Angel of Fire

The next day we stood on the walls and watched the army depart. Endless lines of massive battle-tanks roared off in advance of troop carriers. Valkyries swarmed in the air over them. Titans strode gigantically through the red murk of the dawn. The air vibrated with the passage of the army. Our words seemed to resonate inside our chests when we spoke.

‘We should be going with them,’ said Anton. ‘We should be in Number Ten.’

I wasn’t going to argue with him. If there was any justice in the galaxy we would have been out there in the Indomitable. The lieutenant would have been leading us and Oily and Henrik would have been with us. Instead we were with all the other troops of our hastily assembled company, standing guard on the walls of Irongrad, watching the army leave to go with Macharius to new conquests and victories. Somewhere in the distance were new hives, new heretic armies, new enemies. I told myself I should be glad that I was here, out of the way of danger, but I was not. I was disappointed.

‘It’ll be years before we get another Baneblade,’ said Ivan gloomily. ‘If ever we do.’

‘I’ve dreamed of being a tank driver,’ said the New Boy. ‘Now I am with the bloody footsloggers.’

‘Life’s not fair,’ I said. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

‘Like you have?’

‘Now you are just being disrespectful.’

‘They’ll get all the action,’ Anton said. His gaze followed the huge dust plumes kicked up by the army wistfully.

‘I am sure the locals will come up with something to keep us busy,’ I said. I was thinking about the increasing levels of violence on the streets and the rumours we had heard about the priesthood of the Angel of Fire becoming more active.

I shielded my eyes and kept staring out over the red-and-orange wastes. There were still some burned-out tanks out there from the days of our assault. The tech-adepts had not managed to salvage everything. It was pointless trying to count all the armoured vehicles down there but that did not stop me trying. I reached several dozen, a small fraction of the total, when Anton distracted me with one of his idiot questions. ‘Hey, Leo, what are the chances of us getting another Baneblade?’

‘About the same as you learning to think,’ I said.

‘I am serious,’ he said.

‘So am I,’ I said.

‘No, seriously, what do you think?’

‘I think we’ll all be dead of old age by the time we get reassigned. You know how the Munitorum works. If we’re lucky we won’t be reassigned to Valkyries.’

‘I quite fancy being a pilot,’ said Anton.

‘You have any training for it?’ I asked.

‘How difficult can it be?’

‘If it wasn’t too difficult for you, the Munitorum would never assign you to it,’ said Ivan.

‘Listen to the man, Anton,’ I said. ‘He understands military bureaucracy.’

‘I could learn,’ said Anton, never one to let the idiocy of a statement discourage him from making it. I watched Titans lope out now, the smaller Warhounds racing ahead as if to get to grips with the enemy all the sooner. The giant Reavers followed in their wake, cautious enough on the surface of a world that manufactured Shadowswords.

Despite myself I felt something like pride swell within me. It was an awesome force and it was only a small part of the army the Imperium was bringing to bear on this part of the universe. I felt like I was watching a metal tide that could cover an entire planet and crush all resistance and I was a small part of it. I looked at all the others and I think they felt the same.

‘How far do you think they are going?’ the New Boy asked.

‘To the edge of the galaxy,’ I said. The words had the ring of prophesy.

‘I am starting to hate this place,’ Anton said, conversationally. He held his lasrifle casually, in the crook of his arm, but I could tell he was ready to use it at the slightest provocation. His helmet was tilted back. His rebreather was slung round his neck. He rubbed his scar with his long fingers as he looked out into the crowds. The people watched us as we swept the streets on patrol. They did not look hostile. They did not look friendly. They just looked. We kept moving, bringing up the rear of the foot patrol. We were just there to be seen.

‘Why is that?’ I asked. I was not really interested but sometimes Anton’s inane chatter could provide distraction. I already thought I knew what he was going to say.

In the interval since the bulk of the army departed, things became ominously quiet in Irongrad. There was something odd going on beneath the surface though. Whenever I scanned the faces of that huge crowd I felt as if they were waiting for something, a sign perhaps, from us or from the Angel who had ruled their world for so long. I could not help but feel that concealed within those oceans of flesh were people who meant us ill.

