‘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.