by Dan Abnett
Gaunt smiled. The Emperor will always provide.
'So he didn't die?' mused Corbec, sat on his bunk in the troop bay. Bragg shook his head and swigged from the bottle of sacra. 'Don't think nothing's gonna kill old Gaunt. He said he was gonna get us all out, and he did. Even Obel and Brennan.'
Corbec thought about this. 'Actually,' he said finally, 'I meant Rawne.'
They both looked across the quiet bay to where Rawne and Feygor sat in quiet conversation.
'Oh, him. No, worse luck.' Bragg passed the bottle back to Corbec. 'So, I hear you had some fun of your own?'
A forward post, looking out into the water-choked thickness of the Monthax jungles. The flies were thick out here, like sparkling dust in the air. Amphibians gurgled and chugged in the mudbanks.
The sappers had raised the spit-post out beyond the broad levees of the main embankment, one of six that allowed the Tanith snipers greater reach into the front line. They were long, zagged and lined with frag-sacking and a double layer of overlapped flak-boards.
Gaunt edged along the spit, keeping low, passing the sentries at the heavy-bolter post at the halfway point. The mud, unmoving and stagnant in the dug-away bed, stank like liquescent death. The sagging cable of a land-line voxcaster ran down the length of the sacking, held above the water by iron loop-pins. Gaunt knew it ended at a vox-set at the sniper post. In the event of attack, he would want the earliest warning from his keen-eyed forwards, and one that could be conveyed by good old, reliable, un-scrambleable cable.
Larkin was his usual edgy self. At the loop hole at the end of the spit-post, he was sat on a nest of sacking, meticulously polishing his weapon.
A compulsive, Gaunt thought. The commissar stepped up to him. Larkin looked around, tense. 'You always look like you're afraid of me,' Gaunt said. 'Oh no, sir. Not you, sir.'
'I'd hate to think so. I count on men like you, Larkin. Men with particular skills.'
'I'm gratified, commissar.'
Larkin's weapon was sparkling, yet still the man worked the cloth to it. 'Carry on,' said Gaunt. But for how much longer, he wondered?
FIVE
THE ANGEL OF BUCEPHALON
Larkin thought about death. He thought he might well have begged for it long ago, had he not been so scared of it. He had never figured out, though he had spent whole nights wondering it, whether he was more afraid of death itself or the fear of death. Worse, there had been so many times when he had expected to find out. So many moments caught in Death's frosty gaze, snapped at by Death's steel incisors. The question had been nearly answered so many times.
Now perhaps, he would find out. Here. Death, or the fear of death.
If the Angel knew, she was saying nothing. Her stern face was turned down, demure, eyes closed as if sleeping, praying hands clasped at her breast.
Outside, below them, the war to take Bucephalon raged. The stained glass in the huge lancet window, what remained of it, shook and twinkled with reflections of tracer sprays, salvos of blazing rockets, bright air-bursts.
Larkin sat back against the cold stone pillar and rubbed a dirty hand around his lean jaw. His breathing was slowing now at last, his pulse dropping, the anxiety attack that had seen him wailing and gasping five minutes ago was passing like a cyclone. Or maybe he was just in the eye of that storm.
The ground shook. He felt it through the pillar. His pulse leapt for a moment. He forced himself to breathe deeply through his mouth, slow, deep inhalations of the sort he used to steady himself before taking a shot.
You were telling me how you came to be here.'
Larkin looked round at the Angel. Though her head was still angled down, now she was gazing at him, smiling grimly. Larkin licked his lips and gestured idly around with one dirt-caked hand.
'War. Fighting. Fate.'
'I meant specifically,' said the Angel.
'Orders. The will of the Emperor.'
The Angel seemed to shrug her robed shoulders slightly. 'You are very defensive. You hide yourself and the truth behind words.'
Larkin blinked. For a moment, sickle-shaped moons of bright white light and fuzzy oblongs of red blackness lurched across his vision. A tiny moment of nausea. He knew the signs. He'd known them since childhood. The visual disturbances, the nausea, the taste of tin in his mouth. Then, the anxiety, the tunnel vision. After that, if he was lucky, a white hot migraine pain that would burst inside his skull and leave him dazed and helpless for hours. If he was unlucky: fits, spasms, blackouts and an awakening hours later, bruised and bloodied from the thrashing seizures; empty, miserable, destroyed inside.
