Angel of Fire

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. This 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?

The cathedral was gigantic and awesome, the sense of imminent presence all but overpowering. It was certainly stronger than anything I had ever encountered in the temples of the Imperium. It was as if some great mystic revelation was about to unfold and all I had to do was surrender to the truth of it and I would become part of something greater than myself.

Perhaps these people were right. Perhaps the Angel of Fire really did stand at the right hand of the Emperor. How was I to tell? I had never been to Blessed Terra or stood before the Emperor’s Throne and yet I took the existence of those things for granted, because I had been taught to, because I believed what was written in a book. These people had books too and they told a different and perhaps greater truth...

I felt a pinching grip on my arm and turned to look at Drake. There was a warning glance in his eyes.

‘Resist,’ he said. Perhaps his words shocked me out of the trance state. Perhaps it was something else entirely. I felt the lure of temptation recede but I was aware of how attractive it was and how easy it would be to succumb. I saw something in Drake’s eyes and for a moment I felt something like sympathy for him and I was convinced he felt something like sympathy for me. These were issues he spent his whole life dealing with. He was constantly confronted with challenges to his faith and had to defend it. Did he have his doubts? At that moment I felt certain that he did and that he had to work harder than I to maintain his faith.

I noticed up ahead of us that there was another great arched doorway but this one was barred by lines of armed men who refused all admittance. Instead, lines of people separated to the left and right of the great aisle, passing up stairs and out of sight. Macharius indicated we should go to the right and we joined the crowds going up that way. It seemed better than milling aimlessly in front of the archway until someone became suspicious.

We moved up the steps with the crowd. The stairwell snaked upwards and after what seemed like hours we found ourselves in a huge gallery that looked down into the heart of the cathedral. We gazed out into an immense space. The ceiling was so high above us that it seemed like clouds had formed below us. Perhaps that was only the incense and the smoke of burning flesh from the enormous caged altar. I realised now why the sound of the choir was so loud. It drowned out the sound of the screams of the men being burned alive below me.

People all around watched enthralled as the priests performed their rituals. In the centre of the cathedral was the most beautiful statue of the Angel of Fire I had yet seen. It was perfect and lifelike in every detail. It seemed as if a steel angel with wings of fire really had incarnated itself before us. It looked as if it was just about to open its blind-seeming eyes and gaze down upon us in judgement. Perhaps it was just the flickering of the flames from the altar but it seemed to tremble with life. As I watched a great crane arm lifted the cage full of smouldering corpses from the altar. A second one swung a new cage full of living men into position. Another cage was rolled into place. The people around me watched enthralled. Clearly a high point of the ritual had been reached.

For a moment, there was silence from the choir and the crowd. You could hear only the panicked screams of the men in the cage and the subdued roar of the flames below them. They were burning with a low intensity now, clearly not at their full ritual strength. On a high lectern a priest of the Sons of the Flame spread his arms wide and began to preach a sermon. He talked about heresy. He talked about atonement. He talked about punishing the invaders who had defiled the sacred soil of Karsk. Then he spoke a word and the choir began to sing again, ancient ritual words invoking the blessing of the Angel, asking mercy for the souls offered up and hope that their impure souls would achieve grace as they fed the Emperor’s great servant, the Angel of Fire.

I saw it now in the ancient, beautiful Gothic words of the sacred song. It was an evil parody of the Imperial liturgy. It echoed the words but used them to put a shimmering gloss on this awful sacrifice.

Part of me, the doubting part, whispered that the true Imperial ritual did the same thing, asking men to give up their lives and souls for the Emperor. I quashed it. There is a difference between asking men to act heroically and truly of their own free will and feeding them into a fire in white-hot cages.

I knew looking at the beautiful statue with its beatific face that whatever it represented was nothing holy but something evil and clever which used a shroud of holiness to conceal a corrupt and rotten heart. Below me men burned as flames leapt higher. I thought it could be me down there and realised that we were doing the right thing by opposing the cult even if it cost us our lives. Then it occurred to me that it was most likely going to do just that.

We gaped in horror as more of our comrades were burned. The local people watched agog. I wondered what had made them come. Was it the spectacle? Were they particularly devout? Was this some form of entertainment for them? They did not look any different from the average citizen of Belial and yet here they were, watching people die as if it were entertainment.

I looked from face to face. Some of them wore expressions of awe. One or two of them licked their lips and sweated as if they were taking some sort of pleasure in the brutish spectacle. Most looked a little stunned. I would like to say it was all down to the unholy power of the ritual the Sons of the Flame were enacting but I am sure it was not.

