‘Thunder for Him, wings for Him, words for Him! Thunder for Him!’ By the time Haffith had stepped through the hatch behind her, dropped and spun, Sarell’s weapon had spoken twice and Adalbrect winced at the flat, echoless whud after each shot. Once heard, the sound of a bolt shell detonating inside a body was not forgotten.
Haffith had vanished until Adalbrect stepped through the hatch, dropped in his own turn, landed in a huff of breath and saw the Guardsman rolling in under the carrier, trying to get an angle where his rounds wouldn’t punch through his target and pierce the tyre. Almost as an afterthought, Adalbrect turned to look at the enemy.
Normal. He didn’t know what he’d expected to see, but not this. Two utterly unremarkable men, thick-built and shorn-headed, dressed in the yellow workers’ coveralls he saw in ranks in front of his shrine every day. They were splashed and stained with something darker, and their eyes were stark and wide. Scattered between them were the ruins of what had been a third until Sarell’s rounds had hit home.
He realised his own body was moving. One stride, and here came the slick metallic sound of the nanotempered adamantium blade extending from its mount in the carved aquila, triggering the movements driven deep into his muscle memories over hundreds of hours of drill. A deep low lunge put all the weight of body and weapon behind the blade as it went into one man’s throat. There was a quick red snap of las-fire as his hands convulsed on his gun and then he jerked himself off the blade and crumpled amid the stink of blood and scorched gravel. The second shuddered a moment, too paralysed to decide to shoot Haffith or Adalbrect, and then Haffith found an angle safe enough to shoot out the man’s knee. He went down soundlessly from that, only just drawing breath to cry out when Adalbrect’s blade came in again, another throat strike that silenced him for good.
Suddenly the world was full of sounds again. Shouts and footfalls from behind the carrier. The hatch of the driver’s cab swinging open behind him. His own breathing.
Boots crunched into the stony dust behind him and a hand clapped Adalbrect on the shoulder.
‘Valiant,’ said Colonel Tosk. ‘Might’ve wanted to shoot them, but valiant.’
Adalbrect turned and held up the rod. The blade was still out and the golden aquila was shiny with blood.
‘The aquila doesn’t shirk a fight, colonel.’ He blinked. ‘With respect.’
‘Respect indeed,’ Tosk answered him, his hand still heavy on Adalbrect’s shoulder. ‘Feel up to joining my man there to get the rest of them?’
‘Uh,’ said Adalbrect. He hadn’t quite thought that there would be more of them. The colonel’s hand was turning him to face Haffith, who was already tilting his head.
‘They’re scattering into the machines,’ the adjutant said. ‘Let’s get some of us on their traces.’ He stepped away and Sister Sarell fell in behind him.
‘Lots of pairs of eyes, that’s the way,’ Colonel Tosk put in. ‘Join in with the Mechanicus guards, look like you’re helping, and tell us anything you notice about these stowaways. Same comes back to you, of course.’
Adalbrect nodded, shifted his grip so that the aquila was held high like a standard, drew his pistol with his other hand and followed Haffith and Sarell out into the graveyard.
They still smelled. Adalbrect hadn’t expected that. They didn’t stink, but they smelled. He could pick up a faint metallic tang to the air from the scorched hulls, and the more cloying smell of oils. The desert-scent was flat and barely noticeable, but something thicker had clotted under it and Adalbrect realised he was smelling blood. Not the fresh stuff on the head of his sceptre, but the stale blood and vitals of the Imperial Guard and who knew how many innocent Asheki, still coating the spikes and hooks of the Heritor’s Woe Machines.
That thought hit him in the gut, and a moment later when a las-shot spat against the hull over his head and knocked the patina off the metal, he found himself thinking I’m wearing blood as he felt the powder settling on his face. He dropped into a crouch, unthinkingly leaned back against the hull behind him, and then yelled in pain.
Straight away another two shots skewered the hull, smoke puffing up from the impacts an arm’s length from him. He answered with his pistol, shooting jerkily into the gloom with no clear idea of where the shots had even come from, until Haffith snapped ‘Fire discipline!’ over his shoulder and laid down one-two-three measured stub bursts at something Adalbrect couldn’t see. He tried to drop further into a crouch but the bright and gleeful pain skewered further into his shoulder and he let out another yell. Something was holding him up. Gritting his teeth and growling over the sensation, he tried to shift, then to push himself up, and each time the barb twisted in his shoulder and held him still and wriggling like an angler’s bait. Breathing hard, he muttered a verse of Tobisch’s Fourth Psalm under his breath – ‘with a mirror to His radiant Throne I burn away the night’ – and made himself hold still. Haffith was gone into the shadows, no telling where, but the evening around them had come alive. From somewhere off to Adalbrect’s left came a string of metallic clangs and two voices cursing, one in the hoarse Ashek continental dialect and one in the rolling vowels of the Pragar lowhives. After a few moments they were drowned out by a snarling chainsword motor directly ahead, which revved and then dropped long enough for Adalbrect to hear Sarell’s voice in the middle distance and the screech-bang of bolt shells.
Adalbrect became aware that a foul, greasy adrenaline sweat was oozing into his clothes and giving a chilly edge to the breeze. He shivered and then grunted again when the movement shifted whatever it was that was hooked into his back. He tried to find a way to stand that would take the pressure off it, tried to find a direction he could move that felt like it was lifting him free, and each time he ended up standing in his half-crouch, whispering prayers that increasingly sounded like gabble to ward off panic. He was afraid of what he might do to himself if he panicked even more than he was afraid of what would happen when his legs, already cramping, couldn’t hold him in a half-squat any longer. Bracing himself for the pain, he tried shifting his weight and stretching each leg out in turn while he kept the pistol nosing at the shadows around him, but he couldn’t stop a groan from leaking out between his teeth as the barb winkled back and forth in his flesh. With the groan, the burst of shots from deeper in the graveyard and the tightening of his senses from the pain, he didn’t hear the approaching footsteps until they were next to him.
‘He’s one.’
‘I know, I can see, hurry up.’
‘Do what with him?’
‘Do’s you think, but hurry.’ Curt vowels, consonants clicked against the teeth. Ashek talk, although he’d need Sarell’s ear to identify the region. Adalbrect gulped air, closed his eyes for a moment and rummaged in his mind for the rhetorical tools he’d practised on his voyage here. He lifted up his rod of office, sweat bursting out of him again as the movement flexed the pierced muscles next to his shoulder blade.
‘See the aquila,’ he said. He’d woven the phrase into so many of his sermons that the words should be almost talismanic to anyone who’d heard him. ‘See his gaze on you now? His wings spread wide and there’s room for us all in their shade.’
One of the shapes had turned its back. A flogging, that would have meant at the Chillbreak mission square, turning the back on a raised aquila. Adalbrect could see it making small, panicky darts of its head. Then the other labourer pushed its masked face up to his own.
‘Know you for the preaching-man, so quick now. What’s your aquila want with the Kings? You understand these things.’ The man’s voice was quickening and lowering. ‘What’s the aquila want with the Kings? What’s this Headstone? What?’