Fall of Macharius

Chapter Eight

I was very weak. I was seeing daemons. And I was not the only one. All around me were thousands of beds, each containing a wounded man, or a sick man, or a man who was both. Adepts of the medicae moved from bed to bed, administering potions, stabbing men with huge hypodermics, lopping off infected limbs with massive medical chainsaws.

Every time I heard the whine of the blade, the splinter of bone, I shouted for them to keep away. I did not want to lose my leg. I did not want a mechanical limb, even if there were any to be had, which there had not been for a long time.

The air smelt of purification incense and gangrene, of suppurating flesh and infected blood. The sound of coughs and screams echoed through the halls.

A medicae adept stood at the foot of my bed. He looked at me with something like horror in his eyes. For a moment, I thought he was going to pronounce sentence on me, to announce that the leg was going to have to come off.

I was almost relieved when he shook his head and turned and looked over his shoulder and said that there was nothing to be done, that they did not have the serums, that even if they did, it was touch and go. He sounded ashamed and embarrassed.

I wanted to tell him not to feel too bad, that we were an army that was running out of ammunition and food and everything else. It was no surprise to me that we did not have the medicine – we had nothing else.

When I tried to speak all I could do was make an odd gurgling noise. It sounded as if someone had injected a gallon of phlegm into my lungs. Breathing was not easy. Speech was impossible. Two faces drifted into view: one belonged to Ivan and the other belonged to Anton. They both looked very sad. I closed my eyes and fell into strange dreams.

I woke to find a daemon sitting on my chest. That was the weight that was making it so difficult for me to breathe. It looked the same as all the others, fat and pot-bellied, with scales the green of snot and the brown of excrement. It had the same maliciously gleeful eyes and when it saw I was awake it began to use my stomach as a trampoline. Its bouncing caused the contents of my innards to explode from both ends of my body.

Anton rose from beside the bed and shouted for an orderly. The daemon by this point had me by the throat and was trying to strangle me. A huge gob of phlegm was stuck in my gullet. The pressure increased. Blackness swept over me.

When I opened my eyes again death was standing over me in the form of a beautiful woman. I knew her name. She was wearing a nurse’s uniform very similar to the one she had worn back in the days when we had first met. She was not a nurse, I knew. She was an assassin.

She was holding a vial of some odd blue substance and attaching a needle to it. I smiled at her, pleased in an odd way that I was getting to see her again before I died. I looked around and saw that Anton was slumped in a chair beside the bed. Ivan was nowhere to be seen. She raised a finger to her lips in the universal sign for silence, then she drove the needle into the vein in my arm and pushed the plunger home. A moment later something burning filled my veins and I screamed before a wave of fire burned all consciousness from me. My last thought was to wonder why she was killing me.

‘It’s a miracle,’ the medicae adept said. ‘The Emperor himself must have intervened on behalf of this man. I would have sworn there was no way he could survive without a dose of Universal Purge and we have not seen any of that on Loki for a year. There is not even enough for the Lord High Commander if he should come down with the plague.’

It took me a moment to realise he was talking about me. I certainly did not feel like the beneficiary of a miracle; I felt as weak as a starving rat. My arms refused to obey me when I tried to pull myself upright and it was all I could do to keep my eyes open. Even listening tired me out.

I somehow managed to move my head first to the right and then to the left and I realised that for the first time in days there were no daemons dancing around me. They were not sitting on my chest. They were not poking my eyes and my heart and my liver with their tiny claws. They were not wheezing into my ear and whispering unspeakable promises. They were simply not there. As that thought occurred to me, I thought I caught sight of one scuttling under a nearby bed. Maybe it was just a rodent.

‘So you’re saying he’s going to live then?’ said a relieved voice. It sounded as if it belonged to Anton who was going to burst into tears. I started to wonder if I was perhaps hallucinating again.

‘It’s not one hundred per cent certain,’ said the adept. ‘Last night I would have said this man was certain to die. This morning, he has at least a fighting chance. The fever will return. His wound may once again become inflamed, but at least he has a chance.’

