He pulled the knife back for another stab. I was lucky. The others had not quite understood what was going on, were still trying to keep the silence so they did not give away the intrusion. That would not last.
I brought the shotgun up, knowing I was not going to be quick enough to stop him. It was not my intention. I intended to take his head off even if he got me through the heart. He saw it in my eyes, the certain knowledge of his own death, and he froze for just the second I needed. The shotgun was pointed at his head. From all around came the sound of a muted struggle and silenced shots. It seemed like Macharius’s men were there doing the work after all.
A second later Drake emerged through the door, with Macharius behind him. He raised his hand and Mikhail slumped, a victim of the inquisitor’s psyker powers.
Anton and Ivan emerged from a side corridor, a prisoner struggling between them. Drake nodded, satisfied. ‘I think we’ve got enough for our purposes. Let’s get down to business.’
He sounded satisfied. We had members of the Seventh Belial caught within Macharius’s palace, engaged in an obvious assassination attempt. By the time Drake had finished with them they would no doubt be prepared to confess publicly to anything.
‘We don’t have much time,’ Drake said.
Macharius shook his head. ‘We have enough. I’ve already given the orders to begin the assault on Crassus’s palace.’
‘Is that wise?’
‘Are you going to give me some advice on strategy now, inquisitor?’ Macharius asked. There was a note of sardonic mockery in his tone. We raced to the roof, where the Valkyries were waiting to whisk us across the city.
We jumped into the troop carriers and swiftly took to the skies. The mirrored black starscrapers blurred around us. I wondered how many vehicles were out there, running without lights. I wondered if below us drunken soldiers were looking at the skies and wondering about the sleek shadows passing overhead. Perhaps they had already looked up this night and seen Crassus’s assassins pass. It seemed impossible to believe that those people down there could have missed the secret war that had erupted in the night.
I looked over at Ivan and Anton. They were hunkered down near Macharius and Drake. The Lord High Commander looked utterly relaxed. I thought of all the ways we could be blasted from the sky. All it would take would be one shot from a Hydra Flak Tank – the enemy would not even have to know Macharius was on board. It just needed one man to fire an anti-aircraft weapon and we would go down. I prayed Macharius’s legendary luck would hold at least until we were on the ground once more when I could trust to our skills and weapons.
There are few situations more frightening than hurtling across the night sky in a flyer knowing that at any second a stray shot might kill you, that the slightest miscalculation on the part of the pilot might send you plunging to fiery doom ploughing through the side of a building. It’s the not having any control over my own fate that unsettles me.
Ahead of us now I could see fires burning on the peak of a black pyramid, and scores of raptor-like shadows swirling around the building as gunships strafed it. Some of those vehicles were descending and we moved to join them.
Dust swirled into the sky and flames danced away as the Valkyries displaced air. I jumped out of the door, shotgun held ready and scanned the rooftop. I could see no sign of resistance so far. In the distance I could hear klaxons howling and searchlights beginning to probe the sky. Down there was an army that was starting to wonder what was going on, who was attacking it and why?
I raced across the flat rooftop as the rest of the group tumbled out and moved to join me. Drake’s storm troopers were already crashing through doors. From below us came the sound of combat.
At that moment I felt an odd sadness descend on me. That which I had most dreaded had come to pass. Imperial soldiers were once more fighting against Imperial soldiers as they had done in the Schism. It seemed as if something had broken that could not be repaired, that even if Macharius were victorious he was in a sense defeated. The long balancing act that had kept him at the top of the crusade had finally failed. Forces had been unleashed tonight that would tear apart the unity he had worked so long and so hard to create. It would not be possible after tonight to even pretend that the army was united. If it had been Cardinal Septimus’s plan to undermine Macharius he had succeeded. What was worse was that Macharius had done his work for him.
We smashed through the palace. If Macharius’s grasp of the big picture had loosened, his ability on the smaller scale was intact. We stormed through the building with overwhelming force and savagery, taking prisoners by the dozen. What we did not find was General Crassus. He was gone.
Twenty-One
Macharius stood in Crassus’s apartments and surveyed the scene of his latest conquest. He looked calm but he was quietly furious.
Drake looked at the hidden doorway behind the cabinet full of ancient statuettes and said, ‘Escape route.’
‘It goes somewhere,’ Macharius said.
‘My men are already investigating that.’
‘He’s gone somewhere.’
‘I am getting reports from the space field that a shuttle has taken off.’
‘Not his personal shuttle?’ asked Macharius.
Drake shook his head. ‘Order the field closed if you wish.’
‘Too late now,’ said Macharius, ‘and it would not make much difference anyway. A small craft could be launched from elsewhere on the surface of Acheron.’
‘We need to think about what we are going to say,’ Drake said. ‘We don’t have a prisoner to parade in front of the troops. We can still declare him a traitor.’
Macharius shook his head. ‘If he had been captured, you could have made him confess. As it stands we have nothing to show.’
‘We need to say something. The other generals will wonder what is happening.’
‘Let them wonder,’ Macharius said. ‘I will make my speech tomorrow. No one will try anything until after that and then we can settle things.’