'What's the matter?' asked the Angel.
Larkin tapped his forehead gently with his index finger. 'I'm… not right. Never have been, not in all my life. The fits used to scare my mother, but not half as much as they did me. They come on me from time to time.'
'Times like now? Under pressure? In the presence of danger?'
'That doesn't help. But it's just another trigger. You know what a ploin is?'
'No.'
'Round fruit. Soft, green-skinned, juicy. Lots of black pips in pink flesh. They used to grow in my uncle's orchard on Tanith. Divine things, but even the smell of them would trigger an attack.'
'Is there no medicine you can take?'
'I had tablets. But I forget to take them.' He took a little wooden pill-box from his jacket, opened the lid and showed her it was empty. 'Or I forget when I run out.'
'What do they call you?' asked the Angel.
They call me Mad Larkin.'
That is cruel.'
'But true. I'm not right in my mind. Mad.'
'Why do you think you are mad?'
'I'm talking to a statue of the Imperium, aren't I?'
She laughed and smoothed the folds of the white robes over her kneeling legs. There was a low and perfect radiance to her. Larkin blinked and saw glowing moons and oblongs in afterimage again.
Outside, a hail of gunfire lit the evening and a ripple of explosions crackled the air. Larkin got to his feet and crossed to the nearest window. He looked out through interlocking pieces of coloured glass at the city below. Steepled, tall, rising within a curtain of walls eighty metres high, the capital city-state of Bucephalon clung to the ridge of the mountains. Smoke obscured the sky, las-fire filled the air like bright sleet. Two or more kilometres away, he saw the pair of enormous storming ramps that the sappers of the Imperial Guard had raised against the walls. Huge embankments of piled earth and concrete rubble almost a kilometre long, rising high and broad enough to deliver armoured vehicles to the top of the wall. Heavy fighting within blooms of flame lit the ramps.
Below, nearer, the men on the ground looked like insect dots. Thousands, churning in trenches, spilling out across the chewed and cratered mess of the battlefront to assault the forbidding walls.
Larkin's vantage point was high and good. This shelled, ruined fortress was part of a stone complex which straddled and guarded the main aqueduct into the city, a huge structure that had defied the most earnest attempts of the enemy to fell with mines. Though heavily defended, it had seemed to Commissar Gaunt a good way in for a stealth team. Not the first time the commissar had been wrong.
Gaunt had told them that, before the clutch of Chaos fell upon it, the city-state had been ruled by thirty-two noble families, the descendants of merchant dynasties that had established the settlement. Their brilliant banners, the heraldic displays of thirty-two royal houses, were displayed on the walls, tatters of rich cloth draped from massive timber awnings. Those mighty awnings were now additionally decorated with the crucified bodies of the leaders of those noble families.
It had been Nokad's first act. Nokad the Blighted, Nokad the Smiling, the charismatic cult leader whose malign forces had risen to conquer Bucephalon from within, and win one of the most honourable of the Sabbat Worlds. In his great liberation address at the start of the crusade, Warmaster Slaydo himself had listed proud Bucephalon as one of the worlds he was most eager t
o save.
Shells burst outside the windows and Larkin ducked back into cover. Glass pattered and tinkled onto the stone floor. The flashes behind his eyes were getting worse and he could taste the tang of metal in his saliva. There was a moaning, too, a dull aching groan in his inner ear. That was a particularly bad sign. He had only got that a time or two before, just prior to the very worst madnesses. His vision was not entirely stable. Everything in the chapel around him seemed elongated and stretched, like in the mirror tent at the Attica carnival. In places his vision belled and warped, objects shimmering in and out of focus, drifting near and then away again.
He shuddered, deep in his bones.
The Angel was lighting tapers at the wrought iron offertory. Her movements were slow and lovely, pure grace.
She asked, 'Why don't you believe in angels?'