‘I told you,’ Anton was saying. I was not sure who he was speaking to. ‘I told you he was too mean to die.’

I let myself drift back off to sleep. In the distance I could hear the chainsaws going, and the screams of men in pain and the gurgles of men dying. It seemed I was not going to be joining them just yet.

‘What are you trying to do, kill me?’ I asked.

Anton looked a little confused. If I had not known better I would have said he was hurt. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, the first thing I see when I wake up is your ugly mug. That’s enough to sap any man’s will to live.’

‘Ha-bloody-ha! And here I was thinking I would wheel you around the ward before I reported for duty today.’

‘I thought you would be fighting at the front,’ I said. Anton looked around over his shoulder, as if he were wondering who was listening.

‘The front is stable for the moment,’ he said. It did not sound like he believed it. To be perfectly honest, I did not believe it. ‘We’re guarding the space port.’

I looked at him. How stupid did he think I was? Actually maybe he did not think I was stupid. Maybe he was letting me know the true state of affairs without spelling it out in a way that might be construed as a treasonous attempt to undermine morale by any commissar. It was possible that Anton was not entirely stupid.

If the space port was being guarded by the elite troops of Macharius’s personal guard it was because there was a possibility that we would need to beat a hasty retreat through it. That was tantamount to admitting that we were beaten, that Richter was about to drive us off the surface of Loki, that for the first time in decades Macharius was drinking from the bitter cup of defeat. That was not something that anyone would want to speak aloud. It had a feeling of being the beginning of the end.

I looked at Anton again. For the first time in what seemed like weeks his face was not concealed by a rebreather mask. I could see that despite the juvenat the subtle signs of ageing were there. Around his eyes was a fine mesh of wrinkles. The flesh beneath his chin hung a little loose like the wattles of a hangman lizard. His hair looked washed out, not the straw blond of his long-gone youth on Belial. He was still springy and powerful but the long years and countless battles had taken their toll. They sap vitality and the will to live, in other ways.

He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘I am glad to see you’re still alive.’

‘Me too,’ I said.

He looked away, obviously uncomfortable. ‘I’d best be away. I have guard duty tonight.’

It seemed an odd thing to hear, so mundane after what we had been through, with the endless battles in the trenches, the dead rising, the strange hallucinogenic gases drifting over the battlefields. The phrase guard duty conjured up visions of easier nights on easier worlds when things had been going well. At least for me. He tossed me a mocking salute and shambled off into the night.

I tried to pull myself upright, but I was still weak, so I just lay there and thought about the things I had seen. Had the Emperor really intervened to save me? Had I really seen Anna? Or was she just another product of the fever that had fired up so many strange visions out of my diseased brain? I thought about the daemons I had seen and the odd dreams I had experienced. They had been wild hallucinations, surely, and yet at the same time they had been both consistent and convincing, as if somehow I had been peering into another world, one that existed just below the skin of our reality, at least on this cursed planet.

Such thoughts are easy to come by in a hospital bed, surrounded by shrieking wounded.

The hospital was packed with dying men. At first I wondered about the lack of care that had been given to me since, after all, I was one of Macharius’s chosen guards, but it came to me after a few days that I was getting the best care that was available. Medicae adepts checked me and shook their heads wonderingly and I realised that I had become something of a celebrity in the wards since my astonishing recovery. It turned out I was the only soldier to have done so from the fever I had suffered.

They checked the wound on my leg, which was no longer inflamed, although it was crusted over. They laid cool hands on my forehead and intoned invocations to the Emperor. They wafted incense over me that brought strange dreams and helped control the fevers that I still suffered.

The road to recovery was a winding, circuitous march through fever country. There were days when I was once again sick, when it felt as if daemons were pressing down on my chest and when Ivan or Anton would spend nights beside my bed. There were times, too, when I would open my eyes and see a sister of the Orders Hospitaller, and sometimes she bore a strange resemblance to Anna.