The day of the great speech dawned. Macharius dressed in his most impressive uniform. A dirigible dropped him into the central square of Acheron city, onto a platform set between two massive Baneblades of the Seventh Belial, a deliberate echo of earlier speeches he had given when the crusade first began to drive out between the stars. If any of the tank’s crews wondered what had happened to the commander of their battlegroup, they gave no sign.
In the square tens of thousands of men had assembled. They were there to provide a backdrop for a speech that would be recorded by technical cherubim and broadcast to the entire crusade.
Macharius looked much as he had ever done, tall and impressive, a living avatar of war. His gaze was keen, his back was straight, his face like that of a hawk. He did not look nervous as an ordinary man might when about to speak to the assembled armies of the crusade. He had done this before. He was confident that he could do it again.
He stepped out onto the platform and raised his arms above his head. Where once this might have been greeted with a thunderous cheer, it was now met with a watchful silence. Rumours had been swirling around the camp, about the attack on Macharius, about Crassus’s flight. Men were wondering what was going on. The peace down there was a fragile thing.
If the quiet daunted Macharius he gave no sign. I took up my position on the edge of the platform watching the crowd as he spoke.
All eyes were on Macharius. Whatever else they felt about him, he still commanded the attention of the assembled regiments as no one else could. I studied faces through a magnifying lens, ostensibly looking for would-be assassins and troublemakers, in reality curious.
The regiments out there were the old guard of the crusade, those that had been with the generals longest, the core of the advancing armies of the Imperium. Every man out there was a veteran or serving alongside veterans. Of all men, they were the ones whose support Macharius should have been able to rely on. They belonged to forces that had fought for the crusade since
the very beginning.
And perhaps that was the problem. The faces I looked upon belonged to men who were tired and old and far from home. Most of them did not have access to the juvenat that I had, most of them did not have access to the medical care I had received. They were scarred and wounded. Some of them had crude prosthetics. Some had eye-patches. They looked like hard, deadly men but they also looked like what they were, men who had spent long lives of fighting. They were not the fanatical youths who had set out all those decades ago to rebuild the Imperium and end the Great Schism.
In this I think Macharius misjudged them. He had lived with all the privileges of command. He still wanted more worlds to conquer. His thirst for glory was undiminished and his zeal for the reconquest of the worlds of Man still burned bright. Once it had made him perfectly in tune with all his warriors. Now it made him something else.
‘Comrades,’ he said. ‘We have come far together and we will go further yet.’
He spoke in that confident, confidential way he had. He was not the supreme commander issuing an order. He was a fellow soldier explaining what had to be done. It was a trick of speaking he had that had served him well for a very long time. Perhaps it would serve him again now. He waited, but there was no acclaim, no cheers, no sign that his huge audience was going to respond to the inspiration of his presence.
He made a small gesture of dismissal, shook his head slightly. He smiled. He was not going to let this cool reception put him off from saying what needed to be said. ‘We have come to the edge of the worlds that men knew in the time when the Emperor walked among us. We have travelled even beyond those. We have added new realms to the Imperium and we can be proud of that.’
I saw one or two heads nod. The men out there were proud. They knew what they had done and were reminded of their shared achievements. They knew that Macharius had led them to those triumphs. I saw one or two men stand up straighter, prepared to give the general a hearing. Even that filled me with a sense of wrongness, though. They should not have needed to do that. Once all of them would have hung on his every word, been stirred to martial pride by his merest gesture. No more. They just looked at him, some of them hollow-eyed.
‘We are gathered together for one last great push,’ Macharius said and at last he got some response, a faint murmur of approval, but I sensed it came more from his use of the word last than anything else. These were men seeking an end to their labours, not new duties. ‘We shall leave Acheron, crush our enemies and add more realms, cover ourselves in new glory, march to new and greater triumphs.’
And there he lost them. He kept speaking, building word pictures of great victories and hundreds of new worlds added to the Imperium, billions of souls redeemed from darkness, of triumphs that would be remembered for as long as the Imperium endured. And the more he spoke, the more he conjured up dreams of victory, the more restless the troops became. They had fought and fought and fought. They had watched their comrades die. They had come to a place where the rules as they knew them had stopped working, where the powers of old Darkness stirred. They were not interested in more battles. They wanted to rest.
They did not cheer as Macharius spoke. They did not raise their voices in acclamation. The Lord High Commander’s words were like stones dropped into an abyss. They simply vanished. By the end, even he seemed to realise this. The great speech ended and nothing had been gained.
One way or another the Great Crusade was over. I looked at Macharius and felt sorry for him. His dream had died while he was still alive to see it.
I noticed that Crassus was being painted out of the great mural showing the triumphs of the crusade. The artisans had been dismissed as Macharius had summoned his commanders but the message was clear.
One by one, the generals filtered into the room, accompanied by their staff. Crassus was conspicuous by his absence. Cardinal Septimus was conspicuous by his presence. Those servo-skulls whirling around him seemed to wear the triumphant grin he denied himself.