'Oh, I do.' Larkin sighed. 'Not just now, before. A friend of mine, Cluggan, a sergeant, he was a bit of a military historian. He said that at the Battle of Sarolo, angels appeared over the lines just before dawn and inspired the Imperial forces to victory.'
'Were they visions, do you think? Mass hallucinations brought on by fatigue and fear?'
'Who am I to say?' Larkin replied, as the Angel finished her taper-lighting and blew the long flame-reed out. 'I'm mad. Visions and phantoms appear to me on a daily basis, most of them conjured by the malfunctions of my mind. I'm not in a position to say what is real and what is not.'
'Your opinion is no less valid than any other. Did they see angels at Sarolo?'
'I…'
'Say what you think.'
'I think so.'
'And what were those angels?'
'Manifestations of the Emperor's will, come to vitalise his loyal forces.'
'Is that what you think?'
'It's what I'd like to think.'
'And the alternative?'
'Hnh! Group madness! The meddling of psykers! Lies constructed by relieved men after the fact! What you said… mass hallucinations.'
'And if it was any or all of those things, does that make it any less important? Whatever they saw or thought they saw, it inspired them to victory at Sarolo. If an angel isn't really an angel but has the inspirational effect of one, does that make it worthless?'
Larkin shook his head and smiled.
'Why should I even listen to you? A hallucination asking me about hallucinations!'
She took his hands in hers. The feeling shocked him and he started, but there was something infinitely calm and soothing in her touch. Warmth wriggled into his fingers, palms, forearms, heart. He sighed again, more deeply and looked up into her shadowy face.
'Am I real, Hlaine Larkin?'
'I'd say so. But then… I'm mad.'
They laughed together, hands clasped, his dirty, ragged fingers wrapped in her smooth white palms. Face to face they laughed, his wheezing rattle tying itself into her soft, musical humours.
'Why did you abandon your men?' she asked. He shivered and pulled his hands out of her grip, struggling away from her. 'Don't say that!'
'Larkin… why did you do it?'
'Don't ask me! Don't!'
'Do you deny it?'
He bumped against a pillar across the debris-littered aisle and turned back to her with ferocious eyes. His vision was pulsing now, lights and alterations dancing and flexing across his line of sight. She seemed far away, then huge and upon him. His guts churned biliously.
'Deny? I… I never left them… I…'
The Angel stood and turned away from him. He could see the way her silver-gold tresses fell to waist length between the powerful furled wings which emerged from slits in her samite gown. Her head was bowed. She spoke again after a long pause.
'Commissar Gaunt sent his fire-team into the aqueduct, on an insurgency mission to enter Bucephalon. The primary target was Nokad himself. Why was that?'
'K-kill the head and the body dies! Gaunt said we'd never take this place in a year unless Nokad's charismatic leadership was broken! The whole city-state has become his Doctrinopolis, the wellspring of his cult, to seed and spread the deceitful charm of his sensibilities to the other city-states on this world and beyond!'
'And what did you do?'
'W-we entered the aqueduct channels. Rawne's company led the way to draw fire and break the defence. Corbec's slid in behind to leapfrog the fighting as Rawne met it and enter the city through the canal trenches.'
'Wouldn't you drown?'
'The canals have been dry for six months. They were mined and wired but we had sweepers.'
'You were with Corbec's company?'
'Yes. I didn't want to go… Feth! I hated the idea of taking a suicide run like that, but I'm Corbec's sniper… and his friend. He insisted.'
'Why?'
'Because I'm Corbec's sniper and his friend!'
'Why?'
'I don't know!'
'Might it have been because you are the best shot in the entire regiment? That if anyone could get a shot at Nokad, it was you? Might Corbec, your friend, have been reluctant to take you? Might he have been afraid you could snap if the going got too hard?'
'I don't know!'
'Think about it! Might he have decided to take you in the end because, no matter what the risk and no matter how fragile your mind, you are still the best shot in the regiment? Might he have valued that in you? Might he have needed that asset despite the risk?'
'Shut up!'
'Might you have let him down?'