I dreamed of her often, of how I had first seen her on Karsk when we had escaped from the worshippers of the Angel of Fire together, of how I had seen her again on Emperor’s Glory, where Ulrik Grimfang, an Adeptus Astartes of the Space Wolves, had warned me against her. I dreamed of the bodies of the men she had killed and I had found, and I dreamed of how she had saved my life.

I knew then with the odd clarity that such dreams bring that our lives were linked somehow. It might have been part of some grand design on her part or just the secret unwinding of our interlinked destinies, but our lives had touched in the oddest and most intimate of ways down through the decades. I liked to think there was some bond of affection there but I was never sure, not even of my own feelings. There had been many women in my life, as there always are for soldiers moving from world to world, but hers was the only consistent female presence I could remember.

I was certain of another thing too. That if she was here on Loki someone important was going to die. It was her nature and the nature of her service to the Emperor, and who am I to criticise? How many have I killed in the same cause?

I remembered too many of the campaigns I had fought in the name of the Emperor and Macharius. I experienced them once more in bloody, sweat-inducing dreams that had me waking in terror to stare at the murals on the ceiling depicting angel-winged Space Marines confronting all manner of xenos horrors.

I recalled the jungles of Jurasik and the orks we had fought there. I remembered the great armoured advance on Karsk IV and the burning winged statue of an evil angel perched atop the mountain-sized city of Irongrad. I marched again across the ice wastes of Caledax and watched men’s limbs turn black from the frostbite. I climbed over the peaks of Aquitaine and saw monstrous sentient spiders feast on the flesh of the soldiers they had webbed. I saw living weapons, war machines of flesh, remnants of some ancient invasion of xenos that had lurked like termites in the ruins of the human civilisation they had destroyed. I saw the redemption of worlds ruled by ancient evil cults and I saw the armies of the crusade advance, invincible, until we reached the Halo Worlds.

There everything had gone wrong. There the supply lines had grown too long and the armies too war-weary and the distances too great for reliable navigation even by the great starships of the Imperium. There all manner of horrors had emerged. There we had found ourselves bogged down in endless wars of attrition and even Macharius had seemed to lose his total certainty of victory and begun to whisper blackly of plots and betrayals.

I saw another vision now, of Loki as I had first seen it from space, a ball of green and blue and grey with toxic clouds drifting across seas that had died tens of thousands of years ago by being flooded with poisonous industrial waste. A world of manufactorum-cities whose giant chimneys poured choking clouds into the sky as their inhabitants worked day and night. A place whose landscapes had been blasted by pollution and blighted by the deserts of ash the cities had created.

I saw it as it was now, its greatest city ringed by trenches that stretched out to other man-made mountain ranges where heretics lived and bred and performed obscene rites beneath the glow of ever-burning lanterns. I saw networks of trenches that stretched as far as the eye could see, and plains of mud on which lay the corpses of millions of men, unburied, forgotten, degenerating to piles of bones and walls of skulls. I saw the clouds of gas drifting from sinkhole to sinkhole and I saw what lay beneath the ground, all of the ancient and evil and horrifying things that burrowed blindly, waiting for the chance to emerge and devour.

And just as these images flooded my mind, I felt something else, a vast dark presence. I looked up and could no longer see the murals above me. Instead I was looking into the grinning frog-like face of the gigantic daemon I had first seen on the front lines. It was smiling down at me, watching me with eyes full of that ancient malicious humour, looking at me the way I might look at a whining mosquito, a thing it was going to reach out and swat when the mood took it, and that mood might well be taking it now.

It reached down for me with one massive claw, and grabbed me in a vice-like grip and began to shake me. It was like being in the grip of an earthquake. My body was being thrown from side to side, and it seemed to me that if this kept up the life would be shaken from me.

The vast and horrible presence loomed over me and I wanted to shout defiance, but I could not. Instead I felt the vast head lower, the huge jaw distend, as if it were going to swallow me in a single gulp. A long tongue glistening with green mucus extended from its mouth and descended towards me, and I knew that if it touched me I was going to die in the grip of some vile disease.

The head descended, the tongue reached out, the world shook as the thing approached. I tried to scream and I snapped open my eyes.