Everywhere we went the gaze of the Angel looked down on us. Perched on the side of every hab-tower those metal-bodied seraphim stood ready to take flight on wings of fire. On every ceiling, murals showed its androgynous form. Every day we walked the streets of the hab-zones, just to show the fact that we were there, to remind the natives that a new order had come. Our grey uniforms looked drab and alien among the bright, ruddy colours favoured by the locals. In every square the fountains of fire still burned. Our tech teams had started to take away the sacrificial cages. Many a day I stood watch over them as the great machines demolished them and reclaimed the metal. I studied the faces in the crowd around me. I looked down the vast avenue of hab-blocks stretching to the horizon wall of the hive. Anton surprised me.

‘It looks like home in some ways, but it’s not.’

‘It does not look like Belial,’ I said. ‘It looks nothing like Belial.’

‘It’s a hive,’ he said.

‘And that’s it,’ I said. I looked around and saw no similarity. Belial was grim and grey and all around had been the signs of the heaviest of heavy industry. Pollutant smog had filled the streets and snaked below the level bridges like rivers of mist. The air temperature had been lower and the humidity far greater.

Everything had carried the signs of the different guilds and factories. Here, there was an awful uniformity about everything. The Cult of the Angel of Fire had strangled everything else, like a weed choking the life out of normal plants in an overgrown garden. Everything bore its stamp. All of the people bore its symbol. Metal angels hung from chains around every neck. There were more of those bloody angels than there were of any other Imperial ikons, including our own.

‘I hate those cages,’ Anton said. ‘Whoever thought of putting people to death that way was a madman.’

‘If you are being put to death, what does it matter how you die?’ I asked.

‘If you were going to greet the Emperor which would you prefer – a bolter shell through the head, quick and clean, or being burned alive inside a brewed-up Leman Russ?’

‘Neither,’ I said. ‘I plan on living till I am eighty and collecting a pension.’

‘And I planned on becoming a Space Marine,’ Anton said. ‘Let’s see how those things work out for both of us…’

‘Hush, the pair of you,’ said Ivan. ‘Something’s up.’

We had just entered a large square. All around were stalls where vendors sold hot food and cold metal religious trash, amulets and ikons of the Angel. A small group of people stared at us resentfully. They had been handing out pamphlets whose covers, inevitably, featured pictures of the Angel of Fire standing over the corpses of grey-uniformed off-world invaders.

Most people watched us blandly but some of the pamphleteers looked at us with a ferocious hate. Once a few of them picked up stones and bits of trash and pelted us with them. The Understudy stood there and watched and then strode forwards. A sense of menace, of strangeness, of quietness radiated out from him. I saw some of the stone-chuckers pause in mid-throw.

‘Put those down and go home,’ the Understudy said. His odd rasping voice carried even over the hubbub of the hive. ‘Go home and you will live.’

Somebody pulled back his arm to throw. Suddenly there was a pistol in the Understudy’s hand. He pulled the trigger. The shot went right through the hand. The heretic screamed and fell. He writhed on the ground in agony.

‘Anybody else?’ the Understudy asked. They just looked at him. ‘All right then, go.’

The locals looked shame-faced and shuffled their feet but he just stood there, quiet, gun in hand, a single figure confronting scores of them, unafraid. I watched to see what would happen next. I had the shotgun in my hand in case things turned nasty.

Much to my surprise, the crowd backed away. The Understudy gestured for a couple of the lads to come forwards and take the wounded man away for interrogation then walked back to the ranks and watched as the demolition team continued its work.

‘Understudy we used to call him,’ Anton said. ‘More like a bloody Undertaker these days.’

‘You keep calling him that and the name will stick,’ I said.

‘We’ll see about that.’

The Understudy had his hand to his ear, listening to something on the comm-net in the ear bead. He looked around and gestured for us to follow him. It seemed like something was up. We piled into the Chimera and roared through the streets.

