And if that is so, she thought, then we have lost already. If that is so, then our survival means nothing.
She didn’t notice when the finger tensed, sending the bolt directly into her body. Death was almost instant – a brief punch of bone breaking on impact before the explosive shell detonated within her heart.
Khadi’s lifeless corpse fell to the ground with a splash. The monster stood over her for a long time. The white hand device on its shoulder guard shone in sharp relief in the lumen beams of its brother warriors.
‘More life-signs, further down,’ came Brother Rydek’s voice over the comm.
Khadi’s killer – Brother-Sergeant Naim Morvox of Clave Arx, Clan Raukaan of the Iron Hands – nodded curtly before turning and moving back into the corridor. From behind him, the sound of crunching boots and synthetic armour-hum echoed in the narrow passages.
‘Advance,’ said Morvox, and stalked back out into the darkness.
About The Author
Chris Wraight is a writer of fantasy and science fiction, whose first novel was published in 2008. Since then, he’s published books set in the Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer 40,000 and Stargate: Atlantis universes. He doesn’t own a cat, dog, or augmented hamster (which technically disqualifies him from writing for Black Library), but would quite like to own a tortoise one day. He’s based in a leafy bit of south-west England, and when not struggling to meet deadlines enjoys running through scenic parts of it.
Read more about his upcoming projects at www.chriswraight.wordpress.com
An extract from Angel of Fire by William King
On sale July 2012
Drums sounded. Bugles blared. We lined up outside our tanks, dressed in our parade best. The heat made us sweat but we stood still as statues. We’d been standing that way for hours. We’d keep standing that way for as long as it took. It was a general inspection, and Lord High Commander Macharius himself was conducting it.
I swallowed. The ash in the air was making the back of my throat dry and tickly. I kept my mind deliberately blank for as long as I could and when I could not do that any more I let my thoughts wander where they would to memories of Belial and Charybdis and Excalibur and Patrocles. The back of my right arm itched but I could not scratch it. The combat shotgun it was my special privilege as a driver to carry felt heavy against my shoulder. I fought down the urge to fidget. That just made things worse.
Suddenly he was there, Macharius, flanked by his body-guards and the colonel, the ranking commissar and the other high muckety-mucks and an orderly who carried his personal lion’s head banner. He walked slowly along the line, looking the men in the eye, stopping for a word or two with some veteran, usually one decorated for valour or service. Within a couple of minutes he was close enough for me to see clearly.
Macharius was exactly what you expected an Imperial hero to look like. He was a big man, broad-shouldered, leonine. His hair was golden, his eyes were golden, his skin was golden. He moved with an easy grace. His uniform fitted him perfectly. Even then he was past what would have been middle age for a normal citizen but the juvenat treatments had taken perfectly. He looked no older than me. Hell, he looked younger and a lot fitter. He looked like you imagine the Emperor did when he walked amongst men; more than human.
When he spoke, he sounded the part as well. His voice was deep and perfectly modulated. There was an edge to it. It was the sort of voice you would expect a great predatory cat to have. His gaze settled on me as he passed. At first it was chilling. There was something cold about those golden eyes, something inhuman, but when he smiled, his face lit up and he seemed pleasant enough.
Beside him were others almost as intimidating, regimental officers, members of the High Command and others including Old Walrus Face, the colonel of the Seventh. One man in particular stood out. He radiated an air of cold authority noticeable even in the shadow of Macharius’s dominating presence. He was a tall man with the long, pale, ascetic face of a priest. He wore heavy robes and a long cloak with the cowl down. This was Drake, as I was later to learn and wish I had not. Even then I sensed he was not a man whose eye you wanted to catch. My instincts about such things have always been good.
Surrounding the party were others: half-man, half-machine, members of the Adeptus Mechanicus. They circled around constantly. One or two of them carried huge devices that might have been weapons. They had long copper-covered barrels and strange lenses glittered at their extremities. Similar things were mounted on huge tracked vehicles on the edge of the parade area. They swivelled everywhere, tracking Macharius and his group. Like every Guardsman there, I wondered what they were for.
Macharius seemed well pleased. I imagine it flattered his ego to be the centre of attention for tens of thousands of soldiers. I did not, at the time, know the half of it.
Macharius swept past us and at first it seemed the inspection was over, but no signal to disperse was given. Instead, he went over and stood in the shadow of one of the Baneblades, Number Ten if the truth be told. He paused for a moment and then with the lithe agility of a great cat he scrambled up the Indomitable’s side. He stood poised above the track-guards studying the assembled army, one hand shading his eyes. Beneath him the tech-priests focused their strange weapons on him, like assassins getting their target in their sights. Macharius just stood, unworried. He clearly knew what was happening. As ever, his certainty communicated itself to the watching troops.
