Faith & Fire, page 9
In reply, the catwalk let out a shriek of buckling steel and listed sharply. All at once, the costumed girl fell away from Verity’s grip and Miriya bounded forward to snag the Sister Hospitaller before she went along with her. Their hands met, the Battle Sister clutching a handful of Verity’s robes and then the gantry broke apart.
It was centuries old, and maintained as well as it could have been, but artisans and technicians were not the most favoured of castes on Neva and even in the ampitheatre of the Lunar Cathedral, there were never enough skilled hands to service all of the church’s machinery. Steel and bodies fell through the air and crashed into the wood and fibre of the false eldar domes, straight into the middle of the arena.
Galatea’s knuckles turned white where she gripped the stone balustrade. ‘In Katherine’s name, what is she doing?’
At her side, Sister Reiko peered through a small monocular. ‘An accident, Canoness? I do not think this was intentional–’
‘Now, this is an interesting development.’ Governor Emmel’s words cut off Reiko’s speech as he approached, his retinue trailing behind him and the lord deacon at his side. ‘My dear Canoness, if your Battle Sister wished to take part in the games, she had only to ask.’
‘Governor, I fear that a mistake has been made,’ Galatea spoke quickly. ‘Perhaps if you would consider a pause in the proceedings?’
Emmel made a face. ‘Ah, that would not be prudent. The rules of the fête are quite clear on these matters. The re-enactment must be played out to its conclusion without interruption. There would be much discord if I tried to halt it.’
‘Perhaps even a riot,’ ventured Dean Venik.
The governor cupped his ear. ‘Listen, Canoness. Do you hear? The people are enraptured. They must think this is some surprise performance in lieu of the witch they were promised.’
‘Perhaps not a mistake after all,’ added LaHayn. ‘The God-Emperor moves in mysterious ways.’
Emmel nodded and clapped his hands. ‘Oh, yes, yes. You may be right!’ His eyes sparkled with the idea of it. ‘I wonder, an actual Sister of Battle on the field? What a game that will be!’
‘With respect, governor, Sister Miriya may be injured, and she was not alone. Sister Verity is a Hospitaller, not used to combat.’ Galatea’s words were intense.
LaHayn accepted this with a dismissive nod. ‘I am sure the Emperor will extend to her the protection her vocation merits.’
Miriya hauled herself out of the ruins of the wooden set and winced in pain: her right arm was dislocated. Gritting her teeth, she gripped her right wrist with her left hand and yanked. A sickening snap and a moment of sharp agony resonated through the Battle Sister’s frame. She shook off the pain and coughed out metallic spittle.
A groan drew her to where Verity lay. The Hospitaller was uninjured but dazed, and Miriya pulled her unsteadily to her feet.
‘The… the girl…’ began Verity, but she fell silent when the other woman pointed a gloved finger at the wreckage. The teenager dressed as Celestine had broken the Hospitaller’s fall and rested there in an untidy heap. Sightless, dull eyes looked up into the night sky. Verity knelt and closed the dead girl’s eyelids, whispering a verse of funerary rites over her body.
The roaring of the audience crashed around them, loud as ocean breakers on a storm-tossed shore. In among the players fighting the mock battle, several of the imitation eldar had been startled by the sudden cacophony of metal that had dropped from the air, and they milled about, unsure of themselves. This close to them, Miriya could see that the weapons they bore were actually common projectile rifles and shotguns disguised to resemble the alien shuriken projectors. The Battle Sister knew the look in their eyes all too well. She had seen it before on the faces of heretic vassals and slave-troopers, on cultists whipped into frenzy by their demagogues.
‘Stay close to me,’ she hissed to Verity. ‘They’re going to fire on us.’
The Hospitaller shook her head. ‘But why?’
Miriya ignored her and advanced, stepping off the pile of wreckage and holding up one hand, palm flat in a warding gesture. ‘We have no part in your games,’ she said aloud, in a clear, level voice. ‘Stand aside.’
The costumed men were all dressed in the same warped outfits, so it was unclear if there were any ranks or hierarchy among them. They shot nervous glances at the women and at each other. Miriya saw a path she could take, up and behind the wreckage of the stage to where the gates in the arena walls would lead to safety.