Many of the people looked on, eyes narrowed, features concentrated. They were simply fascinated by the fact of death. For many of them, this was as close as they were ever going to come to it until the day they died. There was an awful mystery here, beyond even that of the rituals of the Angel. I think they were hoping to see something mystical, to get a glimpse of the reality that lies beyond reality, to be witnesses at the moment of transition from life to death, to see something spiritually meaningful.

In this, they were doomed to disappointment. All they saw were men dying. All they heard was a choir drowning out screams. All they smelled was incense and roasting flesh. If there was anything mystical in the air, it was a horror, a sense of something dreadful slowly approaching, a monster lured by the savour of the killing, drawn to the scent of burning meat and departing spirits.

As the ritual ended and the cranes swung the old cage out and a new cage into position, ushers moved us out of the gallery so the next set of spectators could enter and bear witness. It was all well organised, a great machine designed for no good purpose, human sacrifice on an industrial scale.

We shuffled through the exit and back down a set of stairs along with all the believers. I looked at Anton and saw he was as appalled as me. Ivan looked glassy-eyed. Hesse looked almost sick. Anna had the same air of restrained calm she always wore. I was not in a position to see how Drake or the Understudy or Macharius reacted. I wish I had been.

The trudge down the stairwell was long and there was no way of avoiding it and we found ourselves out in a courtyard where vendors sold souvenirs – small metal cages, and bits of burned bone that purported to be from victims already cleansed. Somehow this was the worst part of it all. People were buying trinkets and souvenirs as if this day was important to them and they wanted to carry away some small thing as a reminder.

It was all I could do to keep from shooting.

We huddled together in the corner of the courtyard. It was not unusual, there were other small groups of pilgrims gathered in a similar manner, praying or discussing what they had witnessed in low, awed voices. All of us looked to Macharius for guidance, even Drake. He looked back at the inquisitor.

‘How long?’ Macharius asked. ‘How long before whatever they are summoning manifests?’ His tone was low enough so that it would not carry far.

‘I do not know, hours possibly, days at most. I have read about these things but it is the first time I have witnessed a ritual of such potency from so close at hand.’

‘And what happens if they succeed?’

‘The Angel will manifest, only it will be no Angel and its manifestation will be a dark and unholy thing.’

‘How can we stop it?’

‘Somewhere in there a psyker of vast power is drawing all the mystical energy from those deaths and weaving it into a lure for a daemon-god. If we could kill the psyker that would do it…’ Something about his tone told us that it was not quite so simple as that, if you could call walking through a temple full of fanatics and assassinating a psyker powerful enough to summon a daemon prince simple.

‘But…?’ Macharius said.

‘But if we succeed in slaying him then there will be no one to control all the energy, the ritual will run out of control. At very least it is likely that anyone in the vicinity will be killed. At worst, a hole will be torn in the fabric of reality and hell will crawl through.’

‘Hell is crawling through anyway,’ said Macharius. ‘This way there is at least a chance of stopping it.’

Drake nodded. He was a brave man but something was clearly preying on his mind. ‘Also, if we die in there, there is a good chance our souls will be sucked into the hells from which they are summoning the daemon. They will be devoured and we will be damned for all eternity.’

‘We’ll be damned anyway if we don’t at least try.’

Macharius looked at us. His steely gaze flickered from face to face. ‘We do not have any choice. We must stop this. If we do not our comrades will be destroyed and our armies on this planet overwhelmed. The souls of millions will be lost.’

His voice was quiet enough not be overheard at any distance and yet I heard every word distinctly. He was right, of course. Something had to be done. For a moment I wondered whether I was the man to do it. Briefly I considered the possibility of simply running but under the gaze of Macharius it was no possibility at all. There was nowhere I could flee to anyway. If the Angel of Fire manifested itself, this whole world would be doomed and my soul and most likely my life would be lost.

I saw reflections of my doubts in Anton and Ivan’s eyes. We could wait. Sejanus would get here with the army soon. Surely, the might of that great force would be enough to overcome what was happening here.

‘There is no time for anything else,’ Drake said. He sounded resigned but ready. ‘If it costs our lives, they will be well spent if we can stop the Angel of Fire.’

‘If we die here, we will die as heroes of the Imperium,’ said Macharius. ‘And if we triumph, our names will be remembered for as long as it endures.’

I could see that swayed Anton and Ivan and the New Boy. They were nodding now. I guess they were thinking what I was thinking. Death and damnation lay on all sides. There was no escape from it no matter which way we leapt. Macharius was offering us the possibility of glory.

‘Can you find this psyker?’ Macharius asked Drake. He studied the nearby pilgrims, looking as relaxed as if this were some holiday outing.

