His manner was cheerful and in control. You would never have guessed that we were alone in a city full of potent enemies. He never doubted for a moment that he was going to find some way to turn the situation into a victory. At that moment, I began to suspect that Macharius was not quite sane as most of us measure sanity.
Sane or not though, he was a great man.
‘We’ve been in worse situations,’ Anton said. We sat in a bar in underhive Sector 13 and no one paid too much attention to us. We were just two more armed men in blood-stained coveralls. The medical robes had become progressively more grubby as we hauled stuff back to our new base. Our faces were smudged and we had a few days’ growth of stubble. He took a sip of the distilled alcohol and winced. It must have been bad to make Anton do that. We were talking in Belial street dialect and that got no attention either. No one around here seemed too bothered by strangers’ talk. In hive cities there are all manner of technical dialects spoken by various castes and guilds. Sometimes people raised a couple of kilometres from one and another cannot understand what the other is saying. ‘Care to name some,’ I said. I was feeling gloomy. There was a strange pressure in the air, a feeling of expectancy and something else. I think we all felt it and we had no idea what it was. It was something other than the despair of defeat though. It was as if an invisible psychic miasma was drifting down from the upper levels of the hive and polluting our souls.
Ivan let out a low whistle. The flickering gas-lights reflected in his metal cheeks. I wondered if anyone might have recognised him because of those. I doubted it. The city was too big and the people too many and anyway, what were we going to do about it?
‘The idiot boy is right,’ Ivan said. ‘We’re got money, grub, ammo and most of the time no one is shooting at us. It could be worse.’
‘Thanks,’ Anton said, ‘I think.’
I glanced around the bar. It was a small place with half a dozen seats, just some shelves propped up against the hive wall, a few planks set on top of some empty barrels and some old stools set in front of it. We had a clear view of the street. The barman was a huge, burly man with doughy skin and an interesting wart the size of my fist on the side of his neck. Such stigmata were not uncommon in the underhive.
‘We could set up a gang down here,’ said Anton, the alcohol warming him to the topic. ‘We could rule these streets.’
‘We’ve got Macharius with us and an inquisitor, you think they are going to be happy with us running some street corner extortion racket?’
Ivan said, ‘It won’t be long before Sejanus and the rest of the army get here. All we need to do is wait for that. You heard the inquisitor.’
I was not as sanguine about that as he was. I suspected Sejanus would find Irongrad a lot harder nut to crack this time. I was not exactly sure why yet, but I felt it was going to be so.
‘So what’s going on with your girl, Anna?’ Anton asked. He had been dying to know but had not asked in her hearing. I don’t think he was exactly afraid of her. Just understandably cautious.
‘She’s not my girl. She’s an Imperial Assassin. She’s protecting Macharius.’
‘An Imperial what?’
‘An Assassin, some sort of agent, specially trained and equipped.’
‘She tell you that?’
‘Macharius did. I asked him.’
‘You what?’
‘I asked him. I was going to ask him about making you a Space Marine but you all came back in and interrupted.’ This was not something I really wanted to talk about. Ivan at least had sense enough to know that.
‘She’s no worse than the inquisitor,’ Ivan added. ‘He’s doing some scary stuff. Never cared much for psykers.’
‘You going to tell him that?’ I asked.
Ivan shrugged. ‘He already knows. Or at least he does if he bothered to read my mind.’
‘Damn! Anton’s the only one who’s safe then.’
‘Why is that?’ Anton asked, obliging as ever.
‘Because you don’t have a mind to read.’
‘Ha bloody ha.’
‘We could just not go back,’ I said. I was floating an idea that I knew had passed through all our minds.
‘And do what?’ Ivan asked. He looked at me sidelong. It’s surprising how judgemental his immobile metal features can look in the right light.
‘What Anton says, start up our own gang or join one of the locals.’
‘Keep dreaming,’ Anton said. ‘Three men are not a gang and you think any of the locals will take strangers? Nah – I think I am going to stick with Macharius. I am curious as to what he will do next.’
