by Dan Abnett
The basilica was all of a commotion. I wasn’t yet down the high altar processional, and the place was filling with armed wardens. Deafening instructions continued to boom, almost unintelligibly, from the speakers above, and echo around the vast dome. I had the vast floor space on my side, enabling me to dodge and tack and avoid, but it was not enough of an advantage.
Directly, fate provided me with another. Something ruptured deep below the ground, and made the whole of the basilica tremble. The floor shook. There was a deep, subterranean thump. The vast stained-glass windows shook, the forests of organ pipes shivered and rattled, and many small items such as hymnals, votive medals and psalters rained down from the sills of gallery boxes or fell from the reading ledges of pews. Loose pages fluttered down like dead leaves. A cry, the cry of a great mass of people lurching from alarm to open fear, rose like a pall of smoke into the space of the dome. The pilgrim crowd, still many thousands strong, in the body of the church, began to flee with increased haste and decreased care. Panic swept through the place, as fast and fierce as fire across dry scrub.
Without delay, true fire followed. A bright gout of it, furious as the flames of ignited promethium, bellied up out of the recessional under the high thrones. The force of this outwash knocked those nearby down, and provoked others into frantic flight. Some of them ran with clothing or vestments ablaze. The flames belched out again, igniting fine draperies and the embroidered hangings that dressed the walls and doorways under the high thrones. Pennants caught, and flourished sparks of burning fabric flew into the air. Some wooden seating and prayer stalls also caught fire and began to burn.
More flames, from some underground source, blew up into the open in the main circuit of the church, forced out of ventilation grilles and undercrofts by a considerable pressure. A long row of banners, ancient standards that had been carried by the finest regiments of the Sancour Guard during the war, caught alight and torched off in a choking mass of orange flames and black smoke.
I smelled psychomagic again. I saw traceries of warp-fire dart around the upper reaches of the great dome like lightning, sizzling around metal handrails and flagpost caps. It made the micro-atmosphere of the immense dome turn sour and blacken like the sky on a day when autumn cedes into winter. Though I could not see his thought-form, I knew – I felt – that Grael Magent had come up from below. He had fought free of the brass reading room and the predations of the Traitor Marines ranged against him, and he had torn up from the underworld into the daylight, just as the progenitor of the Orphaeus myth had first done.
The light changed in the huge building’s spacious interior. It curdled and darkened, not by the ministry of mist, or smoke, or dust, but by the staining of the air. Though daylight glowed beyond the huge windows of the dome clearly enough, night fell inside the building. Darkness encircled us, thick and redolent of fire, and of cinders and psykana devilment. Pure panic gripped the fleeing congregation.
I looked up. Winds that should not exist within a building tugged at my robes. In the darkness of the dome’s inverted cup, I saw stars glimmering in a sky that I should not have been able to see, a sky that could not be.
The wardens, the benign expressions of their saintly masks making them look like simpletons in the face of the tumult, were no longer quite so intent upon pursuing me. I fled down the steps and out of the processional onto the main floor of the basilica.
Prayer drones buzzed around, lost and confused, holding up placard screens that no one wanted to read. The broad space was littered with objects dropped by the congregation in its haste to leave: prayer scrolls, data-slates, buttons, candles, charms, flowers, little volumes of praise, and orders of service. Someone had lost a shoe. I also saw an overturned begging bowl and a walking cane, suggesting that some invalid seeking charity at the altar rail had miraculously found vitality restored to his limbs by the efficacy of fear and alarm.
I reached the great banks of pews. They were all but empty, aside from more discarded objects. My intention was to head towards the street doors to the rear of the main space. They were choked with crowds trying to press out, but I reasoned that by the time I reached them, they would have cleared.
By the end of one of the pews, I saw a baby carriage. It was a fine thing, with a black lacquered body, wire wheels and a canvas sun-hood. In their panic to leave, someone had abandoned their child. I could hear it wailing in the perambulator. I faltered. Could I bring myself to leave it there, alone and helpless? The sight of an abandoned infant stirred inside me feelings that I had not realised were so deeply meshed into my heart.
