Angel of Fire

‘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 different. 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.’

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 he 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.