But the burst of gunfire from the nose of the second carrier-eight was not what he had had in mind.
It took a moment for him to realise what he’d heard and jolt upright, and he could see the same reaction from the others as they broke out of the reveries lulled upon them by the rumble and rock of the vehicle and the parade of dead metal grotesqueries past the windows. Then someone in the driving cabin woke up too, flicked the lights from white to battle-stations red, and another flurry of shooting burst out on their tail, a quick whicker of las-shot and two coughing booms from a single-action stubber over the top of a man’s voice screaming in anger and pain.
Sister Sarell was already half out of her seat, her arm across her body to where the lacquered bolt pistol hung at her hip. Vosheni, Kinosa and their two clerks had gone into a huddle in the front seats, and for a moment Adalbrect wondered if they were closing up for protection or trying to console each other. Then the huddle broke and he realised that they had been reciting a prayer over the mag-cells that they now snapped home into slender-barrelled laspistols. Adalbrect looked around to see Haffith, the Colonel’s man, kneeling in the aisle between the seats, his eye glasses shining animal red in the lights, calmly readying a short Guard-issue stub carbine. Finally goading himself into motion, Adalbrect jerked himself into the aisle and snatched his own laspistol out of its holster.
“Stay low and breathe easy, brother,” said Haffith behind him. “Never any sense in charging out until we know… wait…” Haffith’s voice trailed off and his head cocked: he was listening to something over his vox-bead. Adalbrect nodded, realising how hard he was slamming his breaths in and out, and made himself relax. After a few more moments of quiet he remembered his office, re-holstered his gun and reached for the aquila-headed rod of rank that rested at the window where he’d been sitting. If he was going to step out of here into a fight then his enemies would know they faced an ordained servant of the Imperial Cult. One fingertip stroked the collar beneath the aquila’s claws where pressure would set the combat blade sliding up through the mount.
The stub gun boomed again, right outside the carrier’s windows, but Adalbrect’s head was clear now and he didn’t jump. He was about to ask Haffith what he’d heard when the speaker link from the driver’s cabin crackled.
“Tosk. Stowaways from the second carrier. Three have cover by our right side, giving support for another element following the convoy. Step on them, please. Tosk out.”
Haffith was already moving to the right-hand hatch, but Sarell was there before him and Adalbrect hastily fell in behind. With only a little hesitation Vosheni made to lead the other Administratum officers to join them but Haffith shook his head. He motioned Vosheni toward the hatch-handle, whipped two fingers across his lips when the Demi-Lector made to speak, then gave a thumb-up when the man nodded, stayed silent and took a grip.
Haffith jabbed out four fingers, then three, then two, then one, then Vosheni hauled on the handle, lurched back as the hatch slid towards him faster than he’d expected, collided with a seat and overbalanced.
There was a moment of pure anticlimax as a cool breeze spilled gently into the cabin, and then Sister Sarell swung out of the hatchway by one arm, bolt pistol held out in the other and shouting a battle-blessing from some feral world in a voice that had no business coming from such a small frame and narrow mouth.
“Thunder-for-Him wings-for-Him words-for-Him! Thunder-for-Him!” By the time Haffith had stepped through the hatch behind her, dropped and spun, Sarell’s weapon had spoken twice and Adalbrect winced at the flat, echoless whud after each shot. Once heard, the sound of a bolt shell detonating inside a body was not forgotten.
Haffith had vanished until Adalbrect stepped through the hatch, dropped in his own turn, landed in a huff of breath and saw the Guardsman rolling in under the carrier, trying to get an angle where his rounds wouldn’t punch through his target and pierce the tyre. Almost as an afterthought, Adalbrect turned to look at the enemy.
Normal. He didn’t know what he’d expected to see, but not this. Two utterly unremarkable men, thick-built and shorn-headed, dressed in the yellow workers’ coveralls he saw in ranks in front of his shrine every day. They were splashed and stained with something darker, and their eyes were stark and wide. Scattered between them were the ruins of what had been a third until Sarell’s rounds had hit home.