‘Don’t run,’ she whispered. ‘If we run, they’ll attack.’
‘They’re just ordinary people,’ insisted Verity.
Miriya made eye contact with one of the alien-attired men, catching sight of his gaze through the triangular slits in his plumed helmet. ‘That doesn’t matter.’
She saw the thought forming in his mind before the man was even aware of it, her hand tearing away the peace-bond ribbon wrapped around her pistol holster. A dozen camouflaged weapons came about to bear on them and Miriya shoved Verity out of the firing line, her gun clearing its leather as shot and shell spat into the air.
‘Death to the humans!’ The call exploded from the lips of the false eldar, and the crowd watching them roared once again.
Automatic training born from decades of hard, unswerving service in the name of the Emperor took over. Miriya’s gun barked, the ear-splitting shriek of supeheated plasma bolts drowning out the dull rattle of lead shot. It became a rout, every trigger-pull marking a critical hit, no single charge from the energy pistol wasted as the costumed men screamed and died. Paper and cloth in garish oranges and greens were stained with dark arterial crimson. Helmets made out of softwood splintered and broke.
The Battle Sister heard the pellets clattering off her power armour, as ineffectual as hailstones against the black ceramite sheath. A chance ricochet nicked a line of stinging pain across her cheek and she ignored it, turning and firing again in a single fluid motion.
When all the assailants lay dead or bleeding their last into the dust, Miriya closed her eyes and prayed for silence but she was denied it, the air about her filled to overflowing with the deafening adulation of the congregation.
Verity grabbed at her arm and turned her about. The Hospitaller was furious. ‘You didn’t need to kill them!’ she shouted, her voice barely audible above the crowd. ‘Why did you do that?’
The other players in the reconstruction were gathering to them, pathetic remnants in their tattered and bloody costumes. Some dragged injured comrades with them, others limped and showed wounds that were wet and ragged. Miriya shook off Verity’s grip with an angry snarl and jerked her chin at the penitents. ‘Help them.’
The Hospitaller left her there and took to ripping bandages from torn robes. Miriya surveyed the dead arranged around her, Verity’s question ringing in her mind. What madness was this, that these people would force her to end their lives, all in the name of a brutal game? There were other ways to show devotion to the Golden Throne that did not require such a wasteful sacrifice. Was life valued so little on Neva?
The vox speakers struck up again with a fresh barrage of song, beginning with a stern rendition of the grand hymnal from Enoch’s Castigations. Miriya cast her gaze upward, searching the dark sky for some sign, some explanation. Her thoughts were a churn of confusion, a state that was unacceptable for a Sister of Battle. Her skin crawled, and she found that all she wanted at this moment was to purify herself with a purgatory oil and take prayer in the convent’s chapel. What cursed luck has brought me to this madhouse, she asked herself?
A handful of bright dots crossed the night above the ampitheatre, moving with purpose and great speed towards the towering Lunar Cathedral. Just as it had moments before when she locked gazes with the gunmen, Miriya’s honed combat sense rang a warning in her mind. ‘Aircraft,’ she said aloud, ‘in attack formation.’
As if they had been waiting for her to voice her thoughts, the flyers suddenly split apart and swept away in pairs towards different points of the compass. The closest duo dipped low and came into the nimbus of the floating lamp-blimps. They were coleopters, vessels with a ring-shaped fuselage enclosing a large spinning fan that kept them airborne. The unmistakable shapes of boxy weapons pods hung on stubby winglets.
No alarm cry would have warned the people in the crowds, and they watched the flyers with disbelief, perhaps believing them to be yet another surprise addition to the Games of Penance. In the next second panic and terror rose up in a wave as fountains of firebombs spat from the coleopters and fell in orange trails towards the stadium. Everywhere they landed, great balls of black smoke and yellow flame bloomed, immolating hundreds. The aircraft wove through the mayhem they seeded, strafing the panicked people, while above them another lone ship dropped out of sight on the Tier of Greatest Piety. Whoever these killers were, they were landing men on the upper levels of the church tower.
