The Macharian Crusade: Angel of Fire

  ‘You left all your people behind?’ The words just came out of my mouth before I could stop them.

  ‘You are judging me?’ There was a dangerous edge to his voice now. He was not a man used to being questioned. He was a man to be feared. The fact that he had found his way here without aid told me that. I felt like I ought to say something but I could not. Resentment was at war with fear. The cold grey eyes bored into mine. They seemed to look right through me. Perhaps they did. A tiny smile quirked his thin lips as if something he was looking at amused him.

  ‘I saved those I could,’ he said.

  ‘Where are they now?’ Anton asked. ‘We could use the reinforcements.’

  ‘They are where they will be most useful. And if an ill fate befalls us they will be useful to those who come after. There are things on this world that the Imperium must be warned of.’

  ‘And what would those be?’ The Understudy’s rasping delivery was calmer than mine would have been under the circumstances.

  ‘This world is steeped in the darkest sort of heresy.’ Anton shot me an I-told-you-so look. ‘The priests of the Angel of Fire are worse than anything you have encountered before, Private Lemuel.’

  I did not need to ask how he knew. Doubtless as an inquisitor he would have access to our campaign histories. He saw me staring at him and for once misinterpreted my thoughts.

  ‘Yes, I know who you are. I looked into the backgrounds of all those assigned to guard Macharius. I know you are loyal and I know you are decorated for bravery.’

  It was an alarming thought that we had come to the attention of this cold, vain and supremely powerful man. Having an inquisitor look closely at you was worse even than having a commissar do so. I wondered if he had been in touch with Anna before this. I did not doubt that they would know each other. They were of a kind. I wondered whether she was another inquisitor.

  ‘You were saying about the priests of the Angel of Fire,’ the Understudy said.

  ‘I fear their cult is merely concealment for something older and much darker. Their use of unsanctioned psykers tends to confirm that but it is what those psykers are in touch with that troubles me.’

  ‘And what would that be, my friend?’ Macharius’s rich, powerful voice carried easily through the chamber. How long had he been awake and listening? It was possible he had been so the whole time. Macharius was a man who liked to seize whatever advantage in whatever situation he found himself.

  ‘Something daemonic,’ Drake said, without missing a beat. His gaze focused on the Lord High Commander and there was respect there and a challenge, and something else. I am not sure what. He had that look you sometimes see on the faces of the wounded when they are about to experience a religious conversion. Why an inquisitor would look at Macharius that way I do not know. I heard Anton gasp but when I looked at him he seemed secretly pleased. He was caught up in the sort of high drama he had only ever read about. I wished him luck with that. It was the sort of drama I could live without ever seeing.

  ‘You are certain?’ Macharius asked. His tone was flat and fatal.

  Drake nodded. ‘I told you as much when the reports started coming in from my agents.’

  ‘How bad is it?’ Macharius was not going to give even a high inquisitor a chance to say I told you so.

  ‘As bad as can be. There are strange currents in the air now and odd and terrible rituals are being performed. Every death those blasphemers have caused contributes to it. Something is feeding on it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I think there is something preparing to break through into this plane of existence. I think our presence here has contributed to that.’

  ‘You are saying that we are somehow the cause of all of this?’

  Drake shook his head. ‘I think this was going to happen anyway at some point, our presence merely hastened the event. The heretics need aid against us. They are using supernatural means to acquire it before the full force of the Imperium arrives.’

  ‘There’s more, isn’t there?’ Macharius said.

  ‘Our presence has allowed them to move openly, to cloak their evil rites in the mantle of patriotism and resistance to the invaders. The people might have risen against them if they had simply gone about their ritual murders on such a huge scale. Now it is all part of the war effort.’

  ‘You are saying that the locals are not all heretics then,’ said Anton.

  ‘They believe in false gods and false prophets but they are not the pawns of daemonic powers,’ said Drake. ‘At least, not yet.’