He realised his own body was moving. One stride, and here came the slick metallic sound of the nanotempered adamantium blade extending from its mount in the carved aquila, triggering the movements driven deep into his muscle memories over hundreds of hours of drill. A deep low lunge put all the weight of body and weapon behind the blade as it went into one man’s throat. There was a quick red snap of las-fire as his hands convulsed on his gun and then he jerked himself off the blade and crumpled amid the stink of blood and scorched gravel. The second shuddered a moment, too paralysed to decide to shoot Haffith or Adalbrect, and then Haffith found an angle safe enough to shoot out the man’s knee. He went down soundlessly from that, only just drawing breath to cry out when Adalbrect’s blade came in again, another throat strike that silenced him for good.
Suddenly the world was full of sounds again. Shouts and footfalls from behind the carrier. The hatch of the driver’s cab swinging open behind him. His own breathing.
Boots crunched into the stony dust behind him and a hand clapped Adalbrect on the shoulder.
“Valiant,” said Colonel Tosk. “Might’ve wanted to shoot them, but valiant.”
Adalbrect turned and held up the rod. The blade was still out and the golden aquila was shiny with blood.
“The aquila doesn’t shirk a fight, Colonel.” He blinked. “With respect.”
“Respect indeed,” Tosk answered him, his hand still heavy on Adalbrect’s shoulder. “Feel up to joining my man there to get the rest of them?”
“Uh,” said Adalbrect. He hadn’t quite thought that there would be more of them. The Colonel’s hand was turning him to face Haffith, who was already tilting his head.
“They’re scattering into the machines,” the adjutant said. “Let’s get some of us on their traces.” He stepped away and Sister Sarell fell in behind him.
“Lots of pairs of eyes, that’s the way,” Colonel Tosk put in. “Join in with the Mechanicus guards, look like you’re helping, and tell us anything you notice about these stowaways. Same comes back to you, of course.” Adalbrect nodded, shifted his grip so that the aquila was held high like a standard, drew his pistol with his other hand and followed Haffith and Sarell out into the graveyard.
They still smelled. Adalbrect hadn’t expected that. They didn’t stink, but they smelled. He could pick up a faint metallic tang to the air from the scorched hulls, and the more cloying smell of oils. The desert-scent was flat and barely noticeable, but something thicker had clotted under it and Adalbrect realised he was smelling blood. Not the fresh stuff on the head of his sceptre, but the stale blood and vitals of the Imperial Guard and who knew how many innocent Asheki, still coating the spikes and hooks of the Heritor’s Woe Machines.
That thought hit him in the gut, and a moment later when a las-shot spat against the hull over his head and knocked the patina off the metal, he found himself thinking I’m wearing blood as he felt the powder settling on his face. He dropped into a crouch, unthinkingly leaned back against the hull behind him, and then yelled in pain.
Straight away another two shots skewered the hull, smoke puffing up from the impacts an arm’s length from him. He answered with his pistol, shooting jerkily into the gloom with no clear idea of where the shots had even come from, until Haffith snapped “Fire discipline!” over his shoulder and laid down one-two-three measured stub bursts at something Adalbrect couldn’t see. He tried to drop further into a crouch but the bright and gleeful pain skewered further into his shoulder and he let out another yell. Something was holding him up. Gritting his teeth and growling over the sensation, he tried to shift, then to push himself up, and each ti
me the barb twisted in his shoulder and held him still and wriggling like an angler’s bait. Breathing hard, he muttered a verse of Tobisch’s Fourth Psalm under his breath—“with a mirror to His radiant Throne I burn away the night”—and made himself hold still. Haffith was gone into the shadows, no telling where, but the evening around them had come alive. From somewhere off to Adalbrect’s left came a string of metallic clangs and two voices cursing, one in the hoarse Ashek continental dialect and one in the rolling vowels of the Pragar lowhives. After a few moments they were drowned out by a snarling chainsword motor directly ahead, which revved and then dropped long enough for Adalbrect to hear Sarell’s voice in the middle distance and the screech-bang of bolt shells.