‘We took an oath,’ said Ivan. ‘When we joined the regiment.’
‘I guess I’ll stick with you then,’ I said. ‘Someone needs to keep you out of trouble.’
‘Let us know when you find him then,’ said Anton. He took another drink.
Drake did not look pleased when we returned. He looked tired and coldly angry.
He sat opposite Macharius and was in the midst of arguing about something when we walked in. They both looked up and fell silent.
Drake suddenly stiffened and stood up. He swayed. His brow went tight and his face went suddenly pale. He forced his eyes shut. Red teardrops dripped from them and ran down his cheeks before speckling the concrete floor beneath him. He ground his teeth and muttered and clutched at his forehead. I wondered if he was having a stroke. Anna walked over to stand beside him. She looked as if she was ready to catch him if he fell over.
Suddenly he slumped down onto the floor and glared around fiercely. His eyes were bloodshot. He raised his hand and touched his cheek and then inspected his bloodstained fingertips.
‘What is it?’ Macharius said.
‘I have had a vision,’ said Drake. ‘The Emperor has granted me a gift of the Sight.’
‘Tell me,’ Macharius said.
Drake’s eyes narrowed. A small frown crinkled his lofty brow. He looked as if he wanted to be sick.
‘Tell me,’ Macharius repeated.
‘They have started burning the prisoners. From among our men. The ones they captured.’ The words hung in the air like a bad smell. It was obvious that this was only part of it. Drake studied the ceiling for a few moments. I followed his gaze. There was some mould there but the pattern was not interesting enough to justify his concentration.
‘They are burning them in cages,’ he said. The words came out at a steady measured pace like a regiment of troops marching on parade. ‘They are performing a ritual. They are spending lives to work great sorcery.’
‘That does not sound good,’ said Anton. Drake glared at him and then shook his head. Obviously he understood the sort of idiot he was dealing with. He continued talking as if he had not been interrupted.
‘They are summoning something,’ he said. ‘A being of great power and cosmic evil.’
‘The Angel of Fire,’ Anton said.
‘That is one name for it,’ Drake said. ‘It is the entity they have worshipped all these years.’
‘Why now?’ Macharius asked.
‘There is a war on,’ said Drake. ‘They seek to use the power of this daemonic entity to strengthen themselves and smite our righteous armies. If they succeed before General Sejanus lays siege to the city then they will have the power to destroy him.’
I looked at Drake. He seemed deadly serious. I was wondering what could possibly have the power to destroy the sort of force that General Sejanus would bring to Irongrad. I had a suspicion I would not like the answer if I was given it. I glanced at Macharius. He was obviously taking the inquisitor’s words very seriously.
‘What will happen if this being manifests?’ Macharius asked.
‘It will be dreadful. It will bring with it things from the hellish space it inhabits, from the warp.’ He seemed to be forcing the words out, as if h
e did not really want to speak them. I doubt he would have if Macharius had not been there. The force of the Lord High Commander’s will was great enough to daunt even an inquisitor. ‘It will have vast psychic powers at its command and legions of daemons. If it gains a foothold here nothing short of Exterminatus will remove it. General Sejanus’s force will not be able to stand against it.’
‘We need to stop the summoning then,’ said Macharius. He said it as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. I suppose it was. I could foresee a few problems. The half a dozen or so people we had here had been barely enough to get him out of the hospice. How would we be able to stop the manifestation of some daemon-god? Such trifles did not seem to bother Macharius. I suppose the difference is what made him what he was and me a common soldier.
‘Very good,’ said Drake. ‘Now all we need to do is work out how.’
‘We need a plan,’ said Macharius. We needed several Chapters of Space Marines and a couple of Imperial armies, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut.
‘I believe that is your department,’ said Drake with an impressive amount of controlled sarcasm.
‘Yes,’ said Macharius. ‘And I know what must be done. Can you find the locus of this summoning?’