Larkin screamed and pressed his face into the stone floor. His wiry body began to twitch as the storm of madness, the tidal wave of anxiety, rose and crested in his thundering mind. He saw nothing but colours now: his vision was a neon kaleidoscope blur.
'And what did you do? That firefight in the canal. Close quarters. Lopra dead, head blown off; Castin disembowelled; Hech, Grosd, the others, the screaming, the misty smoke of burning blood. Corbec bellowing for reinforcements, daggers of light cutting the air. And what did you do?'
'Nothing!'
'Not nothing. You ran. You ran away. You scrambled and ran and ran and ran and ended up here. Sobbing, vomiting, soiling yourself.'
'No…' Larkin breathed, spread face down on the cold floor. He felt he was in a vacuum now. There was no sound, no vision, no pain. Just her voice.
'You deserted them. That makes you a deserter.'
Larkin looked up sharply. The Angel stood by the reliquary, lifting the studded wooden lid. She took something out and placed it upon her head, smoothing her silver-gold hair under the brim. It was a cap. A commissar's regimental cap. Gaunt's cap.
She reached into the holy box and lifted out something else, wrapped in dusty, mouldering cloth. Her perfect hands unwound it. A bolt pistol. With incongruous sureness, her slender hands slammed a sickle-pattern magazine into the slot, racked the slide and thumbed off the safety. She turned.
Her face, below the commissar's cap, was lean and angular. Larkin hadn't realised how chiselled and thin her cheeks and chin were before. Cut out of stone, firm and fierce, like Ibram Gaunt. She raised the bolt pistol in her right hand and pointed it at Larkin. Her wings opened and spread, twenty metres wide, a vast arch of perfect white eagle feathers.
'Do you know what we do to deserters, Larkin?' she said grimly.
'Yes.'
'We are created to inspire and uplift, to carry the spirit of battle forward, to maintain the sense of glory in the hearts of the Imperial warrior. But if that spirit falters, we are also here to punish.'
'Y-you sound like Gaunt…'
'Ibram Gaunt and I have much in common. A common purpose, a common function. Inspiration and punishment.'
It seemed as if the world outside the chapel had fallen silent. As if the war had stopped.
'Did you desert, Larkin?'
He stared at her, at the gun, at the terrible wingspan. Slowly, he got to his knees and then his feet
. 'No.'
'Prove it.'
Every joint in his body ached, every nerve sang. His head was clear and yet racing and strange. He walked with measured care over to his fallen pack.
'Prove it, Larkin! The Emperor needs you with him at this hour! Muster your strength!'
He looked back at her. The gun and the gaze had not faltered.
'How did you know my name?'
You told me.'
'My forename. Hlaine. I don't use that any more. How did you know?'
'I know everything.'
He laughed. Loud and hard, his thin chest shaking as he stripped open his pack. 'Feth take you! I'm no deserter!'
'Tell me why.'
'See this?' Larkin slid his sniper rifle from the sling across the back of his pack. He held it up and freed the firing mechanism with a deft twist of his hand.
'A gun.'
'A lasgun. Workhorse of the Guard. Solid, dependable, tough. You can knock it, drop it, club with it, submerge it and it just keeps on going.'
The Angel took a step forward, looking at the gun he held out to her. 'It's not standard. Not a standard M-G pattern. Where's the integral optics, the charge-setting slide? That barrel: it's too long, too thin. And that flash suppressed.'
Larkin grinned and reached into his pack. 'It's the sniper variant. Same body, but stripped down. I did some of the work myself. I took out the integral optics because I use this.' He held up a bulky tube to show her for a moment, then slotted it into a bracket on the side of the gun case. He flipped covers off both ends of the tube and the device spread a faint red glow ahead of the gun.
'Night spotter. My own. I tooled the bracket to fit. I used to use it to spot for larisel in the woods back home.'
'Larisel?'
'Small rodents with a fine pelt. Made a good income hunting them before the founding.'
He slid his hands down the gun and tapped the barrel. 'XC 52/3 strengthened barrel. Longer, and thinner than the standard. Good for about twenty shots.' He kicked the pack at his feet, which clinked. 'I always carry two or three spares. They twist and pull out. You can switch them in about a minute if you know what you're doing.'