‘His presence is hard to ignore. I am surprised you cannot sense him yourself. The aura is that strong.’ Drake pitched his voice low so that only we could hear it.

‘You will need to lead us to him.’

‘He will be guarded,’ Drake said. The discussion was between him and Macharius. The rest of us waited on their words. Drake was the expert. Macharius was our leader.

‘They are overconfident,’ said Macharius. ‘They expect no trouble here. We can use that to our advantage.’

‘As you say,’ Drake said. Clearly he was not confident. ‘We do not have any allies here.’

‘There are companies of Imperial soldiers down there,’ said Macharius. He indicated somewhere below us. He was thinking about the men we had seen being sent to sacrifice. There were scores of them. He did not seem to have any doubts that we could somehow free them. We stood at the mouth of hell, half a dozen men in the midst of a world full of heretics, and when he told us that we were going to do the impossible, we nodded our heads and thought, yes we can do this.

‘If we can find them,’ said Drake.

‘I know where they are,’ said Anna. ‘I have studied the plans of this place. I can find them and I can free them.’

She nodded to a doorway in the wall. It was marked as forbidden. ‘That doorway leads to a maintenance section. It must lead also to the machinery of sacrifice. The prisoners will be kept there.’ She obviously had a very clear idea of the topography of the cathedral in her head.

‘Open it,’ Macharius said. He did not seem to have any doubts she could. She began to walk over to the doorway as if it was the most natural thing in the world. We followed her. Her hands flickered over the lock and the door was open. She walked through and we followed before anyone had a chance to object. Up ahead I could hear the whine of heavy machinery and the creak of cages on heavy rollers. The air smelled of grease and incense and men cramped together with no latrines. We walked forwards and came out on a ledge in a tunnel. There were the cages full of prisoners. There were robed guards. We were in the secret heart of the cathedral now, where the mechanisms of sacrifice were visible. There were stairs leading up from here that pilgrims would never see. I wondered if Anna knew where they went too.

‘How do we get them free?’ Hesse asked.

‘We’ll need to be fast,’ said Macharius. ‘Overpower those guards. You will take the keys, Lemuel, and open the cages. Get the prisoners out. Tell them to grab what weapons they can and free the others.’

‘Once they are freed, we need to go up,’ Drake said. ‘And keep going up till we find the heart of this evil.’

Macharius nodded and rattled off orders, clearly and calmly, telling every man exactly what to do, speaking exactly as if we had a chance of pulling off his mad scheme. He did not repeat anything. He spoke as if he had complete confidence in us. He knew we understood and would not let him down. He was right in that too.

We followed him down towards the lines of cages where the prisoners waited. We walked directly towards the guards as if we had every right to be there. One or two of them glanced at us, wondering what was going on, asking themselves if something was wrong, then pushing the thought aside and telling themselves someone else would deal with it. A priest walked over to us and said, ‘You are in the wrong place, pilgrims, be gone or be burned!’

Macharius shot him. All hell broke loose.

I raced forwards, producing my shotgun from beneath my robe. I opened fire at the closest guard and took him down. A moment later I rammed the butt of the shotgun into the face of a second. Bone broke. Blood flowed. I bent down and picked the keys from the guard’s belt. I handed them to the nearest prisoner. ‘Free yourself!’ I told him.

The man just looked at me stunned. Like the guards, he did not quite understand what had happened. ‘Free yourself and free your brothers! Macharius is here!’

It was as if I had spoken a magic word. The hopelessness disappeared from the man’s eyes. His shoulders squared, he began to work the key in the lock and free the others. As one man got free of the chains, I picked up the guard’s weapon and handed it to him. ‘Arm yourself. Arm the others. Take what you can! Kill!’

Along the line others were doing the same. I caught sight of Macharius. He was fighting with a group of guards. In action, he was utterly lethal, a whirlwind of movement, a blur of motion, too fast to be pinned down or targeted. More of our men were breaking free now, attacking the heretics with anything they could pick up: their chains, censers, weapons ripped from the hands of screaming guards. More and more of those to be sacrificed were joining them. A chain reaction rippled through the cathedral as our soldiers broke free, ready to make a desperate last stand. It was hopeless but it was better than being burned alive in those incandescent cages and having your soul devoured by daemons.

Macharius beckoned. I followed. Macharius had his distraction. I was stunned by his ruthlessness. Having freed the men, he had left them to fight. He was sacrificing their lives so that we had a chance. The horrible thing was that he was right, and what was even more awful was the fact that the death he had granted them was better than the one the prisoners had been going to face.

We raced up the stairs, on our way to meet the psyker at the heart of this wickedness.

I made sure my shotgun was loaded. Below us I heard the sound of conflict.