The ten years since Karsk had not changed Macharius physically. He still looked like a warrior god. Some of the other generals were starting to show the signs of easy living and the spoils of victory on a galactic scale, but not him.
The juvenat treatments still worked better for him than any other man I have ever met. He quite literally did not look a day older than when I first saw him inspecting the troops before we began our assault on Irongrad. His hair was still golden, his figure was still lithe, his eyes still resembled those of some great predatory beast. But there was a hardness about his features that had not been there when I had first seen him, a grimness that had grown since his encounter with the daemon that waited at the heart of Karsk. He had seen something during that encounter that had transformed him into an even more relentless conqueror of worlds, made him more determined to reassert Imperial control over all the sectors lost to schism.
As he walked around the command centre he projected the same air of confidence that had been so striking when I first saw him. If anything, he seemed even more certain than he had back then, and he had every reason to.
For ten years the crusade had enjoyed almost uninterrupted victories. It had reclaimed hundreds of worlds, bringing them back into the Emperor’s Light and restoring the true faith to countless billions.
I doubt that I had changed much either. Since being inducted into Macharius’s personal guard I too had been given access to juvenat treatments, and they appeared to work pretty well for me. I did not feel any different from those early days on Karsk. The same was true for Anton, who stood nearby scanning all of the assembled personnel for any threats to the Lord High Commander. He still looked tall and gawky as a fisher bird in the deltas of the Great Black River. His green uniform with the lion’s head insignia of Macharius’s family hung on his body as loose as hand-me-downs on a scarecrow. The juvenat treatment had done nothing for the old scar on his forehead. It writhed like a centipede whenever he frowned or squinted.
Ivan watched everything with a cynical glitter in the human eyes that peered out of his partially metallic face. His grin revealed sharp metal teeth, razor-edged. The juvenat treatments had not worked quite as well for him, possibly because his body was riddled with mechanical parts and this interfered with the technical magic of the serums. Of course, the quality of his augmetic systems was much higher now, as befitted one who was the guardian of the highest warlord in existence. They obviously did not cause him quite so much pain as the older versions had, and he did not drink quite as much as he used to, at least not when he was around Macharius.
We had come a very long way from our homes in the slums of the hive-world of Belial.
The Undertaker watched everything with his strange, empty glance. He too was unchanged from Karsk. Of course, back then, he had been changed more than any other man I have ever known by the events we had witnessed. He had gone from being a junior officer on the crew of a Baneblade to the commander of the bodyguard of one of the most important men in human history, and it had not changed anything. Nothing ever seemed to. He watched everything with the same cold, blank expression he had ever since the days when the lieutenant’s brains had been splattered all over his uniform.
We were not the only ones present responsible for Macharius’s security, of course. There were some who had been there longer, retainers of his family, summoned from his home world to replace the casualties of Karsk and beyond. They looked somewhat like Macharius. All of them had the same golden skin and golden hair. All of them looked like smaller, inferior copies of the great man made from a slightly degraded mould. There were men drawn from a hundred different worlds and a hundred different regiments, all of whom had fought for a position in the service of the supreme warlord of mankind. There were Catachans and Hemorans and Mordians and Telusians. All of them were joined in one brotherhood by their loyalty to Macharius and his crusade.
The Lux Imperatoris rocked again as another blast came close. I offered up a prayer to the Emperor and wondered if He could hear me from His throne on distant Terra.
A scribe approached and spoke to Macharius with the mixture of precision, formality and reverence that Macharius inspired in those around him. He was doing his best to ignore the shuddering of the ship and the possibility of instant death as he brought news of another victory. The worlds of the Proteus system had surrendered, bringing another three planets, ten hive cities and nineteen billion people back into the Imperial fold. Macharius nodded an acknowledgement, turned and said something to another clerk, recommending the general in charge of the campaign for some honour or other, and walked on.
Two more uniformed clerks approached and saluted. Before they could even open their mouths to speak, Macharius rattled off orders, sending instructions to commanders who were five star systems away, instructing them on which cities to besiege, which worlds to offer alliances to and which governors to bribe. He had no difficulty dredging up any of this knowledge. It was all there in his head, all of the details of an infinitely vast campaign the like of which had probably not been fought since the Emperor walked among men. He ordered more reinforcements sent to aid them and kept on walking towards the furthest tables.
Sometimes he looked up and gazed upon the surface of the burning planet with a look of longing in his eyes. I felt a certain sympathy for him then. Macharius was a warrior, born to fight. He loved commanding this great force, but I suspect he missed the thrill of physical conflict, the feeling of danger, of taking his own life in his hands. His thoughts were drifting to those final battles taking place on the world beneath us.
I could tell that he wanted to be there. I could tell also that he had something else on his mind, something to do with his current obsession with prophecies and divinations and ancient relics that so exercised his mind when he talked with Drake. It was a topic that drew the two of them together, it seemed, although Drake has never struck me as a superstitious man. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Here on the galaxy’s furthest rim, superstitions were common. These worlds had been far from the Emperor’s Light for a hundred generations; all manner of strange, deviant and heretical faiths had sprung up, and all manner of weird beliefs had infected the populations. Some had even taken root among our own soldiers, although you would have thought they would have been immune to it. Clusters of prophecies had begun to gather around Macharius himself. That was easy enough to understand. The Lord High Commander appeared invincible, gifted with near-supernatural powers of foresight.
There were some who claimed he was blessed by the Emperor. There were others who thought he was a supernatural being himself. Reports had started to arrive of shrines being set up to Macharius on dozens of worlds and not just by those unbelievers whose temples to false prophets had been overthrown.
The ship shook. We looked at each other for a moment before we went back to pretending that nothing had happened. An officer in Naval uniform walked over.
‘A glancing strike to the void screens, Lord High Commander,’ he volunteered. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
‘I am not worried,’ Macharius replied.
‘I doubt they could possibly know this is the Imperial command vessel,’ said the officer. He clearly was more disturbed than Macharius as the possibility that they did occurred to him.
Macharius nodded and the officer pulled himself together, clicked his heels and saluted. As Macharius strode by, his mere presence seemed to reassure people. Worried frowns disappeared from the faces of scribes and star-sailors. Command must always look confident and that was something that Macharius managed supremely well.