I kept walking, briskly, determined that I could barely ensure my own fate, let alone be entrusted with the destiny of an innocent child, but the wailing voice had its hooks in me. I stopped, and turned back.
It was a mistake.
The baby carriage was empty. The wailing was coming from elsewhere, from high above. I listened carefully: I could hear it wasn’t a baby at all.
I had turned back. I had wasted time I did not have.
One of Blackwards’s men was prowling towards me. It was one of the professional bodyguards Balthus Blackwards had retained. The man had seen me and was closing. I could only presume that when the commotion had descended, Blackwards had despatched his people to recover the one asset he had: me.
He drew aside his black coat and I caught a flash of the silver body-mail he wore over his blue bodyglove. He drew a segrule from a scabbard under his left arm. It was a fine blade, not much longer than my cutro, but single-edged and with a slight curve-and-hook to it. The segrule, a smaller variant of the salinter, was an assassin’s weapon. There was a curved silver knuckle-guard around the grip.
Did he want me dead, I wondered? Surely not. He was under precise instruction from Balthus Blackwards, and Blackwards saw me as property, a commodity. He would have ordered me to be recovered alive.
I wondered, on the other hand, how far the bodyguard might go to prevent me escaping: a slashed hamstring or heel? The removal of a limb?
The bodyguard advanced on me, gathering speed, his sword turned in a hold called the ready rest, which carried it out and to the side. I made ready to block with both weapons. I was sure from the very start that the man outmatched me in both technique and practice.
He came in close, tempting me to make the first blow. I kept backing away. Finally, when he was all but upon me, I flexed and jabbed at him with my cutro.
He darted back with astonishing speed, and was in at me again before I realised it. I jabbed again, and swung the pole to follow it. He danced away from both, displaying more of that unnatural agility. Then he dodged in again.
I swung again, and jabbed, but he avoided both strikes. His segrule was still at ready rest. He had not even committed with his weapon. He was playing with me. He was so confident, he was leading with his body, unguarded. I thought of the silver-wire traceries in the flesh of his face and throat, and imagined the neural acceleration that such an inlay represented. He was fast because he was ingeniously augmented. He was confident because he was inhumanly fast.
He circled me, forcing me around. I now had my back to the altar. Again, he tilted at me, just a shoulder lead to alter his balance and make me react.
So I reacted. I swung the pole, and made it clumsy and graceless. Then I jabbed with the cutro as a follow-up, as I had done each time before. But as he dipped back out of my reach, I pressed in with surprising conviction instead of breaking, and struck again with the pole, this time making a much cleaner and finer job of it. The pole skimmed his left arm, not close enough to harm him, but close enough to make him reconsider the game he was playing. Immediately, he found himself obliged to step outside of the clean thrust I made with my cutro.
Suddenly, he was no longer amused by it all. I saw his grip stiffen. I didn’t wait. I ploughed at him again, a three-form attack: a crosswise strike with the pole, a stab with the blade, then a blow-and-parry with the pole. His action, which had begun, I’m sure, as a sleek dri
ve with the segrule that was supposed to wound me and clip my wings with one stroke, just to emphasise his mastery of sword combat, became a hasty rattle of parries as he fended me off. His segrule crackled against my pole, then drew flint-spark flashes off my cutro.
He became annoyed. He switched hands – another sure sign of a swordsman showing off – and rained three blows at me. I blocked the first two with sword and pole, and then out-stepped the third. He was no longer following a pattern of bout-and-circle. There would be no rest or consideration between each exchange. He struck four more times, stepping into me to part my defence. I parried the first with my cutro, dodged the second, parried again to throw back the third, then lurched back inelegantly to avoid the fourth. I almost out-placed myself. Mentor Saur always taught us that sword fights were won or lost on footwork, and it was too easy to mis-step when reacting instinctively. My backwards lurch had saved me from one blow, but it had left my feet inadequately placed to turn away from the follow-up. Mentor Saur had forever reminded us that swordplay was like regicide. One had to read the moves ahead, beyond the current action. It was not an adversary’s current attack that would kill us, but our inability to respond to his next.