  ‘And we are stuck here in the underhive,’ said Macharius.

  ‘For the moment,’ said Drake.

  ‘We must come up with a plan,’ said Macharius. He slumped back in weariness and stared at the ceiling. He had the abstracted look of a man in deepest contemplation. His body might have been weak but his mind was racing.

  ‘It will need to be a very good one,’ said Drake. ‘I fear the forces we had left in the hive are totally overrun.’

  I thought about that for a long moment. If we were the only loyal Imperial troops left in the city, what chance did we have? And how long would it be before the heretics started looking for Macharius even down here?

  ‘Tell me about Belial, Lemuel,’ Macharius said. ‘What is it like?’

  I sat beside him. He had beckoned me over. I looked down at the Lord High Commander. He lay on his back. His eyes glittered. The surge of energy he had shown when speaking with Drake had faded. Or maybe he was just saving his strength. With Macharius it was always hard to tell. He had recovered from wounds that would have left me flat on my back for weeks and he seemed to be recovering very well. I wondered what it felt like to him at this moment, to have won so much and to have lost it, to have gone from a palace to this rancid, rotting shell of a store in the underhive. I did not ask him though. Macharius had a reputation for speaking to private soldiers, for wanting to know what his army was thinking, but I was not tempted to any familiarity and I suspected he would not brook it.

  ‘What would you like to know, sir?’ At the moment, Macharius seemed to want to talk. There was just the two of us in this part of the building. The Understudy was nearby. Drake was by the door working on a datacore slate. His eyes were closed and he appeared to be talking to himself but I suspect it was all a lot more complicated than that. The rest of them had gone out foraging for supplies. Anna sat near him, weapon on her knees, watching the entrance. I doubted anything short of a small army was going to get past her.

  ‘What was it like? A forge world of some sort?’

  ‘An industrial world, sir, allied to the Adeptus Mechanicus but not a forge world. We supplied components. I am not sure what for. The trade routes were disrupted during the Great Schism and trading ships were rare.’

  ‘You worked in a factorum?’

  ‘A guild factorum, sir. It was before I volunteered for the Guard, before we all did, sir. Anton and Ivan and me.’

  ‘Why did you do that? Were you looking for adventure?’

  This inquisition was making me uncomfortable. I did not want to tell him we joined up because we had no alternative. It was either that or be tortured to death by local gangers. I just nodded.

  ‘I can understand that,’ he said. I sensed that he could too. Sometimes you can tell more about a man by the questions he puts to you and the motives he ascribes to you than he can tell by your answers to his questions.

  ‘Looking for adventure, sir?’

  He nodded back. I suspected that he knew what I had been thinking. He was a very good reader of men was Macharius. In his position, you had to be. ‘That and other things, Lemuel. I want to serve the Emperor. I want to restore His peace and His Light to our sector of the universe.’

  If anyone else had said that to me I would have mocked them. It seemed like a tall order for one man. With Macharius though, it was differe
nt. He took it seriously and somehow that made you do so too.

  ‘A worthy goal, sir,’ I said.

  ‘The only worthy goal, Lemuel,’ he replied. ‘The Schism made humanity weak. It opened our territories to invasion by xenos and heretic. It left thousands of our worlds and billions of our people prey to cosmic evil. We can put an end to that. We can make a difference.’

  ‘It seems like a big job, sir.’ I said.

  ‘Too big, you are thinking, but it is not, not for the Imperial Guard. It is too big for one man, or one million men, but with the resources of the Imperium to draw upon no task is too large.’

  His words were those of the great politician he was but you could tell he believed them. That was what gave them such force. And he spoke with the same passion to an audience of one as to an audience of hundreds of thousands. ‘If we don’t stand together, we are doomed. I don’t care what the Schismatics believe as long as it includes belief in the Emperor, Lemuel, strange as that may sound. What I care about is the way heresy fragments the realm of humanity and tears us apart. United under the rule of the Emperor we are invincible. Split into thousands of warring schismatic states we will fall. Someone needs to put it all back together.’

