Angel of Fire

Flames tore through the chamber. The robes I was wearing started to smoulder. The backwash of heat made my eyes suddenly dry. The smoke made me cough. Most of the heretics were untouched by the flames. The heat and the fire did not seem to affect them. I kept moving towards Inquisitor Drake and Macharius and Anna. I felt sure that the inquisitor’s shield would offer some protection but I was not certain that it would enable any of us to survive once the heretics decided to extinguish our lives.

Anton and Ivan were right behind me and the Understudy was with them. I looked around to see if I could see Corporal Hesse. I caught sight of him out of the corner of my eye and wished that I had not. He was still alive. His uniform was ablaze. He was screaming and his flesh was starting to melt and run. Large chunks had been torn off by the explosion and blackened skin stood out against white bone. I was going to turn back and help him but the crowd was already starting to close around him as more and more of the heretic bodyguards entered the great chamber.

I dived within the bubble of energy surrounding the inquisitor. I landed with one arm on Anna’s shoulder and withdrew it swiftly before she could break it. It was stupid. She had already decided I was not an enemy or she would have killed me. Immediately the air felt cooler and the sound of explosion and fire and screaming was dulled as if heard through a thick armourglas window. We glared around, desperate, at once seeking escape and sure of the fact that we would not find it. Macharius looked at Drake.

‘Is there anything you can do?’ He did not look defeated. He was simply asking if there were any options. There was no fear written on his face. I’m sure it was inscribed on mine.

I looked around. There was no sign of the High Priest. He seemed to have disappeared into the fire and smoke. I wished we could do the same. Drake gestured for us to follow him and began to move towards the wall. I’m guessing that he had some sense other than sight to guide him, because I could see nothing through that fearful blaze.

Behind us, the kneeling heretics began to stir from their trance. Possibly the bodyguards were trying to fight their way forwards through the flames – I could not see them, so there was no way to tell. I simply tried to keep close to the inquisitor because I had no idea what would happen if I stumbled outside the sphere of protection that he currently radiated.

Ahead of us, I saw an archway. We passed through it and down a flight of stairs, moving as fast as we could, trying to put as much distance between ourselves and any pursuit as was possible. We had no idea what we were doing now, not even Macharius, I am sure. Our plan had been to disrupt the ritual and kill the High Priest if we could.

He had escaped us even though Macharius still held his chain of office clenched in his fist. I was not sure why he still had it. Perhaps he was planning on keeping it as a souvenir if ever we got out of this place.

We raced downstairs and encountered more guards coming up. We must have been quite a sight. Our robes were burned and smouldering and we were surrounded by a halo of power. We did not give them any chance to react. We did not pause to bluff. We gave no thought to the fact that there might be hundreds of them coming towards us.

We simply leapt into battle. Macharius was in the lead, chopping with the chainsword that he still held, shooting with a pistol that he had picked up somewhere. Nothing short of a Space Marine could have stood against him at that moment. He fought like a berserk ork, full of terrifying fury with no regard for his own safety.

At least, that’s the way it looked. I’m sure that within his calculating brain he had already worked out the odds of survival and attacking with such passionate fury was simply what he thought to be the optimal strategy. In any case, he cut his way down to a landing, leaving a trail of dead and dismembered bodies behind him, painting the walls with blood and entrails. We raced along in his wake, shooting survivors, putting the wounded out of their misery and occasionally, when we got a clear shot, aiming over his shoulders and taking out some of the enemy ahead.

I fought almost back to back with Macharius. A screaming heretic dived towards him, aiming the butt of a lasgun at the back of the general’s head. Macharius turned a fraction of a second too late to stop him. I could tell from the expression on his face that he knew the heretic was going to connect. I pulled the trigger on the shotgun. The force of the blast knocked the heretic backwards even as it sprayed Macharius with his blood. The general nodded to me in acknowledgement of what I had done and returned to killing. I saved Macharius’s life there but it’s certain he saved mine a dozen times simply by killing the enemy near me. Under the circumstances it seemed impolitic to keep score although I am certain, in this, as with so many things, Macharius forgot nothing. His nod was in recognition of a debt between us, one that would eventually be repaid.