Lasers lanced out of the observation galleries, questing after the darting ships and missing. Miriya assumed the shots were being fired by the gun servitors she had seen serving the nobles earlier. She swore a gutter oath recalled from her childhood. How in Terra’s name had such a thing been allowed to happen? Were the planetary defence forces stationed in Noroc so lax that any terrorist could idle into the city’s airspace unchallenged?
Unbidden, another, darker thought rose to the surface of her mind. Was this some other part of Neva’s dogma of atonement and suffering, a random attack thrown at the innocent as some kind of penance? She shook the idea away and sprinted towards the arena’s edge, where elevator cages would carry her back up to the galleries of the cathedral.
Verity came after her. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To fight a real enemy,’ she retorted. ‘You may join me, if you can stomach it!’
CHAPTER SIX
The men of the Noroc city watch would later report that the terrorist coleopters had come from the south and the west, flying in the nap of the earth along valleys or over the scudding white tops of shallow waves. Too low to the ground for detection by conventional sensors, hulls daubed with black paint and running lights blinded, the aircraft threaded into the air over Noroc and went about their business. In the throes of the festival, where sacramental wines were flowing freely and hymns were blotting out the sound of everything else, not many eyes turned from their devotions to maintain watchfulness. In the days that followed, the enforcers would have their hands full, in both matters of arrest and punishment as well as purging its own officers guilty of inattention.
A good percentage of the men in the flyers had previously visited Noroc, some had even been born there. All of them were chosen because they knew the city well enough to wound it. Torris Vaun had gathered them all in the hold of a chilly, echoing transport barge as they crossed the coastal waters, goading them into readiness. Some of these men brought their own codes and morals to the fight, with big talk of striking against the moneyed theocrats in the name of the people, but most of them, like Vaun himself, were in the game for the fire and the havoc. They wanted anarchy for the sport of it, because they thrived on it.
The rockets dropped from the coleopters were stolen from Imperial Guard regiments, elderly area denial munitions pilfered from bunkers where they waited for rebellions and uprisings that never came… until now. The warheads broke open in bright plumes that made miniature daybreaks wherever they struck, and where people did not die from smoke and flame, they smothered each other in panic.
The air inside the Lunar Cathedral was hot with terror. Many of the nobles had fled to the lower levels to find their carriages and draymen destroyed by explosion and firestorm, and they milled about and became frantic, some of them starting small scuffles as their frustrations boiled over. On the higher levels, in the vaulted space of the chapel proper and the galleries that ranged above it, barons and upper echelon priests took to gathering in small, terrified packs with their gun servitors surrounding them, bleakly waiting for invasion, destruction or salvation.
The flyer that approached the Tier of the Greatest Piety executed a running touch-and-go, its wheels barely kissing the careworn granite for ten seconds before it took off again, thrusting away to enter a wide, lazy orbit of the conical tower. It left behind a squad of rag-tag men with no single uniform or look to them. All that united these killers was a callous, predatory anticipation, that and the absolute loyalty they showed to their leader.
Vaun dropped a pair of battered night vision goggles from his eyes and pointed with both hands. ‘Get in there, and make some trouble.’
The men obeyed with harsh laughter and ready violence.
Rink jogged to keep up with him. ‘We gonna kill them here, then?’
‘Patience,’ replied the other man. ‘It’s a nice evening. We’ll see how things play out.’
The big thug’s eyes glittered. ‘I wanna do the priest.’
Vaun shot him a hard look. ‘Oh no. That one’s for me. I owe him.’ The criminal’s hand strayed to an old, hateful scar beneath his right ear. ‘But don’t worry, I’ve got something in mind for you.’
The rattling cage was little more than a basket of steel mesh, but it clambered doggedly up the stone wall of the cathedral, cogged teeth picking their way past oval service hatches cast from fans of brassy leaves. Oil and sparks spat at them as the elevator slowed and halted, presenting them to the observation level. Miriya came through the hatch leading with her pistol, and Verity was close behind, virtually throwing herself out of the lift. The clattering machine seemed to have unnerved the Hostpitaller – and after the accident with the falling catwalk, it was perhaps no surprise that she was newly afraid of Neva’s ill-maintained mechanisms.