Adalbrect became aware that a foul, greasy adrenaline sweat was oozing into his clothes and giving a chilly edge to the breeze. He shivered and then grunted again when the movement shifted whatever it was that was hooked into his back. He tried to find a way to stand that would take the pressure off it, tried to find a direction he could move that felt like it was lifting him free, and each time he ended up standing in his half-crouch, whispering prayers that increasingly sounded like gabble to ward off panic. He was afraid of what he might do to himself if he panicked even more than he was afraid of what would happen when his legs, already cramping, couldn’t hold him in a half-squat any longer. Bracing himself for the pain, he tried shifting his weight and stretching each leg out in turn while he kept the pistol nosing at the shadows around him, but he couldn’t stop a groan from leaking out between his teeth as the barb winkled back and forth in his flesh. With the groan, the burst of shots from deeper in the graveyard and the tightening of his senses from the pain, he didn’t hear the approaching footsteps until they were next to him.
“He’s one.”
“I know, I can see, hurry up.”
“Do what with him?”
“Do’s you think, but hurry.” Curt vowels, consonants clicked against the teeth. Ashek talk, although he’d need Sarell’s ear to identify the region. Adalbrect gulped air, closed his eyes for a moment and rummaged in his mind for the rhetorical tools he’d practised on his voyage here. He lifted up his rod of office, sweat bursting out of him again as the movement flexed the pierced muscles next to his shoulder blade.
“See the aquila,” he said. He’d woven the phrase into so many of his sermons that the words should be almost talismanic to anyone who’d heard him. “See his gaze on you now? His wings spread wide and there’s room for us all in their shade.”
One of the shapes had turned its back. A flogging, that would have meant at the Chillbreak mission square, turning the back on a raised aquila. Adalbrect could see it making small, panicky darts of its head. Then the other labourer pushed its masked face up to his own.
“Know you for the preaching-man, so quick now. What’s your aquila want with the Kings? You understand these things.” The man’s voice was quickening and lowering. “What’s the aquila want with the Kings? What’s this Headstone? What?”
Adalbrect was paralysed. The urgency in the voice was as palpable as the gouging in his back, but the pain was disorienting him and he couldn’t start to make the connections. Kings? Kings? Was that what the hive-lords had been called before the Archenemy had deposed them? The Missionaria Galaxia was accomplished at speed-briefing its agents, but its learning sessions weren’t geared to situations like this. What was going on?
Then the man switched his little punch-cleaver to his left hand, reached out with his right and gripped the blood-painted golden aquila as Adalbrect’s arm sagged.
“Eh,” he muttered, seemingly to himself. “Dead thing. No use.” He was turning to his companion and never really got the chance to see that that had been the wrong thing to say.
Adalbrect swung his right arm up and jammed his hand in behind his head as though he were trying to scratch his back with the pistol barrel. Face contorted, he fired, fired again, and a third time, hearing the snap of the shots, and the gouging pain turned searing.
A moment later the barb that had held him came loose as he shot through its mounting and Adalbrect stumbled forward, half-embracing the man who’d interrogated him. Both of them shouted, Adalbrect in pain and the Asheki in angry surprise, as Adalbrect’s laspistol went off straight into the ribs of his companion. The first shot staggered him, spasming and choking with a smoking pockmark drilled into his torso, and the second and third struck him in the chest and silenced him.
Adalbrect saw stars as the other man’s forehead cracked into his own, and felt his legs start to sag. He tried to turn the movement to his advantage, gripping the enemy’s shade-shawl and pivoting, desperate to avoid falling back against the barbed hull a second time. But the shawl tore and the man kicked him hard in the belly, sending him sprawling on the packed stones with his shoulder shouting in pain.
“We listen to our Kings, not to you,” he heard through the pain. “This is the night they find their voices. Hear that, eagle-licker?” The man was grabbing for his dead companion’s gun, barking out some syllables that Adalbrect didn’t catch. A benediction for a comrade or an appeasement to the weapon, he couldn’t tell.