Under the circumstances I was surprised that any of the generals had shown up. If I were in their shoes I would have feared removal or assassination. Perhaps that is just a comment on the way that I think.
Some of those supremely powerful men looked sullen. Some of them looked defiant. Some of them looked ashamed. None of them looked afraid. Macharius sat on his command throne and surveyed them all. He did not look angry. He looked weary. Of all the men there only Cardinal Septimus looked as if he might be happy with the way things had gone. He still wore his secretly self-satisfied air.
Macharius looked at the generals and they in turn stared back at him. It seemed as if no one wanted to be the first to speak. There was a sense of bitterness and betrayal and broken promises in the air. Things that had simmered away in the background, that had been kept down by Macharius’s long unbroken track record of victory, were at long last coming to light. I saw something else too. Each of the generals looked with as much hostility on his companions as he did Macharius. They were all rivals and none of them knew where the others stood.
‘Has it come to this?’ Macharius asked at last.
‘The men are on the edge of mutiny,’ General Tarka said. ‘Even the commissars doubt their ability to motivate them.’
I saw it then. It was not just each other they were afraid of. I think each one of them saw the potential consequences of their actions rise up to thwart their dreams. If these regiments, the proud core of the crusade, could rise in mutiny, then other regiments could. And no one wanted to light that particular fuse.
Macharius did not say anything. ‘Where is General Crassus?’ Fabius asked. ‘I do not see him present.’
‘Alas he will not be joining us,’ said Macharius. ‘It seemed he, too, was on the edge of mutiny and then he stepped off.’
A ripple of shock passed around the room. ‘Apparently he lost faith in my leadership,’ Macharius said. ‘I doubt he was alone in this.’
His gaze passed from one to another of his former lieutenants and not one of them could meet it.
Cardinal Septimus could barely keep from rubbing his hands together but when he spoke his voice was soft and respectful. ‘Now is a good time to return to Terra and enjoy your triumphs, Lord High Commander. Let another take up your burdens.’
It was like throwing raw meat into a pit full of dinogators. All eyes turned towards the representative of the Imperium. In every cold brain, swift calculations were being made. If Macharius stepped down, he must have a successor. There was glory to be had in leading the crusade, even if it was weakened, even if it conquered no more worlds. Indeed, I am sure that many of those present thought that the current state of the crusade was a reflection of Macharius’s leadership, that with them in command it would go on to new heights. I saw the fires of ambition light in five pairs of eyes. I saw them glance around and measure potential rivals and allies.
‘No,’ said Macharius. Suddenly those baleful fires were dimmed as the generals turned to look at their commander.
‘No?’ said Septimus. His voice was soft, but there was both menace and an undercurrent of glee in it. It appeared Macharius was about to disobey a direct order from the Imperium.
‘No,’ said Macharius. ‘Richter remains and he is a threat to the Imperium beyond measure. I must settle matters with him before I depart.’
‘How will you do it if the armies are on the verge of mutiny?’ Septimus asked. ‘It would be madness to risk it.’
‘I do not need the armies gathered here. I can do it with the Lion Guard and the troops of my personal battlegroup.’
‘With all due respect, General Macharius, you have been trying to do that for two standard years and you have failed.’
‘I will not fail this time,’ said Macharius, with utter certainty. ‘By the time your ship is prepared to return to Terra, the matter will be settled.’
I could tell that no one there believed him. They thought it was a delaying strategy of some sort.
‘You really think tha
t is possible?’ Septimus asked. He could not keep the disbelief out of his voice.
‘I would bet my life on it,’ said Macharius. I felt a sudden resurgence of faith in him. If Macharius said he was going to do this thing, he would do it. Or die in the attempt.
Cardinal Septimus stood silent for a moment. The skulls orbited around him as he considered his options. He squared his shoulders and allowed a smile to spread across his face. ‘You shall have your last campaign then, General Macharius, and afterwards you will return to Terra with me.’
The generals departed to plot and try to instil some semblance of discipline in their unbelieving armies. Macharius departed to make preparations for his return to Loki. As we left the chamber, I turned and saw Inquisitor Drake deep in conversation with Cardinal Septimus. Just for a moment they looked like conspirators. It was disquieting.
Twenty-Two
Beneath us once more I could see the murky globe of Loki. The crusade had returned to settle with Richter and his minions once and for all. Macharius had announced that he would be victorious here if it was the last thing he did. It was time to put his plan to the test.
All around us the command deck hummed, but it was a bleak parody of the way things had once been. There had been a time when reports would have been coming in from hundreds of distant worlds scattered throughout an entire sector of the galaxy. Now they were concerned only with this one world and its occupants. It showed the terrible narrowing of focus as the energies of the crusade dissipated in internal strife.
Now the holo-sphere showed only the great murky orb of Loki and the two satellites that orbited it, the huge skull moon and the tiny, speeding lesser one. Inquisitor Drake studied them intently as if by staring hard enough he could somehow divine the course of the future. The rest of the commanding officers watched warily. Macharius smiled grimly to himself, in possession of a secret that only he knew, but which would decide all of our destinies.