There were bodies. Mostly they were servitors, and by the pattern of the kill shots they had been targeted by weapons aimed from a moving platform beyond the balconies. Miriya recognised the distinctive wound patterns of shells from Navy-issue heavy bolters. The bodyguards had died under the guns of the coleopter as it strafed the tower with random cascades of fire. With a degree of delicacy that seemed out of place among the carnage, Verity stepped lightly over the bodies of a few aristocrats, giving each a murmured prayer verse.
The Celestian saw one of the perfumed women they had crossed earlier in the evening, her only bouquet now the copper of spilt blood.
‘Sister, how many times have you given last rites?’ The question came from nowhere.
Verity gave her an odd look. ‘There was once a time when I kept a count. I decided to stop when the number brought me to tears.’
‘Take comfort then that those you attended are at the Emperor’s side now.’
The Hospitaller gestured to the dead servitors. ‘But not all.’
‘No,’ agreed Miriya. ‘Not all.’
From the inner halls of the gallery at the back of the platform a figure approached, a sharp-edged shadow where the dying glow of broken biolumes struck it. ‘Stand and be recognised!’ called a voice.
Miriya returned a nod. ‘Sister Isabel, is that you?’
Isabel emerged into the flickering light cast from the fires down in the amphitheatre, throwing the screaming crowds a cursory look. ‘Sister Superior, it’s good to see you’re still with us. The Canoness bid me to scout this tier for any fresh threats, but these cloisters are like a maze…’
‘Where are the other Battle Sisters?’
‘Below in the chapel. It is pandemonium in there. The cathedral has been compromised. Invaders are abroad.’
‘I saw their aircraft land,’ said Miriya. ‘Not a large ship. Less than ten men, I’d warrant.’
‘Very likely, but we have barely that number of able fighters here–’ A crashing salvo of bolt fire from the floors below them cut into Isabel’s words and her eyes went wide.
The Sister Superior spoke into the vox pickup on her armour’s neck ring. ‘This is Sister Miriya, report. Who is firing?’
‘He’s here,’ Galatea snarled in her ear bead speaker. ‘Vaun. Warp curse him, the witch is here!’
Across the mosaic floor of the chapel the fleeing, shrieking nobles fled back and forth, clouding Galatea’s line of sight and that of every other Battle Sister in the chamber. Fallen braziers knocked askew in the panic had set light to tapestries as old as the city itself, filling the vaulted chamber with thick, choking smoke. The Canoness wished that she had ordered her women to bring their helmets: the optical matrix of Sabbat-pattern Sororitas headgear had a full-spectrum capacity that would render the darkest clouds transparent. But then, they had not expected to face a terrorist attack on this, the most sacred of Neva’s holidays, and by the order of the High Ecclesiarch they had only been allowed to carry token weapons into the house of the God-Emperor.
She glimpsed Vaun and his killers as they moved and fired. They had no need to pick their targets, discharging streams of stubber rounds into silk-clad torsos, firing without aiming. Behind her, the floating illuminator that dominated the centre of the chapel took a shot in the heart and exploded, showering her with glass fragments and curls of hot brass.
‘The governor,’ she snapped. ‘Where is he?’ It did not occur to her to ask after the ecclesiarch. Lord LaHayn was more able to defend himself than the fragile politician ever could be. Years in service to the church had taught LaHayn how to fight against the enemies of order. But Emmel… He was another case entirely. Born of Neva’s best noble stock, he fancied himself a man of action, but the reality was far less flattering. He was a peacock among peacocks, as much as he played at being a hawk, and was certainly no match for a killer of Torris Vaun’s calibre.
Sister Portia was close by, clearing a fouled cartridge from her bolter. The ritual cloth of ceremony that chapel law required she wrap about her gun had tangled in the mechanism, stopping her from shooting back at the attackers. ‘I last saw the governor in the company of Baron Sherring, a moment before the firing started.’