Beneath him, the chief of the tech-priests made a symbolic gesture. The smell of ozone and technical incense filled the air and suddenly, in the air above us was the face and form of Macharius, magnified a dozen times, looking down on us like that of the Emperor himself as you have seen him on many a painted ikon. The huge handsome visage considered us all for a moment and then Macharius spoke, his voice rippling out over the assembled army like that of a primarch during the Great Crusade. I did not know it then but his speech was being relayed out across the system even as he spoke, to every orbiting ship, to every soldier in the vast army sweeping through the skies of the worlds of the Karsk system, to every soldier in the force descending onto the soil of Karsk IV, and every word was being recorded for posterity.
‘Soldiers of the Emperor,’ he said. His thunderous amplified voice was rasping and calm and filled with a quiet authority that commanded attention and belief. There was a trace of the accent of the backwater world that had birthed him, a rough metallic burr that marked his speech and which only vanished when he was talking to the very highest notables. ‘We stand on the brink of a mighty war.
‘Soon you will face the first battle of many against those who would defy the Emperor’s will and keep these human worlds buried in the foetid darkness of heresy and unbelief.
‘For their own selfish reasons they seek to withhold from their fellow man the Blessings of the Emperor’s Word and the goodness of His holy rule. We are here to save our fellows from this wickedness and restore order and light to these long-abandoned worlds.’
He paused for a moment as if overwhelmed by the scale of the evil he was contemplating. Not coincidentally, the pause gave his audience a moment to reflect on what he had said.
It was not the words themselves that convinced you. It was the tone in which he said them. When you heard Macharius speak you knew that he believed utterly in what he was saying, and that you should too. There was something about his blazing conviction that forced you to push aside any doubts and reassess your own thoughts on the matter.
The man had an immense presence, an enormous authority, an aura that enveloped him and everything he touched and transformed if not the words themselves then your perception of those words. All around me, hardened soldiers strained to hear what he had to say, listened as if their hope of salvation depended on it. More than any priest, more than any commissar, Macharius made you believe, in him if nothing else.
‘Today we take the first step towards our greater goal. It is an
important step. If we falter here, we will fail. If we do not harden our resolve, foreswear false mercy and carry ourselves with the firmness of purpose this great task deserves, we will condemn billions of our fellow humans to lives of squalid darkness and eternities of torment in the toils of the daemons who feast on the souls of the damned. Do not let your finger rest on the trigger of your weapon. Sparing our enemies merely extends their lives for a pitiful eye-blink in the Emperor’s sight and condemns their souls for all eternity. Show mercy to the heretic and you do the work of daemons yourself.’
We’ve all heard similar sermons preached before battles and on High Holy Days and I am damned if I can tell you what it was about Macharius that made his words different. Perhaps his lack of doubt communicated itself, but that could not be all. Many commissars I have known were every bit his equal in faith. No – it was something about the man. When Macharius spoke you could have been listening to the Emperor speaking to you from the depth of his Sacred Throne. I know it sounds like heresy, but that is what it felt like. Something had touched Macharius; maybe the light of the Emperor, maybe something else.
And then, in a moment, the whole mood of the thing changed. Macharius went from being a priest preaching a sermon to an officer talking to his men, telling them the plan, letting them know what they needed to know.
‘The way forwards is harsh. It carries us through lava seas and across great chasms where the jaws of the earth could swallow a Titan whole. It passes through sandstorms so powerful they can strip a man to the bloody bone in seconds. It takes us through clouds of poison so deadly that one breath is fatal.’
It should have sounded off-putting but he made it sound as if these were the sort of challenges that true men should expect to face and which it was their glory to overcome. His slight grim smile told you that he knew you, you personally, could overcome them. And he was letting us know that we were all in this together.
‘This is all to the good.’ He paused and smiled and as he had expected the whole army laughed at the joke, feeble as it was. Then his expression was grim again. ‘I am serious. It is all to the good. While we are doing this, the second part of our force will be assaulting Hive Irongrad from the south, along the easy route, the way they expect us to come. They will not expect a massive armoured assault from the north-west, and we shall hit them where we know the defences are weakest. We will have the pyrite refineries and the weapon factorums. We shall bring millions of lost souls into the Emperor’s Light.’
He paused again, to give what he had said time to sink in. We knew now where we were going, a hive city. He had even told us why.
If you have never had any experience of being a soldier in the Imperial Guard, you will probably not realise how unusual it was for a ranking general like Macharius to say things like this to an assembled army. He was telling us the plan – personally. He was letting us know that there was one and that it was a good one, that he and his officers knew what they were doing, and that he personally was taking the time to communicate the details to you so that you understood your place in it, and you shared his faith in its efficacy.
He had the trick of pitching his voice and casting his eye over the crowd in such a way that you felt he was talking directly to you. You felt as though you mattered. As if you had a central role to play in this great scheme. Everyone present was as important as Macharius himself.
He spoke on, outlining the plan in broad strokes and making it clear where each major battlegroup was to move and strike. By the end of it, every man present must have felt as if they had as clear an idea of what was going to happen as Macharius himself and all of them shared his certainty of success.
When he vaulted down from the side of the Baneblade, you could probably have heard the cheers in Irongrad, hundreds of leagues away.
That was my first exposure to the legendary charisma of Macharius. It was not to be my last.
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Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK
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