‘It is centred on the cathedral. If we get close enough I can pinpoint it more precisely. You cannot be thinking to go there…’
‘We are the only ones who know and can do anything. If we don’t, no one else will.’
‘But breaking into the cathedral will be impossible.’
‘Nothing is impossible,’ said Macharius. ‘Bold men can overcome any difficulty if the Emperor is with them and their faith is strong.’
Anna nodded. She quite clearly believed what the Lord High Commander was saying. So did Anton and Ivan and Hesse. The Understudy’s face was blank.
Drake looked at him coolly as if not quite sure what to say. Macharius rattled off orders telling us how to prepare. None of us seemed to know what to say. What he was proposing was quite clearly madness but then so was waiting for a daemon-god to appear. And he was Macharius and our commander. We could not disobey him. I looked around the shabby, half-abandoned shopfront. It suddenly seemed quite home-like, now I knew we were leaving and where we were going.
We left within the hour.
On the upper levels of the hive, the cages were in use. All of those hideous metal artefacts were full and all of them were frying Imperial soldiers like a Belial beer-hall vendor making rat steaks on a feast-day night. Every plaza was full of people watching men burn. The air was full of the smell of charring human flesh and the screams of men dying in agony. A lot of people stared. You’d think they’d get tired of it but they never seemed to. There was a strange festival atmosphere about the whole thing. Over everything hung that ominous sense of presence, of something waiting and watching and feeding.
It had its advantages, of course. No one had paid the slightest attention to us as we moved back into the upper levels of the city. Everyone on the street there was taking part in a screaming, chanting, hysterical victory celebration. The priests of the Angel of Fire were ringmasters of this carnival – shouting out paeans of praise to their master through amplification systems, demonstrating their power by igniting the gas jets of the sacrificial cages with a wave of their hands.
They shimmered with power. There was something terrifying and terrible in the air, a hideous, gloating presence that got fractionally stronger with every heartbeat. It felt as if a monster was coming forwards with a slow inevitable tread. Drake looked nauseous. He dabbed tears of blood from the corners of his eyes. He was far more sensitive to whatever it was than I was. Of us all, only Macharius and the Understudy did not look worried and one of them was quite mad. Even Anna looked troubled.
Once as we walked through the crowd we heard a scream and saw a burning figure reeling through the crowd towards us. I reached for my shotgun, wondering what was happening, but the blazing figure only ran by us screaming with an odd mixture of agony and ecstasy.
‘A martyr to the Angel, a martyr to the Angel,’ the crowd chanted.
Some of them reached out to touch him, burning their hands. I tried not to flinch away lest I look suspect. People were starting to spontaneously combust in the street, as if all the hysteria and faith was too much energy to be contained within their frail human forms and needed to be transformed into fire. A madness had taken over the city and sometimes, when I looked into the eyes of the people around me, I saw no more humanity there than in the blood-red orbs of an ork.
It got worse the closer we got to the cathedral. It was the focus of all the madness and badness going on. There were more priests in the open area surrounding it than in all the other sectors of the city put together and there were armed soldiers from the local militias come to gape in awe and show their faith. They stood at the base of the tower looking upwards at the sanctified sky where the Angel stood atop the cathedral. It was like standing at the foot of a burning mountain gazing at the blazing peak. The cathedral towered above us, awesome and gigantic, a massive structure guarded by an army of fire-winged metal angels. A web of piping clutched its sides like metal ivy.
No one paid us any attention. They did not feel threatened. They thought they had already won.
Macharius looked interested in everything around him. If the horror had touched him he gave no sign. If he knew the faintest flicker of fear at the prospect of entering the heart of all this evil and confronting its source it did not show. He looked, as always, at ease and utterly in control of himself and the situation. There was no sign of the wounds that had slowed him just a few days ago. His health seemed to have been miraculously restored. There are those who would take that as a sign he was blessed but a medical adept told me that some people simply take very well to the juvenat treatments and that the cellular stimulation helps them regenerate wounded tissue. He thought it most likely Macharius was one of those. Of course, who is to say it was not both? Why should Macharius out of all those millions treated have been so blessed? Sometimes miracles are subtle instead of overwhelming. Or so the Testaments tell us.