My feet would not move me far enough. I had bunched my placing and ended with my weight on the wrong leg. As the bodyguard slipped the segrule in to take advantage of this mistake, I had no choice. I switched my left guard up, and bashed his blade away with the force pole.
It saved me, but I was obliged to sacrifice the pole. To effect the block, I had been forced to take a more perilous grip on the pole, and the parry had torn it from my hand.
It clattered, fizzling, onto the flagstones.
Immediately, I switched to a side-on guard, leading with my cutro. Reduced to one weapon, I was undeniably outclassed.
He saw it and made a stamping attack, which I defended. He crossed, and then tore the sleeve off my robe with a pass, although I evaded hard enough to avoid actual harm. I stepped to the rear, my empty hand in the small of my back, my spine arched backwards to clear his scything blade. I immediately lunged at him, hoping to exploit the exposure of his extension, but he was too quick. His boosted nerves lit up and turned him in an impossible pirouette, a rotation that took him out of my cutro’s path and back on the attack. I blocked, blocked again, parried, and then found myself rammed into the end of one of the pews.
Without warning, he broke off. I blinked, trying to work out where he had gone. The bodyguard was suddenly fighting someone else, a man who had attacked from nowhere as we had been duelling, and whose appearance had forced the bodyguard to break off and defend himself.
I did not know who this new man was. I had never seen him before. I was grateful for the respite from harm, but I was beginning to find it most unnerving that strangers kept interceding on my behalf.
The man was big and very well muscled. He wore a heavy brown bodyglove. His head was shaved bald except for a grizzled goatee. There were old scars on his scalp and face, echoes of a life spent at war. His expression was curiously dead-eyed. He was not driven by anything, I felt, other than a need to win his fight. It was the weariness of the old warrior, hardened to all blood and effort, recognising that he must fight again in order to prevail. There was no hunger in it, no glee of battle, no satisfaction in skill at arms. Driving this bodyguard from me was a task, a necessity, and he was supremely skilled at it.
He lacked the bodyguard’s speed. His neural pathways were not enhanced in any way. What he had was a true, practical brilliance with the blade, a natural talent that had been honed over the period of a long lifetime in actual combat rather than a swordmaster’s drill hall.
He was wielding a hanger with a heavy, straight blade, and carried a main gauche to drive off the bodyguard’s much more rapid counter-strikes.
I began to back away. It was an opportunity to run.
The newcomer saw me edging aside.
‘Don’t you dare!’ he yelled at me, grunting with the effort of a blow traded. ‘Take a seat. Wait. Don’t go anywhere.’
I was not especially disposed to obey this order. In issuing it, he had taken his eye off the bodyguard. Blackwards’s man ripped in, and put a cut across his opponent’s ribs, to the left. Blood welled out of the slashed bodyglove. If he hadn’t turned, the segrule would have impaled him through the heart.
This annoyed my protector enormously. He called the bodyguard some words that I would choose not to repeat in this record. I think, in that moment, the bodyguard realised that he had made the most awful mistake in enraging the newcomer. He had woken something up, something best left slumbering. He had thrown pain into the mix, and pain was a spur. The world-weary old veteran, dogged and determined, was suddenly spiked out of his slow-burn professionalism by the goad of a wound. He lost his composure, and became aggravated by the nimble, enhanced killer dancing around him.
He rammed the main gauche into the bodyguard’s chest, right under the sternum, and lifted him off the ground on it, like a fish on a hook. The bodyguard opened and closed his mouth rapidly, in utter surprise. His eyes widened. He dropped his sword. Still holding his victim off the ground on his knife, the newcomer severed his neck with a single cross-blow of his hanger.
Then he let the body fall off his knife. Blood jetted from the stump and gurgled from the gut wound, quickly forming an almighty pond on the floor around my protector’s feet. The bodyguard’s head lay on one cheek a surprising distance away in a small pool of its own.
My protector looked at me.
