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.