Drake looked physically ill, as if the manifestation of whatever evil was here was crushing his spirit and his internal organs. I could almost feel sorry for him. He, better than any of us, knew what was going on. Given his training and his background this place must have been anathema to him.
Anna looked calm but her face had a frozen look as if she was keeping the expression on her face by an effort of will. It made her features seem mask-like to me although that might just have been my imagination and what I knew of her.
Anton looked pale and scared. At long last he was on the sort of big adventure he had always dreamed of being part of. I don’t think it had turned out to be quite what he had expected.
Ivan loomed large in the gloom. His metal features showed no emotion but his eyes were feverish and he fidgeted and whistled loudly, always a sign he was nervous.
Corporal Hesse was sweating and he had bags under his eyes. He smiled nervously and studied our surroundings closely but gave no other signs of fear.
The New Boy, oddly enough, looked fascinated. I suppose he had passed through that stage of being afraid to acceptance of the inevitable. Or maybe he was just a better actor than the rest of us.
The Understudy looked stone-faced as he had from the day the lieutenant was killed. He was not frightened. He was not looking too human either. I wondered what was going to happen to him if his humanity ever returned. There did not seem much prospect of him living long enough for that to happen but I was curious nonetheless. As it was, in his inhumanity, he did not look out of place amidst these revels. There were plenty of people around us who looked crazier than he did.
One thing Drake had made clear – we needed to make this attempt. If the Sons of the Flame succeeded in what they were doing not only were our lives forfeit but also our souls. Thi
s ritual was going to birth something dark and strange and terrible and it would devour this world and all the worlds around it, until the overwhelming might of the Imperium arrived to confront it. The chances of us being around to see that were infinitesimal.
Macharius gestured for us to proceed. We shouldered our way through the crowded ferrocrete plain around the cathedral, making for the entrance. Its shadow fell upon us as we neared the huge structure. It felt warm, perhaps from the heat of all those burning wings.
The entrance to the cathedral was an enormous arch twenty times the height of a man. It was flanked by two enormous stone saints carrying bolter and chainsword. Perched over it, as if about to take flight, was another representation of the Angel of Fire. The local sculptors never seemed to tire of those.
No one stopped us from going in. I was astonished. Either the heretics really were confident or there were other safeguards against intrusion. I would not have taken a bet against the latter. Over the years I have developed a healthy distrust of things that seem too easy.
There were armed men wearing the robes of priests inside but they merely blessed us as we passed. They made a strange gesture in the air with their fingers. Their fingertips left a blazing trail in the air, an oddly shaped rune that seemed to leave its mark on your retina long after you had stopped looking at the original. Everyone ahead of us was dropping the bronze local coins into offering slots so we did the same.
Inside was the nave, a long corridor with a ceiling even higher than the entrance arch. Murals painted by an artist of genius covered it. The Angel of Fire led its cohorts against armies of daemons and orks and mutants, slaying them with its sword of flames. Its prophets watched armies of stony-visaged faithful with burning eyes.
From up ahead came a terrible smell of burning flesh mingled with incense. The sound of choirs singing an infernally beautiful hymn filled the air. We walked on. People greeted us and slapped us on the back, celebrating victory, drunk on the strange carnival atmosphere, assuming that we were like them.
For a moment, I felt my view of the world tip towards heresy. There were thousands of people here, and millions outside in the hive and billions scattered across the system, all of whom believed in the absolute truth of the Angel of Fire. I was one of a tiny band of unbelievers. Who was to say that they were wrong and I was right? Who was to judge the truth of the words I had been taught on Belial against the words that were spoken here?