When I was not there to cover his back Anna was, moving gracefully, precisely and with eye-blurring speed. She seemed as inhuman as a Space Marine as she kicked and clawed and shot. She had the same terrifying speed and grace.

I’ll say one thing for the heretics – they were brave. Even in the face of Macharius’s terrifying rampage they stood their ground and were killed to a man. Maybe they simply had no choice. Maybe they did not have time to realise what was happening. To me, everything seemed to be happening with the slowness of a nightmare, which is often the way things happen when you’re in combat. Taken by surprise, perhaps they simply did not have time to react and what I think of as courage was simply a stunned lack of response.

Suddenly the fight was over. The heretics were all dead. We stood on a huge landing that looked out over one side of the cathedral. Beneath us an army of fire-winged angels stood poised for flight. Above us, in the central sanctuary, explosions still raged.

‘At least we’ve disrupted the ritual,’ said Drake. ‘And bought ourselves some time.’

‘How much?’ Macharius asked.

Drake shook his head. ‘Perhaps a day, if we are lucky.’

Looking around I could see the same look of disappointment on every face, except that of Macharius. After the carnage we had wrought, we had hoped for more.

‘The High Priest is still alive. He is the locus of all this,’ said Drake. ‘The vessel of all the power. He will be able to bring the psychic backlash under control. I am sure of it.’

‘It looks like we need another plan,’ Macharius said, obviously not a man to let a little adversity discourage him.

‘What are we going to do now, sir?’ I asked. He turned and stared out the window for a moment, looking at all of the aircars flying below us.

‘We need to get out of here,’ Macharius said. ‘There’s nothing more to be done in the city. We won’t get another chance at the High Priest of the Angel of Fire. They’ll be on their guard now.’

Drake shook his head wearily. He was tired and pale but you could see that a formidable will still drove him onwards. He was not going to admit to any weakness in front of us. I doubt very much that the man had admitted to any weakness even to himself. He was that sort. ‘We still need to stop them. We’ve delayed the ritual for a while. They’ll start again soon and their daemon-god will manifest himself on the surface of this world.’

‘We need an army to break through,’ Anton said, scratching his face with one long, claw-like hand.

‘Precisely,’ Macharius said. ‘We need an army. Fortunately we know where to find one. And at least we have located the exact point at which we must strike.’

I was astonished by Macharius’s definition of good fortune. Apparently, as far as he was concerned, all we needed to do was make contact with our forces on the surface of Karsk and the problem would be solved.

From the look on his face, you could tell that the general thought that this would prove no insuperable obstacle. Drake nodded agreement. Under the circumstances, I don’t suppose there was anything else he could do. Macharius did not look mad. He looked like a man in full possession of his senses. I suppose in a way he was. He had decided that there was only one way to save the situation and that we needed to proceed accordingly, and there was nothing that I could really disagree with in that. So even if hundreds of leagues separated us from our army, we were going to have to make contact with it.

‘We will have to do it soon,’ Drake said. ‘We’ve done no more than buy ourselves a little time.’

‘Then we’d best get going,’ Macharius said in a tone that brooked no dispute.

Macharius had already decided the best way out of the city. His brain never stopped calculating, even when the odds against him seemed insurmountable. ‘We need to get to the airfield and we need to get our hands on a flyer.’

He had it all worked out in his mind you see, and he could say things like that as if we were not on our own in the middle of a hostile city. And for all the self-evident madness of his words, there was a confidence about him that made you believe it was possible. We walked through the cathedral as if we were flanked by Chapters of Space Marines, with Macharius in the lead and Drake just behind him and the five of us, the Understudy, Anton, Ivan, the New Boy and myself swaggering to the rear.

Fortunately for us everything in the cathedral was in chaos. The surviving prisoners must have put up an epic fight against the heretics and it seemed as if the sheer boldness of our attack on the High Priest had stunned them.

I could understand why. If I had been in their position I would not have believed that so small a group of men would have assaulted so strongly held a position myself.