And it didn’t matter, because he was rolling onto his side with his teeth bared. Another insult to the aquila, and this one would die for it. Two insults, two lives. Not enough payment to extract, but the best a mortal could do.
“Wings-for-Him!” he snarled and used the burning in his back as fuel to drive the rod forward. It caught the man in the sternum, the blade burying itself until the aquila’s heads were pushing into his skin, and he let out a groan like a bending girder and fell to his knees with the rod in front of him. As Adalbrect struggled up onto his feet the man tilted forward, grounding the rod and sinking onto it, until Adalbrect yanked it out and away with his left hand. The man continued to hunch, the back of his neck bare with the shade-shawl gone, and Adalbrect whirled the impromptu weapon up and over. His arm was strong and the head of the rod heavy, and the man’s neck parted in one stroke.
A moment later the strength dropped out of him. He went down on one knee, breath rasping and the gouge in his shoulder burning like hot cinders jammed under his skin. He worked the catch on the rod and with the blade retracted Adalbrect planted its pommel on the dirt and leaned his head against the blood-sticky gold, murmuring lines from the Militant Pilgrim’s Prayer.
“And another struck down, and another, and let each be dust beneath that righteous tread…”
“Here he is!” came a voice he didn’t recognise, swimming into his head through the dark and the pain. “The young fellow, the bluecoat. Got him, he’s back here!”
“What? He didn’t even move!” That was Haffith’s voice, somewhere behind the bobbing orange lanterns that were appearing through the gaps in the dead machines. The lieutenant’s tone was bantering, only not. “Brother Adalbrect? That you? I wondered where you’d run off to. Didn’t occur to me you’d just decide to hole up and… wait… no. Wait. Are you injured? Throne’s foot, yes, all right, you two! He’s injured, let’s get him moving. Brother, can you tell me where you’re hit?”
Adalbrect shook his head. His mouth was suddenly very dry, wringing his words down to a croak, and he could feel his balance going. A vision danced by him of falling forward with a great flap of flesh ripping free from his back. He clenched his fists and concentrated on not falling. Not falling. The dark hulks around him tilted and the ground seemed to float up towards him and then away again. He groaned. Not falling.
“Agh, all right, I see what’s happened.” Haffith was up by his side now, peering behind his shoulder in the lantern-light. “Steady him, get his arms, don’t let him fall. We have you, brother, stay with us. You’re in shock. Say a prayer of fortitude with me.”
They went over the words together. Haffith knew a slightly different version to Adalbrect, but they finished on the same lines, and by that time each of Adalbrect’s arms was being gripped by a burly convoy guard. His thoughts were sluggish and his h
ead wanted to loll forward, but he finally realised what had seemed so odd about saying the prayer. His hands were empty.
“Mhhmmm…” he managed, then scraped his tongue along his teeth and worked his cheeks until he had enough moisture in his mouth to talk. “My aquila. I dropped it. Can you take it… out of the dirt?” Haffith bent for a moment and then Adalbrect felt the familiar weight and grip in his hand. It settled him a little.
“Don’t move too much, brother, and don’t get any closer to that bastard’s hull again. You can see there’s plenty more of those shitsump barbs left on it. I’m not game to try and—wait. Sister! Sister!” At the edge of the lantern-light there came a pale glimmer of tunic and a glint of gold: Sister Sarell was coming back to them.
“The preacher’s wounded. I’d like one of us to stay with him until we get an all-clear.”
“Do you think they’ll double back?” Sarell asked.
“Who knows? At this point we barely know what they’re even doing. Some of them hid on the delegation convoy and helped a second lot break in behind them. No telling what they want.”
“But I’m betting it’s not to shake the magos’ hand when he arrives,” Adalbrect managed to gasp out. Breathing deeply hurt his shoulder, but breathing shallowly made him dizzy.
“He’ll have already had instructions to delay his landing,” said Haffith. “He’d better have.” He stood for a moment longer, then stared up at the sky where the speck of the Headstone hung, high enough to still catch some yellow-red daylight. Haffith looked at it a moment, cursed to himself and turned to Sarell.