Adalbrect was paralysed. The urgency in the voice was as palpable as the gouging in his back, but the pain was disorienting him and he couldn’t start to make the connections. Kings? Kings? Was that what the hive-lords had been called before the Archenemy had deposed them? The Missionaria Galaxia was accomplished at speed-briefing its agents, but its learning sessions weren’t geared to situations like this. What was going on?
Then the man switched his little punch-cleaver to his left hand, reached out with his right and gripped the blood-painted golden aquila as Adalbrect’s arm sagged.
‘Eh,’ he muttered, seemingly to himself. ‘Dead thing. No use.’ He was turning to his companion and never really got the chance to see that that had been the wrong thing to say.
Adalbrect swung his right arm up and jammed his hand in behind his head as though he were trying to scratch his back with the pistol barrel. Face contorted, he fired, fired again, and a third time, hearing the snap of the shots, and the gouging pain turned searing.
A moment later the barb that had held him came loose as he shot through its mounting and Adalbrect stumbled forward, half-embracing the man who’d interrogated him. Both of them shouted, Adalbrect in pain and the Asheki in angry surprise, as Adalbrect’s laspistol went off straight into the ribs of his companion. The first shot staggered him, spasming and choking with a smoking pockmark drilled into his torso, and the second and third struck him in the chest and silenced him.
Adalbrect saw stars as the other man’s forehead cracked into his own, and felt his legs start to sag. He tried to turn the movement to his advantage, gripping the enemy’s shade-shawl and pivoting, desperate to avoid falling back against the barbed hull a second time. But the shawl tore and the man kicked him hard in the belly, sending him sprawling on the packed stones with his shoulder shouting in pain.
‘We listen to our Kings, not to you,’ he heard through the pain. ‘This is the night they find their voices. Hear that, eagle-licker?’ The man was grabbing for his dead companion’s gun, barking out some syllables that Adalbrect didn’t catch. A benediction for a comrade or an appeasement to the weapon, he couldn’t tell.
And it didn’t matter, because he was rolling onto his side with his teeth bared. Another insult to the aquila, and this one would die for it. Two insults, two lives. Not enough payment to extract, but the best a mortal could do.
‘Wings for Him!’ he snarled and used the burning in his back as fuel to drive the rod forward. It caught the man in the sternum, the blade burying itself until the aquila’s heads were pushing into his skin, and he let out a groan like a bending girder and fell to his knees with the rod in front of him. As Adalbrect struggled up onto his feet the man tilted forward, grounding the rod and sinking onto it, until Adalbrect yanked it out and away with his left hand. The man continued to hunch, the back of his neck bare with the shade-shawl gone, and Adalbrect whirled the impromptu weapon up and over. His arm was strong and the head of the rod heavy, and the man’s neck parted in one stroke.
A moment later the strength dropped out of him. He went down on one knee, breath rasping and the gouge in his shoulder burning like hot cinders jammed under his skin. He worked the catch on the rod and with the blade retracted Adalbrect planted its pommel on the dirt and leaned his head against the blood-sticky gold, murmuring lines from the Militant Pilgrim’s Prayer.
‘And another struck down, and another, and let each be dust beneath that righteous tread...’
‘Here he is!’ came a voice he didn’t recognise, swimming into his head through the dark and the pain. ‘The young fellow, the bluecoat. Got him, he’s back here!’
‘What? He didn’t even move!’ That was Haffith’s voice, somewhere behind the bobbing orange lanterns that were appearing through the gaps in the dead machines. The lieutenant’s tone was bantering, only not. ‘Brother Adalbrect? That you? I wondered where you‘d run off to. Didn’t occur to me you’d just decide to hole up and... wait... no. Wait. Are you injured? Throne’s foot, yes, all right, you two! He’s injured, let’s get him moving. Brother, can you tell me where you’re hit?’
Adalbrect shook his head. His mouth was suddenly very dry, wringing his words down to a croak, and he could feel his balance going. A vision danced by him of falling forward with a great flap of flesh ripping free from his back. He clenched his fists and concentrated on not falling. Not falling. The dark hulks around him tilted and the ground seemed to float up towards him and then away again. He groaned. Not falling.
‘Agh, all right, I see what’s happened.’ Haffith was up by his side now, peering behind his shoulder in the lantern-light. ‘Steady him, get his arms, don’t let him fall. We have you, brother, stay with us. You’re in shock. Say a prayer of fortitude with me.’
They went over the words together. Haffith knew a slightly different version to Adalbrect, but they finished on the same lines, and by that time each of Adalbrect’s arms was being gripped by a burly convoy guard. His thoughts were sluggish and his head wanted to loll forward, but he finally realised what had seemed so odd about saying the prayer. His hands were empty.
‘Mhhmmm...’ he managed, then scraped his tongue along his teeth and worked his cheeks until he had enough moisture in his mouth to talk. ‘My aquila. I dropped it. Can you take it... out of the dirt?’ Haffith bent for a moment and then Adalbrect felt the familiar weight and grip in his hand. It settled him a little.
‘Don’t move too much, brother, and don’t get any closer to that bastard’s hull again. You can see there’s plenty more of those shitsump barbs left on it. I’m not game to try and– wait. Sister! Sister!’ At the edge of the lantern-light there came a pale glimmer of tunic and a glint of gold: Sister Sarell was coming back to them.
‘The preacher’s wounded. I’d like one of us to stay with him until we get an all-clear.’
‘Do you think they’ll double back?’ Sarell asked.
‘Who knows? At this point we barely know what they’re even doing. Some of them hid on the delegation convoy and helped a second lot break in behind them. No telling what they want.’
‘But I’m betting it’s not to shake the magos’s hand when he arrives,’ Adalbrect managed to gasp out. Breathing deeply hurt his shoulder, but breathing shallowly made him dizzy.
‘He’ll have already had instructions to delay his landing,’ said Haffith. ‘He’d better have.’ He stood for a moment longer, then stared up at the sky where the speck of the Headstone hung, high enough to still catch some yellow-red daylight. Haffith looked at it a moment, cursed to himself and turned to Sarell.
‘Change of plans, sister and brother. Master Adalbrect, can you walk?’
There had never been any question but that Kovind would carry the main key into the graveyard. He had fretted a little about the other two, knowing how short time would be once they were under way and that not even Psinter would be able to get to two Kings in time. So Jopell was luckier than he knew that he’d hit on the plan to infiltrate the Adeptus convoy: that had earned him the third key and the leadership of the third crew. Nobody else had even remotely the seniority in the Traditions, or even in the worldly hierarchy of the manories. The three of them it was.
He carried the key the way the rakes of the outer manory walks used to carry their knives: gripped loosely in his left hand, the length of it turned back against his arm under his sleeve, the metal cool against his skin. His autopistol was in his other hand and he kept it up and ready as they ran. It was further into nightfall than he had anticipated and as it had darkened he’d been afraid that it would be harder to keep direction through the maze of wrecked machines without the reassuring might of the Kings against the skyline to urge him on. But now he felt unstoppable, as though he were running on a high-speed pedway back in the High Hive, carried along unerringly. The higher mysteries were not for Kovind Shek. He was steeped in Asheki culture, the Customs of knowledge, the Traditions ordering its holders, the ancient Practices of engineering that the glorious Heritor had shown them how to bring to majestic and terrible perfection. But on a night like this he could almost feel the most sublime mysteries that the Heritor’s preachers had sung and danced and screamed about, some power that was carrying him through the night on sombre wings.