In such an array, inevitably many candles were guttering. Their flames leapt and faded, leapt and faded. Shadows quivered like insubstantial night-creatures infesting the side-chapels. Rakel, in black, was merely one such shadow. An eroded legend read:
FEMUR SINISTR— BENEDIC—
Silently Rakel lifted from the altar a crystal monstrance resembling a supernova outburst. Next, some altar bells. Finally, an iron candelabrum in the shape of an upright battleship. She pulled away the altar brocade.
This plasteel altar had only been locked for a few decades. Tumblers yielded to her lock-picks. She raised the heavy lid.
W
HAT A BURDEN
the battered reliquary was! To shift it she had needed to climb inside the altar, then heave with all her might, using the lip of the altar as a fulcrum. But not before she had dragged a malodorous body-bag into position to act as a cushion to deaden the fall. Otherwise, the din of impact upon a flagstone would have rung throughout the basilica.
Now that the reliquary lay upon the floor, she scrutinized the dead woman’s head. She memorized for the morrow the rictus of teeth and shrunken sunken eyes. She unknotted the throat-thong. She unpeeled the camelopard hide from the abused body. Although ten days deceased, the corpse seemed unlikely to fall apart yet.
With a monomolecular blade she severed the dead woman’s head at the base of the neck. Grimm had contrived a hooking device. One hook would anchor inside a gap in the reliquary. The other would lodge within the decapitated head of the corpse. Thus to fasten the two together.
Rakel had scarcely begun to thrust a hook up through one of the artery apertures in the base of the skull when a voice called out, ‘Who being there?’
There in the chapel she crouched. She froze.
Sexton? Deacon? Priest? Footsteps were padding close.
‘Being you, Jagan the Wakeful?’
Rakel had a laspistol. Firing the gun in itself would be silent. A hit would result in a bright explosion. If only the night had been thundery; but it wasn’t.
What choice was there but to use the miniature needle-gun? This would fire a tiny sliver doped with powerful toxin. The target’s body would convulse. He would choke and suffer stroke and heart-attack all at once. Hopefully he would fall with no more than a thump.
Why, now she was an assassin! As the snooper entered the chapel, she crooked a finger at his silhouette.
Instead of a noiseless mini-needle, a jet of chemicals spurted from the baroque ring. Igniting in the air, the volatile liquid wrapped the intruder’s chest in flames – and he screamed. How he screamed. She had mistaken which digital weapon the needler was. If she had fired higher, her victim might instantly have sucked flame into his lungs and been unable to shriek.
Head thrown back, he howled in agony as he tried with seared hands to tear a burning cassock loose. He was a shrieking torch – a screeching illuminated alarm, capering away from her.
Time almost stood still. Each moment seemed so prolonged. Adrenalin was racing in Rakel. Discard the body-bag plan! Separate the relic from the bulk of the reliquary! Three seconds were becoming four. Already she was clawing with Grimm’s hook at the once-glorious gold, prising and ripping. No one was responding to the screeching yet. Four seconds becoming five. How much longer, how much longer?
‘O
H MY ANCESTORS
, how could I be so stupid!’
At the first ascent of that scream Grimm had let the gathered rope drop. A moment later he was over the lip of the vent. He crammed himself through the aperture. He slid down the rope at high speed, braking perfunctorily with his boots. If his hands hadn’t been so calloused, he would surely have suffered ropeburn. What if he’d met Rakel ascending from the incense-pricked gloom? Some collision! However, she wasn’t in the way.
He had crashed to a standstill. He had dashed across the colonnaded atrium. Immediately he spotted the screaming torch. He pounded past it.
He knelt beside Rakel, helping rip the reliquary apart, bless his tough hairy hands.
‘Oh my grandsires, how could I be so dumb!’
Screeching only spasmodically now, the torch fell over. A lambent aura spread around him as though some psychic energy had come into play. Reflection of the flames from the flagstones?
‘Ach!’ At last the great femur came free from its ruptured golden container. Bit bulky, that bone, but far easier to shift on its own. Here came trouble, in the shape of numerous scurrying figures in various states of dress and undress: temple personnel
brandishing stunners, autoguns, shotguns, laspistols. Beware of those stunners especially. Priests might not be prepared to blast off shells and fragmentation shot amidst holy chapels.