In any case, it worked to our advantage. We raced through the chaos, just one more group of uniformed men, apparently dithering as the heretics tried to reassert control of the situation. We did our best to keep to the emptier ways of the cathedral but when we had to, we shouldered our way across packed corridors and massive naves with all the confidence that Macharius inspired.

No one questioned us and soon, by devious ways, we found ourselves on an emergency walkway, looking down over one of the massive gas pipes that fed the fires of the cathedral. We raced across it. It was as broad as a military highway. I caught a clear view of the roiling crowd below us. The vast open space around the cathedral was filled with people. They screamed and chanted the name of the Angel of Fire. Obviously, they knew that something was going on within the cathedral and it had stirred them to the edge of the abyss of fanatical madness.

As a soldier of the Emperor it is hard to imagine heretics having faith but they do. The problem is that their faith is misplaced. Zeal, which in the service of the Emperor would be truly holy, becomes something worse than wickedness. Looking down on the vast maddened crowd, lit by the fiery wings of thousands of evil Angels, I shuddered.

Those people down there had no idea what it was they were so desperately keen to protect. They had been misled or they had misled themselves and there was no time to teach them the error of their ways any more. Time had run out. Now all that was left to us was war, if we could get in touch with our army, if we could warn them what was happening, if they could get here in time to stop the manifestation of a greater daemon or something worse.

I could see that I was not the only one affected by the sight. Drake had paused, looking down over the protective barrier on the edge of the great gas pipe. There was a look of horror on his face and something more, something I would not have expected to see there: sympathy. I dismissed the thought as an illusion created by my own fevered mind. Who ever heard of an inquisitor feeling sympathy for anyone?

Looking down at that seething sea of heretics, I felt only a sort of numbness. All of them seemed lost. Of all of us, only Macharius seemed certain. In some ways, the more terrible the situation became, the more certain he became. The more indecisive we looked, the more decisive he looked. Perhaps that was simply the effect of my own confusion. In any case, I know that at that time Macharius was the rock upon which all our faith settled. He, at least, seemed to have no doubts that he was worthy of such devotion.

We raced along the top of the gas pipe heading towards a vast arched entrance between two towering hab-blocks. As we got closer, I felt the heat of the fire-winged angels once more. They gazed down at us and in that moment they seemed alive and hostile and I wanted very much to be in a place where I never had to look upon them again.

We clambered down the exit ladder from the pipe and landed on the huge pile of trash propped up against the walls of an alleyway. Even here, oceans of rubbish had gathered and scavengers made their way through it seeking whatever pitiful remains would keep them alive, whether it was food or some half-functional thing that they could sell. They gazed at us with blank, uncomprehending eyes. At least their gaze did not hold any fanaticism, only hunger and a nasty expression that made me glad I was armed. These were men who would do anything to keep themselves alive. I realised then that most of them were beggars who normally would have sought alms in the great square surrounding the cathedral and had been forced out of their normal pitches by the surging crowds and the violence of the uprising. We raced down the narrow alleys between the tumbled mountains of trash. Rats as large as dogs scuttled away from our racing feet. Cockroaches as long as a bayonet dived into the rubbish like soldiers seeking cover in a trench. The stink of decomposing food, of mould and rot mingled with the gassy taint in the air.

My heart pounded. My breath came in gasps. Sweat ran down my face. My eyes felt dry and yet, for all the horrors that I had seen, I was starting to feel strangely optimistic. Despite my worst fears, I was still alive and I was free, although the Emperor alone knew how long that was likely to last. Somehow, we had escaped from that vast horde of heretics, and had not yet been burned alive to feed the terrible god that the heretics were hell bent on summoning. Perhaps the Emperor was watching over us, or at least over Macharius. Until almost the very end he always had that thing that all great commanders need: luck.

It was obvious that we had stirred up a huge hornets’ nest. Sirens bellowed out across the city. In the distance I could hear the roar of the crowd surrounding the cathedral. Where we were, all was eerily quiet. It was as if the vast majority of the citizens were huddled in their homes waiting to see what would happen.