  ‘And you think you are that someone, sir?’ It was almost disrespectful of me to say it, but Macharius was in a strange mood. He seemed to be talking to himself as much as to me. Perhaps he had been more affected by his wounds and his overthrow than I thought.

  ‘In the absence of anyone better, Lemuel, yes. I am that man.’

  And there it was – the iron core of his self-belief, the secret of what made him what he was. Macharius was a believer. He believed in the Emperor, he believed in humanity, but most of all he believed in Macharius. All of his beliefs were in perfect alignment and all of them supported each other. If you opposed the Imperium, you opposed Macharius. If you were the enemy of Macharius, you were the enemy of the Imperium. I was to see evidence of just how ruthless that could make him, before the end.

  ‘I believe you, sir,’ I said. And I did. Just like everyone else who ever followed him, except maybe one.

  ‘I have a question for you, sir, if I may ask,’ I said. I nodded at Anna. ‘That girl, what is she?’

  Macharius laughed. ‘Not who, what! An interesting question.’

  I kept my face blank. I did not want Macharius to know exactly how much of a personal interest I had in Anna and what she might say. Macharius’s eyes flickered in the direction of Drake as he considered his reply. ‘She is an agent of the Imperium, Lemuel. I would go as far as to say she is a highly trained one, possibly even altered by ancient, arcane science. An assassin.’

  ‘An assassin, sir?’

  ‘The Imperium has other tools than armies, Lemuel, more subtle ones. Sometimes a stiletto is needed instead of a chainsword.’

  ‘Why was she there, sir?’

  ‘I can see you are disturbed by this. She was watching over me.’ I thought of the circumstances in which I had met Anna. She was a newcomer at the hospice. She had arrived there a mere day before Macharius himself was flown in. It seemed a little too much to be a coincidence. Macharius watched me closely and for once came to the wrong conclusion. ‘She is not someone you have to worry about, Lemuel. She is a loyal servant of the Imperium.’

  I suppressed a shudder and wondered what would happen if she decided that I was not. I looked over at Drake and wondered what would happen if she passed on a suspicion of that to him. I made myself shrug, for one brief instant forgetting that Macharius was watching me. He laughed. ‘That’s the spirit, Lemuel.’

  He closed his eyes and returned to sleep. I noticed that his gun was in his hand. It would not do to wake him suddenly I thought, so I moved quietly away.

  I walked over to Anna. She stood in the shadows now, leaning against the wall with its peeling plasterwork, studying Macharius and the room and our surroundings without seeming to. She looked completely relaxed but I knew that any moment she could erupt into violent action. Approaching her was like approaching a great predatory beast.

  She watched me without seeming to and as I approached, I knew she was as aware of my presence as I was of hers.

  ‘Private Lemuel,’ she said as I reached her. I was almost close enough to reach out and touch her. Her voice was pitched low. It might have been not to disturb Macharius. It might have been so she could not be overheard.

  ‘Anna?’ I said. I kept my voice just as soft. ‘Is that your name?’

  ‘It will do, for now,’ she said. I looked at her with a mixture of fear, embarrassment and something I could not quite put my finger on. Attraction, maybe? She looked back at me as if I were a complete stranger.

  ‘I must say I was surprised to see you,’ I said. Idiotic, I know, but you try making conversation with a stone-cold covert killer that you just happen to have slept with and who knows enough to have you executed at whim.

  ‘I wasn’t surprised to see you. I knew you were on the detachment guarding Macharius. I approved it.’

  ‘You approved it?’ I was confused but a little reassured.

  ‘I transferred into the hospice when it became obvious that Macharius was going to be sent there.’

  I thought about that. The timing was certainly right. We had met the night before we had found out Macharius was wounded.

