His coordination was uncanny, his movements eye-blurringly swift. Just when you thought you knew where he was going to step and whom he was going to strike, he surprised you.
The bullet aimed at him passed through the space where you thought he was going to be. His stroke turned out to be a feint, never hitting where it was expected, but burying itself in flesh nonetheless. A heretic raised his weapon to block the blade and took a bolt pistol shot through the eyes. Another ducked to avoid the killing shot and found himself impaled on the blade instead.
Macharius fought in close combat the way he led armies: swiftly, decisively, with feints within feints and a defence that consisted of the swiftest attacks. He was a living god of war, perfect in all he did when it came to battle. At least that was the impression he was still capable of giving when he chose to enter the fray in person. Seeing him, fighting beneath the fluttering Lion banner, you could not help but feel your heart rise and know that victory was certain.
He battled his way over to us, and I noticed that Ivan was by his side, fighting away, a clumsy half-human automaton compared to Macharius, but deadly in his own way. Macharius’s gaze swept over me and he nodded encouragingly and then he went by, killing as he went, leading the massive counter-attack he seemed to have organised out of nowhere.
I noticed then that Inquisitor Drake, his permanent shadow, was with him. Pale where Macharius was golden, thin where Macharius was athletic, Drake nonetheless had his own deadliness. His lean form possessed a surprising strength and an incredible resilience. If he was not quite so quick as Macharius, he seemed just as capable of countering all attacks, possibly because he was capable of reading the thoughts of the attackers.
A halo of light played around his head as he unleashed his psychic powers in terrifying bolts of energy. For a moment, his gaze rested on me as well and I shuddered, for his eyes seemed to be boring into my soul, and I felt he could see the contamination there, the doubts I had picked up, the daemons I was guilty of seeing.
Around Drake were the hand-picked storm troopers of his personal guard, their blank, mirrored visors reflecting the grimness of the battlefield on which they fought. Seen in the shimmering armourglass of those helmets, the landscape of Loki looked even more bleak and terrifying.
In a few more heartbeats, they, too, swept by and more and more troops of Macharius’s personal guard followed, looking stern and efficient and implacable.
I wondered then if this was another of Macharius’s famous feints, whether we had been the bait in yet another trap to draw in his enemies. At that point I was past caring. I slumped down against the earthwork wall of the trench, my back against a couple of stray sandbags, and I contemplated the staring eyes of the carpet of dead bodies Macharius had left in his wake. I wondered whether any of them would spring back into motion, and whether they would come to drag me down into death and I realised, at that moment, that I did not exactly care.
I did not feel at my best when I came to. I found I was looking up at the face of Macharius. He was standing talking with the Undertaker, saying something so quietly that even as close as I was I could not make it out. Over his shoulder the skull moon leered. The lesser moon raced across the sky, a small daemonling perched on it, giggling.
I tried to pull myself upright and I noticed that Anton and Ivan and a number of the other soldiers were there along with a few high-ranking officers. They were inspecting the dead and noting the fact that some of the corpses were dissolving into puddles of greenish slime, while others, in a new twist, seemed only to be lying there, their flesh green and corrupt-looking.
Around everything small pot-bellied daemons gambolled, sticking out their tongues, farting and belching, walking along behind the officers with taloned hands behind their backs, their movements and expressions mockeries of the men they were following.
I wondered where Drake was. Why wasn’t the inquisitor sorting these little frakkers out? It was his job, after all. Part of my mind, the tiny bit that still held a faint crumb of rationality, told me these were hallucinations, that I was feverish, that I was seeing things.
I pulled myself upright, gurgled for water, and noticed that one of the officers with Macharius did not look like the others. His skin had a greenish tinge. His eyes were mocking. There was something about him that reminded me of the daemons. He seemed to be just as inhuman as them and was fumbling in his belt, pulling his pistol free. I shouted a warning and pointed.
Macharius turned and so fast were his reflexes that he was already reacting to my pathetic attempt at a warning and the sight of the attacker he must have just caught from the corner of his eye. Even as the heretic drew a bead on him he was already in motion, pulling his bolt pistol free from its holster and swivelling at the hip to snap off a shot.
It was touch and go. The laspistol shot seared Macharius’s shoulder, melting one of the lion’s head epaulettes there. Macharius’s return took the heretic in the stomach and punched an enormous hole in it, the way bolter shells do when they explode. I pulled myself upright, and snatched up a laspistol from a corpse. I shot the heretic again, but he still kept moving, animated by some spirit of destruction, or so it seemed.
Others opened fire until glittering las-beams made a net around him and through his body and still he kept on coming. A sniper rifle sounded. The officer’s head exploded. I heard Anton give a grunt of satisfaction as the would-be assassin toppled and fell. Someone shouted for a medic and men swarmed towards Macharius.
That’s another life you owe me, I thought with satisfaction, somehow managing to forget in that moment all of the times Macharius had saved mine.
Chapter Eight
I was very weak. I was seeing daemons. And I was not the only one. All around me were thousands of beds, each containing a wounded man, or a sick man, or a man who was both. Adepts of the medicae moved from bed to bed, administering potions, stabbing men with huge hypodermics, lopping off infected limbs with massive medical chainsaws.
Every time I heard the whine of the blade, the splinter of bone, I shouted for them to keep away. I did not want to lose my leg. I did not want a mechanical limb, even if there were any to be had, which there had not been for a long time.
The air smelt of purification incense and gangrene, of suppurating flesh and infected blood. The sound of coughs and screams echoed through the halls.
A medicae adept stood at the foot of my bed. He looked at me with something like horror in his eyes. For a moment, I thought he was going to pronounce sentence on me, to announce that the leg was going to have to come off.
I was almost relieved when he shook his head and turned and looked over his shoulder and said that there was nothing to be done, that they did not have the serums, that even if they did, it was touch and go. He sounded ashamed and embarrassed.
I wanted to tell him not to feel too bad, that we were an army that was running out of ammunition and food and everything else. It was no surprise to me that we did not have the medicine – we had nothing else.
When I tried to speak all I could do was make an odd gurgling noise. It sounded as if someone had injected a gallon of phlegm into my lungs. Breathing was not easy. Speech was impossible. Two faces drifted into view: one belonged to Ivan and the other belonged to Anton. They both looked very sad. I closed my eyes and fell into strange dreams.
I woke to find a daemon sitting on my chest. That was the weight that was making it so difficult for me to breathe. It looked the same as all the others, fat and pot-bellied, with scales the green of snot and the brown of excrement. It had the same maliciously gleeful eyes and when it saw I was awake it began to use my stomach as a trampoline. Its bouncing caused the contents of my innards to explode from both ends of my body.