That aura around the burning sexton! Why, the floor itself was softly on fire! Grease and soot deposited by generations of candles had ignited. Higher up the walls of the basilica there must be an even thicker skin. Dumping the thigh bone temporarily, Grimm fired his laspistol over the heads of the oncomers. Swivelling, he fired in other directions.
Las-fire bloomed dazzlingly upon the walls. With a soft whoosh, a lustrous and almost gentle flame rolled outward from the site of each explosion.
‘Run for it, Rakel! Keep low!’
The temple-dwellers had halted to goggle up at this phenomenon which was spreading swiftly around the interior surface of their basilica. Those who held stunners were themselves stunned with awe. The whole edifice was becoming radiant as if itself it were a candle. Everywhere candle-flame glowed yet did not consume. Surely this was a miracle. Surely what had ignited it – its wick – was the dying sexton who still writhed. Him, and those other outbursts of psychic fire! Was this some visitation from the Emperor’s spirit, some wondrous and unexpected epiphany for Holy Year?
As the miraculous flame spread across the great ceiling, in majestic yet seemingly undamaging fashion, beads of molten wax began to drip. The faces of those below were stung. A deacon wailed as hot wax hit his eye.
Realization dawned.
‘
Being fire!
’
‘
Being arson!
’
‘
Incendium!
’
Grimm and Rakel reached the archway to the atrium. They were spotted. Heedless of damage to columns, someone opened fire with high-velocity shells. Reason deserted many minds. Were they all not now in a vast oven, beginning to be basked?
G
RIMM AND
R
AKEL
reached the rope. No time to unfold a fish-net for the relic.
‘Climb, lady, climb!’
She began to ascend, hand over hand.
How could Grimm possibly shin up a rope with a great bone under one arm? Impossible!
The bone was far too big to clamp his teeth on to.
He limber-hitched the end of the rope around the bone. This was a scaffolder’s knot for hoisting a spar. No sooner done than he began climbing after Rakel.
Wondrously, the rope was rising as he climbed. It was being hauled up powerfully, by a familiar superhuman winch which loomed over the vent above.
P
URSUIT HAD ARRIVED
among the forests of smoking incense-sticks. The disappearance of the fugitives bewildered the searchers briefly. Some dashed towards the oratory.
Could the intruders have taken wing? At last someone stared up into the smoke.
Something
was on the point of disappearing through a vent.
W
ARMTH WAFTED UPON
Lex’s face as first he hauled Rakel clear. He inhaled greasy combustion. Then Grimm came through the hole, followed by a tail of rope on which a great bone waggled to and fro. Shots followed soon after. Several shots winged through the vent, and skyward. Others exploded within, the lip of the vent serving as shield, and shrapnel sprayed downward. Reverently Lex unknotted the bone.
They left the rope, still hitched for quick-release. No point, now, in removing evidence of the means of access. Let furious deacons fix plasteel grilles across the dozen vents. Away across the rooftops they scrambled, to commence a circuitous descent.
J
AQ HAD HEARD
gunfire, muffled and faint. Armed men spilled from the portico. They were gesturing to one another to head around the side of the temple complex.
He aimed his laspistol from within the wreckage of the booths. Sub-vocalizing a prayer of forgiveness – since those people were the loyal disciples of Him-on-Earth – Jaq fired surgically. A modest energy blast toppled a target, though the man still squirmed and writhed.
Jaq fired again, and another man fell.
A high-velocity shot crashed into the timber near him, spraying splinters. Jaq withdrew. Ducking, he darted away through the darkness. Deacons and sextons would be busy for a while, shooting at wood.
A
COUPLE OF
hours later, they had rendezvoused back at the mansion...
Lex sat upon a black slate floor with the thigh bone across his lap. That bone was pitted with antiquity. Lex’s fingers roved over it as though it were some musical instrument which had lost its strings. Before he could begin engraving he would need to sand the bone finely then immerse it in hot paraffin wax to seal its pores and thus prevent the ink of the designs from bleeding. Meanwhile, he caressed this sacred femur with a sense of serene inner joy. Might it even once have belonged to an Imperial Fist, several aeons ago? Rather than to a Blood Angel or a Space Wolf or whomever else. Probably not. Yet no matter.
‘I’m obliged to you,’ he told the false Meh’lindi.
‘And I to you,’ she said, ‘for pulling up the rope so quickly.’