  ‘If I had arrived sooner some of this unpleasantness could have been avoided. As it was, I was just in time to forestall the Lord High Commander’s assassination. You and your comrades helped. You have my thanks.’

  I wondered if she was joking. She did not seem to be. There was no trace of the girl I thought I knew in her face. She was gone, as if she had only been a mask of flesh and just as easily removed.

  ‘You saved us as well.’

  ‘It was incidental to saving the Lord High Commander but you’re welcome.’

  I smiled at her. She was letting me know exactly how little the rest of us meant to her in no uncertain terms.

  ‘All of the other stuff, what happened between us, that was just part of your cover story wasn’t it, part of fitting in with the girls and avoiding suspicion? That’s why you defended the Angel so strongly.’

  ‘Exactly so. You are a perceptive man, Private Lemuel.’

  ‘I said some things…’

  ‘Yes. You did.’

  ‘Are they…’

  I didn’t know exactly what I was going to say but she finished the sentence for me. ‘…on your file?’

  I looked around to make sure no one else was listening to us. Drake seemed wrapped up in his note-making. Macharius was asleep. I nodded.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘They may never be.’

  She left that hanging in the air. It seemed she had a lever to use on me if she wanted. I wondered why she would need one of those. I did not then understand the truly devious world in which she lived and operated. Perhaps I do not now.

  ‘I see,’ I said. I turned to stalk away, hoping I looked more disgusted than afraid.

  ‘Leo?’

  I turned and looked at her over my shoulder. She smiled and looked a little like I remembered her from before. ‘It was fun.’

  I shook my head and kept walking. I was wondering whether she meant the night we had spent together or what she had just done to me.

  ‘We need to find out what is going on,’ Macharius said. He looked more energetic now after a cycle of rest. We were all back in the shop-front, listening attentively. ‘We need supplies and we need to make contact with our own people if there are any left alive.’

  He looked at us. His leonine gaze moved from face to face as if seeking dissent. No one disagreed with him. No one had thought of deserting either. Where would we go?

  In the few hours since he had returned to his senses he had taken charge completely. We were like small asteroids who had fallen into the gravity well
of a gas giant and become temporary moons. Only the Understudy seemed completely unaffected but then he was not affected by anything much any more.

  ‘If we head up, the heretics will most likely spot us. They will be looking for you in particular, if they realise they do not have your body.’ Drake was the only one of us who felt capable of speaking out against Macharius. The rest of us would probably have followed him if he had ordered us to charge the Cathedral of the Angel of Fire single-handed. ‘All we need to do is remain hidden until General Sejanus arrives and takes back the city. We can contact our forces then.’

  ‘You have agents here,’ Macharius shot back. ‘You spent the first few weeks putting them in place and putting pressure on the locals.’

  ‘Our own people will be reliable if they are not caught,’ said Drake. ‘I doubt the locals will be of any use. They were with us because they thought we were winning or because we could put pressure on them. We don’t have a lot of leverage on them now.’

  ‘You can contact your people by the usual means?’ Macharius’s tone let us all know he was talking about using psyker powers.

  ‘It might not be wise. The heretics employ many of the unsanctioned. They might be able to detect me.’

  ‘Might. Might. Might. It seems to me that you spend an awful lot of time telling me what cannot be done, high inquisitor, and not very much telling me what can be.’ Drake shot him a cold glare. He was not used to being talked to in that tone. He was used to being feared. Macharius matched his stare easily. He might only be in charge of an army of less than a dozen but he was still every inch the Imperial field commander. It was perfectly possible that Drake had the power to kill us all without any effort but Macharius gave no hint that he took such a thing into consideration. In the battle of wills between general and inquisitor, it was the inquisitor that looked away first.

  ‘I will do what I can,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ said Macharius and grinned. ‘The rest of you gather supplies and get ammunition. We’ll need all we can get. Try not to draw too much attention to yourselves while you are doing it.’