By the time we arrived, the battle was over and our side had taken heavy casualties. I looked around to see if there was any sign of the attackers. All I could see was at least a dozen of our boys lying dead on the ground. All that was left of them was scorched bodies. Their flesh was black and cracked in places. Most of their uniforms looked as if they had been set on fire. Their weapons lay close at hand, buckled and melted as if someone had thrown them into very intense flame.

Anton studied the survivors. There were half a dozen of them and they all looked pale-faced and frightened. I clutched my shotgun very close and surveyed the streets. The battle had taken place in a narrow alleyway close to a main thoroughfare. Some of the mountains of trash piled up against the walls still burned. Thick, oily stinking smoke rose above them. The corpses of roasted rats lay nearby. Cockroaches the size of dinner-plates had exploded in the heat.

I looked up and I could see the towering tenements rising hundreds of storeys above me. I wondered if our boys had come under attack from ambush and whether someone was still lurking on the balconies of the tenements waiting to take shots at us.

One thing I could not see was any sign of the people who had attacked. I looked around very carefully for bodies. There were probably two score civilians but none of them had any weapons.

I surmised that the survivors had gathered up the guns and taken them for themselves because I could not see any sign of flamethrowers or the sort of heavy weapons that would have resulted in this sort of loss. Some of these soldiers looked as if they’d been hit by a lascannon. There were a number of people heavily wounded – they had suffered very bad burns. The last time I had seen people who look like that, they had been dragged from the cockpits of burning tanks. Most of them had not lived very long afterwards.

Anton walked over to one of the survivors of the company. ‘How many of them attacked you?’ He sounded as cocky and arrogant as usual but he was just trying to be friendly.

The soldier looked up at Anton as if he was an idiot, a thing that Anton must’ve been very used to by now. ‘Just the one,’ he said.

Anton shook his head and made a low tut-tutting sound. He walked over to another soldier; this one’s face was all smudged with soot as if he had been standing next to a blazing building or perhaps had worked in one of the forges back on Belial. ‘How many of them attacked you?’ Anton asked again.

The soldier looked up at Anton and shook his head. ‘You heard Boris,’ he said. ‘Are you deaf?’

Anton turned around and looked at us, his face blank. He made a circling motion with his little finger close to the side of his forehead. He quite clearly thought that the soldiers had been made just a little bit crazy by what they had just been through. We had all seen that before. He went over to third soldier and said, ‘How many?’

‘One, you moron,’ said the soldier. Anton’s eyes narrowed and I was not sure whether it was because of the insult or because of the information that the soldier had imparted. It was starting to look as if there was no mistake here.

I walked over to the first soldier that Anton had talked to and I squatted down beside him. I offered him a lho stick from one of my packs and he took it and stuffed it into his mouth gratefully. I produced my igniter and he squirmed away at the sight of the flame as if it brought back some terrible memory.

‘Just one of them did all this?’ I kept my voice flat and level and did not let any fraction of emotion show. He took a long puff on the lho stick and he nodded. A cloud of smoke emerged from his lips and he pulled it back in again with a long breath as if he somehow thought that he could cover the smell of burning flesh that surrounded him with the odour of tobacco.

‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘just the one.’

‘Was he in a Hellhound, complete with a flamethrower attached?’ Anton asked. He was never the most sensitive of souls.

‘He was a psyker, one of those priests,’ the soldier said. The others nodded agreement. I saw Anton flinch. I did too. None of us liked the idea of having to face a psyker. Regimental rumour had it that an unbonded psyker could be possessed by daemons. It was one of the truths preached by the Imperial cult and none of us had any reason to doubt it. Ivan gave out a low whistle. It was the one he used to indicate that he was disturbed. The New Boy looked as pale as the soldiers who had been fighting against the psyker. I don’t suppose I looked any better.

The first soldier continued to puff away at the lho stick. His eyes were focused on its burning. It looked as if he was seeing something strange there. Maybe he was. Who can tell?

