‘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.
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.