At that moment in time, I felt a long way from the certainties of Imperial law. Strangely enough, having been given something to compare it with, I had never been more certain that the Imperium was worthy to rule this place. I even felt a certain nostalgia for the Imperial Guard and its crude, slow-moving, bureaucratic processes. I would have welcomed marching into camp and being surrounded by my comrades more than anything else in the universe just then.

We sloped on through the gathering darkness, not quite certain of what we were going to do except that we were going to follow Macharius to the bitter end.

We huddled down in the shadow of a cave accidentally created in the giant mound of trash. It must have been some primitive instinct that made us do that, to crawl out of sight, for there was no other real reason. The only people around us were the hordes of scavengers and they paid no more attention to us than anyone else around them. If we had looked weaker or less well armed they would have seen as us as prey but as it was we were untouchable. Overhead aircars quartered the sky. Searchlight beams probed into the darkness. I could not avoid the suspicion they were looking for us.

‘We need to get to the airfield,’ Macharius said. ‘We need to find a vehicle that can get us out of this place.’

He said it as reasonably as a man discussing walking down to the canteen to get lunch. He spoke in that calm, powerful voice and all of us just nodded our heads as if what he was saying was sane.

I will say this about Macharius, he never let the fact that he was planning something completely unreasonable stop him from contemplating the possibility of it. In his mind, to come up with something was to do it. For him, there was no difference between visualising a thing and executing it. He had no doubts in his own competence and somehow he projected the idea that he had no doubts of yours. Drake just nodded as if he saw the sense of this as well, then returned to making inscriptions on his data-slate.

‘We won’t find an aircar in this part of the city,’ Anna said.

‘You are right,’ said Macharius. ‘We’ll need a place where they are more common.’

Wearily, we picked ourselves up and began to move again, looking for a way out of this vast maze of rubbish and scavengers and a way back into the wealthier parts of the city where such things as flying vehicles were available to be stolen.

The first thing we grabbed was a groundcar. It was easy. Anton jimmied open the window with his bayonet. Anna invoked the engine spirits aided by a piece of sanctified wire. There was not much room for all of us inside the car, big as it was, but we crawled in and took to the highway between levels.

Macharius knew where the nearest airfield was. Drake found a route on his slate. He had ingested all the information from the datacores into it before the rising. I drove. It seemed like my duty. I even felt a certain nostalgia to be behind the controls of a vehicle again although it was nothing compared to a Baneblade.

Everywhere we passed signs of warfare. There were burned-out vehicles at numerous crossroads. Some of them bore the marking of our regiment, an ominous omen. Gangs had risen across the city, taking advantage of the general chaos to go on a looting spree. I saw nobles and outcasts fighting in the streets, for the pure unadulterated joy of combat, as far as I could tell. One side certainly did not need the loot. Or maybe they were all skanked on blaze.

In other sections, the Sons of the Flame were already out in force. They moved through the streets with companies of bodyguards, flaming halos surrounding their heads. Here they rounded up opposition for burning. There they preached a sermon to a fast-gathering crowd. I watched them all scroll by through the armourglass of the groundcar window. I listened to Drake’s directions and kept the vehicle on course. In the back, most of them slept. Macharius sat wide-eyed, planning. The Understudy’s eyes were sinister black pits. He said nothing, did not move. I wondered what was going on in his head. Anna studied the crowds with her usual calm.

Over everything there still brooded the terrifying sense of presence. I was not surprised by the hysteria in the city. Everyone must have felt it as much as I did. They were reacting in their own way and I suspect the thing the priests worshipped was feeding on it and drawing strength. When I caught sight of the faces of Ivan and Anton and the New Boy I knew they felt as I did, possibly worse, that reaction to what we had done was setting in. We had done our best and we had failed and time was running out.

The road twisted and turned through the hive, climbing levels and then swooping lower, curving back in on itself like the spiral staircases of the cathedral. The Angels watched over every junction, perched on every building. Crowds were visible in every square. There seemed to be a lot of burning going on. Drake followed my gaze.

‘They are making sacrifices. It is all part of the great ritual now.’ He looked sick, but returned to making inscriptions in incomprehensible Inquisitorial runes.