‘Huh,’ said Grimm. ‘Took three of us to steal a bone, and no gold at all. Besides setting fire to the temple.’ The little man shrugged. ‘Set fire to a chimney to clean it!’ The flames had been superficial. That sooty grease must have consumed itself or been extinguished by beating. Otherwise, the night sky would have glowed with the bonfire of Occidens.
Deacons would have found the ripped reliquary, empty of its relic. This must seem to have been a religious, sectarian raid. Staged by whom? By Oriens loyalists? Hard to imagine who those might be! Not after genestealer infestation, and thorough cleansing, and all the subsequent decades. So was the raid mounted by the Austral temple? That’s where the finger of suspicion might point, provoking a bitter and futile religious feud...
Had Rakel been tested sufficiently? Had the robbery proved to be partly a fiasco? Brave endeavours were often derailed; yet all four participants were safe, and remained incognito.
‘Tomorrow,’ Jaq said to Rakel, ‘you will go to those Shuturban brothers bearing a ruby more precious than gold, prised from our book. Tell those Shuturbans that you found the ruby along with the reliquary. Say that the gold was merely gilding over soft copper. Buy any details about the courthouse, especially where data is stored. Local builders were employed.’
Grimm grinned encouragingly. ‘Best plan once you’re inside the courthouse might be to knife an Arbitrator and steal his black gear and mirror-mask. You’d better practise your exercises, mock assassin.’
Jaq was staring at the counterfeit woman with such bitter wistfulness. Of course she must assassinate some official while inside the courthouse! What other course of action would a devout inquisitor require to galvanize judges in their duties? What else would sow confusion and paranoia amongst them?
D
URING THE NIGHT
, yet again, Jaq dreamed of Askandargrad, ravaged and ravished...
Raven Guards, in their black power armour, were advancing through smouldering ruins, their boltguns ready to fire at whatever moved. Many brothers were also armed with chainswords.
Whatever moved could only be an enemy – whose joy was to kill, but especially, and lustfully so, by rushing in close with power sword or chainsword. Lethal close contact was the delight of these devil-Marines – an erotic, sadistic impulse which sometimes impelled them to berserk recklessness.
So long as a Raven kept calm, these assaults could be ideal opportunities to kill or cripple a renegade.
How could one keep calm? Chaos spawn scuttled, spiderlike, over the smoky terrain. How nauseating if these creatures leapt at a Raven, to cling to his armour. They could hardly harm a Marine in armour, but they could disorient. Worse, and far more sickening and dangerous, were the daemonettes.
Their exquisite single breasts. Their lush thighs and loins. Their green eyes – uncannily elongated – and their manes of blonde hair. The razor-sharp pincers of their hands! And the barbed tails which sought to impale!
To be assaulted by such a creature was sickening, dizzying, destabilizing to a devout Marine. Daemonettes materialized as accomplices of renegades. Daemonettes were manifestations of the vicious lusts of the Chaos brood.
Along with a captain of the Raven Guard, Jaq wearily surveyed the advance from the low roof of a warehouse. Hooded ventilators were like monkish sentries to Jaq’s eyes. He hadn’t slept for fifty hours or more. Neighbouring buildings had collapsed, forming ramps of rubble. The destruction was disproportionate. Numbers of the iniquitous legionnaires were now hosting daemons, daemons with powers, whose joy was to destroy people if possible, but people’s property too, so it seemed, so that their victims should be as nakedly vulnerable as could be, utterly defenceless. To the Legionnaires of Slaanesh the battle was an orgy of foul delight.
The captain had been scanning rune displays within his visor of the disposition of his own men.
‘The Emperor’s Children!’ he exclaimed bitterly to Jaq. Those renegades had been merely a dark item of history to him, until now. ‘How dare these fiends still call themselves by such a title! Our Emperor protects the innocent.’ He whispered hauntedly, ‘Daemons are in their ranks. Such hideous blasphemy!’
Was this superbly trained man approaching snapping point? Badges of honour upon his inky-black armour told of past heroism. A scorch mark blistered his shoulder pauldron. His back-banner had been shot to shreds.
‘We will win,’ the captain assured Jaq. ‘We
must
win.’
For if not, then his badges and those of his men would be taken as trophies; and worse, far worse, organs and hormones would be extracted from the corpses of the Ravens to create drugs of delirium.