar entrance beneath it.
His luck had apparently run out. He came around a corner and found the man with the chainsword waiting.
The man did not say anything. The chainsword ended the conversation.
Hak hit the ground. His body would not stop shaking. He was so cold. His vision was losing its edges.
He had not avenged his sister. He had not avenged his mother and father.
It wasn't fair. Why did it have to be like...
Duvette shook the worst of the blood off the chainsword's teeth and let the blade spin down. Text appeared in the upper right of his vision.
[You have completed a perfect ambush. Units under your command gain 10% experience. Morale and loyalty increased by a minor amount. Emperor's Wrath +100.]
[The Emperor approves of you.]
Throne, Duvette thought, the golden boys weren't watching his every move, were they? He checked the company status. Overall morale had climbed to 75%. Loyalty was holding at 80%. Supply had dropped to 48%.
He still had four more ritual sites to destroy. He could only hope the supply situation held.
Anderson came up behind him and gave his report. The lieutenant was covered in blood from collar to boot, though from what Duvette had personally witnessed, none of it was his own. He had seen Anderson tear a cultist's head off with his bare hands. He found himself looking at the big man's status readout and thinking about why there was no Potential Elite marker above it.
According to the report, only four soldiers had been hit during the engagement, all of them grazes from stray fire. The medic had already dealt with them. None were impaired.
"Stroud, take a team and sweep the perimeter. I want confirmation there are no stragglers." Duvette gave the orders quickly. "Anderson, two squads on the east side buildings. Everyone else, with me."
The soldiers moved without comment. After this many engagements in rapid succession, the company had arrived at a working rhythm that did not need to be explained.
Duvette took ten soldiers through the west side of the village. Most of the buildings were empty, holding nothing but the occasional dead cultist slumped in a corner. The air was blood and burning and the sour fermentation smell of crops, and it sat in the throat unpleasantly.
In the third outbuilding he checked, something on the floor caught his attention. A heap of broken agricultural tools and burlap sacks had been piled carelessly into one corner, but the earth beneath them had been disturbed by recent footprints. He gestured to the nearest soldier.
They moved the pile. Underneath was a rough-cut wooden board. Duvette tapped it with the chainsword and heard the hollow answer from below.
"Cellar." He signaled two soldiers to cover the hatch. Then he crouched down and worked the board up with the chainsword's tip.
Damp mold hit him immediately. A ladder dropped into darkness. He took a glow-rod from his belt, cracked it alight, and dropped it through the opening. The pale light spread through a narrow space roughly three meters across, stacked with a few rotting sacks.
He went down first. His boot landed on something solid and he looked down. Half a blackened loaf of bread.
"Is anyone there?" He kept his voice level. It echoed off the low ceiling.
Nothing.
Duvette raised the chainsword and moved forward. The cellar ran deeper than it appeared from above. There was a small partition at the back. He reached the entrance to it.
Something came at him from the side.
He shifted his weight and put his left fist into the center of the movement, a short punch with his bodyweight behind it. There was a choked grunt and a body stumbled backward.
He brought the chainsword up. In the glow-rod's light, a boy in his teens was curled on the ground with both arms across his stomach, face contorted with pain.
Behind him, pressed into the corner behind a pile of sandbags, was a smaller girl, hugging her knees and pressing her face into her arms. Her thin shoulders were shaking without pause.
Both of them wore filthy rough-woven clothing. Their faces were smeared with mud. There were no Chaos markings. Their eyes held no madness, only terror in its purest form.
Duvette lowered the chainsword slowly.
"Civilian survivors." He said it quietly, as if making a note for himself.
He looked back at the soldiers who had come down behind him. "Bring them up. Carefully. Do not frighten them."
The soldiers moved in. The boy struggled briefly, but the punch had taken the fight out of him. The girl went rigid and stayed that way, and the soldier carrying her did his best to be gentle about it.
Duvette climbed the ladder last. The moonlight and the cold air were both preferable to what the cellar smelled like.
The wind had picked up while he was inside. A heavy bank of cloud was moving in from the distance. He was not sure if that was imagination or something to pay attention to.
Stroud was crossing the square toward him, three salvaged crude-made firearms slung over one shoulder.
"All clear, sir." The bald lieutenant's eyes moved to the two children being helped out of the building. He raised an eyebrow. "Found some mice."
"Assign two men to them." Duvette looked at the village around him, the bodies, the extinguished ritual pyres, the blood on every wall. "Fifteen-minute rest. Then we move."
"Understood."