‘We got a call,’ he said. ‘We were told that there was a heretic preacher ranting in the street and that someone had better come and do something.’

‘You did,’ Anton said.

‘We arrived in force,’ the soldier said. ‘We did not know what to expect but we thought we were prepared for the worst.’

He shook his head, considering how silly that statement sounded now. ‘There was a preacher here – he was dressed in simple robes and he was telling the crowd how the Angel of Fire would return and scour the face of this world, cleansing it of unbelievers. The commissar ordered Honza and Johan to go forwards and arrest him. The rest of us were to watch in case of ambush. There was an ambush all right – it just did not come the way we expected it.’

‘The preacher was a psyker?’ The New Boy looked frightened as he spoke. The soldier nodded his head.

‘As soon as Honza and Johan got close, he just laughed and called upon the Angel of Fire to smite the heretics. That’s when it happened–’

‘What?’ Anton asked.

‘Wings of fire erupted from his back and a halo of flame surrounded his head. He gestured with his hands and Honza and Johan were burned down on the spot. They just caught alight – one second they were there, the next second they were surrounded with just as much flame as the preacher. The only difference was that it burned them; it did not burn him.’

‘You opened fire?’ Anton said.

‘Of course we did,’ the soldier said. ‘Some of us tried hard not to hit our boys but most of us just fired our lasguns. We might as well have been using flashlights for all the difference it made. The bolts from our lasguns just seemed to make the preacher stronger and he kept invoking the name of the Angel and telling us that we were all going to be destroyed. The sacred flame was going to cleanse this world and we should repent.’

‘I take it you didn’t,’ Anton said. I stared at him hoping to forestall any more misguided attempts at humour.

‘We kept firing and firing and firing,’ the soldier said. His eyes were fixed in the middle distance now and it was obvious that he was not looking at us but at the scene that the words were pulling from his memory. ‘It didn’t make the slightest difference. It just made him stronger. The commissar told us to stop shooting and use grenades. It was the last order he ever gave. The heretic burned him down where he stood.’

Anton looked at me. His eyes were wide and he looked a little more frightened now. He had always assumed that commissars enjoyed a special protection from the Emperor in return for their faith.

‘Of course, most of the boys just kept on firing. Some of us tried using grenades but there was something in the air around the heretic that sent them flying back towards us. The explosions killed even more of our lads.’

‘But you got the bastard in the end,’ Anton said. ‘Otherwise you would not be sitting here talking to us now.’

The soldier shook his head. ‘Those wings of fire on his back spread wide open and he leapt into the air. It was like something out of one of those old pictures from the time when the Emperor walked among men. He just hovered in the air and threw bolts of fire at us. All the time he was smiling and laughing and ranting. His voice got louder and when I looked I saw his eyes were glowing, like there was a fire inside his skull.’

My mouth felt dry and I wanted to mock but I could not. The soldier just kept talking. ‘He looked happy, ecstatic, there was this glow within him now, getting brighter, as if there was a light inside of him so brilliant it could shine through flesh. He shouted that he was going to meet the Angel and the Angel would come and judge us all then he jumped among us, his body on fire. Everyone he touched just burned. They rolled on the ground, beating at themselves but nothing could put the flames out. The heretic kept on coming. His flesh was being consumed from within now. He was getting thinner and thinner, vanishing like a sugar cube in water. He had almost reached me when he was gone. The flames leapt up all of a sudden and I thought I was dead, but when I opened my eyes there was no one there, except our boys, all burning and dying.’

Anton looked on appalled. Ivan studied something in the middle distance. Corporal Hesse and the New Boy moved around, dispensing med-packs, applying sacred balm.

‘You know the worst of it?’ the soldier said.

‘What?’

‘I kept thinking, what if he was right? What if the Angel had blessed him and we were the heretics here and we were all going to be judged?’

‘Just as well your commissar got burned,’ Anton said. ‘If he was alive now you and he would be having words.’

‘You never know,’ the soldier said. ‘He might have agreed with me.’