‘Why?’
‘I think there is something preparing to break through into this plane of existence. I think our presence here has contributed to that.’
‘You are saying that we are somehow the cause of all of this?’
Drake shook his head. ‘I think this was going to happen anyway at some point, our presence merely hastened the event. The heretics need aid against us. They are using supernatural means to acquire it before the full force of the Imperium arrives.’
‘There’s more, isn’t there?’ Macharius said.
‘Our presence has allowed them to move openly, to cloak their evil rites in the mantle of patriotism and resistance to the invaders. The people might have risen against them if they had simply gone about their ritual murders on such a huge scale. Now it is all part of the war effort.’
‘You are saying that the locals are not all heretics then,’ said Anton.
‘They believe in false gods and false prophets but they are not the pawns of daemonic powers,’ said Drake. ‘At least, not yet.’
‘And we are stuck here in the underhive,’ said Macharius.
‘For the moment,’ said Drake.
‘We must come up with a plan,’ said Macharius. He slumped back in weariness and stared at the ceiling. He had the abstracted look of a man in deepest contemplation. His body might have been weak but his mind was racing.
‘It will need to be a very good one,’ said Drake. ‘I fear the forces we had left in the hive are totally overrun.’
I thought about that for a long moment. If we were the only loyal Imperial troops left in the city, what chance did we have? And how long would it be before the heretics started looking for Macharius even down here?
‘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.’