‘You need to come with me, young lady,’ he said.
‘Do I now?’ I replied.
‘Throne,’ he murmured. ‘When you pull that face, that twitch of the lip, you’re just like her.’
‘Who are you?’ I asked.
‘My name’s…’ he stopped. ‘What does it matter what my name is? You’re to come with me.’
‘You’ve saved me from that sell-sword, for which I am grateful,’ I replied, ‘but I hardly see the incentive to do as you say. You just proved yourself quite ready to behead a person.’
‘For Throne’s sake,’ he snapped, dabbing at the gash in his side. ‘Shut up and come with me.’
‘I have no idea who you are,’ I said.
‘I’m Nayl,’ he said. ‘Nayl. I’m a friend to you right now, if you stop disobliging me, that is.’
‘I have other friends, Mr Nayl,’ I said.
‘Not here you don’t,’ he said. What was that accent? Thuva? Loki?
‘I have other enemies too,’ I added.
‘Not here you–’ he began to say, then saw the look in my eyes. He sighed, cursed most terribly again, and turned. Two of the other bodyguards had appeared, the female and another of the males, and they were coming right for him, blades drawn.
‘Dammit all!’ cried the man called Nayl, and engaged them both. He was suddenly very occupied indeed. I wondered if I should help him.
‘Beta!’ a voice rang out. I turned, and saw Lightburn at the back of the pews. He gestured to me to join him urgently. I felt, on balance, that I had a great deal more reason to trust Lightburn than I did the mysterious Mr Nayl. I ran towards the Curst, and heard Nayl call out in fury as he realised I was leaving him to fight it out with Blackwards’s men.
Lightburn grabbed me by the arm, and we ran towards the back of the basilica. Blackness filled the dome, and the stars that peeked out of it were not stars I recognised, or ever wanted to visit. They were discoloured and bloodshot, as if from a diseased stretch of space somewhere. The smell of psychomagic was still strong.
‘Where’s Judika?’ I asked.
‘Somewhere,’ he answered.
‘That answer is not enough, Curst!’ I said.
‘He was above, in the upper walks,’ Lightburn replied, looking this way and that for signs of pursuit, ‘but I have lost track of him. He said he was providing a diversion.’
‘This is not his diversion,’ I snapped.
‘Indeed, I had not taken it to
be so,’ he agreed. He regarded the monstrous turmoil of the space above us with revulsion. ‘I have not seen him, not since we last parted company,’ he continued. ‘I do not know what has become of him in this madness.’
He looked at me.
‘What has happened here?’ he asked me plainly. ‘What have you seen? What was done?’
‘I cannot say,’ I replied. ‘Not now. Perhaps when we have got clear of here, and I have had time to reflect upon all that I have seen, and make sense of it.’
I returned his gaze. There was a look in his hooded, anxious eyes that made me feel he was the only person in the whole of the Emperor’s Imperium who actually cared for me for myself rather than as some trinket or desired commodity.
‘I have seen things today, Renner,’ I said, with an emotion that surprised me. I had a break in my voice. ‘I have seen such things as I never thought to see, and other things that no person should comfortably look upon. I have unsettled myself.’
‘I think you are in shock,’ he ventured.
‘I suppose I probably am,’ I replied. ‘Now, tell me please, did you and Jude concoct any sort of plan for this escape or is it entirely an improvisation?’
‘There is a plan,’ he said. ‘Of sorts,’ he added with less confidence. ‘Your friend Judika hatched it, but not without the help of that wastrel Shadrake. For such a disagreeable man, he has his talents.’
‘Did Judika go to the church elders, as I told you?’ I asked.
‘I have not seen him!’ he repeated. ‘I have not seen him to pass on your suggestion.’
He was right. He had told me this already. My mind was in a fuddled state of disarray.
‘We will go to the west,’ he said, grasping my hand and running with me along a golden colonnade under one of the grand, banked choir theatres. ‘There are two exits to the street where the crowds may be lighter, and, if not, a side passage behind the crypt of Saint Eilona.’
